1.
Charles Darwin (his thinking is at the foundation of so many
of our scientific theories today):
"At some future period, not
very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of
man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the
world the savage races.
At the same time the anthropomorphous
apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be
exterminated.
The break will then be rendered wider, for it will
intervene between man in a more civilized state as we may hope,
than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of
as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla."
2.
Bill Gates:
"The problem is that the population is growing
the fastest where people are less able to deal with it. So it's
in the very poorest places that you're going to have a tripling
in population by 2050. (…)
And we've got to make sure that we
help out with the tools now so that they don't have an
impossible situation later."
3.
Bernie Sanders:
"In poor countries around the world where
women do not necessarily want to have large numbers of babies,
and where they can have the opportunity through birth control to
control the number of kids they have, is something I very, very
strongly support."
4.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson:
"The primary challenge
facing our species is the reproduction of our species itself… It
is time we had a grown-up discussion about the optimum quantity
of human beings in this country and on this planet…
All the
evidence shows that we can help reduce population growth, and
world poverty, by promoting literacy and female emancipation and
access to birth control."
5.
UK Television Presenter Sir David Attenborough:
"The human
population can no longer be allowed to grow in the same old
uncontrolled way. If we do not take charge of our population
size, then nature will do it for us."
6.
Paul Ehrlich, a former science adviser to president
George
W. Bush and the author of "The Population Bomb":
"Solving the
population problem is not going to solve the problems of racism…
of sexism… of religious intolerance… of war… of gross economic
inequality.
But if you don't solve the population problem,
you're not going to solve any of those problems. Whatever
problem you're interested in, you're not going to solve it
unless you also solve the population problem."
7. Dave
Foreman, the co-founder of
Earth First:
"We humans have
become a disease, the Humanpox."
8. CNN
Founder Ted Turner:
"A total population of 250-300 million
people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal."
9.
Japan's Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso: about medical
patients with serious illnesses:
"You cannot sleep well when you
think it's all paid by the government. This won't be solved
unless you let them hurry up and die."
10. David
Rockefeller:
"The negative impact of population growth on
all of our planetary ecosystems is becoming appallingly
evident."
11.
Richard Branson:
"The truth is this: the Earth cannot
provide enough food and fresh water for 10 billion people, never
mind homes, never mind roads, hospitals and schools."
12.
Environmental activist Roger Martin:
"On a finite planet,
the optimum population providing the best quality of life for
all, is clearly much smaller than the maximum, permitting bare
survival.
The more we are, the less for each; fewer people mean
better lives."
13.
HBO personality Bill Maher:
"I'm pro-choice, I'm for
assisted suicide, I'm for regular suicide, I'm for whatever gets
the freeway moving - that's what I'm for.
It's too crowded, the
planet is too crowded and we need to promote death."
14.
Al Gore:
"One of the things we could do about it is to
change the technologies, to put out less of this pollution, to
stabilize the population, and one of the principal ways of doing
that is to empower and educate girls and women.
You have to have
ubiquitous availability of fertility management so women can
choose how many children to have, the spacing of the children…
You have to educate girls and empower women.
And that's the most
powerful leveraging factor, and when that happens, then the
population begins to stabilize and societies begin to make
better choices and more balanced choices."
15.
MIT professor Penny Chisholm:
"The real trick is, in terms
of trying to level off at someplace lower than that 9 billion,
is to get the birthrates in the developing countries to drop as
fast as we can.
And that will determine the level at which
humans will level off on earth."
16.
Julia Whitty, a columnist for Mother Jones:
"The only known
solution to ecological overshoot is to decelerate our population
growth faster than it's decelerating now and eventually reverse
it - at the same time we slow and eventually reverse the rate at
which we consume the planet's resources.
Success in these twin
endeavors will crack our most pressing global issues: climate
change, food scarcity, water supplies, immigration, health care,
biodiversity loss, even war.
On one front, we've already made
unprecedented strides, reducing global fertility from an average
4.92 children per woman in 1950 to 2.56 today - an
accomplishment of trial and sometimes brutally coercive error,
but also a result of one woman at a time making her individual
choices.
The speed of this childbearing revolution, swimming
hard against biological programming, rates as perhaps our
greatest collective feat to date."
17.
Colorado State University Professor Philip Cafaro in a paper
entitled "Climate Ethics and Population Policy":
"Ending human
population growth is almost certainly a necessary (but not
sufficient) condition for preventing catastrophic global climate
change.
Indeed, significantly reducing current human numbers may
be necessary in order to do so."
18.
Professor of Biology at the University of Texas at Austin Eric
R. Pianka:
"I have two grandchildren and I want them to
inherit a stable Earth. But I fear for them.
Humans have
overpopulated the Earth and in the process have created an ideal
nutritional substrate on which
bacteria and
viruses (microbes) will grow and prosper.
We are behaving
like bacteria growing on an agar plate,
flourishing until natural limits are reached or until another
microbe colonizes and takes over, using them as their resource.
In addition to our extremely high population density, we are
social and mobile, exactly the conditions that favor growth and
spread of pathogenic (disease-causing) microbes.
I believe it is
only a matter of time until microbes once again assert control
over our population, since we are unwilling to control it
ourselves. This idea has been espoused by ecologists for at
least four decades and is nothing new.
