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[babies crying]
-Almost 100 million babieswill come into the world this year.
The rate increases.
More babies meanfinally still more babies.
When these have reached the age of 40,the world will have doubled its numbers.
Helpless, harmless infantsbut by their numbers and by their needs,
part of a possible danger for mankind.
Danger from a child,
from new life,
something cherishedby all people everywhere,
yes,
because ours is a hungry world.
One-half of humanityhas less than enough to eat.
How are we to feed the new millions
who arrive each year?
Population and food supply,
a subject that haunts the mindsof thoughtful men and women everywhere.
By many, it's consideredthe major crisis of our time
next to the threat of atomic war.
Some think it's an even greater danger.
I've spoken to one authorityat the United Nations who says,
in the end, the womb may provemore dangerous than the bomb.
These are harsh words.
They serve to describe the coming crisisin population and food supply
that's aptly calledthe population explosion.
The heart of the problem is the fact
that the rate of human growthcan be truly fantastic.
One expert has illustratedthis human multiplication
in a striking illustration.
Let's assume that the human racebegan with Adam and Eve
in the year 4004 BC.
If their descendants increasedat the rate of 1% annually,
the population would have increased
by the year 1900 BC to 4 billion people.
At the beginning of the Christian era,
there would have been standing room only
on the entire land surface of the Earth.
Humanity didn't explode then,
but it's begun to do so in our time.
We're increasing right nowat the rate of 1.6% annually.
In the last 60 years,we've doubled our numbers.
We'll double that again,
not in 60 years,
but in 40.
Double that population againin approximately 25 years,
and so on.
More people mean even more people.
Obviously, the explosion is underway.
Standing room onlyin this world of ours is possible.
Some experts sayit could happen in 200 to 300 years,
a more conservative opinion,
in 600 years.
Now, the state of the world in 600 years
or even 100 years is something that
people living today maynot feel too alarmed about,
but they should.
The population explosionhas immediate dangers for us
and for our children.
How has this sudden accelerationin human growth happened?
It's not so much a matterof more births as fewer early deaths.
More people are living longer.
This is because we've changednature's control of human numbers.
In the past, up to fairly recent times,
natural controls limitedthe rate of human increase.
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-Nature killed in many ways,
by flood.
Through all human memory,water, the giver of life,
has also been a destroyer,
taking life and the means of life.
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-Those who survived death by drowning
usually faced death by starvation
because the fields and crops were ruined.
If not by flood,
possibly by drought,
in one corner of the world,too much water,
in another, too little.
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-The end was the same,
devastation,
ruined crops,
no food for man or for beast,
famine.
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-When the soil died, man died.
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-Long before the airplane and the bomb,
death came from the sky,
plagues of locusts,
winged killers in their millions,
sweeping in on the trees and plants,
devouring everything in their path.
The armies of locustswere instruments of divine wrath,
primitive people thought,
some still do.
The gods have been angered,
and so punish the people
by sending locuststo sweep the earth clean,
or perhaps the angel of death would come,
bearing disease.
The dread plagues,
the black death,
aided and abetted by superstition,ignorance, and primitive filth,
these frightful epidemicsswept away towns,
cities,
whole regions.
People died in hundreds, in thousands,in tens of thousands,
in all ages, in all regions,
through all the known world.
There was no escape,
no protection,
no cure.
In the year 1665 in London,
a small town then,
there were 97,306 deaths.
68,000 of these deathswere attributed to bubonic plague.
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-Death triumphed,
the symbol most people thoughtof divine retribution,
something to be met onlyby prayer and incantation.
Always throughout all civilizations,
there were a few who thought otherwise,
who looked to natural causesfor the source of disease.
Of course,there were quacks and charlatans,
false doctors who killed far more oftenthan they cured.
There were also the true doctors,
and they slowly learned more and moreabout the human body and its workings.
Though science and medicine were startingto come to grips with disease and death,
ignorance was still dominant.
Medicine was irrationalrather than rational.
Public attitudes toward medical carein theory were also irrational.
New ideas were metwith fear and hostility.
Louis Pasteur and his methodsof immunization were ridiculed
and attacked on religious groundsas unnatural and evil.
An American doctor inoculated his sonand touched off a storm of criticism.
