Make Room! Make Room!

PROLOGUE

In December, 1959, The President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, said: “This government… will not… as long as I am here, have a positive political doctrine in its program that has to do with this problem of birth control. That is not our business.” It has not been the business of any American government since that time.

In 1950 the United States — with just 9.5 per cent of the world’s population — was consuming 50 per cent of the world’s raw materials. This percentage keeps getting bigger and within fifteen years, at the present rate of growth, the United States will be consuming over 83 per cent of the annual output of the earth’s materials. By the end of the century, should our population continue to increase at the same rate, this country will need more than 100 per cent of the planet’s resources to maintain our current living standards. This is a mathematical impossibility — aside from the fact that there will be about seven billion people on this earth at that time and — perhaps — they would like to have some of the raw materials too.

In which case, what will the world be like?