J. H. Fremlin

The book (and the article that preceded it - 'How many people can the World Support?' was published in New Scientist in October 1964.') has been high in the list of books that shaped my world view in my teens. His views on the future of world human population are not clouded by law, religion, sentiment or morality just the remorseless need to shelter and feed ever increasing numbers.
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This isn't my own review but came from rel="nofollow" target="_top">http://margaret.fremlin.org/index.html

One of his speculative articles developed from discussions of population levels. Generalised worry about the increasing world population was common then as now, usually taking the form of an assumption that some resource or another would run out. John had begun to wonder exactly which resource was going to run out first, because if this was known in advance, perhaps something could be done about it in time. He looked up the basic constituents of the human body and the standard ways in which the materials found on the earth are converted into people and also noted housing and fuel needs. Then he got hold of estimates of the total stores of the necessary basic elements and started to manipulate his collections of figures with his slide rule. However much he checked and re-checked the figures, the answer came out that nothing essential for human life would run out completely until the population had reached extremely high levels.

At this point in his calculations, he started to develop his findings into an article by creating scenes of the type of life people could expect at various population levels. At the time of writing his article, the world population was about three thousand million and was doubling every thirty-seven years. This would give a trillion (a million million million) people in one thousand years' time. Describing this phase, he said that there was enough carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sodium, chlorine, calcium and potassium in the top ten kilometres of the earth's crust to make a trillion people, although extensive new technology including mirrors reflecting sunlight all the way round the world and total recycling would be needed. By that time, the whole world would be covered by buildings two thousand storeys high and each person would be allowed seven and a half square metres of floor space. While he was actually engaged in writing up this article, he found that there was an interesting limit that came into effect at this stage. He discovered that if the population were to rise any further, it would be physically impossible to design the heat pumps needed to remove the heat generated by all the people and machinery in their roofed-in world and so it would be through overheating rather than through running out of resources that the world's population growth would finally come to a halt. The finished article was called 'How many people can the World Support?' and was published in New Scientist in October 1964.

John enjoyed writing this article and it got a good reception, so he added the subject to his repertoire of lectures, refining his calculations each time he reviewed it prior to an engagement. Then, after a series of television programmes on the same subject, it was suggested that he should write a book, which he agreed to do. Sitting in the evenings at his make-shift desk (a piece of hardboard he had cut in the early fifties to fit over his knees and round the arms of his favourite easy chair) he collected all his material together and formed it into a book called 'Be Fruitful and Multiply', which was published in 1972 and which followed very similar lines to the original New Scientist article, but had the problems and types of technology needed for each level of the population described in far greater detail. It had the same conclusion, that man, alone within the animal kingdom, would limit himself by his own production of heat. John also included a certain amount of philosophy on how people would have to learn to interact to accept living within such high population densities together with a couple of chapters on the choices open to us to prevent such population levels ever being reached.

John's cheerful predictions in the population articles and book appeared to indicate a detachment from the consequences of overpopulation. But even before the book was written, he was already taking an interest in practical ways of limiting world population. He began to support the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) that had been set up to help guide women to legal abortions and in 1970 he was invited to become a Trustee. At this time there were still a lot of illegal back-street abortions, permanently injuring or killing some of the women concerned. This was in spite of the 1967 Act, which came into effect in 1968 and which had detailed a number of conditions in which abortion by a qualified and registered surgeon came within the law. The BPAS operated small clinics where qualified advisers would interview pregnant women wanting abortions, explain the conditions that must be met and investigate sympathetically why the abortion was desired. The Trustees met weekly and were responsible for the budget, with the appointment of new qualified staff and the starting of new clinics. As a charity, they did not have to pay tax, but to keep their charitable status they were not allowed to turn down any case where a woman was genuinely unable to pay. John also lent some support to the Family Planning Association. He was quite aware that these were only small contributions to limiting world population but he felt that, in such an over-populated world, there was no excuse for society to force a woman who did not want a baby to give birth to and rear one.… (mais)