American Geographical Society

Population Dynamics: Causes and Consequences of World Demographic Change by RalphThomlinsonReview by: Wilbur ZelinskyGeographical Review, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Apr., 1967), pp. 273-275Published by: American Geographical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/213166 .

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GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS

POPULATION DYNAMICS: Causes and Consequences of World Demographic Change. By RALPH THOMLINSON. xxvi and 576 pp.; maps, diagrs., bibliogr., index. Random

House, New York, 1965. $8.50. 9/2 x 6 inches.

This most recent addition to the half-dozen or so introductory college texts in demography has one obvious, if transient, advantage over its competitors-its timeliness. For those geog- raphers who have some prior acquaintance with population studies, Thomlinson's book will serve as a newsletter from a social-science storm zone where a swarm of intriguing facts and ideas are erupting continuously. For those untutored in the ways of the demographer, it is a

reasonably useful primer-despite a large batch of factual boners and some rather more basic intellectual weaknesses that detract from its sturdy virtues.

On the positive side, we find an encyclopedic range of coverage. The mere recapitulation of chapter headings and subheadings would fill up most of this space. Be assured that no sig- nificant population topic has been neglected, and that each has been given its due. As the title

promises, a praiseworthy preoccupation with population dynamics, past, present, and future, is apparent throughout most of the volume, but an even more single-minded commitment to this strategic issue might have built a stronger, more sharply focused work. Also quite com- mendable is the effective treatment of city and metropolitan growth in a chapter that clearly shows the benign influence of Kingsley Davis, Professor Thomlinson's mentor. The vigorous discussion of the interrelations of population and politics, and of various social and govern- mental attitudes toward population matters, is most rewarding, as are the three chapters on

fertility topics. I regret having to report that the one chapter of most immediate geographical appeal, that on "Resources and Food," is also one of the least satisfactory. Aside from an aim- less treatment of "geographic determinism," it is concerned with food and water to the ex- clusion of other resources or factors; and even within this restricted arena it manages to elude

any confrontation with solid ideas about the interrelations of population and food, despite the truly vast literature that has recently proliferated around this question. The insertion of a

glossary of technical terms, in addition to the usual "Recommended Readings," is a welcome feature; and any footnote fancier bitten by the bibliographic bug will find his eye dwelling more often on the bottom of the page than elsewhere, for the richjungle of references found there is truly valuable. A generous number of graphs and small-scale maps and cartograms have been included. And for those readers who revel in the form of books as well as in their contents, let it be recorded that the publisher has nobly maintained his usual high standards of book design and manufacture.

On the less adulatory side, there are all too many matters, major and minor, of both form and content over which to lift an eyebrow or even shake one's head. Take the interrelated problems of the language and the intellectual syntax. The style tends strongly toward the breezy and genial. At best, this makes for rapid, buoyant reading, but all too often there is a descent into small talk. The recourse to quotation dropping is excessive (there are even ample passages from competing texts), to the point that one begins to wonder what opinions of his own Thomlinson may have. There is a certain disconnectedness, a lack of orderly marshaling ofideas, within paragraphs, within chapters, and even beyond. I suspect that if the twenty-two chapters of this work had been randomly scrambled, the result would have been quite as

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THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

logical as the present sequence. Whenever any controversial topic comes up-and that is more than half the time-Thomlinson is a resolute fence straddler; and this pervasive wishy-washi- ness ultimately becomes annoying. There is frequently a certain fuzziness of thought or ex-

pression that is best described by direct quotation, as from the following passage, where there

may be the germ of a worthwhile idea-or, again, is there? "Population pressure is more a

feeling in people's minds than an objective economic distress. A complex subjective phenom- enon made up of income, density, standard of living, ambition, and social values, it is not

always consciously recognized as such; tensions and dissatisfactions arising from population pressure are often indistinguishable from complaints arising from other social ailments. Yet

ignorance of the sources of one's disquiet does not make that disquiet any less serious; more often perhaps the reverse reaction applies-that is, ignorance converts worry into terror."

Incidentally, this is about as far as the author plunges into the major problem of overpopula- tion; that is, approximately skin-deep.

