Model Man

"The U.S.," says Zoologist Kenneth E.F. Watt of the University of California at Davis, "is plunging into the future without any planning worthy of the name." He has a vision of what the results of that plunge may be: the seething, hungry masses in Calcutta "give us an idea of what the world will look like when it is really breaking down." Right or wrong, Watt demands special respect. Backing up his gloomiest predictions are an interdisciplinary team of busy scientists and a bank of whirring computers.

Watt terms himself a "systems ecologist," one of the first of a new species. Together with a growing number of colleagues, he has worked for seven years to design mathematical models of various ecosystems for the computers to analyze. In a Ford Foundation-funded program, he now has operating models of a sample county in California and selected state phenomena: crime, education, farm production, taxation, transportation and population growth. If a $750,000 federal grant comes through, he hopes to finish an even more intricate set of equations describing land uses and energy flows.

Why go to all the trouble? Existing planning procedures, says Watt, "fail utterly to consider all the relevant consequences of decisions made or not made in both the public and private sectors; they fail to consider all the alternatives and fail to figure in all the costs and benefits when alternatives are considered." Large, improved computers can easily handle the complexities.

Depleted Reserves. Computer readouts have already convinced Watt that population growth causes high, if hidden social costs. For one thing, a baby boom like that of the late 1940s and 1950s produces a shift in the nation's age distribution. When the young outnumber the old, higher tax loads are needed to finance the kids. Even if the absolute population growth slows to 1% a year, the relative dominance of the young boosts school taxes by 25%. More ominous, a baby boom leads to what Watt describes as "an excessive rate of social change." Adults cannot maintain traditional social and moral values. All the wrong things increase: alcoholism, divorce, drug addiction. Crime rises, as more people respond to threatening change with violence.

Food is another problem. Watt reckons that the typical 154-lb. American requires no less than .4 acres of prime farm land to provide him with a decent balanced diet. But by far the best agricultural land tends to be near cities, where pioneers first settled. Thus when population rises, vast new subdivisions are built on precious loam. Then, to boost the productivity of the remaining rich cropland, farms are mechanized. By so doing, says Watt, society wrongly assumes that there will always be enough energy readily available to produce chemical fertilizers and run farm machines.

The computers assume nothing. Watt's projections indicate that the world's estimated 2,100 billion barrels of oil reserves will be depleted around the year 2000. (One reason: a tremendous per capita increase in jet travel.) In response to intense demands for more energy, the coal reserves will be used up next. By then, atomic energy may or may not take up the slack. "If it turns out there isn't enough atomic power," says Watt, "the carrying capacity of the world will suddenly drop from somewhere between 10 billion and 20 billion people to something between 1 billion and 4 billion. This simply means starvation and perhaps violent wars between the haves and have-nots."

Desperate Need. The future looks brutish, nasty and short, but Ken Watt is determined to change it. A tall, music-loving (Prokofiev, Bartok, Oliver Nelson) 40-year-old, he is so busy learning, lecturing and testifying these days that he seldom gets to see his wife and two daughters. "I am a revolutionary who is trying to operate within institutional frameworks," he says. His recommended steps toward reform include:

> Legalizing abortion in every state.

> Persuading Congress to modify income tax provisions for dependents so that deductions would apply only to the first two children.

> Emphasizing careers instead of children as a source of personal and emotional satisfaction for women.

>Creating pollution-free, high-speed, interurban rail systems to conserve fossil fuel and enhance efficient travel.

> Urging local governments to buy and preserve open land around cities.

Above all, Watt is determined to get better data for his computers: "One problem is that things we desperately need to measure haven't ever been measured. We don't have a good understanding, for instance, of how far out in the atmosphere particles from air pollution are going, or what they are doing to the weather." With fuller data, Watt's computer models will give scientists and politicians the information they need to plan intelligently and realistically.

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