4 JULY 1992, Page 27

Terrified reader

Sir: Lord Vinson (Letters, 13 June) writes: `Manifestly twice as many people mean twice as much pollution, poverty and envi- ronmental degradation.' I wonder how many times the population has doubled since, say, the invention of agriculture? What a miserable place this must be! The citizens of York killed their river in the 9th century — what can it be like now? (Pretty clean, as it happens.) It is nothing less than terrifying that a chairman of the Develop- ment Commission could have such facile views.

A.J.R. Shaw

St Benet's Hall, 38 St Giles, Oxford