Neville reports reading in the paper that the Rhine River had gone stagnant with fish, with millions dying of an undetermined cause some weeks or months earlier; he notes the waters had already replenished themselves, without human help, comparing it to how lemmings periodically destroy themselves and then reproduce. He cites it alongside a Peruvian disaster and Vietnam War casualties as evidence that the world's problems are not a matter of scarcity but of an economic failure to share abundance.