Around the sun leaving a bright trail behind. For more than

Contrary to the impression that grandmothers are delighted to help their grown daughters and care for their grandchildren, a study of multi-generational families indicates that many older women resent the frequent impositions of the younger generations on their time and energy.

“Young women with children are under a lot of pressure these days, and they expect their mothers to help them pick up the pieces," noted Dr. Bertram Je Cohier, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago. "This is often the strongest source of resentment on the part of Grandmother, who has finished with child-caring and now has her own life to live. Grandmothers like to see their children and grandchildren, but in their own time.

Dr. Cohler is the director of a study, supported by the National Institute of Aging, of 150 working-class families that live in a Midwestern suburb. He and a collaborator, Dr. Henry U. Grunebaum of Harvard Medical School, have already completed an intensive investigation of four such families in New England, summarizing their findings in a book, Mothers, Grandmothers and Daughters, published recently by Wiley-Interscience for professional audiences.

Dr. Cohler tells of a middle-aged Boston woman who works as a seamstress all week and for her church on Sundays₁ Every Saturday (her only day off) her daughter and family visit, expecting Mother to make lunch, shop and visit. "That's not how she wants to grow old," said Dr. Cohler, who was told by the older woman: "My daughter would never speak to me if she knew how mad I get."

In all the four New England families studied, the older women resented the numerous phone calls and visits from their grown daughters, who often turned to their mothers for advice, physical resources, affection and companionship as well as baby-sitting services. "American society keeps piling on the burdens for older people, particularly those in their 50's and 60's," Dr. Cohier said in an interview here. "They are still working and taking care of their grown children and maybe also their aged parents. Sometimes life gets to be too much. That's one reason many of them move far away, to Florida or Sun City (Arizona). Older people need more space and fime to attend to their own affairs and friends. Young people don't understand this, and that's part of what creates tension between generations.”

He has found that, Contrary to what the younger generations may

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think, older people have an enormous amount to do. "More than half of working-class grandmothers still work, and if they^tre retired they have activities in the community that keep them occupied," he said. "Each generation has got to appreciate the unique needs of the other," Dr. Cohler went on. "The younger generation has to realize that grandparents have busy, active lives and that they need privacy and more space for themselves. Moreover, the older generation has to realize that continuing to be pan of the family is important to the younger generation and that they need help and support.”

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LEARNING IT AT HOME

Learning a language at home via a home study course is often the most convenient, though not necessarily the most efficient. You can go at your own pace and needn't adjust your schedule to accommodate a regular class. Sets of recorded lessons are available at book and record stores or by mail order. They usually cover only the more common languages, and most do not go beyond the needs of the casual tourist. The tapes and records consist of groups of phrases and conversations you learn by repetition. A set of four to six tapes and accompanying workbook might cost about $125.

Taped lessons used by the Foreign Service Institute's School of Language Studies to train diplomats are more complete and cover a wider range of languages. The State Department does not market these tapes directly, but they are available by writing to Order Section, National Audio-Visual Center, General Services' Administration, Washington, D.C. 20409. The price for a basic course of about 20 cassette tapes and a text is $100 or so; the more cassettes, the higher the price. Delivery generally takes four to six weeks after receipt of your order.

If you want to earn credits toward a degree or prepare yourself to read foreign literature, consider a university correspondence course. A one semester course generally costs about $135 for beginners, postage not included. Any audio materials used may involve extra cost. Course quality is comparable to on-campus offerings. All assignments are reviewed by a professor or instructor and then returned, usually within a week.

Language courses are included among the 12,000 courses listed in The Guide to independent Study Through Correspondence instruction, prepared by the National University Continuing Education Association. It is available in libraries or from Peterson's Guides, P.O. Box 2123, Princeton, N.J. 08540, for $4.50 plus $1.25 for postage and handling.

One caveat about university correspondence courses: if your object is to achieve minimal conversational skills, either for business or pleasure, you may not be willing to expend the effort required for these courses, according to Dr. Robert Batchellor, associated with the NUCEA guide. Self-instruction requires a commitment of at least ten hours per week.

The National Association of Self-Instructional Language Programs (NASILP) assists schools in designing and operating self-instruction programs based on tape learning supplemented by text and tutorials and eligible for college credit. NASILP keeps up with all of the options,

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including commercial programs, and will help you find a course to fit your specifications, whether or not it is a NASWP product.

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ANIMAL PREDATORS

No doubt the greatest single leap in human prehistory was the one we made from being helpless prey to becoming formidable predators (animals which hunt and eat others) of other living creatures, including, Eventually, the ones with claws and fangs. This is the theme that is acted out over and over, obsessively, in the initiation rites of tribal cultures. In the drama of initiation, the young (usually men) are first humiliated and sometimes tortured, only to be 'reborn' as hunters and warriors. Very often the initial torment includes the threat of being eaten by costumed humans or actual beasts. Orokaiva children in Papua New Guinea are told they will be devoured like pigs; among Indians of the Pacific Northwest, the initiates were kidnapped or menaced by wolves; young Norwegian men, at least in the sagas, had to tackle bears single-handedly.

As a species, we've been fabulously successful at predation. We have enslaved the wild ungulates, turning them into our cattle and sheep, pushing them into ever narrower habitats. We have tamed some of the wolves and big cats, trivializing them as household pets. We can dine on shark or alligator fillets if we want, and the only bears we're likely to know are the ones whose name is teddy. In fact, horror movies wouldn't be much fun if real monsters lurked outside our cinemas. We can enjoy screaming at the alien or the monster or the blob because we know, historically speaking, it was our side that won.

