William Ophuls: The Economy vs the Environment

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Because we are likely to exceed the Earth's carrying capacity for human population, society can be expected to crash to pre-industrial forms.
Because we are likely to exceed the Earth's carrying capacity for human population, society can be expected to crash to pre-industrial forms.
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William Ophuls shares his projections for how the world economy will need to change to adapt to our changing world environment.
William Ophuls shares his projections for how the world economy will need to change to adapt to our changing world environment.

Ain’t Nature grand! She simplywillnot tolerate a vacuum. Sure, the old order is dying on its feet of greed, corruption and resource mismanagement. But there’s a whole new breed of still little known but keenly discerning movers and shakers coming on. We may not always like what they have to say . . .but their vision of the future — unclouded by under-the-table campaign contributions and wishful thinking — simply screams for our attention.

One of these hitherto virtually unknown men isWilliamOphuls. Ophuls was the U S. State Department’s political analyst for Afghanistan for two years. From 1961 to 1963, he served as vice consul and political officer at the U.S. Embassy in the Ivory Coast and, later, he was an assistant to United States ambassadors in Japan. Ophuls left the Foreign Service in 1967 and began work on a Ph.D. at Yale. He received that degree in June of 1973.

Ophuls’ Ph.D. dissertation was on the management of political, social and economic problems arising from the environmental crisis, and it was good enough to win the John Addison Porter Prize. It was also good enough to lure Ophuls into expanding the paper into a somewhat more speculative book — still being written — on the same subject.

What will be the consequences if we adopt this approach over that one in our efforts to solve the environmental problems which mankind daily creates? William Ophuls is now living in California and devoting all his time to answering these thorniest of all questions. And he iscoming up with (sometimes unpleasant) answers . . . as Stephen McNamara, editorand publisher of the Pacific Sun, found out last fall when he visited Ophuls at his home.


  • Published on Jan 1, 1974
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