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by Paul Ehrlich

1968

Source - The American Life League

CHAPTER 131 - THE PERSISTENT MYTH OF OVERPOPULATION
from LightNetwork Website

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1- The world is critically overburdened with people right now

This crush of humanity is destroying the environment and detracting from everybody's quality of life. It is absolutely essential that we slow or halt population growth by making contraception and abortion available to all of the world's women.

If we do not put the brakes on our runaway population, the use of coercion will be necessary in order to save the planet.

"Family Planning has a theme

Two children as each couples dream;

Three years after marriage, one -

Before 33 childbearing's done.

Let a small family be your goal

Just choose a method of birth control

Methods are safe and simple too

A happy future waits for you."

Poem from a Taiwanese population control pamphlet entitled "Paste Your Umbrella Before the Rain" [2]

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2- The Malthus Manifesto

There exists, at this very moment, a tremendous battle of minds over the vexing problem of world population vs. world food supply.

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This struggle, largely unnoticed by the public, has been going on ever since the British economist, the Rev. Thomas Malthus, published his landmark work Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798.

The heart of Malthus' philosophy, and the cornerstone of the population controller's credo, was contained in his book:

"The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio ...

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By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal power must be kept equal. This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence."

The title of the second edition of Malthus' book, published in 1826, betrayed his strong bias towards "quality of life":

An Essay on the Principle of Population: Or a View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness; With and Inquiry into Our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evil Which it Occasions... Take it to the Limit...

The "New Malthusians" seem to delight in painting pictures of mass horrors that will inevitably befall society if various nations do not get serious about controlling their populations right now .

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Their predictions are almost always wrong and frequently comical.

25 years ago, Paul Ehrlich, the dean of the population scaremasters, warned us that mass starvation would strike the North American continent by the year 1985. Now, of course, the United States and Canada have tens of thousands of weight-loss clinics, and diet books routinely occupy the New York Times bestseller list.

In the 1970s, the mass media, ever ready to hitch a ride on a politically correct cause, warned us,

  • that by 1990, huge artificial islands would be constructed in the middle of the ocean to handle the earth's exploding population

  • that the world's oil supplies would be completely depleted by 2000

  • that the prime motivator of all wars by the year 1990 would be attacks on other nation's cached food stores

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3- Zero Population Growth

(ZPG) leaders took advantage of the media drumbeat and loudly insisted that the United States create a Bureau of Population Control. [3]

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Some of the population controllers extrapolated current trends far past the point where they are physically possible in order to frighten people who were not familiar with statistical theory or demographics.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the population is unschooled in these disciplines, and so accept the bogus math of the population controllers without question.

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A 1972 article by David Lytle, which was heavily circulated by Planned Parenthood-World Population, was chillingly and verbosely entitled,

"The Human Race Has Thirty-five Years Left: After That, People Will Start Eating Plankton"

Other population controllers predicted that, if population growth continued at a rate of two percent annually for 650 years, there would be standing room only on the planet, with only one square foot allocated per person. [4]

In other words, the population of the world under such an absurd scenario would be 1,589 trillion persons, or 450,000 times the world population in 1972.

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Even this was not the most ridiculous prediction made by the population controllers.

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Ansley Coale won the prize for the most ludicrous projection when he said that we are experiencing,

" ...a growth process which, within 65 centuries and in the absence of environmental limits, could generate a solid sphere of live bodies expanding with a radial velocity that, neglecting relativity, would equal the velocity of light." [5]

A little fiddling with numbers reveals that this would be equivalent to,23,891 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion people,

23,891,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,

...or more than the number of atoms in the known universe!

Such statistical extrapolations obviously have no bearing on reality whatever and are entirely useless for any purpose other than scaring people. Opposing Viewpoints. Intellectuals who are interested in the population 'problem' have gravitated towards two poles.

A minority insists that it is indeed possible for the world population to continue to grow almost without restraint, because we could feed as many as 50 billion people comfortably if we could just remove all of the existing barriers to food production and distribution. This is an unrealistic viewpoint.

Inevitably, the world population will indeed exceed the food supply, even if production and distribution methods operate under ideal conditions. At the rate the world population is growing, we would reach the 50 billion limit in about 150 years.

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What would we do then? How could we possibly overcome the momentum of such massive population growth?

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Any measures taken to limit population growth would be much more severe under such a scenario than they would be today. And, of course, any population-limiting or reducing disaster would be much worse indeed than under current conditions.

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The other viewpoint of those interested in population problems is much more practical. It is also terrifying.

Those who hold this view have the primary or secondary goal of limiting population at any cost, and include members of,

  • the Rockefeller Foundation

  • the International Planned Parenthood Federation

  • UNICEF

  • Zero Population Growth (ZPG)

  • and many others organizations

This extensive, vastly wealthy, and very influential cartel is so bold in its work, and so convinced that it are right, that it doesn't even bother to conceal or package its activities in a more attractive and appealing format any more.

So the fundamental question remains: Where is the middle ground between a planet-wide sewer and the dreaded Uterus Police ( a la the People's Republic of China)?

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The Environmental Agitators.

