Word: vogt
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More alarmed and alarming were William Vogt, who warned the world in Road to Survival that its growing population was rapidly using up the earth's substance, and Fairfield Osborn who, in Our Plundered Planet, lectured man for destroying the fertility of the land. Poet Thomas Merton, now a Trappist monk, lent poetic excitement to his autobiographical account of a worldly young pagan's conversion to Roman Catholicism, in Seven Storey Mountain. And, in a category all its own, there was Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was a continuing bestseller in spite...
Your Nov. 8 analysis of William Vogt's book Road to Survival is probably the most inaccurate and misleading article that TIME has ever published. The implication that "real scientists" do not agree with Vogt's main thesis is far from the truth. It is true that Vogt has exaggerated the dangers of soil erosion, but he has underestimated the difficulties in the adequate control of population growth and the control of "moral erosion...
...Vogt's "main thesis" is that the world cannot materially expand, perhaps not even maintain, its present food production. The scientists TIME consulted (in the U.S. Bureau of Plant Industry, Soils and Agricultural Engineering, and the U.S. Soil Conservation Service) disagree strongly with this thesis. TIME did not deny that the human species is theoretically able to multiply without limit. Neither is there any theoretical limit to the food supply. But TIME pointed out that when people reach high standards of living and education, they tend to balance their increase with their means of subsistence...
While most soil men have never taken Malthus' theory too literally, it was a useful tool to frighten farmers into soil conservation. For this reason, those of us who are crusading for conservation believe that your analysis of William Vogt's theories, while essentially sound and correct, will be a damaging blow. Farmers will now sleep late, plow up and down the hill. Most of them have to be frightened into action, and now our bogie man is dead by the hand of TIME...
...TIME'S smug and complacent dismissal of William Vogt's ideas on world population and world food supply, there were numerous references to "the real soil scientists" who assured TIME that everything will be O.K.-the technologists will find a way to feed everybody . . . That crops can be grown on intensively cultured and fertilized areas of poor soil is not news . . . Where is the unlimited supply of fertilizer coming from-particularly the phosphates...