Population stabilization should become a priority for sustainable development.
A Good Tenant?
We have probed the earth, excavated it, burned it, ripped things from it, buried things in it, chopped down its forests, leveled its hills, muddied its waters, and dirtied its air. That does not fit my definition of a good tenant. If we were here on a month-to-month basis, we would have been evicted long ago.
Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.
Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavour on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally?
I consider the dramatic growth in the world’s population to be the greatest challenge currently facing the environment… The effects of this rapid increase are felt around the globe. Starvation, deforestation and lack of clean water are just some of the problems…
The latest phase of technical-scientific progress, with its fantastic increases in population, has created a situation fraught with problems of hitherto unknown dimensions…
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.
Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population.
Those who in principle oppose birth control are either incapable of arithmetic or else in favour of war, pestilence and famine as permanent features of human life
Population growth prevents the development that would slow population growth.
…women must come to recognize there is some function of womanhood other than being a child-bearing machine.
Family planning… is possible, practical and necessary. Unlike plagues of the Dark Ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is solvable by means we have discovered and with resources we possess. What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution, but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and education of the billions who are its victims.
On my 70th Birthday I was asked: What are Mankind’s prospects? My reply: We are behaving like yeasts in a brewer’s vat, multiplying mindlessly while greedily consuming the substance of a finite world. If we continue to imitate the yeasts we will perish as they perish, having exhausted our resources and poisoned ourselves in the lethal brew of our own wastes. Unlike yeasts, we have a choice. What will it be?
If the people will lead, the leaders will follow.
The accusation that a stand to reduce immigration is racist is music to the ears to those who profit from the cheap labor of immigrants. They are the same people who love to see environmentalists make fools of themselves. And there is no environmentalist more foolish than one who refuses to confront the fact that uncontrolled human population growth is the No. 1 cause of the world’s increasing environmental problems.
A suitable total for the number of citizens cannot be fixed without considering the land..
Human population growth is the most pressing environmental problem facing the U.S. and the world.
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.
Family planning could bring more benefits to more people at less cost than any other single technology now available to the human race…
We are dealing with two opposing forces, the scientific power of food production and the biologic power of human reproduction… Man also has acquired the means to reduce the rate of human reproduction, effectively and humanely…but has not yet used this potential adequately. There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort.”