POPULATION EXPLOSION: IS MAN REALLY DOOMED?

THE mathematics of the nightmare always makes it sound inevitable: the population of the world, which required centuries to reach 1 billion, took only 80 years to double that number, and only 41 years more to reach today's 3.7 billion. If the progression continues, it is widely and gloomily predicted by the spiritual heirs of Thomas Malthus, there will be 7 billion people standing in line for their rations in the year 2000. By 2050, perhaps 30 billion will be fighting like animals for a share of the once-green earth.

After the statistics come the Dantesque visions and the cries of moral revulsion. "We shall, in the rich countries, be surrounded by a sea of famine," warns British Novelist C.P. Snow. "Many millions of people are going to starve. We shall see them doing so upon our television sets." Even if some way can be found to feed the onrushing millions, they may still face a psychic fate similar to the one that befell Dr. John Calhoun's white mice. A psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington, D.C., Calhoun started with eight mice in an null cage; within a little more than two years, they had multiplied to 2,200, but they were hardly alive-mere "passive blobs of protoplasm, frozen in a childlike trance." Summing up the sentiments of many population experts, Stanford Biologist Paul Ehrlich (who has had himself sterilized) concludes that "if we don't do something dramatic about population and environment, and do it immediately, there is just no hope that civilization will persist."

This is the famous "population explosion" that President Nixon has described as "one of the most serious challenges to human destiny." Yet it is sometimes hard to believe -at least in America-that it really exists. The nation does have its slums and traffic jams, its squalors of polluted air and water, but it can also boast mile upon mile of open land, forests and farms that stretch to the horizon. Is all this doomed by the arrival of tomorrow's children?

Population growth1% a year in the U.S.; 2% in the world as a whole-is undeniably a problem. But despite the cries of alarm, it is considerably less clear just what the problem is, how grave it is, and what should be done about it. It does seem safe to say, though, that the great famine is by no means inevitable.

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Parts of the world-the slums of great cities like New York, London and Tokyo-are obviously overcrowded. But this does not mean that the entire planet is running out of room. Although India has a major population problem, with about 570 million people crammed into 1.1 million sq. mi., Australia has more than twice that much land and only 1/40 the population. Canada, Brazil and Russia all have vast empty spaces. And although much of this space is jungle or steppe or desert, the Israelis have demonstrated in the Negev that technology and hard work can make the most inhospitable land support new settlers.