preventing the optimisation of other values. I t means that while most people receive the bare minimum of calories necessary for survival, a large propor­ tion are deprived of the nutrients (especially protein) essential for intel­ lectual development. They are alive, but unable to realise their full potential —which is the grossest possible waste of human resources. An optimum population, therefore, may be defined as one that can be sustained indefinitely and at a level at which the other values of its members are optimised—and the fact that we are above this level does not justify despair, but does justify a great sense of urgency in working towards our long-term goal of the opti­ mum. For it is obvious that given the dynamic of population growth, even i f all nations today determined to stabilise their populations, numbers would continue to rise for some consider­ able time. Indeed the Population Coun­ cil has calculated (Annual Report 1970) that. . i f the replacement-sized family is realised for the world as a whole by the end of this century—itself an unlikely event—the world's population will then be 60 per cent larger or about 5.8 billion, and due to the resulting age structure it will not stop growing until near the end of the next century, at which time i t will be about 8.2 billion (8,200 million) or about 225 per cent the present size. I f replacement is achieved in the developed world by 2000 and in the developing world by 2040, then the world's population will stabilise at nearly 15.5 billion (15,500 million) about a century hence, or well over four times the present size". Clearly we must go all out for the "unlikely event" of achieving the replacement-sized family (an average of about two children per couple) throughout the world by the end of this century, i f our children are not to suffer the catastrophes we seek to avoid.

256. Our task is to end population growth by lowering the rate of recruit­ ment so that i t equals the rate of loss. A few countries will then be able to stabilise, to maintain that ratio; most others, however, will have to slowly reduce their populations to a level at which it is sensible to stabilise. Stated baldly, the task seems impossible; but i f we start now, and the exercise is spread over a sufficiently long period of time, then we believe that it is within our capabilities. The difficulties are 14

enormous, but they are surmountable.

257. First, governments must ack­ nowledge the problem and declare their commitment to ending popula­ tion growth; this commitment should also include an end to immigration. Secondly, they must set up national population services with a fourfold brief:

(1) to publicise as widely and vigor­ ously as possible the relationship between population, food supply, qual­ ity of life, resource depletion, etc., and the great need for couples to have no more than two children. The finest talents in advertising should be re­ cruited for this, and the broad aim should be to inculcate a socially more responsible attitude to child-rearing. For example, the notion (derived largely from the popular women's magazines) that childless couples should be objects of pity rather than esteem should be sharply challenged; and of course there are many similar notions to be disputed.

(2) to provide at local and national levels free contraception advice and information on other services such as abortion and sterilisation;

(3) to provide a comprehensive domi­ ciliary service, and to provide contra­ ceptives free of charge, free sterilisation, and abortion on demand;

(4) to commission, finance, and co­ ordinate research not only on demo­ graphic techniques and contraceptive technology, but also on the subtle cultural controls necessary for the harmonious maintenance of stability. We know so little about the dynamics of human populations that we cannot say whether the first three measures would be sufficient. I t is self-evident that i f couples still wanted families larger than the replacement-size no amount of free contraception would make any difference. However, because we know so little about population con­ trol, it would be difficult for us to devise any of the socio-economic restraints which on the face of it are likely to be more effective, but which many people fear might be unduly repressive. For this reason, we would be wise to rely on the first three measures for the next 20 years or so. We then may find they are enough—but i f they aren't, we must hope that intensive research during this period will be rewarded with a set of socio-economic restraints that are both effective and humane. These will

then constitute the third stage, and should also provide the tools for the fourth stage—that of persuading the public to have average family sizes of slightly less than replacement size, so that total population can be greatly reduced. I f we achieve a decline rate of 0.5 per cent per year, the same as Britain's rate of growth today, there should be no imbalance of population structure, as the dependency ratio would be exactly the same as that of contem­ porary Britain. Only the make-up of dependency would be different: instead of there being more children than old people, i t would be the other way round. The time-scale for such an operation is long of course, and this will be suggested in the section on orchestra­ tion.

Creating a new social system 260. Possibly the most radical change we propose in the creation of a new social system is decentralisation. We do so not because we are sunk in nostalgia for a mythical little England of fetes, olde worlde pubs, and perpetual con­ versations over garden fences, but for four much more fundamental reasons:

261. (a) While there is good evidence that human societies can happily remain stable for long periods, there is no doubt that the long transitional stage that we and our children must go through will impose a heavy burden on our moral courage and will require great restraint. Legislation and the operations of police forces and the courts will be necessary to reinforce this restraint, but we believe that such external controls can never be so subtle nor so effective as internal controls. I t would therefore be sensible to promote the social conditions in which public opinion and full public participation in decision-making be­ come as far as possible the means where­ by communities are ordered. The larger a community the less likely this can be: in a heterogeneous, centralised society such as ours, the restraints of the stable society i f they were to be effective would appear as so much outside coercion; but in communities small enough for the general will to be worked out and expressed by individuals confident of themselves and their fellows as indi­ viduals, "us and them" situations are less likely to occur—people having learned the limits of a stable society would be free to order their own lives
within them as they wished, and would therefore accept the restraints of the stable society as necessary and desirable and not as some arbitrary restriction imposed by a remote and unsympa­ thetic government.

