Town Meeting in Briggs Ends With Some Criticizing Results

A two-day "town meeting" held in Briggs Cage to establish world priorities for the future ended yesterday on a note of optimism despite open criticism of its format and results by some participants.

The meeting, which its organizers said was "a practical attempt to continue our American Evolution in a desirable manner" concluded with the adoption of a series of resolutions on the future of the world and on the direction of policy efforts to insure that future.

Proposals adopted ranged from the one that advocated a Zero Population Growth resource policy" to a plan that suggested the restriction of the "explosive growth of consumption and environmental degradation."

According to Barbara Marx Hubbard, cofounder of the Committee for the Future and one of the event's organizers, the televized meeting "put the future within the carshot of the people and in that respect it was like a shot heard round the world."

Hubbard acknowledged that the meeting had come under attack by some of its participants as being a forum not for new ideas but for proposals that have already been put forward in other settings.

"Despite the criticism which we have received from some concerning the process we have followed we still feel that we have been successful in identifying broad areas at consensue," Hubbard said.

One of the meeting's participants said he left that "the only reason any consensus was achieved at all was that the proposals which were read at the final meeting were watered down and innocuous, calling only for 'thought' along certain lines, not for specific actions."

Only a few of the proposals read at yesterday's voting session provoked more than mild debate and all but a few were adopted overwhelmingly by the meeting's participants.

One of the proposals which was not adopted concerned the need to make the private ownership of art illegal in order, in the words of the proposal, to "de-mystify" its role in society.

Maud Morgan, an artist and a member of the committee which drafted the controversial proposal, said yesterday that her committee's action was motivated by a "desire to inject some controversy into the otherwise bland proceedings."