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?

NEW YORK CITY — stolen from the trusting Indians by the wily Dutch, taken from the law-abiding Dutch by the warlike British, then wrested in turn from the peaceful British by the revolutionary colonials. Its trees were burned decades ago, its hills leveled and the fresh ponds drained and filled, while the crystal springs have been imprisoned underground and spill their pure waters directly into the sewers. Reaching out urbanizing tentacles from its island home, the city has become a megalopolis with four of its five boroughs blanketing half of one island over a hundred miles long, engulfing another island, and sprawling up the Hudson River onto the mainland of North America.