Jim, This article needs to be part of the context for our next Book Study. I remember a TED Talk years ago that excited me about how the World population would peak and then decline. He also pointed out the exact same growth pattern for Africa, especially Nigeria. This, of course was long before the Pandemic. He said it would “level” off at around 7.1 Billion people. He made no reference to it dropping “like a stone” that this one does. It was an optimistic trend that said we would stabilize and our resource threat would end. What excited me was that he said it was due to Cultural shifts he discerned regarding China, Japan, Korea and other Asian Countries. It was the inspiration for his emphasis on Cultural Affairs that led me to the Triangle I made on The Life Process and my top triangle of Cultural Process being just one of the three triangles and my seeing the emergence of what I discerned to be the Life Process dynamic and how our whole work on Systems Thinking was what the World needed. We were way ahead of our Time. But this same talk was available to the authors of our current Book we are studying. Did they not do their research? Maybe, but again, the Pandemic changed everything. It reminded me that Willis Harmon called us “The People of the Question” nor the people with the answer. It allowed me to say a yes rather than a no to our breaking up of the Order. JWM spoke at the end of his life about the we would be part of what he called The Wayside Inn. A place where we would be caring for people, not Religious Houses. People, including our authors only saw the Crisis of a “Trend” that was they show as growing exponentially as practically a straight line straight up. I won’t go on with this. I just hope we can then see why Racism (and the other two) that Niebuhr wrote so many years before in the paper we used for the Church part of RS-I and Chardin also spoke of. It is also why I kept wanting people to read Journey to the East in our last Study but was cut off before I could say “Read the Book”! Peace, Jack -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications Fewer babies’ cries. More abandoned homes. Toward the middle of this century, as deaths start to exceed births, changes will come that are hard to fathom. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/world/global-population-shrinking.html?sm... <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/world/global-population-shrinking.html?smid=em-share>