
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, January 1, 1995                   TAG: 9501040030
SECTION: EDITORIALS                    PAGE: F-2   EDITION: HOLIDAY 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

TALL WAILS

FUTURISTS like to get a jump on fretting, and one thing worrying them now is this trend toward tallness. Throughout the world, people are getting taller. Why, by the next century, basketball players might have to be 8 to 10 feet just to compete.

So, besides squashing every 7-footer's dreams of making the NBA, what would be wrong if people on average were taller? In a word: inefficiency.

All that height, so admired and rewarded in a world that equates tallness with leadership and ability (``s/he's head and shoulders above the rest"), really just wastes precious resources, management consultant Thomas T. Samaras argues in the current issue of The Futurist magazine. Tall people need more food and water, requiring more land to be cultivated, more fertilizers and pesticides to be used, and on and on. And they plain take up more space. Automobiles, for instance, have to be built bigger for them.

Short people, on the other hand, use fewer resources and produce less waste. Samaras doesn't liken them to well-made compact cars, but the comparison seems apt. He suggests nutritional scientists might want to develop low-cal, low-fat diets so kids can grow short and healthy.

Trouble is, moms and dads all over the world want their boys and girls to grow up to be Cadillacs, not Beetles. And, with the possibilities and temptations of genetic engineering revving up our egos, er, engines, the magazine's editors envision a race of giants inheriting the Earth and squandering its wealth.

We're having a hard time getting worried about this, even though the editorial board here is on the short side. (Hey, the tall guy is the boss, come to think of it.) And we're intrigued by the thought of a scientific effort to cut the human race down to size - say, small enough to fit comfortably in airline seats. But we find our attention span is just too short to give it serious thought.

Besides, we have our doubts about The Futurist's assertion that Samaras is unbiased because, at 5-10, he's of average height. Perhaps his unstated worry is that in the future, he'll be one of us: short people.

by CNB