That the population explosion is the single most important problem facing the world today. As long as population continues to increase, we must expect the continuous creation of new threats to survival, perhaps at a rate of one per year, until we reach the ultimate condition of famine (which Hawaii is in no position to face). We offer no solution here to the population explosion, but we note that every solution which we can imagine is made difficult or impossible by the thinking and attitudes of Occidental culture.

(7) That the very first requirement for ecological stability is a balance between the rates of birth and death. For better or for worse, we have tampered with the death rate, especially by controlling the major epidemic diseases and the death of infants. Always, in any living (i.e., ecological) system, every increasing imbalance will generate its own limiting factors as side effects of the increasing imbalance. In the present instance, we begin to know some of Nature’s ways of correcting the imbalance—smog, pollution, DDT poisoning, industrial wastes, famine, atomic fallout, and war. But the imbalance has gone so far that we cannot trust Nature not to overcorrect.

That the ideas which dominate our civilization at the present time date in their most virulent form from the Industrial Revolution. They may be summarized as: ... It’s the individual (or the individual company, or the individual nation) that matters.

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I suggest then that a healthy ecology of human civilization would be defined somewhat as follows: A single system of environment combined with high human civilization in which the flexibility of the civilization shall match that of the environment to create an ongoing complex system, open-ended for slow change of even basic (hard-programmed) characteristics.

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A “high” civilization shall be limited in its transactions with environment. It shall consume unreplaceable natural resources only as a means to facilitate necessary change (as a chrysalis in metamorphosis must live on its fat). For the rest, the metabolism of the civilization must depend upon the energy income which Spaceship Earth derives from the sun. In this connection, great technical advance is necessary. With present technology, it is probable that the world could only maintain a small fraction of its present human population, using as energy sources only photosynthesis, wind, tide, and water power.