Living within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos by Garrett Hardin

Author:Garrett Hardin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780199879557
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1993-04-21T14:00:00+00:00

Gregg was a revered and powerful figure in the medical world, and his remarks were widely noted—and widely condemned. Gregg observed: “Cancerous growths demand food; but they have never been cured by getting it.” This was later called “Gregg’s Law.”31 The frankness of this “law” affronted the foreign aid establishment, which had the feeding of overpopulated countries as one of its major missions. After a brief period of notoriety, Gregg’s Law disappeared from public consciousness. His paper is seldom included in anthologies on either population or the environment, though Dr. Gregg himself recognized that his argument had an important bearing on the environmental movement then in the process of being born.

One might have expected Alan Gregg’s insight to play an important role in the genesis of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which appeared seven years later, but the index of Carson’s book does not include Gregg. Carson was a voracious reader; she surely must have noticed Gregg’s address at the time. Did she repress knowledge of it because she herself was suffering from a terminal cancer when she wrote her influential book? Or did she not refer to Gregg because she felt that the mere mention of so “controversial” a message might harm her cause?

The foreign aid establishment continued to distribute annually hundreds of millions of dollars overseas in the faith that antidemostatic mechanisms would ultimately prevail. Only after the political reversals of Marxism in Europe, culminating in the crises of the autumn of 1989, did the wealthy nations start to disassemble their most extreme and least productive “humanitarian aid” apparatus in sub-Saharan Africa, where diminution of the death rates had been accompanied by a disastrous increase in infant survival rates.32

Returning to the Rockefeller Foundation, we have to ask: did it, in the light of the statement made by its own vice-president, mend its ways and cease to promote population growth in already overpopulated countries? It did not. The saving of infant lives may originally have been intended as the means whereby poor people would be induced to accept contraception, but the means had become the end.

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