World Problems “Too Many People Or None”

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30120, 2 May 1963, Page 15

World Problems “Too Many People Or None”

The world faced two related super-problems: the population explosion and the thermonuclear explosion, Dr. R. S. Bigelow, a zoology lecturer at the University of Canterbury, told the Canterbury branch of the Royal Society of New Zealand last evening.

The alternatives boiled down to “too many people or no people at all,” Dr. Bigelow said. To avoid both, a world-wide co-operative effort was needed on a comparable scale to the effort which went into World War 11.

It was no answer to the population explosion problem to make a gigantic effort to produce more food, he said. Various persons, including those who sold agricultural chemicals. were advocating this: but it was naive to think the motivating aspiration was to feed the hungry. The basic motive was to enrich those who produced the chemicals and the food.

This could be seen by present results, for food surpluses piled up in the richer countries while the numbers of the hungry continually increased. '

Man was only one of the species on earth—only a part of nature, not the whole of it. “We cant have all the food to ourselves, no matter how we lock at it,” said Dr Bigelow. The thermonuclear explosion problem was a related one, for the motive behind present policies was much the same as in good production. In the United States, for example, there was a continual call for more military spending, not basically, through fears of inadequate defence but because of the prosperity which military contracts brought to those

who worked on then. Anticommunjsm was merely the priming for the pump; the real motivation was “prodoilarism ” Insecticide Use

Speaking on methods of controlling insects, Dr. Bigelow quoted with approval the views of Dr. Rachel Carson, who. in her book "The Silent Spring." forecast disaster because of the increasing use of insecticides. Insects developed resistance quickly, because of their high reproductive potential: humans bred much more slowly and sparingly. “We might be able to breed a resistant population—if we were prepared to kill off more than 93 per cent, of our children in each generation for 500 years," he commented.

Dr. Carson had been criticised, he said, for presenting a biased picture, but the manufacturers of chemicals had, through their advertising, given the public an impression heavily biased in the other direction. It was necessary for those who saw the danger to “compete with the chemical companies’ propaganda as energetically as possible.

“I do not suggest that we should discontinue the use of chemical poisons to fight insects, but we should not use them on a vast scale unless we are assured there will not be widespread harmful results," he said. For example, the increasing use of insecticides was causing a rise in the concentration of such chemicals as DDT and dieldrin in human fat, but no-one knew the danger limit or what the results of say, a three-fold or four-fold increase in the concentration might be. Sometimes, poisonous insect irides were sold over shop counters in New Zealand without any indication that they were dangerous, Dr. Bigelow said. He had seen lindane sold as the main ingredient of two proprietary pest-killers without any mention of its poisonous nature. It was conceivable, too, that seme of those who used dangerous agricultural chemicals might do so without giving enough thought to the possible results if the poison regulations were not observed. Control by Predators Insufficient attention was being paid to the alternative method of insect control: the use of predatory creatures, usually insects themselves. The method already had several notable successes behind it. but the chemicals used to fight pests often killed the predators as well, and sometimes killed the predators without killing the pests. Even experimental work on the biological control of insects was often difficult for this reason. Dr. Bigelow said he would like to see biological research get even half the annual sum now spent on insecticide research, and he wished also that certain areas were set aside where chemical insecticides could be banned to prevent interference with trials of biological control systems. Dr. Bigelow’s lecture was the first of four by various speakers oh the artificial control of animal populations by chemicals.