Mr. Vogt's thesis is simple and damning; I had somewhat reflected upon it earlier that evening.
It is the philosophy of modern man to produce. To industrialize himself. To learn the techniques and technologies of science and of applied science. This is progress. Chinese, Soviets, Americans—everybody strives to speed up production, distribution, consumption. It is also the object of all nations to increase their populations.
The earth cannot support either of these two goals.
The topsoil of the planet will not feed the existing numbers of us, even now—and our method of using it is diminishing it at a gruesome rate. Faster and faster, we starve; and as we multiply, more of us will starve. Medicine, which increases the percentage of persons who survive infancy and extends the life span of all these, is but rapidly adding to sure victims of starvation.
We are busy breeding mouths to eat our future out of house and home.
Ideas of this sort have been around since Malthus's time.
These days, the facts accumulate.
I often reflect that man's contemporary sexual taboos lead (as they must, by the law of opposites) to sexual excesses: these are seen in man's witless overbreeding. His "moral" Catholic couch, his unregulated Baptist bed, sustains orgy and is the senseless agent of biological catastrophe. This is the riposte of Nature to man's refusal to use reason concerning his own nature.
Vogt wants planet-wide birth control, before the teeming hordes locust up the hope of a human hereafter.
Try and get it!