THE GRIM FUTURE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 547, 16 December 1949, Page 12

THE GRIM FUTURE

NEW COMPASS OF THE WORLD, edited _ by Hans W, Weigert, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, and Richard Edes Harrison; Harrap, English price, 21/-. N a world where the pursuit of ideological shibboleths is preferred to the search for less palatable truth, this symposium of the contributions of 23 specialists in the geography, history and economics of problems of particular importance today brings us face to face with facts which we must look in the eye, though they slay us. Its arrangement is primarily geographical: there are sections on the Arctic and Antarctic spheres, the Heartland concept of Mackinder and its relation to the expansion of the U.S.S.R., new frontiers in Central

Europe, with an excellent chapter by Kiss on the geographical unification of the Danube area, and a section on the particular problems of Asia. Five-sixths of the book is concerned with the immediate problems of the present, viewed in their geographical aspects. Indeed, the editors state that "history is.geography in motion," a statement with sufficient truth in it to be dangerous. The last sixth of the book, however, is concerned with problems so fundamental, and so difficult of solution, as to dwarf completely the preceding chapters, excellent though they are. These problems are the relentless rises in world population, as measured against man’s food supply. Most of the/ evidence discussed has already appeared in periodicals concerned with geography and population, but it is excellently summed‘ up here by Bertram of Cambridge on population trends and the world’s biological resources, Thompson of Miami on population changes in Asia, ‘Taeuber of Princeton on the population of Japan and peace, and Russell Smith

of Columbia on science and population. The picture is.a grim one; every advance in human welfare, in Asia in particular, reacts. at once as a drop in the immediate death rate and a rise in popu-

lation, which in the case of India is increasing at a rate of fifteen thousand souls daily. Each improvement in food supply, too, results in more swarming mouths to eat the food. If the present rise in rate of increase continues India alone will need a threefold rise in food supply in the next thirty years‘to maintain its present food standards, even now on the verge of starvation level. No hope can be held out for the drop in reproduction rate which has taken place in European countries; the complex changes in social patterns consequent on the adoption of European contraceptive measures could make headway only slowly in custom-bound Asian society, even under the most favourable conditions. The authors see the pressure of population on food resources becoming more and more acute, and though they think that man will in the end adjust his reproductive rate to his food supply, they see a time of trial ahead. Such a problem is one which is the fundamental cause of much of the world’s ills, and before we can hope to improve matters we must see the position clearly. This book is a help to that end.

D. W.

McK.