Noah Men vs Doomsday Men
Tara Ali Baig
PEOPLE POPULATING by Derek Llewellyn-Jones Faber and Faber, 1976, 355 pp., £3.95
April 1976, volume 1, No 2

The 9th article of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China states, ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat.’ This seems to sum up, with typical Chinese compression, what the Doomsday men anticipate when population increases in the present stage of exponential growth (now doubling themselves in smaller and smaller periods of time) result in appalling human numbers in less than 35 years more. The UN diagram based on human growth estimates after 1970 shows a pattern like an Egyptian lily rising from a slender stem and sweeping into a wide flower, India and China providing almost half the petals. By the year 2000 when the world population may exceed 6.5 thousand million, the rate of human growth will change from doubling every 100 years in 1850 to only 35 years by the year 2000.

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