!! spellx done
204  Lemmings And Men
     The Washington Post  April 11, 1970

     "Overpopulation is the main problem.  Scientists fear that if
people, like rats, live too close together, they will destroy each
other."--a Palo Alto fifth-grader's response to a questionnaire on 
environment is inserted in the Congressional Record by Repr. George E.
Brown (D., Calif.).  This is an admirable example of the vitality and
awareness of one of today's schoolgirls.

     Grayer heads have voiced the same threat of doom that we will
destroy ourselves like the lemmings, even if we find technical and
political solutions to the hazards of war, famine and pollution.

     The argument is often self-contradictory.  On the one hand, we
are in a bad fix about pollution because we have lost, in the course
of evolution, the behavioral regulators that keep some animal species
from overgrowing their habitat.  On the other hand, our collective
psyche is supposedly still shadowed by an urge to self-destruction
that will become irresistible when our population exceeds a certain
density.

     Scientists are indeed making some extraordinarily interesting
discoveries about the effects of crowding on reproductive failure and
on fighting in animal communities.  The results vary a great deal
among different species and circumstances.  One important
generalization is that the introduction of a strange male into a group
is likely to be more stressful than crowding itself.

                Crowding Leads to Crime

     Some popularizers have insisted that crowding leads directly to
crime and other social pathology--as an inevitable consequence of man's
animal heritage.  Scientists working in the laboratory and involved in
objective psychological testing are much more critical and cautious.
The noted anthropologist, Edward T. Hall, has been one of the most
avid students of "proxemics," the science of man's use of space. In
"The Hidden Dimension," he writes: "The animal studies also teach us
that crowding per se is neither good nor bad, but rather that 
overstimulation and disruptions of social relationships as a consequence
of overlapping personal distances lead to population  collapse."

     He then goes on to discuss methods of environmental management,
through architecture and urban planning, that can minimize the stress
of the human organism that may be a byproduct of crowding.  

     The organization of our communities then faces us as the essential
issue for our survival as a species.  Planning new cities, and
the rebuilding of our old ones, are inelegant challenges.  They involve
complicated and intellectually unrewarding arrangements of people
and resources.  The academic mind is not the best adapted for these
tasks; but it may still unearth a great deal about the biology and
psychology of living together which is profoundly relevant.  Airy 
speculations about the biological inevitability of doom or not only bad
science, but serious impediments to solving some of our most urgent
problems.

     One of the most immoral suggestions now adrift on our campuses is
that we must pull back on our economic growth.  Obviously, we are a
badly mis-developed country, but a redirection, not a regression, is
what we need.  The construction of our cities is already a task which
can properly consume any conceivable surplus that our industrial
economy can generate.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------