EROSION AND OTHER EVILS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 515, 6 May 1949, Page 17

EROSION AND OTHER EVILS

OUR PLUNDERED PLANET. By Fairfield Osborn. Faber and Faber. English price, 10/6. : N the course of the last 10 years the reading public has received a succession of very impressive warnings about the waste of natural resources all over the world. In three remarkable and very readable books Sir Albert Howard (An Agricultural Testament), Messrs, Jacks and Whyte (The Rape of the Earth), and Lord Northbourne (Look to the Land) showed us how far the evil had gone; and for a time we all went about haunted by visions of the desert encroaching on the sown and of Nature’s (continued on next page) i. wre. "a

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(continued from previous page) preparations everywhere for a_ revolt against the greedy exploitation of her resources. Then the war came, and made waste take on the appearance of something very like a virtue. And now, with a general return to more normal times, Mr. Fairfield Osborn in Our Plundered Planet takes up the tale again and brings in the spectre of over-population to add to the frightening appearance of the spectre of waste: "The tide of the earth’s population is rising, the reservoir of the earth’s living resources is falling." Such is the theme. Like the good American that he is Mr. Osborn spares us nothing-waste, erosion, over-specialisation, undue reliance on chemical stimulants, the increase of population, and the decline of human physique and much else. He begins with the words, "Yesterday morning more than 175,000 mothers looked down on the vague uncomprehending eyes of their new-born babes" and he wrings his hands over the menacing fertility of the women of India and China» He doesn’t trouble us with signs of the opposite tendency in some countries, for example, in Europe and U.S.A.; but he does give an alarming account of the physical conditions of most of the young men of his own country. Altogether, he has written an interesting book--a little breathless perhaps for old-fashioned tastes-but it certainly covers a great deal of ground.

H.

M.