The Leaves in Winter
Page 53
Paul Ehrlich
Professor of Population Studies
From The Population Bomb
“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class - involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing - are not sustainable.”
Maurice Strong
Rio Earth Summit
“My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.”
Dave Foreman
Co-founder of Earth First!
“The big threat to the planet is people: there are too many, doing too well economically and burning too much oil.”
Sir James Lovelock
Scientist, environmentalist, futurologist; proposed Gaia hypothesis, from BBC Interview
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
Prof Paul Ehrlich
Stanford University
“The optimum human population of earth is zero.”
Dave Foreman
Co-Founder of Earth First!
“We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of acres of presently settled land.”
David Foreman
Co-founder of Earth First!
“Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.”
Amory Lovins
Rocky Mountain Institute
“Which is the greater danger - nuclear warfare or the population explosion? The latter absolutely! To bring about nuclear war, someone has to DO something; someone has to press a button. To bring about destruction by overcrowding, mass starvation, anarchy, the destruction of our most cherished values-there is no need to do anything. We need only do nothing except what comes naturally - and breed. And how easy it is to do nothing.”
Isaac Asimov
Author
“There are only two possible ways in which a world of 10 billion people can be averted. Either the current birth rates must come down more quickly or the current death rates must go up. There is no other way…to put it simply: excessive population growth is the greatest single obstacle to the economic and social advancement of most of the societies in the developing world.”
Robert McNamara, Former U.S. Secretary of Defense
“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”
Michael Oppenheimer
Environmental Defense Fund
“A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.”
Paul Ehrlich
“One American burdens the earth much more than twenty Bangladeshes. This is a terrible thing to say in order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it's just as bad not to say it.”
Jacques Yves Cousteau
UNESCO Courier
“Frankly, I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Supreme Court Justice
“Each person we add now disproportionately impacts on the environment and life-support systems of the planet.”
Paul Ehrlich
“We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence...on pain of liquidation.”
George Bernard Shaw
Author, co-founder of the London School of Economics
“A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero.”
Garrett Hardin
Author, ecologist, coined the concept of The Tragedy of the Commons
“Still, whether we like it or not, the task of speeding up the decrease of the human population becomes increasingly urgent.”
Havelock Ellis
British physician, psychologist, author, and social reformer
“Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, maybe we should control the population to ensure the survival of our environment.”
Sir David Attenborough
Author, broadcaster, naturalist
“Once it was necessary that the people should multiply and be fruitful if the race was to survive. But now to preserve the race it is necessary that people hold back the power of propagation.”
Helen Keller
Author, Blind/Deaf Advocate
“Either a species learns to control its own population, or something like disease, famine, war, will take care of the issue.”
Chuck Palahniuk
Author, freelance journalist
“In the last 200 years the population of our planet has grown exponentially, at a rate of 1.9% per year. If it continued at this rate, with the population doubling every 40 years, by 2600 we would all be standing literally shoulder to shoulder.”
Stephen Hawking
Physicist, cosmologist, Director of Research at Cambridge University
“...democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies. The more people there are, the less one individual matters.”
Isaac Asimov
Author
“Out of the full spectrum of human personality, one-fourth is electing to transcend…One-fourth is ready to so choose, given the example of one other…One-fourth is resistant to election. They are unattracted by life ever-evolving. One-fourth is destructive. They are born angry with God…They are defective seeds…There have always been defective seeds. In the past they were permitted to die a ‘natural death’…We, the elders, have been patiently waiting until the very last moment before the quantum transformation, to take action to cut out this corrupted and corrupting element in the body of humanity. It is like watching a cancer grow…Now, as we approach the quantum shift from creature-human to co-creative human—the human who is an inheritor of god-like powers—the destructive one-fourth must be eliminated from the social body. We have no choice, dearly beloveds. Fortunately you, dearly beloveds, are not responsible for this act. We are. We are in charge of God’s selection process for planet Earth. He selects, we destroy. We are the riders of the pale horse, Death. We come to bring death to those who are unable to know God…The riders of the pale horse are about to pass among you. Grim reapers, they will separate the wheat from the chaff. This is the most painful period in the history of humanity…”
Barbara Marx Hubbard
Former Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Advisor to the U.S. Department of Defense,
From The Book of Co-Creation, self-published, 1980
“There is a single theme behind all our work–we must reduce population levels. Either governments do it our way, through nice clean methods, or they will get the kinds of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran or in Beirut. Population is a political problem. Once population is out of control, it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it….”
Thomas Ferguson
Former official in the U.S. State Department Office of Population Affairs
“It is obvious that if in the future racial qualities
are to be improved, the improving must be wrought mainly by favoring the fecundity [fertility] of the worthy types... At present, we do just the reverse. There is no check to the fecundity of those who are subnormal...”
