Word: cannot
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...that he was wrong. But they claim that new and frightening threats have developed recently. The present-day world, they say, has no fresh lands (or almost none) to cultivate. Its old lands, "plundered" by reckless exploitation, are losing fertility as their "irreplaceable topsoil" washes down the rivers. Farmlands cannot maintain their present production. The world's population is still increasing rapidly, and modern medicine, by cutting the death rate from infectious diseases, is sure to quicken this increase. The falling food-production curve, cry the Neo-Malthusians, will soon cross the rising population curve. Then-kaput...
Again & again he yearns for the "lost song" of the extinct Eskimo curlew, "a Mozart of the prairies," and all through the book he develops the idea that men cannot live happily and permanently on the planet except in "ecological" balance with "the wildlife." In many cases, he thinks, this balance can be restored only by drastic reduction of human population (100 million Americans would be about right). According to Vogt, medical men who keep people from dying, upset nature's balance; if more people died there would be more room for mountain lions...
First is the notion that "soil cannot be stretched," that each acre has a certain production capacity (Vogt calls it "biotic potential") which cannot be boosted without dire peril. This is the same fallacy that expresses itself in the old saying, "There are only so many slices in the cake." Some businessmen say this when they decide that their markets cannot be expanded and, therefore, should be divided among them in quotas set by their cartel. Some labor unions decide that there are only so many jobs to be divided, and therefore oppose labor-saving devices...
...that a constant stream of admiring foreign visitors, from Latin America, India, China, the Near East, has come to learn U.S. methods. Last week even Soviet Russia paid the U.S. an unadmitted compliment. Crying loudly (in five pages of Pravda and five of Izvestia) that heedless and greedy capitalism cannot protect its soil, the Russians announced a conservation program (hardly started yet) that is almost an exact copy of what U.S. conservation has already achieved...
...quickly the practice of conservation will spread throughout the world, U.S. soil men cannot say. But they do say that the obstacles are economic and social, not technical. Science can stop most kinds of soil deterioration and will surely lick the rest. For the Neo-Malthusian scare-dogma that the world's soil must inevitably lose its productiveness, the soil men have a one-word answer: bunkum...