Other exploitative human activity based in utilitarianism is not crass or all so obviously wrong, especially in today's context. Population growth poses a moral question but also a logistical one: uncontrolled growth may well be questionable, but it is a staggering reality. The additional millions of people thus invited to present and future feasts must be provided for. Many thinkers view the economic expansionism of our time, together with the vigorous technology which it fosters and is fostered by, as the only means toward this end. Some, indeed, view it as a happy and healthy state of things, indefinitely extensible as technology itself furnishes substitutes for exhausted natural substances, natural forces, and natural experiences. Allied to this view is a sturdy and widely held American belief that "development" of natural resources is automatically a good thing regardless of the need--toning up the economy of a region or a state or a nation, keeping things moving. Most people give it some practical support, even those who in theory suspect its validity. For we are a moving people. We have known little stasis in the centuries of our presence on this continent, and each generation of us is imbued anew in childhood with certain axiomatic ideas; movement is forward, growth is up, construction is better than vacancy, not to make economic use of something is to waste it. These ideas linger in our reactions: "You can't," the saying goes, "stand in the way of progress." [Illustration] Certain other philosophers, growing in numbers these days, say emphatically that you can and should. These are the history-minded people, the wilderness folk, the nature traditionalists, and the others whose main concern is that man and the pleasant world around him have lost all semblance of a balanced relationship with each other, and whose view of the sturdy plunderlust of our ancestors is that our inheritance of it, combined with the technology of bulldozers, is aiming us straight toward a world in which our own structures and destructions may be all there is to see, our own fumes and sewage all there is to smell, our own voices and machines all there is to hear. Some people of this stamp are quietly pessimistic; others actively commit themselves to fight. Some who fight see present human growth and the growth of human demands on resources as the stark unavoidable realities they are, and seek mainly to guide them and mitigate their effects. Others stiffen their necks against development to meet those demands, staunch enemies to all reservoirs and other forms of compromise, stubborn if highminded nay-sayers against the tide, consistent even when illogical.