On Growth

25. Sir Julian S. Huxley

Sir Julian Sorell Huxley was born in 1887. He studied biology at Eton and Oxford University. From 1912 to 1916 he taught at the Rice Institute in Houston, Texas.
After World War II he served as executive secretary of UNESCO.
Sir Julian recalled during his conversation with the author that at the turn of the century, when he was asked to write an essay for a scholarship to Eton on the subject, ‘What would you do, if the government gave you a million pounds to spend?’ he centered his theme around buying land and parks for conservation.

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Some of Sir Julian's best-known books are Problems of Relative Growth (1972), Evolution, the Modern Synthesis, and Soviet Genetics and World Science. In 1971 he published Memories.

Sir Julian, when the Club of Rome report reached you, did you think it important?

The obvious and most important thing about it is demonstrating that population increase means more sewage, more litter, more technology and more pollution. That I think is the essential fact. They make some economic suggestions which I am not in a position to comment on, as I am not an economist. But I think the most important thing is to show the interconnection of population growth and the fact that exponential growth always leads to eventual doubling and redoubling. This is inevitably connected with pollution and damage to the environment, and its nonhuman inhabitants, plant and animal. Population increase also inevitably involves increase in the size of the cities, which in the modern world always seems to involve the creation of slum areas; and once you get slum areas with overcrowding, you tend to get violence.

You see, in animals overcrowding by itself gives rise to violence. Mice, harmless little mice, turn vicious when overcrowded; and this applies also to human beings, so long as we have the conditions persist - about which the Club of Rome is writing, about economic advance - we shall go on competing for our means of subsistence, notably as regard to nonrenewable resources. This may very likely lead to war, especially so long as we think in terms of power rather than in terms of the good life, of improving the human condition further.

There have been some critics - like my old friend Lord Zuckermann - he critizes the book on the ground that too much attention is paid to long-term problems like increase of population. But this after all is not long-term but immediate. He feels that we ought to concentrate more on trying to get rid of poverty and ill health. These are of course urgent, but I still think that at the back of them are these basic problems of population growth and resulting pollution.

But, Sir Julian, don't we need economic growth to fight starvation, chaos and crowding?

Of course, we need economic growth to keep up the standard of living;

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but this becomes increasingly difficult as more people have to be dealt with. Thus, in India they are making a gallant attempt to industrialize the country, but this does not mean that the danger of overpopulation has diminished. Indeed it seems that Indian overpopulation is more serious than ever before.

As population increases there are fewer jobs on the land, so again you get a tendency to migrate to the cities. I don't know if you know India, but Calcutta to me is absolutely appalling.¹ Of course, conditions in it are aggravated by the refugee problem, but even before partition it was terrible - with hundreds of people sleeping in the streets and unable to get jobs - and all the diseases.

Another point - if you promote health facilities, there will be more people - and, furthermore, a greater proportion of elderly people. And they are past working. It is what we call a ‘vicious circle.’

Sir Julian, in your essay on population you said: ‘A traditional culture, like a wild species of animal or plant, is a living thing.’ And then you added: ‘If it is destroyed, the world is poorer.’²

Luckily, we in Europe are not going on in quite this way. After all, in Britain we have now a minister for the environment, we have strong conservation societies, national and international, and that is increasing pressure for population control.

Some people want to be very drastic about population and talk about taxing people for every child above two. I don't think we shall come to that, unless the situation has become absolutely intolerable: I don't believe that public opinion and political expediency would tolerate that now. On the other hand, one thing might be done - the government might diminish the amount of family allowance for every child after the second. Today even in this country (and still more in France) a family can live on its family allowances; indeed, the more children it has, the better life it can lead. This has got to be stopped. You must obviously help people, but if they don't do their duty as regards overlarge families, you can at least not pay them for having too many children - pay them less at any rate.

Sir Julian, do you think we will lose more of our freedom when we are getting to organize this planet like managers of a multinational company?

What sort of freedom?

1 Not only has Sir Julian visited Calcutta often, in this connection he would like to recommend to the reader Something Beautiful for God, William Collins Sons (London, 1971), the book Malcolm Muggeridge wrote about Mother Theresa of Calcutta, the Yugoslav nun who worked all her life among the Calcutta poor and dying.

