Established in 1967 by the Agriculture Research Service of the U. S. Department of Agriculture to honor the memory of a gifted scientist . . . and to recognize accomplishment in a field or discipline that relates to the problem of nutrition and food production, the W. O. Atwater Memorial Lecture invited Dr. Jean Mayer, Professor of Nutrition at Harvard, to present the 1971 lecture. Dr. Mayer discusses current problems of world nutrition, its relationship to resource conservation, and the role of man and his government in ecologically-based decisions. (CP)