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The following are some famous environmental quotes centered on the theme of over-population. If you would like to go to the online environmental forum Click Here.
“The mother of the year should be a sterilized woman with two adopted children.”
- Paul R. Ehrlich
“The command "Be fruitful and multiply" was promulgated, according to our authorities, when the population of the world consisted of two people.”
- William Ralph Inge
“There can be no question that more hunger can be alleviated with a given quantity of grain by completely eliminating animals [from the food production process]. About 2,000 pounds of concentrates [grains] must be supplied to livestock in order to produce enough meat and other livestock products to support a person for a year, whereas 400 pounds of grain (corn, wheat, rice, soybeans, etc.) eaten directly will support a person for a year. Thus, a given quantity of grain eaten directly will feed 5 times as many people as it will if it is first fed to livestock and then is eaten indirectly by humans in the form of livestock products.”
- Dr. M. E. Ensminger
“It is not prudent to rely on science and technology alone to solve problems created by rapid population growth, wasteful resource consumption and harmful human practices.”
- U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Royal Society of London, joint statement
“When the family is small, whatever little they have they are able to share. There is peace.”
- Philip Njuguna
“Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, maybe we should control the population to ensure the survival of our environment.”
- David Attenborough
“To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem.”
- Lamont Cole
“The optimum population is, then, less than the maximum.”
- Garrett Hardin
“The human race could go extinct and I for one would not shed any tears.”
- Dave Foreman
“As a scientist I wanted to find a scientific solution; but reason inexorably led me to conclude that the population problem could not possibly be solved without repudiating certain ethical beliefs and altering some of the political and economic arrangements of contemporary society.”
- Garrett Hardin
“Arguments for a larger Australian population are uniformly based on a belief that it will increase the growth of the economy. Whatever the merits of the argument (and there are few), the population boosters never ask the most fundamental question: Will a higher rate of economic growth actually make us any happier? Why do we equate national progress with economic growth when we know that continued expansion of our levels of consumption are putting ever-greater pressures on the natural environment? It's time to get over our growth fetish.”
- Clive Hamilton
“With an estimated population of nine billion people by 2050, we cannot continue to consume resources at the same rate and maintain our quality of life.”
- David Suzuki
“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
“Men and women aren't going to be motivated to practice any form of birth control until they know that most of the children they do bear will survive! As it is now, the only way poor people can provide for their old age is to have several children who will care for them . . . and the only way they can be sure of having enough living offspring is to have many, many births. People must be sure that they can meet their own basic security needs, and that the children they bear will have a reasonable chance to survive, before birth control can be considered a realistic option. Only then, when people have freedom from famine, can conscientious efforts to teach and encourage family planning be successful.”
- Frances Moore Lappe
“It seems disingenuous for the intellectual elite of the first world to dwell on the subject of too many babies being born in the second- and third-world nations while virtually ignoring the over-population of cattle and the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of sustenance to feed the rich a steady diet of grain-fed meat.”
- Jeremy Rifkin
“The human overpopulation issue is the topic I see as the most vital to solve if our children and grandchildren are to have a good quality of life.”
- Alexandra Paul
“Working on elephant populations in Zambia, I was visited by Sir Peter Scott, founder of the World Wildlife Fund. He said, 'You know, I have often thought that at the end of the day, we would have saved more wildlife if we had spent all WWF's money on buying condoms.' He was right, and human overpopulation is ultimately the greatest threat to wildlife.”
- Roger Short
“This century has witnessed dramatic changes in two key factors that define the physical reality of our relationship to the earth: a sudden and startling surge in human population and a sudden acceleration of the scientific and technological revolution. From the beginning of humanity’s appearance on the Earth to 1945, it took more than ten thousand generations to reach a world population of 2 billion people. Now, in the course of one human lifetime – mine – the world population will increase from 2 to more than 9 billion, and it is already more than halfway there. Global warming, ozone depletion, the loss of living species, deforestation – they all have a common cause: the new relationship between human civilization and the earth’s natural balance.”
- Al Gore
“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.”
- Paul Ehrlich
“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
“Malthus has been buried many times and Malthusian scarcity with him. But as Garrett Hardin remarked, anyone who has to be reburied so often cannot be entirely dead.”
- Herman E. Daly
“In California, we are in the midst of a population crisis that is already affecting every aspect of life in our state and will continue to get worse.”
- Gary Miller
“Licenses to have babies incidentally is something that I got in trouble for some years ago for suggesting even in Canada that this might be necessary at some point, at least some restriction on the right to have a child.”
- Maurice Strong
“The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer.”
- Paul Ehrlich
“It is a mistake to think that we can control the breeding of mankind in the long run by an appeal to conscience.”
- Garrett Hardin
“The optimum human population of earth is zero.”
- Dave Foreman
“A meat-fed world now appears a chimera. World grain production has grown more slowly than population since 1984, and farmers lack new methods for repeating the gains of the green revolution. Supporting the world's current population of 5.4 billion people on an American-style diet would require two-and-ahalf times as much grain as the world's farmers produce for all purposes. A future world of 8 billion to 14 billion people eating the American ration of 220 grams of grain-fed meat a day can be nothing but a flight of fancy.”
- Alan B. Durning and Holly Brough
“Suppose food were distributed equally. If everyone in the world ate as Americans do, less than half the present world population could be fed on the record harvests of 1985 and 1986. Of course, everyone doesn't have to eat like Americans. About a third of the world grain harvest -- the staples of the human feeding base -- is fed to animals to produce eggs, milk, and meat for American-style diets. Wouldn't feeding that grain directly to people solve the problem? If everyone were willing to eat an essentially vegetarian diet, that additional grain would allow perhaps a billion more people to be fed with 1986 production.”
- Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich
“We must stabilize population. This will be possible only if all nations recognize that it requires improved social and economic conditions, and the adoption of effective, voluntary family planning.”
- Lester Milbrath
“Population is exploding. We’ve got to do something about getting a sustainable population level and of course this gets back to poverty, it gets back to the education of women and so on. We’ve got the problems of food supply, of global warming, massive increases in the population. Now these are not the figments of Bob Hawke’s imagination. These are facts. You’ve got over a billion people in the world of over six million now living in absolute poverty and half the world’s population living in very meagre situations.”
- Bob Hawke