Theodore Roosevelt
Former U.S. President
“If the world is to save any part of its resources for the future, it must reduce not only consumption but the number of consumers.”
B.F. Skinner
Behaviorist, author, inventor, social philosopher
“We have been God-like in our planned breeding of our domesticated plants and animals, but we have been rabbit-like in our unplanned breeding of ourselves.”
Arnold Joseph Toynbee
British author and historian
“A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men. The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.”
John P. Holdren, Barack Obama’s science advisor
“The negative impact of population growth on all of our planetary ecosystems is becoming appallingly evident.”
David Rockefeller
Grandson of John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil
“No human is genuinely 'carbon neutral,' especially when all greenhouse gases are figured into the equation.”
United Nations Population Fund report
“There are some reports, for example, that some countries have been trying to construct something like an Ebola Virus, and that would be a very dangerous phenomenon, to say the least. Alvin Toeffler has written about this in terms of some scientists in their laboratories trying to devise certain types of pathogens that would be ethnic specific so that they could just eliminate certain ethnic groups and races; and others are designing some sort of engineering, some sort of insects that can destroy specific crops. Others are engaging even in an eco- type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves. So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations. It’s real, and that’s the reason why we have to intensify our efforts, and that’s why this is so important.”
U.S. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen
April 28, 1997, Testimony before Congressional Committee
“No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child… without a permit for parenthood.”
Margaret Sanger
Founder of Planned Parenthood
In her proposed The American Baby Code, intended to become law
“The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights. An extra child is the equivalent of a lot of flights across the planet.”
John Guillebaud
Professor of Family Planning
University College London
“The elderly are useless eaters.”
Henry Kissinger
Former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State
Nobel Peace Prize Recipient, Member Club of Rome
“I mean, sure, we have great respect for the human species .... But evolution can be just damn cruel, and to say that we've got a perfect genome and there's some sanctity to it, I'd just like to know where that idea comes from. It's utter silliness. And the other thing, because no one really has the guts to say it, I mean, if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we do it?”
James Watson
Molecular biologist, geneticist, zoologist, co-discovered the structure of DNA
“Looking past the near-term concerns that have plagued population policy at the political level, it is increasingly apparent that the long-term sustainability of civilization will require not just a leveling-off of human numbers as projected over the coming half-century, but a colossal reduction in both population and consumption.”
Ken Smail
Professor in the Anthropology Department
Kenyon College in Ohio
“This planet might be able to support perhaps as many as half a billion people who could live a sustainable life in relative comfort. Human populations must be greatly diminished, and as quickly as possible to limit further environmental damage.”
Eric R. Pianka
Professor of Biology at the University of Texas at Austin
“…in early times, it was easier to control a million people, literally it was easier to control a million people than physically to kill a million people. Today, it is infinitely easier to kill a million people than to control a million people. It is easier to kill than to control....”
Zbignew Brzezinski
Former National Security Advisor
Chatham House Address, November 17th, 2008
“The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.”
Henry Kissinger
Former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State
Nobel Peace Prize Recipient, Member Club of Rome
Quoted in New York Times, Oct. 28, 1973
“I believe it is appropriate to have an 'over-representation' of the facts on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience.”
Al Gore
Former U.S. Vice President
Nobel Peace Price Recipient
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill…. But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap of mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”
Alexander King, Bertrand Schneider
Founder and Secretary, respectively, Club of Rome
The First Global Revolution, pgs 104-105, 1991
“Eventually, it seems evident, a general system, whether private or public, whereby all personal facts, biological and mental, normal and morbid, are duly and systematically registered, must become inevitable if we are to have a real guide as to those persons who are most fit, or most unfit to carry on the race.”
Havelock Ellis
British physician, psychologist, author, and social reformer
The Task of Social Hygiene
"As an advocate of birth control I wish … to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘fit,’ admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation…. On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective."
Margaret Sanger
Founder of Planned Parenthood
“Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
Guide reproduction wisely - improving fitness and diversity.
Be not a cancer on the earth - Leave room for nature.”
Georgia Guidestones
Anonymously commissioned
Three of the “New 10 Commandments”
Elbert County, Georgia, USA
“This planet is on course for a catastrophe. The existence of Life itself is at stake.”
Dr Tim Flannery
Research Scientist, Professor at Macquarie University,
Chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council
M. C. Mi
ller is the author
of the epically bizarre apocalyptic spectacle
PW2 2012: The End of the Beginning,
the Sino-American techno-thriller Islands of Instability,
and the seriously zany black comedy Uberwoot!
He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife Deborah Joy
and enjoys hiking, kayaking, food adventures in the
kitchen and what-if speculations about the near future.
www.mcmillerbooks.com