[The following letter is reprinted from a recent issue of the Biologist, by kind permission of the Institute of Biology, 20 Queensberry Place, London, SW7 2DZ]
An octogenarian FIBiol am I: a "rare breed" now. And therefore I can fully admire your obituary of Charles Elton who was so kind and helpful long ago. In 1932, David Lack, that notable ornithologist, and I, then young Cambridge graduates, followed Elton to bear Island, that remote and fog-bound avian paradise, where he had been the ecological research pioneer 11 years before. We prospered there; and indeed we found the then most northern recorded pair of starlings. We were imbued with Elton's new ecological approach.
The great man founded the Bureau of Animal Population and was a contemporary of Carr-Saunders, the leading human demographer. Those two pointed the way. Would that leaders among the nations had begun to understand the realities of the human dilemma, and the prospect of our planetary environment becoming over-filled with our own rapacious species. Our total now is three times what it was when I was born, and we still increase globally at a million extra every four days.
I look back with delight to those happy days in the mid-30s when nine of us for months on end were the only human inhabitants of the entire Antarctic Continent. Occasional isolation is good for the soul. In contrast, I was present in teeming Bombay in 1952 at the foundation of the International Planned Parenthood Federation which strives so valiantly. Since then world population has doubled again; and now the television brings us instant awareness of the starving of Africa, and of children picking over the refuse heaps of Egypt and Brazil.
We now properly care for others at a distance, and fauna and flora likewise. Smallpox we have eliminated, but AIDS has arrived. Still it is the few who have much knowledge, while the church and political leaders are fearful even of discussion of popoulation limitation by kindly means. The biological and planetary degradation proceeds apace - and of that some of us have warned for the last 45 years.
The more we know, the more we care, and the more difficult it is to maintain optimism for the future. Huge population increase brings advantage to nobody. "What are People for?" was the title of a chapter I wrote for Julian Huxley 30 years ago. Let that question still be pondered. The answer lies in quality of life, not quantity.
Colin Bertram