Vidal statistics
From Paul Warwick
Sir: In his review of Gore Vidal’s Point to Point Navigation (Books, 18 November), Nicholas Haslam asks, ‘Who, in 1973, but Vidal was talking of a “world dying of over population and the poisoning of the environment”?’ Well, quite a lot of people actually. Paul Ehrlich had written The Population Bomb in 1968, the same year that he established the Zero Population Growth organisation. Coincidentally, this was also the year that the Club of Rome was formed, whose The Limits of Growth (warning of environmental disaster) was published in 1972. Both books sold fairly well, I believe. Their subject matter was certainly widely discussed.
Rather than reading Mr Vidal writing about the 1970s, your reviewer might have been better advised to go back and read some of Mr Vidal’s essays from the 1970s (or 1980s and 1990s for that matter) and count how many times his predictions were wrong. I can assure you that it is an instructive and frequently hilarious exercise.
Paul Warwick
Ferny Hills, Queensland, Australia
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