Books
Review: OUR PLUNDERED PLANET, by Fairfield Osborn, Pyramid, 176 pp, $0.75 paper. Merely the fact that this book could have been written in 1948 — and largely ignored until quite recently — is telling. It is even more telling to update, or compare the 1948 predictions of coming problems with the 1969 actuality; e.g., in 1948 Osborn stated with some horror that the population of the world could be expected to reach three billion by the end of the twentieth century.
Books
Review: OUR PLUNDERED
PLANET, by Fairfield Osborn, Pyramid, 176 pp, $0.75 paper.
Merely the fact that this book could have been written in 1948 — and largely ignored until quite recently — is telling. It is even more telling to update, or compare the 1948 predictions of coming problems with the 1969 actuality; e.g., in 1948 Osborn stated with some horror that the population of the world could be expected to reach three billion by the end of the twentieth century. In the foreword to the 1968 edition, he presents the following statistics:
1948 world population
2,331,000,000
1 968 world population
3,479,000,000.
which goes to show that even our most pessimistic extrapolations may turn out to be too optimistic.