Sobering Realities: Quotations on Planet Earth in the 21st Century
By Frosty Wooldridge on 5 March 2018
In the final analysis, this series could continue into some very sobering material, but for now, it gives Americans an idea of what this civilization faces and what we must do to change course. These quotes give you an idea of our predicament from some of the finest minds in the world.
Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases of population, locally, nationally, or globally.”
- Dr. Albert Bartlett AlBartlett.org
The stresses caused by population growth cannot be solved by international migration. They must be confronted by and within each individual nation. Fundamental to the concept of national rights and responsibilities is the duty of each nation to match its population with its political, social, and environmental resources, in both the short and the long term. No nation should exceed what the biologists call its ‘carrying capacity.’”
If we don’t halt population growth with justice and compassion, it will be done for us by nature, brutally and without pity – and will leave a ravaged world.”
- Nobel Laureate Dr. Henry W. Kendall
The raging monster upon the land is population growth. In its presence, sustainability is but a fragile theoretical construct. To say, as many do, that the difficulties of nations are not due to people, but to poor ideology and land-use management is sophistic.”
- Harvard scholar and biologist E.O. Wilson
Most Western elites continue urging the wealthy West not to stem the migrant tide [that adds 80 million net gain annually to the planet], but to absorb our global brothers and sisters until their horrid ordeal has been endured and shared by all—ten billion humans packed onto an ecologically devastated planet.”
- Dr. Otis Graham, Unguarded Gates
Somehow, we have come to think the whole purpose of the economy is to grow, yet growth is not a goal or purpose. The pursuit of endless growth is suicidal.”
- David Suzuki
Growth for the sake of yet more growth is a bankrupt and eventually lethal idea. CASSE is the David fighting the Goliath of endless expansion, and we know how that one turned out.”
- David Orr
The green revolution has won a temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space. If fully implemented, the revolution can provide sufficient food for sustenance during the next three decades. But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only.”
- Norman Borlaug, winner of 1970 Nobel Peace Prize
The cheap oil age created an artificial bubble of plentitude for a period not much longer than a human lifetime….so I hazard to assert that as oil ceases to be cheap and the world reserves move toward depletion, we will be left with an enormous population…that the ecology of the earth will not support. The journey back toward non-oil population homeostasis will not be pretty. We will discover the hard way that population hyper growth was simply a side-effect of the oil age. It was a condition, not a problem with a solution. That is what happened and we are stuck with it.”
- James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency
We must alert and organize the world’s people to pressure world leaders to take specific steps to solve the two root causes of our environmental crises – exploding population growth and wasteful consumption of irreplaceable resources. Over-consumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today.”
- Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Oceanographer
Upwards of one hundred species.. mostly of the large, slow-breeding variety… are becoming extinct here every day because more and more of the earth’s carrying capacity is systematically being converted into human carrying capacity. These species are being burnt out, starved out, and squeezed out of existence… thanks to technologies that most people, I’m afraid, think of as technologies of peace. I hope it will not be too long before the technologies that support our population explosion begin to be perceived as no less hazardous to the future of life on this planet than the endless production of radioactive wastes.”
- Daniel Quinn
We’ve poured our poisons into the world as though it were a bottomless pit.. and we go on gobbling them up. It’s hard to imagine how the world could survive another century of this abuse, but nobody’s really doing anything about it. It’s a problem our children will have to solve, or their children.”
- Daniel Quinn
As we go from this happy hydrocarbon bubble we have reached now to a renewable energy resource economy, which we do this century, will the “civil” part of civilization survive? As we both know there is no way that alternative energy sources can supply the amount of per capita energy we enjoy now, much less for the 9 billion expected by 2050. And energy is what keeps this game going. We are involved in a Faustian bargain—selling our economic souls for the luxurious life of the moment, but sooner or later the price has to be paid.”
- Walter Youngquist
The U.S. will set a record in the rate of rise—and fall of an empire. Between wide open borders and fall of the dollar and growing population against a declining resource base, the US will be defeated from within. Mobs will rule the streets in the nation that is now the third largest in the world and unable to support its population except by taking resources from other countries.”
- Arnold Toynbee, historian
A simple look at the upward path of global greenhouse emissions indicates we will continue to squeeze the trigger on the gun we have put to our own head.”
- Eugene Linden, The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather and the Destruction of Civilization
The ship is already starting to spin out of control. We may soon lose all chance of grabbing the wheel. Humanity faces a genuinely new situation. It is not an environmental crisis in the accepted sense. It is a crisis for the entire life-support system for our civilization and our species.”
- Fred Pearce, The Last Generation: How Nature Will take Her Revenge for Climate Change
Imagine we live on a planet. Not our cozy, taken for granted planet, but a planet, a real one, with melting poles and dying forests and a heaving, corrosive sea, raked by winds, strafed by storms, scorched by heat. And inhospitable place. It needs a new name, Eaarth.”
- Bill McKibben, Earth: Making a life on a Tough New Planet
If present growth trends in population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth will be reached sometime in the next 100 years.”
- The Club of Rome 1972
The power of population is so superior to the power of earth to produce subsistence to humanity that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”
- Thomas Malthus, 1798
All causes are lost causes without limiting human population,”
- Dr. Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
This article is Part 5 of a series.
Note
The issues of unending physical growth, population growth, mass migration, and ecological sustainability are inextricably intertwined. Unending population growth is root cause of environmental degradation. In developing countries, population growth is driven by high fertility. In developed, Western countries, population growth is driven by mass immigration.
No mater what the cause, every nation has not only the right, but the responsibility to control its population numbers.