But the defeat of the animal predators was not a clear-cut victory for us. With the big land carnivores out of the way, humans decided that the only worthwhile enemies were others like themselves - 'enemy' individuals or tribes or nations or ethnic groups. The criminal stalking his victim, the

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soldiers roaring into battle, are enacting an archaic drama in which the other player was originally non-human, something either to eat or be eaten by. For millenniums now, the earth's scariest predator has been ourselves.

In our arrogance, we have tended to forget that our own most formidable enemies may still be of the non-human kind. Instead of hungry tigers or fresh-cloned dinosaurs, we face equally deadly microscopic life forms. It will take a whole new set of skills and attitudes to defeat HIV or the TB bacterium - not the raging charge on the field of battle, but the cunning ambush of the lab.

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SAVE THE JUNGLE- SAVE THE WORLD

The so-called jungle' of popular imagination, the tropical rain forest belt stretching around our planet at the Equator, has taken some 60 million years to evolve to its present state. It is, quite simply, the most complex, most important ecosystem on Earth.

Homo Faber, Man the Builder, has tragically always seen the jungle as something alien, an environment to be vanquished, replaced with his own constructions. In the past twenty years, the rate of pillage has increased alarmingly and huge tracts of verdant, beautiful forest - an irreplaceable treasure house of living things - has often given way to wasteland. The evidence is that Man will redouble his destructive efforts Until the forest ‘system’ is smashed, and the jungle will function no more.

Many experts gloomily predict that the tropical rain forests will finally vanish around the end of our century. Well done, 20th century!

What are the burning reasons that drive men to destroy our monumental inheritance?

Man seldom does anything for entirely rational reasons; usually, the less rational his 'reasons’, the more he defends them with short-term economic arguments₁ That is one of the modern lessons in ecology₁

"We need the land for people," runs the argument. Well, many people already inhabit the tropical forest belt. There, native tribes have their own ‘low-impact' life style, hunting, trapping, practising a little cultivation. Perhaps not idyllic, it is, nevertheless, a life style that does not endanger the forest ecosystem.

We stress a little cultivation because, paradoxically, the forest soil is often infertile; trees and green plants thrive on the compost of their fallen foliage, which is rapidly broken down and recycled as nutrients. So, when the jungle is cleared to plant crops, there is no means of putting fertility back into the soil. Many governments spend much time 'resettling' people in deforested areas as part of so-called forward-looking development projects, but the crop yield is meagre, and brief: the soil soon makes its point. Erosion and flooding also tend to follow deforestation.

"We need the timber," continues the argument. Well, the forests have always been generous with their riches - so far as they are able. They are not limitless. They are being exhausted at ever increasing speed. Forest ecology, wisdom in planning and less greed could keep Man and the delicate rain forest relationship in balance indefinitely. This is our last great store house, our last wonderland.

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TIGHTEN YOUR BELT

The fact is that the energy crisis has been with us for a long time now, and will be with us for an even longer time. Whether Arab oil flows freely or not, it is clear to Everyone that world industry cannot be allowed to depend on so fragile a base. The supply of oil can be shut off at whim at any time, and in any case, the oil wells will all run dry in thirty years or so at the present rate of use.

New sources of energy must be found, and this will take time, but it is not likely to result in any situation that will ever restore that sense of cheap and copious energy we have had In times past. We will never again dare indulge in indiscriminate growth. For an indefinite period from here on in, mankind is going to advance cautiously, and consider itself lucky that it can advance at all.

To make the situation worse, there is as yet no sign that any slowing of the world's population is in sight. Although the birthrate has dropped in some nations, including the United States, the population of the world seems sure to pass six billion and perhaps even seven billion as the twenty-first century opens. The food supply will not increase nearly enough to match this, which means that we are heading into a crisis in the matter of producing and marketing food.

Taking all this into account, what might we reasonably estimate supermarkets to be like in the year 2001? To begin with, the world food supply is going to become steadily tighter over the next thirty years - even here in the United States. By 2001, the population of the United States will be at least two hundred and fifty million and possibly two hundred and seventy million, and the nation will be hard put to expand food production to fill the additional mouths. This will be particularly true since the energy pinch will make it difficult to continue using the high-energy method of agriculture they makes it possible to combine few farmers with high yields.

It seems almost certain that by 2001 the United States will no longer be a great food-exporting nation and that, if necessity forces the exporting of food, it will be at the price of belt-tightening at home.

This means, for one thing, that we can look forward to an end to the 'natural food' trend. It is not a wave of the future. All the unnatural' things we do to food are required to produce more of the food in the first place, and to make it last longer afterward. It is for that reason that we need and use chemical fertilizers and pesticides

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while the food is growing, and add preservatives afterward.

In fact, as food items will tend to decline in quality and decrease in variety, there is very likely to be increasing use of flavouring additives. Until such time as mankind has the sense to lower its population to the point where the planet can provide a comfortable support for all, people will have to accept more artificiality.
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GALDIKAS AND ORANGUTANS

Birute Galdikas remembers the scene very well. She was in a cluttered London flat, anxious and awestruck, with her two heroes: Dian Fossey, the strong-willed American studying the mountain gorillas in Africa, and the elegant Briton Jane Goodall, famous for her discoveries about chimpanzees' humanlike abilities. Presiding was their common mentor, the paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey. He was preparing Galdikas, then a bookish young graduate student at the University of California, for the wilds of Borneo and life among the great apes. As Leakey jotted down campfire recipes, Galdikas turned to Goodall and asked, "What will I do when I get there?" Replied Goodall: "You'll go out and find orangutans."