There were riots, beatings,and violent denunciations in the press.
Cartoons were usedto condemn the new ideas.
One showed people with animal headsspringing from their bodies
because they'd been inoculatedwith serum taken from animals.
The progressive doctor was held up
as a vicious lunatic experimenterwho deserved to be treated by animals
as he was thought to treat them.
Of course, the ridiculeand hostility eventually vanished.
Immunization was proven effective,
and inoculation becamea standard practice,
not only as a measureof personal protection,
but also as a social dutyto prevent the spread of disease.
This concept of social responsibilityand acceptance of health regulation
took solid root in more recent years.
A graphic example of organized actionin the face of an epidemic
can be seen in this record ofa Manchurian outbreak of plague in 1911.
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-There were 60,000 deaths,
but there could have beenmany times that number.
Houses were burned,
bodies were burned.
The methods were crudeby contemporary standards
but comparatively effective,
and a far cry from despairor hysteria or superstition.
Death no longer triumphant,
no longer the symbol of unknownand uncontrollable disease.
We now know a great deal about diseaseand that knowledge is spreading.
The student nurse in South Americalearns how to stamp out infections
that would and perhapsdid kill her grandfather.
Medical colleges now existin almost every corner of the globe.
Still far too few,
many, many more are needed,
but the numbers grow slowly
and the knowledge spreads.
Knowledge of hygieneand sanitation acquired by social workers,
district nurses,
health inspectors,
all working with the doctor and the nurse
to hold back death prolonged life.
Baby clinicsto find disease to prevent disease,
spearheading the worldwide spreadof medical skills
of the specialistsof the World Health Organization.
They and their studentsare people of all races and tongues.
In the years that WHO has been at work,
millions of children and adultshave been saved from blindness,
deformity, malaria, cholera,
yellow fever.
These new frontiers of healing
are often crudein appearance and facilities,
but they represent something newin human experience,
an expanding worldwide structureof clinics and health systems,
local, national,and through WHO, international,
in effect the foundations ofa worldwide health system.
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-In less than one generation,
great victories over diseaseand death have been won.
A single injectionof penicillin will cure yaws,
a fowl disease sufferedby 50 million people just 10 years ago.
Today, the end of yaws is in sight.
X-ray detection of tuberculosis,
so familiar in Western societies
is spreading to almost every countryin the world.
Insect control in Africa,
workers collect specimensof the Tsetse fly,
carrier of sleeping sickness.
When enough is known about this fly,the disease it carries may be eradicated,
or at least controlled.
This is now the casewith the malaria-carrying mosquito.
Since 1945,
malaria areas have been sprayedwith DDT and other chemicals.
The result,
nearly 300 million peoplenow protected from malaria,
once the greatest of all killer diseases.
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-Water tests for typhoid,
another great killerthat can be brought under control.
In field tests, in rice paddies,in clinics and hospitals, in laboratories,
research,
treatment,
cure.
Still so much remains to be done.
World health workers have foundthat there are even greater shortages
and more problems than was realizedonly a few years ago.
They now know the extentof world facilities for medical care,
and these are terribly limited.
Burma, for instance, has one hospital bedfor every 10,000 people.
Canada, by comparison,has a bed for every 77 people.
Indonesia,one doctor for every 70,000 people,
United Statesa doctor for every 800 people,
and so on.
Nevertheless,a tremendous volume of human life
is now being savedand prolonged to a natural span of years.
Unquestionably a magnificent achievement,
but it helps create the new problem,
the population explosionmost acute in the older countries,
but now affecting the new countries.
For example, New York City,
a metropolis of 10 million people,
the buildings grow higher
and the city canyons deeper,
and New York has becomethe most crowded center
on the North American continent.
Every daylight hour,
the streets are filled with torrentsof people jostling, crowding,
living in a welterof noise and congestion.
Population pressurein North America's large cities
is not yet truly critical in termsof living space and food supply.
Their people are fairly prosperous.
They're housed fairly well.
They eat fairly well.
By Asian standards,they're immensely rich.
Urban crowding has created many problems.
Juvenile crime,shortage of schools and classrooms,
and, of course,the insane tangles of traffic.
