'His work took him to underdeveloped countries; what he saw there worried him. In a 1969 guest column for the Times, he correctly warned that world population (then at 3 billion) would double by 2000, as food supplies dwindled. As preventive measures, Dr. DeGroot recommended sweeping birth control programs. "If this proposal sounds a bit too logical and sensible, it probably is," Dr. DeGroot wrote.'
Unfortunately, Dudley goes on to team with Paula Hawkins to promote, in Florida, municipal sewer systems over septic tanks and drain fields.
Hawkins, who would go on to the U.S. Senate, campaigned for Dr. DeGroot's then-controversial plan to replace septic tanks with a sewer system.
So, he had good environmental and economic ideas, and bad ones. My own view is that the Hindu practice of defecating in the open is still the best long term solution for the enormous number of poor people. The big problem, then, becomes cities, where one cannot feasibly defecate in the open.
He was a Rear Admiral, and according to his obituary, a spy.
This post is dedicated to the memory of Dudley, and to Greta Thunberg, for whom population reduction should be job one.
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