The Wordsworthian reaction followed, imitated and continued by many other poets, in this country in Whitman, above all in certain of the short essays in Specimen Days, which have a kind of quietness about them which much of his poetry does not have. One feels so much with Whitman’s poetry that he was addressing a very large audience, but in the little essays of Specimen Days describing his life in the country after his stroke, we have the impression that he was talking to himself. There are descriptions of sitting by a pond and watching kingfishers, or deriving a sense of life by holding on to the sapling of an ash, or sitting under an oak tree, which are wonderfully beautiful, and one can see the religious value the Wordsworthian attitude towards nature had in the bustling, spreading world of modern technology.
In the present world, and this is a fact which disquiets me, the prevailing nature mysticism of nineteenth-century landscape painting and poetry seems to a great extent to have evaporated. It is as though contemporary artists have resigned themselves to the new technological environment and are not paying much attention to the given environment of nature. We have seen in painting a retreat from landscape painting into non-representational painting, into the use of abstract forms which are supposed to be symbolic and expressive of events in the mind, but which to me are a good deal less expressive than the landscapes in which, say, the Sung painters, Constable, Turner, or the Impressionists expressed the states of their mind. And we see in poetry something of the same kind. I personally find a great deal of contemporary poetry too abstract for my taste.
There is a great tendency to use abstract phraseology to escape from the concrete, factual description of natural things into descriptions of some aspect of our technological civilization. For my own part, I am old-fashioned enough to feel that I would like another reaction towards nature poetry, nature mysticism, and nature landscape painting of an earlier day. It could not be the same thing, of course; we can never repeat what happened in the past. But its general tendency would be towards health and genuine religious feeling which we could very well do with more of at the present time.
What we see then is that we are in a position to patch up the damage we have done to the planet and prevent more damage being done. But it is going to be exceedingly difficult because there are many factors which militate against it. And we need the right kind of mental atmosphere, one in which it will seem natural to people to do what we ought to do in relation to our planet. We need an extension of our present system of ethics; we need a philosophy, some form of what I would call realistic idealism, which will harmonize man with nature and which will take account of all the facts. And we need, finally, not only a good ethic and a good philosophy, but also a good art, which will give us the terms in which we can feel as well as think about this problem—an art which, I regret to say, I don’t think exists today because of the reaction against the previous manifestation of it in the nineteenth century, but which I do feel very strongly deserves to come back and to receive all the attention of a young talent.
The Population Explosion
Today I want to pass on to what is happening to the human species and to think a little about what our philosophy and our ethical outlook on the subject should be. This lecture is essentially about human numbers and their relation to human well-being and human values in general.
Needless to say, any accurate estimation of human numbers is very recent, but we can extrapolate into the past and come to what seem to be fairly good conclusions. Although there are some fairly wide margins of difference among the experts, the numbers they come to are roughly in agreement. They agree that in pre-agricultural days, for example in the lower Palaeolithic times, when man was a food-gathering creature, there were probably not more than twenty million humans on this whole planet. In later Palaeolithic times, after organized hunting had been invented, the number probably doubled. We can make a rough estimate of what an organized hunting people could do because we know how many Indians were present in North America when the white man arrived—not more than one million in the entire North American continent east of the Rockies—and this gives one an indication of the extremely low density of population possible in a hunting economy.
The Great Revolution came about 6000 b.c. with the invention of agriculture, and the creation of cities in the next millennia. By about 1000 b.c., after five thousand years of agriculture, there were probably about one hundred million people in the world. By the beginning of the Christian era, this figure had a little more than doubled: it was somewhere between two hundred million and two hundred and fifty million—less than half the present population of China. The population increased very gradually in the following years; sometimes there were long periods of standstill and sometimes there were even periods of decrease, as in the years immediately following 1348, when the Black Death killed off 30 per cent of the population of Europe and nobody knows how much of the population of Asia.
By the time the Pilgrim Fathers arrived in this country, it is estimated that the population of the world was about twice what it had been on the first Christmas Day—that is to say, it had doubled in sixteen hundred years, an extremely slow rate of increase. But from that time on, from the middle of the seventeenth century, with the beginnings of the industrial revolution and the first importation of food from the newly developed lands of the New World, population began rising far more rapidly than it had ever risen before. By the time the Declaration of Independence was signed, the figure for the human population of the world was probably around seven hundred million; it must have passed the billion mark fairly early in the nineteenth century and stood at about fourteen hundred million around the time when I was born in the 1890s. The striking fact is that since that time the population of the planet has doubled again. It has gone from fourteen hundred million, which is already twice what it was at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, to twenty-eight hundred million. And the rate of increase now is such that it will probably double again in rather less than fifty years.
Thus the rates of increase have been increasing along with the absolute increase in numbers. The net rate of increase did not reach 1 per cent per annum until the beginning of this century. It has now risen to an average of 1.6 per cent per annum for the world at large, and there are considerable areas of the world where it exceeds 2 per cent and even reaches 3 per cent or more. Now, a 3 per cent increase when compounded annually (population increases as money increases, by compound interest) doubles the population in about twenty-five years, and a 1.5 per cent increase doubles the population in about fifty years; thus a 1.6 per cent increase will double the population in somewhat less than fifty years. The fact that the rate of increase never reached 1 per cent until the twentieth century, and that in the short time since about 1905, when this point was reached, it has already reached the figure of 1.6 per cent, is extraordinary. It indicates very clearly that we are living in a world for which there are no historical precedents whatsoever and that we have to resign ourselves to thinking in entirely new ways about a problem which our fathers never had any occasion to think about so intensively.
I indicated that, at the present time, there are large differences in the rate of increase in different parts of the world. Western Europe had its great increase during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although the rate never came up to even 1 per cent per annum, the increase was very rapid and startling at the time. The population in Europe has now reached about four hundred million and is increasing at less than 1
