NATURE

ONLY ONE WORLD by Gerard Piel (W. H. Freeman: $21.95; 336 pp.) What would you guess the founder and chairman emeritus of Scientific American prescribes to save the earth from self-destruction? Right: Technology! Is he optimistic? You bet! And do you think the father of the magazine that assumes real science ought to be a part of everyday life is a simpleton? Not on your life.

Scientific American and its publisher, W. H. Freeman, pride themselves on tight, unemotional editing. Gerard Piel has apparently tired of that routine: “Only One World” is boundlessly energetic, stylistically idiosyncratic, driven, . . . and yet, at its core, loyal to the tradition of the clear-eyed, dispassionate analysis that has been the hallmark of professional science and Piel’s famous magazine. It is also loaded with data--er, information.

Piel carefully develops the links among overpopulation, poverty, economic underdevelopment, environmental degradation, and the lack of technology. He argues--doggedly--that the solution to rampant population growth is industrialization and technology, and that there can be no solution to the other problems without a halt to the population explosion. But if the rich developed world does not assist in transferring technology and capital to the developing world, there will not be time to save the world from the catastrophic planetary effects of environmental destruction and pollution, especially from fossil-fuel burning. On the other hand, if we are willing to share--generously and promptly--we can stabilize the world at a livable standard within 50 years. Piel’s “best outcome” is a rather depressingly controlled planet, lacking in wild places, with a kind of science-fiction-future neatness to it. But the alternative, . . . ah well, we have rather already eliminated the attractive ones.

“Only One World” is politely merciless in its critique of Western indifference to the plight of the Third World, and its baleful eye is especially turned to the United States. Fortress America is a dangerous self-deception: Watch the immigrants washing up on our shores. Piel is not arguing charity, but enlightened self-interest. Is anyone in Washington listening?