SPECIAL REPORT:
OVERPOPULATION IN AMERICA
(Part 12 of 18)
ARE YOU SURE?
ARE YOU SURE?
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| Infinity Express #Flight2100 Are you ready to board this starship? ARE YOU SURE? |
By Frosty Wooldridge
Part 12: Facing Our Civilization in the 21st the Century
In the final analysis, this series could continue into some very heavy, if not sobering material, but for now, it gives Americans an idea of what this civilization faces and what we must do to change course.
These final quotes give you an idea of our predicament from some of the finest minds in the world.
“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 was instigated as a result of the efforts of Norman Borlaug, who,
while accepting the Nobel peace prize in 1970, said: “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.”
“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 two 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 – Nature – Life – People – World – Technology – Peace – Environmental
“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 – Nature – World – Insanity – Greed – Problems – Environmental – Responsibility
“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
“At this point, it’s almost certainly too late to manage a transition to sustainability on a global or national scale, even if the political will to attempt it existed, which it clearly does not. Our civilization is in the early stages of the same curve of decline and fall as so many others have followed before it. What likely lies in wait for us is a long, uneven decline into a new Dark Age from which, centuries from now, the civilizations of the future will gradually emerge.”
“We are strong and adaptable animals and can certainly make a new life on the hotter Earth, but there will only be a fraction of inhabitable land left. Soon we face the appalling question of whom can we let aboard the lifeboats? And who must we reject? There will be great clamor from climate refugees seeking a safe haven in those few parts where the climate is tolerable and food available. We will need a new set of rules for limiting the population in climate oases.” James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A final Warning
“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, Eaarth: 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
“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 www.albartlett.org
“All causes are lost causes without limiting human population,” Dr. Paul
Ehrlich, Stanford University
“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
“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 was instigated as a result of the efforts of Norman Borlaug, who,
while accepting the Nobel peace prize in 1970, said: “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.”
“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
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 two 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 – Nature – Life – People – World – Technology – Peace – Environmental
“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 – Nature – World – Insanity – Greed – Problems – Environmental – Responsibility“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
“At this point, it’s almost certainly too late to manage a transition to sustainability on a global or national scale, even if the political will to attempt it existed, which it clearly does not. Our civilization is in the early stages of the same curve of decline and fall as so many others have followed before it. What likely lies in wait for us is a long, uneven decline into a new Dark Age from which, centuries from now, the civilizations of the future will gradually emerge.”
“We are strong and adaptable animals and can certainly make a new life on the hotter Earth, but there will only be a fraction of inhabitable land left. Soon we face the appalling question of whom can we let aboard the lifeboats? And who must we reject? There will be great clamor from climate refugees seeking a safe haven in those few parts where the climate is tolerable and food available. We will need a new set of rules for limiting the population in climate oases.” James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A final Warning
“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, Eaarth: 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 “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 www.albartlett.org
“All causes are lost causes without limiting human population,” Dr. Paul
Ehrlich, Stanford University
If we do not change course - consider the possible consequences.