People just don't want to
hear it."
19.
Kofi Annan, UN Secretary-General from 1997-2006:
"The idea
that population growth guarantees a better life - financially or
otherwise - is a myth that only those who sell nappies, prams
and the like have any right to believe."
20.
Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, UN Under-Secretary-General from 2000-2010:
"We
cannot confront the massive challenges of poverty, hunger,
disease and environmental destruction unless we address issues
of population and reproductive health."
21.
Bill Nye:
"In 1750, there were about a billion humans in the
world. Now, there are well over seven billion people in the
world.
It more than doubled in my lifetime. So all these people
trying to live the way we live in the developed world is filling
the atmosphere with a great deal more carbon dioxide and other
greenhouse gases than existed a couple of centuries ago.
It's
the speed at which it is changing that is going to be
troublesome for so many large populations of humans around the
world."
22.
Actress Cameron Diaz:
"I think women are afraid to say that
they don't want children because they're going to get shunned.
But I think that's changing too now. I have more girlfriends who
don't have kids than those that do. And, honestly? We don't need
any more kids.
We have plenty of people on this planet."
23.
Democrat strategist Steven Rattner:
"WE need death panels.
Well, maybe not death panels, exactly, but unless we start
allocating health care resources more prudently - rationing, by
its proper name - the exploding cost of Medicare will swamp the
federal budget."
24.
Matthew Yglesias, a business and economics correspondent for
Slate, in an article entitled "The Case for Death Panels, in One
Chart":
"But not only is this health care spending on the
elderly the key issue in the federal budget, our
disproportionate allocation of health care dollars to old people
surely accounts for the remarkable lack of apparent cost
effectiveness of the American health care system.
When the
patient is already over 80, the simple fact of the matter is
that no amount of treatment is going to work miracles in terms
of life expectancy or quality of life."
25. Planned
Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger:
"All of our problems are
the result of overbreeding among the working class"
26.
Gloria Steinem:
"Everybody with a womb doesn't have to have
a child any more than everybody with vocal chords has to be an
opera singer."
27.
Jane Goodall:
"It's our population growth that underlies
just about every single one of the problems that we've inflicted
on the planet.
If there were just a few of us, then the nasty
things we do wouldn't really matter and Mother Nature would take
care of it - but there are so many of us."
28. U.S.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg:
"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."
29.
Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger:
"The most
merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant
members is to kill it."
30.
Salon columnist Mary Elizabeth Williams in an article
entitled "So What If Abortion Ends Life?":
"All life is not
equal.
That's a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk
about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving,
kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers.
Yet a
fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the
woman in whose body it resides."
31.
Paul Ehrlich:
"Basically, then, there are only two kinds of
solutions to the population problem. One is a 'birth rate
solution,' in which we find ways to lower the birth rate.
The
other is a 'death rate solution,' in which ways to raise the
death rate - war, famine, pestilence - find us."
32.
Alberto Giubilini of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia
and Francesca Minerva of the University of Melbourne in a
paper published in the Journal of Medical Ethics:
"[W]hen
circumstances occur after birth such that they would have
justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be
permissible...
[W]e propose to call this practice
'after-birth
abortion', rather than 'infanticide,' to emphasize that the
moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of
a fetus... rather than to that of a child.
Therefore, we claim
that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the
circumstances where abortion would be.
Such circumstances
include cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at
least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at
risk."
33.
Nina Fedoroff, a key adviser to
Hillary Clinton:
"We need to
continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population;
the planet can't support many more people."
34.
Barack Obama's primary science adviser,
John Holdren:
"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."
35.
Another quote from
John Holdren:
"If population control measures are not
initiated immediately and effectively, all the technology man
can bring to bear will not fend off the misery to come."
36. David
Brower, the first Executive Director of
The Sierra Club:
"Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society,
unless the parents hold a government license...
All potential
parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the
government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for
childbearing."
37.
Maurice Strong:
"Either we reduce the world's population
voluntarily or nature will do this for us, but brutally."
38.
Thomas Ferguson, former official in the U.S. State
Department Office of Population Affairs:
"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…"
39. Mikhail
Gorbachev:
"We must speak more clearly about sexuality,
contraception, about abortion, about values that control
population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the
population crisis.
Cut the population by 90% and there aren't
enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage."
40. Jacques
Costeau:
"In order to stabilize world population, we must
eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say,
but it is just as bad not to say it."
41.
Finnish environmentalist
Pentti Linkola:
"If there were a button I could press, I
would sacrifice myself without hesitating if it meant millions
of people would die"
42.
Author Dan Brown:
"Overpopulation is an issue so profound
that all of us need to ask what should be done."
43. Prince
Phillip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II and co-founder of the
World Wildlife Fund:
"In the event that I am reincarnated, I
would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute
something to solve overpopulation."
44.
Ashley Judd:
"It's unconscionable to breed, with the number
of children who are starving to death in impoverished
countries."
45.
Charles Darwin:
"With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a
vigorous state of health.
We
civilized men, on the other hand,
do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build
asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute
poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save
the life of every one to the last moment.
There is reason to
believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a
weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox.
Thus the weak members of
civilized societies propagate their
kind.
No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic
animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the
race of man.
It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care
wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race;
but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so
ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."