"[Environmental groups] are missing the boat because picking up the garbage is not the issue, having sewage treatment plants is not the issue - those are really details of the bigger issue. It's like trying to talk about a pimple when you really have cancer."

Jean-Michel Cousteau. [6] Introduction.

As described in Chapter 91, "Animal Rights and Environmentalism," some people believe that Man has no particular status on this earth, and that he is just another animal who must take into consideration all the other animals when making any decisions regarding his own welfare.

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This all sounds logical from a Humanistic point of view, but when people begin to see themselves as morally equal to or even lower than animals, a certain inevitable depressive world outlook must result.

After all, if we are not the supreme creation of God, then we are a cancer. If we do not occupy a privileged place on this earth, we occupy the lowest rung of existence because of our unparalleled ability to destroy other species.

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If we desire to escape responsibility in sexual and other matters, we may assuage our consciences by accepting culpability for 'destroying' our planet - a psychological ploy that allows us to take no concrete action other than being politically correct in our speech.

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Despairing Statements.

This attitude is reflected in many statements made by animal rights activists like Ingrid Newkirk, who once said that,

"We [humans] have grown like a cancer. We're the biggest blight on the face of the earth." [7]

Although not an activist by any means, even United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once remarked that,

"I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand." [8]

Some environmentalists even wish for death, not only for themselves, but for the entire human race. For them, the world is an unending circus of horrors, to be endured and survived until the blessed release afforded by the end of their lives.

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Bill McKibben writes in The End of Nature that,

"We are not interested in the utility of a particular species or free-flowing river, or ecosystem, to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value to me than another human body, or a billion of them. Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet ...

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Somewhere along the line - at about a billion years ago, maybe half that - we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the earth ... Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along." [9]

Vehemently yours.

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Perhaps the most extreme statement of this nihilistic philosophy was made by what has to be the world's ultimate anti-life group - The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, or VHEMT, pronounced "vehement" for short.

Anti-people crusader Les U. Knight, Portland, Oregon substitute teacher and founder of VHEMT, says in his newsletter These Exit Times, that,

"The hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo Sapiens - us ... When every human makes the moral choice to live long and die out, Earth will be allowed to return to its former glory.

Each time another one of us decides not to add another one of us to the burgeoning billions already squatting on this ravaged planet, another ray of hope shines through the gloom ...

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No matter what you're doing to improve life on planet Earth, I think you'll find that phasing out the human race will increase your chance of success." [10]

Knight seems not to notice that people will have a hard time 'improving life on planet Earth' if there are no people left to do the work!

One Expression of the Worldview. One strange manifestation of the extreme animal rights/ environmental worldview is that such activists are uniformly pro-abortion.

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They turn pale at the thought of inflicting any discomfort or damage upon animals or even upon inanimate objects, but shrug indifferently when confronted with the specter of a late-term unborn baby writhing in agony as it is torn limb from limb by the steel instruments of the abortionist.

Molly Yard, former president of the National Organization for Women, neatly tied abortion and radical environmentalism together when she said that,

"The abortion question is not just about women's rights, but about life on the planet - environmental catastrophe awaits the world if the population continues to grow at its present rate." [11]

The following environmental and animal-rights organizations have gone on record as favoring repeal of the Mexico City Policy and restoration of Federal funding to the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), the chief architect of China's one-child population control policy.

This program includes mass forced sterilization and abortion, as described in Chapter 50 of Volume II, "Forced Abortions."

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References

[2] Poem from a population control pamphlet entitled "Paste Your Umbrella Before the Rain." Prepared by the Chinese Center for International Training in Family Planning of Taiwan. Funded by UNICEF. See "UNICEF and Population Control," United States Coalition for Life Newsletter dated January 1973. Distributed to every Taiwanese boy and girl graduating from secondary, high, and vocational schools.

[4] Murray Bookchin. "The Population Myth." Kick It Over , Spring 1992, pages 8 to 12. Also see Reverend John A. O'Brien. Pastoral Life , July- August 1966.

[5] Ansley Coale. "Increases in Expectation of Life and Population Growth." In Louis Henry and Wilhelm Winkler (editors), Proceedings of the International Population Conference (Vienna, Austria), page 36.

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[6] Jean-Michel Cousteau, quoted in Richard L. Hill. "Explorer Finds No. 1 Threat in a Word: Overpopulation." The Oregonian , October 8, 1992, page B1.

[7] Ingrid Newkirk of PETA, quoted in Charles Oliver. "Liberation Zoology." Reason Magazine, June 1990, pages 22 to 27.

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[8] Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, quoted in Richard Hertz. Chance and Symbol . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948. Page 107.

[9] David M. Graber quoting Bill McKibben's The End of Nature in the Los Angeles Times book review, as printed in the Orange County (California) Register , October 28, 1990.

[10] Les U. Knight of VHEMT, quoted in Joel Dippold. "Live Well and Die." The Portland [Oregon] Alliance , March 1991, page 5. See also "That's Outrageous!, A Compilation: The Dodo Solution." Reader's Digest , April 1992, page 147.

[11] Proletarian Revolution , Fall 1989. [12] Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt, quoted in Eugene E. Russell. Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotable Definitions (2nd Edition). New York: Prentice-Hall, 1988. 674 pages

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