The number of misstatements and misinterpretations is not reassuring. To take a few at random: the astonishing assertion that, despite their high efficiency, the "expense" of intrau- terine devices prevents their widespread use; the undocumented remark that "nine per cent of all American couples have undergone an operation to make conception impossible"; or the notio'n that with increasing human control over the environment "climate and related factors

may become irrelevant to migration." The denial that generally lower female mortality rates

(as compared with male) can be attributed to physiological factors flies in the face of some

quite elegant, irrefutable demonstrations of this proposition. We find self-contradiction even within a single brief passage: the statement that international migration in the United States "has been consistently positive" is followed by the statistic that in the 1930-1940 period the net movement was -122,000.

A more than incidental flaw in this work, and one unfortunately shared by all the other standard American texts on the subject, is an unhealthy preoccupation with United States material. This is not, of course, to deny the importance of our nation's demography or the sub- tle commercial persuasiveness of the fact that American college students are the market for whom such books are largely intended. But it is dangerous, in intellectual terms and in terms of such policy making in foreign affairs as may be grounded in demographic study, to extrapo- late the experience of 6 percent of the world's people into universal postulates, and thus largely ignore the other 94 percent. Whatever defense there may have been for such a strategy a gen- eration ago, when statistics for much of the world were hard to come by, it no longer holds in view of a large and growing library of demographic writings on the so-called "developing" countries. The single chapter on "World Population by Regions" is thin and sketchy.

Perhaps the greatest intellectual challenge to the author of a general treatise on population science is how to deal with the impending collision between a rapidly proliferating human

species and a finite social and physical world. Thomlinson meets this challenge with a facile

optimism that is not easily reconciled with the many dismal facts he has adduced. Or the facts are just not faced, as in the much too carefree prognosis of 600 million Latin Americans in 2000 living bountifully off "the natural riches of the land." The closing sentence of the book is a monumental non sequitur: "Still... men seem likely to be here for many centuries to come, attaining quantities and qualities that offer the prospect of permitting most persons reasonable comfort and enjoyment of their lengthening lives." Amen. But the effect is much the same as

finding "and they all lived happily ever after" appended to Andersen's "The Little Match

274

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GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS

Girl." I fervently hope Thomlinson is right; but he has done a poor job of persuading me.- WILBUR ZELINSKY

THE ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON HUMAN AFFAIRS, With Special Reference to International Politics. By HAROLD and MARGARET SPROUT. xi and 236 pp.; index. Prince-

ton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1965. $5.50. 834 x 5 inches.

The core of this volume is a considerably expanded and entirely rewritten version of the authors' essay on "Man-Milieu Relationship Hypotheses in the Context of International Politics" (1956). The focus and coverage remain essentially the same, but the new title is mis-

leading. This is not a book on human affairs as seen from an ecologist's perspective or one that deals (to use R. W. McColl's phrase) with "political ecology." It does not touch on problems that most often link ecology and politics, either on the practical socioeconomic level (for example, underdeveloped areas, overpopulation, conservation, "water and politics") or on the conceptual level (for example, in the context of the recently once-more-debated concepts of genres de vie and the "Asiatic mode of production").

The nature of the volume is succinctly described by Professor Klaus Knorr in the Fore- word: "The present work represents simply an attempt to clarify and straighten out certain semantic and conceptual issues that are implicit in any theory of politics." Indeed, it is on semantic and conceptual issues that the authors concentrate above all. Hence the problems of determinism, environmentalism, possibilism, and the like are dealt with on a more abstract conceptual level than they are in the geographical literature; for instance, in Gordon R. Lewthwaite's able and concise review of the debate centering around the very same problems (Environmentalism and Determinism: A Search for Clarification, Annals Assn. of Amer.

Geogrs., Vol. 56, 1966, pp. 1-23). The authors' theoretical approach is, however, nonphilosophical. They briefly discuss

"philosophical postures" and "philosophical generalities," but basically they are not interested in philosophical ideas. They leave out entirely the problem of the man-nature relationship as it was, for instance, extensively treated at the Twelfth International Congress of Philosophy (1960), or as it has been for some years now discussed in the Soviet Union jointly by geogra- phers and philosophers and taken up in debates between American and Soviet scholars (S. Hook versus M. V. Mitin and C. J. Glacken versus V. L. Kovda).

