THE very term "population explosion" conjures up visions of swarms of people like teeming ants covering every square inch of land and perhaps ocean. In some parts of the world this picture has already been realized, whether we are thinking of the slums of Chicago or Calcutta, where people reside, or the canyons of lower Manhattan, where they work, or the sampans of Hong Kong, where families live their entire lives on the water. If a person in 1900 could have foreseen the present metropolitan complexes with their density, geographic scope, transportation snarl, and pollution, the picture would have been described as an intolerable one which called for immediate, imaginative, courageous, and radical preventive measures.
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