THE AUDUBON BULLETIN 
Published Quarterly by the 
ILLINOIS AUDUBON SOCIETY 
Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Ill., 60605 
aber 149 March 1969 
Mere Ss DIE NTS PA GE 
by RAYMOND MOSTEK 
[E OBSERVATIONS ON WORLD’S FOREMOST PROBLEM: 
mn Dwight Eisenhower entered the White House in 1953, there were 
billion persons on earth; now as Richard Nixon begins his presidency 
ere 16 years later, we have 34% billion persons. By the time his four 
-Jease ends, Nixon will preside over ten million more Americans. There 
also be 300 million more people on this earth; fourteen million persons 
have died of starvation; there will likely be less wildlife on earth; our 
ams and air will likely be more polluted, and our natural environment 
be all the poorer. 
It has been said that it takes at least one generation for a new idea 
btain a hearing; it takes another generation to accept the new idea; 
xkes a third generation to finally do something about it. It has taken 
it that long for the world to try to come to grips with the need for 
h control since Margaret Sanger began her campaign of education and 
sent to jail for the effort. 
here have been violent except- 
‘to the archaic pronouncements 
ope Paul on the issue of birth 
trol from members of his own 
rch and from civic leaders 
ind the world. The criticisms 
ge from bishops of the Pope’s 
rch in the Netherlands to sev- 
| hundred members of the 
erican Association for the Ad- 
cement of Science, who signed 
yetition terming the views of 
Pope “unenlightened.” The im- 
tance of family planning was 
»gnized in the platforms of both 
ior political parties in 1968. We 
e come a long way from 1914 
jail for birth control advocates. 
ir. Paul Ehrlich, staff biologist 
h Stanford University, in a 
io interview declared, “I am 
greatly concerned with the ef- 
fect, if any of the Pope’s words 
on the Catholics in America, most 
of whom already practice birth 
control. I am greatly concerned 
with the effect of the pronounce- 
ment of the Pope upon the various 
governments of the earth where 
the political control is in the hands 
of unenlightened members of his 
own faith.” 
Dr. Ehrlich is author of the high- 
ly popular paperback “The Popu- 
lation Bomb,” published by Bal- 
lantine for the Sierra Club. It was 
my pleasure to share the speaker’s 
table with Dr. Ehrlich when he 
spoke in Chicago recently before 
the Planned Parenthood Associa- 
tion at the Sheraton Hotel. Infor- 
mation and leaflets on the popula- 
tion crisis may be obtained from 
the “Campaign to Check the Popu- 