The authors' decision to concentrate primarily on the semantic aspect of concepts pre- cluded, perhaps unavoidably, the volume's becoming easy reading. But it does seem that the excitement of discovering and clarifying the meaning of words has at times been unnecessarily eroded by an insistence on splitting every hair into four. At the beginning of the second chap- ter, one of the longest, we have an admission that "some readers may feel" that the authors "proceed rather like the lawyer who insisted on introducing evidence in court to prove what a lead-pencil is." They certainly do, and the procedure is difficult tojustify; for in the ten years since "Man-Milieu" appeared the various arguments have been repeatedly rolled back and forth. Thus what would be useful today is a summary of the points at issue, with whatever conclusions might seem proper, rather than the spreading out once more of all the views and arguments on more than twice as many pages. Among the various conceptual issues the authors dwell on, the following seem to this reviewer the most important: (1) the distinction between the "psycho-milieu" and the "operational milieu" (discussed in Chapters 1 and 2;

see especially "the thesis" of the book as stated on page 1); (2) the distinction between statis-

Girl." I fervently hope Thomlinson is right; but he has done a poor job of persuading me.- WILBUR ZELINSKY

THE ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON HUMAN AFFAIRS, With Special Reference to International Politics. By HAROLD and MARGARET SPROUT. xi and 236 pp.; index. Prince-

ton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1965. $5.50. 834 x 5 inches.

The core of this volume is a considerably expanded and entirely rewritten version of the authors' essay on "Man-Milieu Relationship Hypotheses in the Context of International Politics" (1956). The focus and coverage remain essentially the same, but the new title is mis-

leading. This is not a book on human affairs as seen from an ecologist's perspective or one that deals (to use R. W. McColl's phrase) with "political ecology." It does not touch on problems that most often link ecology and politics, either on the practical socioeconomic level (for example, underdeveloped areas, overpopulation, conservation, "water and politics") or on the conceptual level (for example, in the context of the recently once-more-debated concepts of genres de vie and the "Asiatic mode of production").

The nature of the volume is succinctly described by Professor Klaus Knorr in the Fore- word: "The present work represents simply an attempt to clarify and straighten out certain semantic and conceptual issues that are implicit in any theory of politics." Indeed, it is on semantic and conceptual issues that the authors concentrate above all. Hence the problems of determinism, environmentalism, possibilism, and the like are dealt with on a more abstract conceptual level than they are in the geographical literature; for instance, in Gordon R. Lewthwaite's able and concise review of the debate centering around the very same problems (Environmentalism and Determinism: A Search for Clarification, Annals Assn. of Amer.

Geogrs., Vol. 56, 1966, pp. 1-23). The authors' theoretical approach is, however, nonphilosophical. They briefly discuss

"philosophical postures" and "philosophical generalities," but basically they are not interested in philosophical ideas. They leave out entirely the problem of the man-nature relationship as it was, for instance, extensively treated at the Twelfth International Congress of Philosophy (1960), or as it has been for some years now discussed in the Soviet Union jointly by geogra- phers and philosophers and taken up in debates between American and Soviet scholars (S. Hook versus M. V. Mitin and C. J. Glacken versus V. L. Kovda).

The authors' decision to concentrate primarily on the semantic aspect of concepts pre- cluded, perhaps unavoidably, the volume's becoming easy reading. But it does seem that the excitement of discovering and clarifying the meaning of words has at times been unnecessarily eroded by an insistence on splitting every hair into four. At the beginning of the second chap- ter, one of the longest, we have an admission that "some readers may feel" that the authors "proceed rather like the lawyer who insisted on introducing evidence in court to prove what a lead-pencil is." They certainly do, and the procedure is difficult tojustify; for in the ten years since "Man-Milieu" appeared the various arguments have been repeatedly rolled back and forth. Thus what would be useful today is a summary of the points at issue, with whatever conclusions might seem proper, rather than the spreading out once more of all the views and arguments on more than twice as many pages. Among the various conceptual issues the authors dwell on, the following seem to this reviewer the most important: (1) the distinction between the "psycho-milieu" and the "operational milieu" (discussed in Chapters 1 and 2;

see especially "the thesis" of the book as stated on page 1); (2) the distinction between statis-

275 275

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