Multitudes, Oil, and $3 Lettuce

REUNION SEMINAR

"Turning Toward a 50th Reunion - World Crises before 1999" was moderated by Dartmouth Professor of Geography Robert Huke '48. His panel included Sheldon Segal '47, director of the Population Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Sonny Drury '48, former vice president of Gulf Oil's crude oil operations.

Segal, an impressive speaker, presented by means of staggeringly clear charts the distressing population figures for this planet. "At our graduation," he observed, "there were 2.5 billion people in the world. There are four billion now. By our 50th reunion in 1998, there will be six billion. That is a fact that cannot be reversed. The parents of those six billion are already born." Segal stuck pretty closely to citing figures, but they spoke for themselves, and what they said, loud and clear, was, "How will the earth support that many people?"

Drury introduced a note of optimism in discussing sources of energy for some of the six billion people - those who are citizens of the United States. He said that he was convinced that with our current domestic sources of crude oil, plus the availability to us of the North Sea oil, and the favorable political relationship between the ,United States and the OPEC countries, the United States can supply all its energy needs with oil throughout the late eighties. Some members of the audience felt that an optimism based on ten years of grace was ill-founded.

Huke then spoke about the decline in the amount of land cultivated for food production and of the earth's inability, under present policies, to produce enough food to feed its increasing humanity. He detailed his own efforts to raise fish and vegetables year-round in a backyard plastic dome in Norwich. At the end of his slide show presentation he conceded that his investment in the dome had been considerable. He figured his winter lettuce probably cost $3 a head.

When the speakers were done, the audience grabbed the ball and commenced to holler for solutions. Only the nuclear-power proponents had one. Several eloquent justifications for proceeding full speed ahead with the development of nuclear power were made. They were not objected to.