2 On Population: Three Essays by Thomas Malthus, Julian Huxley, and Frederick Osborn, New American Library (New York, 1960).

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I'm thinking of what Skinner³ says in Beyond Freedom and Dignity, that man might have to give up his individuality in exchange for a more dictatorial form of government.

What do you mean by ‘individuality’? I think people will have to give up various types of enterprises, and will have to collaborate in certain other enterprises. For instance, a great deal of pollution can be avoided by recycling litter and other waste materials and by installing really efficient sewage plants; but I don't see that this interferes with our liberty. After all, liberty is always relative. We are not at liberty to do exactly what we like. I am not at liberty to go out and start firing pistols outside my house or to shout and make a disturbance - I would get arrested. And of course in this country there is liberty to protest. But when mass protests cause disorder and violence, then the police can interfere. I don't see why anybody should interfere with liberty to try to improve matters. But certainly the liberty of factory owners who release pollutants into our rivers will be diminished, but that is a very different thing.

Do you think Limits to Growth and its mass distribution is contributing to a more conscious acceptance of the global problématique?

How can I tell? I don't know anything about its distribution.

In the Netherlands the report sold 250,000 copies in one year. That is pretty good. But I don't know what is happening in America, Germany. Do you think the book is valuable?

In the whole, yes. I think that it includes rather too complicated diagrams and tables for the average reader, but of course for the professionals, sociologists, economists, these are important, indeed necessary. But it's rather stiff reading, and sometimes the argument is hard to follow. In general, I am sure that the report is highly desirable as showing the way in which the different facts interact, and of course one thing that we need to consider is what we thought of as really safe before, namely, the ocean as a whole. This has been stressed by Heyerdahl,⁴ who reported on the polluted state of the Pacific, that he was crossing. The same apparently is true of the Atlantic. And recently I read that even Antarctic waters are getting polluted with various metals which have come all the way from the Arctic ice. The world's oceans are a unity. Already we

3 See conversation no. 7.

4 See conversation no. 63.

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are getting people poisoned by eating marine creatures contaminated with dangerous metals, like mercury, discharged into the sea by various industries, notably in Japan, but the same sort of thing is true elsewhere.

On the other hand, we must say that the campaign to preserve the environment has done much good in Britain: For instance, salmon have not returned to the Thames, but we have got back quite a number of smaller fish, not yet in the center of London, but close to it. Many other rivers are being cleaned up, but there's still a great deal to be done to purify our waters.

Population has always been your greatest worry. Are you hopeful about the future?

How can one be hopeful about population, which is increasing so fast? The only encouraging thing I can say is that the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Health Organization and Unesco have all set up committees to deal with population pressure. This is something quite new. As I record in my memoirs, already in 1931, I suggested that radio should focus more attention to the subject of birth control and population increase in general. I was put on the mat by Sir John Reith, then head of the BBC, accusing me of ‘polluting the ether’ with such disgusting ideas. Since then, there's been a big change in our thinking (and our actions) about these problems. The trouble is that all the remedies first of all demand a great deal of popular education - about the need for family planning, for instance - also about the not expensive methods for preventing the environment from being spoilt, like proper sewage disposal, proper recycling. Remember that unless we recycle our water, we shall run short of it - then we should be a damned planet.

[Following my interview with Sir Julian, he remarked:]

I am most interested to hear what Toynbee said. Was he at all hopeful?

No, not too hopeful.

After all, he is a great historian. He has seen and read about so many civilizations, their growth and their decay - by invasion, or just by decay, or by war. Not unnaturally he cannot be very hopeful. How can I be very hopeful? All I can say is that the situation is more hopeful than it was because today more people are becoming aware of it.

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Don't you think here is a task for the media?

Yes, I do.

Of course, there are some people who say they are getting terribly bored with these prophecies of doom. But it isn't doom if we act about remedying the dangers in the right way.

We shall have a difficult time, but I don't see that we are doomed. It's nonsense to say that the human species will die out. Our species will certainly survive. It may survive in stunted form, with not enough food and with too much pollution, but it will survive. After all, the distinguishing characteristic of man is his ability to think and plan and to communicate his ideas and transmit them to later generations. I think there are enough people with brains and goodwill to see that something decisive is achieved in all these threats to the quality of life and of nature.