larger numbers of people and technology. It remains, even
in this time of rapid technological change and accumulat-
ing wealth, the essential and immediate objective of per-
haps as many as four to five billion people who are poor in
a world of six billion. This fundamental purpose has not
changed despite a ten- or twelve-thousand year history of
experience with agriculture and the development of civi-
lization. Survival is marginal for most of the world, and it is
tied to a close dependence on local resources.

The issue seems remote to most in the wealthy western
democracies but even there the wealth is recent and the
difference is small between the freedom provided by con-
fidence in the availability of the essential requirements for
life and struggling for subsistence. It is small in history and
small at the moment. The issue comes home to us all in
discovering the wasting humans living in the streets of our
cities, on the very edge of our culture and the edge of sur-
vival. It came home to me recently in an interesting way as
I considered a worthless stock certificate I had tucked in a
drawer some years ago and forgotten. The stock had be-
longed to my father. It was the only stock he ever owned
and it came to him as an inheritance along with ownership
of a farm in southern Maine where his mother had grown
up. The farm had been in her family for two hundred and
fifty years or more but became dysfunctional, at least as a
farm, in the modern economy of the mid-twentieth cen-
tury. The small savings from the farm had been in the local
bank in 1929 when the bank failed. When the bank was re-
constructed years later, some small recompense from the
money lost was made by issuing new stock in the new
bank. That stock split and gradually accumulated as the
bank was transformed over nearly sixty years into a branch

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