RANSVESTIA

of Egypt has increased in the days since Nasser first dreamed up the dam to such a point that food production per head is just where it was before the dam. The increase in irrigated lands occurred alright, but the number of mouths to feed increased right along with it so that it only put off the evil day of widespread hunger.

The world is also suffering from twoother new problems — over exploitation and over pollution. We use up our raw materials for non- productive and unnecessary purposes because our society pays homage and pays its rewards to the entrepreneur who can invent, manufacture, advertise and sell anything whether it serves a really useful function or not. The world got along very well for thousands of years without Hulahoops and Frisbies. True they provide a few people with a little entertainment . . . and they provided their inventors and merchandizers with sizeable fortunes, but did anyone ask whether the petrochemicals that went into the plastic raw materials for those items could have been better utilized elsewhere? Certainly not, he would have been called a communist and a nut if he had. These are trivial ex- amples but they illustrate the point. Our raw materials are not inex- haustible, we ARE on spaceship earth with a limited supply of raw materials in the hold and with NO ports of call where we can refuel and reprovision our vessel. It's time we took stock of our stock and utilized it more intelligently.

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A by-product of such individual (and this includes corporations, of course) ambition and effort has been the dumping of the by- products of industry into the air, the water and onto the land of our spaceship to the point where it threatens our food, our water, our air and through them our lives themselves. This will have to be stopped but the corporations . . . and a lot of the public . who find themselves under pressure to reconsider their activities fight the en- vironmentalists, and everyone else who gets in their way, by every means at their disposal. They feel they have a god-given right to dis- pose of their refuse as they please. After all, the air, water and land won't be so polluted that they can't eat, drink and breathe during their lifetime, so let the next generations worry about it. "Whatever is going to happen let it happen after I'm done with my sojourn on this earth." At the time of the French Revolution the expressions was used, "Apres moi le deluge." It means "after me the flood." That is exactly the attitude of big business today.

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