Word: planets
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Thomas Robert Malthus, was on the rampage last week. Cresting a wave of postwar pessimism, it flashed through the air on the radio, rode through the mails in magazines. Publishers opened their arms and presses to "Neo-Malthusian" manuscripts prophesying worldwide overpopulation and hunger. Two "scarce books"-Our Plundered Planet, by Fairfield Osborn, and Road to Survival (a Book-of-the-Month selection), by William Vogt-were glowingly reviewed and selling like hot cakes. Their influence has already reached around the world...
Played-Out Planet? The Neo-Malthusians admit 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...
...their worries is overpopulation. Man apparently cannot go on multiplying -and eating up the planet he lives on. This recurrent theme is emphasized by Fairfield Osborn, president of the New York Zoological Society and author of the recently published shocker, Our Plundered Planet. "Within only three centuries," says Osborn, "the population of the earth has increased five times ... It is now increasing at a net rate that, if continued, would double the earth's population again in another 70 years . . . But now, with isolated and inconsequential exceptions, there are no fresh lands anywhere . . . Many of the fertile areas...
Slaughterhouse or Survival? "The towering enemy of man is not his science but his moral inadequacy. Around the world today, laboratories . . . are feverishly pushing their research in the development of physical and bacteriological weapons which overnight could turn this planet into a gigantic slaughterhouse...
According to one theory, it was once part of a planet that blew up, and it came from the planet's stony crust but contained traces of the metallic core. A sample was air-expressed at once to the Institute before its radioactivity could diminish much. What it told about its life with the cosmic rays the Institute isn't saying in public...