RECONCILING TEXAS AND BERKELEY: THE CONCEPT OF OPTIMUM POPULATION

• Lindsey Grant
• November 1, 1989
• Forum Papers
• The Optimum Population Series
• 0 Comments

Click here for a downloadable, printable PDF version.

RECONCILING TEXAS AND BERKELEY: THE CONCEPT OF OPTIMUM POPULATION
An NPG Forum Paper
by Lindsey Grant
November 1989

This is the first of a series of NPG FORUM papers exploring the idea of Optimum Population. The author is a retired Foreign Service officer and former China specialist. During his Government career, he was an NSC staffer, member of the Department of State’s Planning and Coordination Staff, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Slate for Environment and Population Affairs, and Department of State coordinator for the Global 2000 Report.

Images float in the mind’s eye. I recall (probably from some long ago Western) a scene of horses in deep grasses, and I remember a quotation in a history book describing the arrival of the Anglos in Arizona a century or so ago: ” … the grass was up to the horses’ bellies.”

More immediately, this year, I was in the Glorieta Pass in northern New Mexico, at a National. Monument surrounding the remains of the Pecos Pueblo. It sits on a low ridge partly enclosing a shallow swale. And that little flat valley was a miracle: a profusion of tall grasses and sedges and weeds, full of birds. They owed their existence to their “exclosure”—the specialists love that word—from the effects of domestic cattle grazing.

What have we lost? The ranch that surrounds that little valley is a rich man’s ranch, protected from the brutal overgrazing that one sees everywhere in the West, particularly on Indian reservations but also (whatever the statistics may claim) on BLM (Bureau of Land Management) and private lands. But it bore no comparison with that little protected area, for beauty, for diversity of life, or even—for that matter—for the amount of food that it could produce for human use if only we would live within our environment rather than savaging it.

….Continue reading the full Forum paper by clicking here.