Twenty Ninth Day : accommodating human needs and number to the earth's resources

The The purpose of this book is to shed some light on the interaction of the world ecological, economic and social systems, a topic of central interest to me and my colleagues at the World watch Institute. Our goal is to analyze important global issues and bring them to the attention of busy decision makers at all levels, whether political leaders establishing national priorities, foundation officers allocating research funds or young couples deciding whether to have a child. We hope this book will be a useful source of information for those working for a world that is ecologically sustainable and socially just.

The book draws on a wide range of personal experiences including formal education in both the natural and social sciences, a youth spent farming with my brother, a year spent living in villages in India, a decade with the U.S. Department of Agriculture during the Kennedy-Johnson era, and five years with the Overseas Development Council. The early part of the decade with USDA was spent in researching and writing on world agriculture and the remainder in managing the Department's technical assistance programs in some forty countries. This latter position involved extensive travel, much of it in the countryside of the Third World where many of the problems addressed in this book were then beginning to surface.