IV. Try to Change the World Gradually, One Clod at a Time
     11. At first glance, this course is far from inviting. It lacks glamour. It promises no quick results. It depends on the exasperating and uncertain instruments of persuasion and democratic decision making. It demands patience, always in short supply. About all that can be said for it is that it sometimes works -- that in this particular time and place it offers a better chance for remedying some of the world's outrages than any other available strategy.
     12. So at least the historical evidence seems to suggest. When I was graduating from college, my generation also found the world in a mess. The economic machinery had broken down almost everywhere: In this country nearly a quarter of the population was out of work. A major war seemed all too likely. As a college newspaper editor at that time, I protested against this just as vehemently as student activists are protesting today.
     13. At the same time, my generation was discovering that reforming the world is a little like fighting a military campaign in the Apennines, as soon as you capture one mountain range, another one looms just ahead. As the big problems of the thirties were brought under some kind of rough control, new problems took their place -- the unprecedented problems of an affluent society, of racial justice, of keeping our cities from becoming uninhabitable, of coping with war in unfamiliar guises. Most disturbing of all was our discovery of the population explosion. It dawned on us rather suddenly that the number of passengers on the small spaceship we inhabit is doubling about every forty years. So long as the earth's population keeps growing at this cancerous rate, all of the other problems appear virtually insoluble. Our cities will continue to become more crowded and noisome. The landscape will get more cluttered, the air and water even dirtier. The quality of life is likely to become steadily worse for everybody. And warfare on a rising scale seems inevitable if too many bodies have to struggle for ever-dwindling shares of food and living space.
     14. So Jim Binns' generation has a formidable job on its hands. But not, I think, an insuperable one. On the evidence of the past, it can be handled in the same way that hard problems have been coped
with before -- piecemeal, pragmatically, by the dogged efforts of many people.