The Leaves in Winter (60 page)

Dr. Robert Muller

UN Assistant Secretary General

“Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely. Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today's problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time.”

Club of
Rome

The First Global Revolution

“We need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination… So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts… Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”

Stephen Schneider

Stanford Professor of Climatology, Lead author of many IPCC reports

 
“Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic micro-organism, or like the cells of a tumor.”

Sir James Lovelock

From Healing Gaia

“Public health measures for child survival don’t necessarily have to be put into practice, merely because they are possible.”

Professor Maurice King

Compiled and edited the bible of the primary health care movement, Medical Care in Developing Countries From 1990 article in the Lancet

 
“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony, climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”

Christine Stewart

Fmr Canadian Minister of the Environment

“We've got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.”

Timothy Wirth

President of the UN Foundation

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

Maurice Strong

Founder of the UN Environment Program

“If we do not voluntarily bring population growth under control in the next one or two decades, then nature will do it for us in the most brutal way, whether we like it or not.”

Henry W. Kendall

Nobel Prize recipient, a founding member of the Union of Concerned Scientists

“A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells, the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.”

Paul Ehrlich

Professor of Population Studies

From The Population Bomb

“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class - involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing - are not sustainable.”

Maurice Strong

Rio Earth
Summit

“My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.”

Dave Foreman

Co-founder of Earth First!

“The big threat to the planet is people: there are too many, doing too well economically and burning too much oil.”

Sir James Lovelock

Scientist, environmentalist, futurologist; proposed Gaia hypothesis, from BBC Interview

“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”

Prof Paul Ehrlich

Stanford
University

“The optimum human population of earth is zero.”

Dave Foreman

Co-Founder of Earth First!

“We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of acres of presently settled land.”

David Foreman

Co-founder of Earth First!

“Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.”

Amory Lovins

Rocky Mountain Institute

“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

Author

“There are only two possible ways in which a world of 10 billion people can be averted. Either the current birth rates must come down more quickly or the current death rates must go up. There is no other way…to put it simply: excessive population growth is the greatest single obstacle to the economic and social advancement of most of the societies in the developing world.”

Robert McNamara, Former U.S. Secretary of Defense

“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another
United States
. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the
US
. We have to stop these
Third World
countries right where they are.”

Michael Oppenheimer

Environmental Defense Fund

“A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the
United States
. De-development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.”

Paul Ehrlich

“One American burdens the earth much more than twenty
Bangladeshes
. This is a terrible thing to say in order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it's just as bad not to say it.”

Jacques Yves Cousteau

UNESCO Courier

“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.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Supreme Court Justice

“Each person we add now disproportionately impacts on the environment and life-support systems of the planet.”

Paul Ehrlich

“We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence...on pain of liquidation.”

George Bernard Shaw

Author, co-founder of the London School of Economics

“A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero.”

Garrett Hardin

Author, ecologist, coined the concept of The Tragedy of the Commons

“Still, whether we like it or not, the task of speeding up the decrease of the human population becomes increasingly urgent.”

Havelock
Ellis

British physician, psychologist, author, and social reformer

“Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, maybe we should control the population to ensure the survival of our environment.”

Sir David Attenborough

Author, broadcaster, naturalist

“Once it was necessary that the people should multiply and be fruitful if the race was to survive. But now to preserve the race it is necessary that people hold back the power of propagation.”

Helen Keller

Author, Blind/Deaf Advocate

“Either a species learns to control its own population, or something like disease, famine, war, will take care of the issue.”

Chuck Palahniuk

Author, freelance journalist

“In the last 200 years the population of our planet has grown exponentially, at a rate of 1.9% per year. If it continued at this rate, with the population doubling every 40 years, by 2600 we would all be standing literally shoulder to shoulder.”

Stephen Hawking

Physicist, cosmologist, Director of Research at
Cambridge
University

“...democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies. The more people there are, the less one individual matters.”

Isaac Asimov

Author

“Out of the full spectrum of human personality, one-fourth is electing to transcend…One-fourth is ready to so choose, given the example of one other…One-fourth is resistant to election. They are unattracted by life ever-evolving. One-fourth is destructive. They are born angry with God…They are defective seeds…There have always been defective seeds. In the past they were permitted to die a ‘natural death’…We, the elders, have been patiently waiting until the very last moment before the quantum transformation, to take action to cut out this corrupted and corrupting element in the body of humanity. It is like watching a cancer grow…Now, as we approach the quantum shift from creature-human to co-creative human—the human who is an inheritor of god-like powers—the destructive one-fourth must be eliminated from the social body. We have no choice, dearly beloveds. Fortunately you, dearly beloveds, are not responsible for this act. We are. We are in charge of God’s selection process for planet Earth. He selects, we destroy. We are the riders of the pale horse, Death. We come to bring death to those who are unable to know God…The riders of the pale horse are about to pass among you. Grim reapers, they will separate the wheat from the chaff. This is the most painful period in the history of humanity…”

Barbara Marx Hubbard

Former Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Advisor to the U.S. Department of Defense,

From
The Book of Co-Creation
, self-published, 1980