‘Feeding the World’s Hungry’

I could not believe what I was reading in Hardin’s article.

The message I gleaned from this article is that let those starving now starve; to rescue them and to nourish them will add to the world’s population and that this will increase a demand for food. So “nip the problem in the bud;” let them die and in this way there will be less people to feed and less people who will reproduce. There is a feeble suggestion at the end of the article about reducing the population through measures of birth control, but the clear message throughout is “let them die.” (If the author was serious about the importance of birth control as a means of reducing population, then logic would have it that the saved and nourished starving could also practice birth control and not necessarily reproduce because of new-found health and vigor.)

Such heartlessness is hard to conceive in anyone, but most shocking is that this attitude and message comes from a professor emeritus from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and that The Times finds sufficient merit to this thinking to give it prominence in the Opinion Section.

MADELINE DeANTONIO

Encino