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-These really are problems of abundance,of privilege.
They're not life-and-death problems,
at least not yet.
North Americans stillhave some element of choice.
Most or many don't needto crowd into the big centers.
People can live and for that matter,work outside the cities.
They still have space,
vastly more livable living spacethan almost any other part of the world.
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-Europe has less space.
It has more cities,
more urban sprawls,more dwellings and factories,
and, of course, more people.
Their places of work and homesradiate out from every city.
The countryside isbeing blotted out by the cities.
London has now spread some 25 milesin almost every direction from its center.
There too, the cities teamwith people jostling and crowding.
Europe has all the problems of congestion,
including the space devouring automobile,
overcrowding in homes, streets,colleges, and schools.
Most European countries havea lower rate of population increase
than the world average of 1.6%.
Even so population growth is outstrippingfacilities needed to keep up with it.
The greatest human concentration isin Asia in such cities as Hong Kong,
Singapore, Kolkata, and dozens of others.
All the coastal areas of China, Indonesia,and India are packed with people,
more than 400 to the square mile.
In North America,in the most crowded eastern areas,
there are only 180 to the square mile.
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-The rate of increase for Asiais less than one would expect,
about the same rate as North America,
and India has an even lower ratethan Europe,
but the increase in numbers is enormous.
More people mean more people.
The compound interest to the human race.
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-The multitudes of Asia have filledthe cities and the lands are overflowing.
There's intense competitionfor living space and food,
competition for work for the meansto buy living space and food.
Many millions lack these means,have no homes of any kind.
They live in the streets.
Many were born there.
Many have and will continue to die there.
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-This intense and explosivepopulation pressure
is rapidly building upin the western hemisphere.
Latin America now has the greatest rateof population increase of all.
In the next 40 years,
this region will morethan double its numbers.
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-In Latin America,in Asia, in Africa, in Europe,
everywhere in the world,
more and yet more human beings.
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-Can people go elsewhere?
Is migration one answerto the population pressure?
It has been in the past for some people.
Europeans have migratedto the newer countries in numbers,
but the flow has lessenedthrough the years.
What about India and China?
Even if the new countrieswould accept mass migration
from non-white countries,
this would not beginto solve the population explosion.
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-Nature was never completelyin control of population,
man assisted nature.
He very often decimated his kind in war.
War accomplished two things,
a chance of acquiring new wealth,new resources,
and also a reductionof population pressure
through the destruction of human beings.
This ancient methodis as old as man himself,
and while he deplores it,he's still capable of using it.
We've experiencedthe method quite recently.
Remember?
-[cheers]
They called it destinyor national right,
or [?]
but by any name,it was deliberate war of aggression
with all the fine phrases,with all the propaganda,
with all the pretenseof justice and moral right,
the true purpose was quite simply
to take living spaceand resources from someone else by force.
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-War has always meant sufferingand death for other than soldiers.
Civilians have always been uprooted,displaced by war.
War devastates town and countryside,
and the people scatter and flee.
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-33 million people diedthrough war between 1939 and 1945.
Not many people diedby violence compared to those
who died in the war that followed the war,
the battle for food.
Starvation killedfar more people than bombs,
but the bombs created the starvation.
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-If not war, if not mass migration,if not disaster and pestilence,
then what?
What can avert the looming crisisin population and food supply?
Well,
a great many solutions or part solutionshave been offered by many people,
including some of the best mindsin the world.
Mainly, they propose stepsto secure more food and less people.
Biologists, chemists,and many other scientists
believe that we can develop new sourcesof food and new kinds of food.
They say the sea can give us more food,
that we can developlarge areas of new land.
Many among these experts warn us
that there are limitsto the world's resources.
There's only so much land mass,so much fresh water,
so much timber, coal, oil,minerals of all kinds.
As to less people, well,
there we encounter oneof the most contentious issues
of our time.
Many authorities and some whole nationsare in favor of direct population control.
Birth control.
These advocates say we have no choice,
that we must sooneror later limit world population.
A wide range of opponentsto birth control say
that this is impossible, immoral,
or irreligious.
All these questions are vast and complex,difficult to understand, and judge.
We invite you to make your judgmentas we discuss them on coming programs.
Thank you.
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