Word: present
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
...Malthusian propaganda has, on the face of it, a high and beneficent purpose: to favor good farming practices. A similar erosion scare in the 19305 did result in widespread adoption of erosion-control practices. Some of the clear implications of the present scare, however, give unintended comfort to political and social policies that are anything but beneficent. If even rich nations like the U.S. have, too little land to keep their people passably well fed (as some of the doom-criers try to prove), then what should they do? The answer, for any vigorous people, is obvious...
Food for New Billions. Dr. Salter figures that if the world's present croplands were cultivated at the efficiency levels considered attainable in the U.S. by 1950 (this is conceivable), in 1960 they would produce nearly enough food to meet FAO's very generous requirements. Then Dr. Salter looked around the world for new soil to conquer, not by war but by intelligent change. Forty-eight percent of the land area, he said (ice, tundra, mountains or deserts), is hopeless for agriculture. In the remaining 52% there is plenty of room for expansion, for only...
...podsols (300 million acres) and 20% of the tropical red soils (one billion acres). If the podsols were cultivated by methods now used in Finland, and the tropical soils by methods used in the Philippines (neither of them tops in farming techniques), their production, added to that of present croplands efficiently cultivated, would jump the world's total food to more than twice the 1960 target...
Edward Callanan '41, a veteran of former Idler and HDC productions, will fill the role of the Restoration dandy. At present, he is a student in the Theological School...