130 The City's Challenge in Resource Use 



The transition of our continent to a predominantly urbanized pat- 

 tern of setdement, with great new intermeshed metropohtan concen- 

 trations, thus calls for new approaches and new public policies. 



//. New Lines of Conservation 



This statement of the problem of conservation of national re- 

 sources throws the emphasis on the added pressures created by our 

 rapidly spreading urbanized settlement and the changing pattern of 

 demand, and brings me to our second question, "What can be done 

 about it?" 



I shall not deal with the reduction of population growth as a solu- 

 tion, since population policy is a wider matter, not a problem of 

 urbanism. However, I might at least suggest that rates of population 

 growth are in fact extraordinarily flexible as shown by the recent past 

 histories of France, Ireland, and the United States, and the fertility 

 pattern of several "undisturbed" cultures, and are dictated more by 

 cultural standards and public policy than most alarmists have appre- 

 ciated. Given a rising education, greatly stimulated by urbanism, 

 along with generally rising standards and advancing medical knowl- 

 edge, is it not possible that population pressures may be brought 

 into far better ecological balance than most projections now postu- 

 late? The sudden export from the Western World of public health 

 techniques and of our economic and political gospels has certainly 

 dramatically upset human equilibria in Asia and elsewhere. We have 

 a great deal to answer for, and have been unbelievably naive in 

 thinking that our cultural standards, developed against the back- 

 ground of our plentiful resources, have validity for populations with 

 no such resource abundance. ^^ But we do not underrate the proba- 

 bility that the resulting increasing pressures around the world and, 

 ultimately, even here, will induce social, political, and fundamental 

 cultural changes which will bring men and resources into better bal- 

 ance than is now so freely predicted from the mere projection of 

 existing trends? 



1^ Bertrand de Jouvenel, "From Political Economy to Political Ecology," 

 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Chicago), October 1957, p. 287. 



