Grim Analysis
HERE is a vivid passage in Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence in which the Arch-Vicar of Belial denounces the "criminal imbecility" of 20th Century man in squandering natural resources. His words came to my mind as I listened to the first of a Winter Course series on The Use and Misuse of Resources
in the South-West Pacific, by Professor K. B. Cumberland. Without the Arch+ Vicar’s rhetoric, but in as stern a vein, Dr. Cumberland stressed the progressive diminishing of the earth’s natural wealth, Using Rarotonga as an example, he painted a graphic and disturbing picture of
unnecessary waste and depletion of resources. His calm. voice, pleasant, but just a shade too slow to my ear, conveyed so convincingly grim an analysis that Huxley’s concept of man’s folly and his future began to seem less fantastic. The parallel with Ape and Essence was made even stronger when in his second talk, in the following week, Dr, Cumberland contrasted the rigid taboos the Polynesians laid down to conserve the land with the exploitation of the Pacific islands by short-sighted commercialism.
J.C.
R.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19490722.2.19.2
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 526, 22 July 1949, Page 10
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183Grim Analysis New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 526, 22 July 1949, Page 10
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