262. (b) As agriculture depends more and more on integrated control and becomes more diversified, there will no longer be any scope for prairie-type crop-growing or factory-type livestockrearing. Small farms run by teams with specialised knowledge of ecology, ento­ mology, botany, etc., will then be the rule, and indeed individual small­ holdings could become extremely pro­ ductive suppliers of eggs, fruit and vegetables to neighbourhoods. Thus a much more diversified urban-rural mix will be not only possible, but because of the need to reduce the transporta­ tion costs of returning domestic sewage to the land, desirable. In industry, as with agriculture, i t will be important to maintain a vigorous feedback between supply and demand in order to avoid waste, overproduction, or production of goods which the community does not really want, thereby eliminating the needless expense of time, energy and money in attempts to persuade it that it does. I f an industry is an integral part of a community, i t is much more likely to encourage product innovation because people clearly want qualitative improvements in a given field, rather than because expansion is necessary for that industry's survival or because there is otherwise insufficient work for its research and development section. Today, men, women and children are merely consumer markets, and indus­ tries as they centralise become national rather than local and supranational rather than national, so that while entire communities may come to depend on them for the jobs they supply, they are in no sense integral parts of those communities. To a considerable extent the "jobs or beauty" dichotomy has been made possible because of this deficiency. Yet plainly people want jobs and beauty, they should not in a just and humane society be forced to choose between the two, and in a decentralised society of small communities where industries are small enough to be responsive to each community's needs, there will be no reason for them to do so.

263. (c) The small community is not

only the organisational structure in which internal or systemic controls are most likely to operate effectively, but its dynamic is an essential source of stimulation and pleasure for the indi­ vidual. Indeed it is probable that only in the small community can a man or woman be an individual. In today's large agglomerations he is merely an isolate—and i t is significant that the decreasing autonomy of communities and local regions and the increasing centralisation of decision-making and authority in the cumbersome bureau­ cracies of the state, have been accom­ panied by the rise of self-conscious individualism, an individualism which feels threatened unless i t is harped upon. Perhaps the two are mutually dependent. I t is no less significant that this selfconscious individualism tends to be expressed in ways which cut off one individual from another—for example the accumulation of material goods like the motor-car, the television set, and so on, all of which tend to insulate one from another, rather than bring them together. In the small, self-regulating communities observed by anthropol­ ogists, there is by contrast no assertion of individualism, and certain individual aspirations may have to be repressed or modified for the benefit of the com­ munity—yet no man controls another and each has very great freedom of action, much greater than we have today. At the same time they enjoy the rewards of the small community, of knowing and being known, of an inten­ sity of relationships with a few, rather than urban man's variety of innumer­ able, superficial relationships. Such rewards should provide ample com­ pensation for the decreasing emphasis on consumption, which will be the inevit­ able result of the premium on durability which we have suggested should be established so that resources may be conserved and pollution minimised. This premium, while not diminishing our real standard of living, will greatly reduce the turnover of material goods. They will thus be more expensive, although once paid for they should not need replacing except after long periods. Their rapid accumulation will no longer be a realisable, or indeed socially acceptable goal, and alterna­ tive satisfactions will have to be sought. We believe a major potential source of these satisfactions to be the rich and variegated interchanges and responsi­ bilities of community life, and that these

are possible only when such communi­ ties are on a human scale.

264. (d) The fourth reason for decen­ tralisation is that to deploy a popula­ tion in small towns and villages is to reduce to the minimum its impact on the environment. This is because the actual urban superstructure required per inhabitant goes up radically as the size of the town increases beyond a certain point. For example, the per capita cost of high rise flats is much greater than that of ordinary houses; and the cost of roads and other trans­ portation routes increases with the number of commuters carried. Simi­ larly, the per capita expenditure on other facilities such as those for distri­ buting food and removing wastes is much higher in cities than in small towns and villages. Thus, i f everybody lived in villages the need for sewage treatment plants would be somewhat reduced, while in an entirely urban society they are essential, and the cost of treatment is high. Broadly speaking, i t is only by decentralisation that we can increase self-sufficiency—and selfsufficiency is vital i f we are to minimise the burden of social systems on the ecosystems that support them.

265. Although we believe that the small community should be the basic unit of society and that each community should be as self-sufficient and self-regulating as possible, we would like to stress that we are not proposing that they be inward-looking, self-obsessed or in any way closed to the rest of the world. Basic precepts of ecology, such as the interrelatedness of all things and the far-reaching effects of ecological pro­ cesses and their disruption, should influence community decision-making, and therefore there must be an efficient and sensitive communications network between all communities. There must be procedures whereby community actions that affect regions can be discussed at regional level and regional actions with extra-regional effects can be discussed at global level. We have no hard and fast views on the size of the proposed communities, but for the moment we suggest neighbourhoods of 500, repre­ sented in communities of 5,000, in regions of 500,000, represented nation­ ally, which in turn as today should be represented globally. We emphasise that our goal should be to create community feeling and global awareness,