My shelves in the office are nearly empty now. I have given away most of my books, reports, and odd issues of different journals. This morning only three books remain at one end of one of the shelves. A few minutes ago I took one of them down. Its appeal was that it was the slimmest. The book turned out to be A Blueprint for Survival by the editors of The Ecologist.[1] I bought it in Ljubljana in 1978. Much of it is underlined. Many pages bristle with my comments. Flipping through the yellowing book I started reading an unmarked paragraph spanning pages 118 and 119. As the argument goes, an individual in an advanced industrial country consumes far more resources and contributes far more to environmental pollution than an individual in a less developed country. In 1970, according to Wayne Davis,[2] an American had twenty-five times the impact on the environment as an Indian. Thus, worked out in “Indian equivalents,” the population of the United States was equivalent to that of five-billion Indians. An impressive figure, but I wonder whether anyone has been keeping it up to date. It must be growing, and fast. By today, that figure must have doubled at least. If the environmental effect of all the recent wars is taken into account, it cannot be less then four times as large. Imagine, twenty-billion Indians in America alone!

Footnotes

1. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1972.

2. “Four-Billion Americans,” The Ecologist, July 1970.