Resources

Quotes on Population and other related subjects

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.

Former Australian Prime Minister, Bob Hawke - Enough Rope with Andrew Denton, ABC TV (2008)

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, Former US Vice-President - "Earth in the Balance: Forging a New Common Purpose" (2007)

Keep up the good fight - it's really critical in overpopulated Australia.

Paul Ehrlich commenting on SPA's work

Suzuki: You know I was shocked to find that you have got a Minister in the Federal Cabinet here (Treasurer Peter Costello) who is encouraging Australians to have more and more children. Why? Because everybody thinks that in order to keep the economy growing forever you have got to have a growing population to keep that economy growing.

And so no one ever asks what is the cost of adding more people to Australia, a country as far as I am concerned that is already overpopulated because the demand of each Australian is so great?

Journalist: So you are saying Australia is overpopulated?

Suzuki: You bet.

David Suzuki - Interview with radio station 6PR, 22 Sept 2006

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.

Prof Stephen Hawking - The Universe in a Nutshell (2001)

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

John Nichols - novelist (1940-)

... Mankind is looking for food not just on this planet but on others. Perhaps the time has now come to put that process into reverse. 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 - The Life of Mammals

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, Executive Director, The Australia Institute, April 2003

We have elevated environment concerns to the heart, not the fringe of politics. We have fought against the ultimate in overdevelopment - namely, a rate of population growth too big for Sydney or Australia to handle. We have engaged a mature electorate about population policy and the slim carrying capacity of our fragile land.

Labor's approach in NSW is far removed from the growth at any cost view of some other states. Our focus is on protecting our quality of life.

Bob Carr, former NSW Premier, 9 March 2003

Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases (which) we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess. What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution, but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and the education of the billions who are it victims.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jnr.

The Great Challenge: Can you think of any problem on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted or advanced by having larger populations at the local level, the state level, the national level, or globally?

Prof. Albert Bartlett 'Arithmetic, Population and Energy' lecture.

First, we need a democratic consensus on population. We mustn't fall for the line that more is better. A strong, proud and confident Australia doesn't mean a bigger Australia.

Those who advocate an Australian population of fifty million aren't talking about the verdant stretches of cultivated land in the central tablelands or the western planes, let alone in the continental interior. They aren't talking about inland cities, conjured into being by benevolent developers and the Burley Grifins of our time. They are talking about the urbanisation of the eastern coast from north Queensland to Melbourne: ever more housing estates, more shopping malls and multiplexes, more freeways and petrol stations where now we have rivers and forests, unpolluted beaches and open country, and in a few areas (such as Daintree or Dadgee) coastal wilderness as old as the continent itself.

James McAuley, in his satirical poem 'The True Discovery of Australia', a parody of Gulliver's report on Lilliput, gave us one sardonic commentary on our attitudes to the land:

'The place, my lord, is much like Gideon's fleece
The second time he laid it on the ground;
For by the will of God it has remained
Bone-dry itself, with water all around.

Yet as a wheel that's driven in the ruts,
It has a wet rim where the people clot
Like mud; and though they praise the inner spaces,
When asked to go themselves, they'd rather not'

It is still true that most new immigrants, like those before them, would spurn that bone-dry centre for the wet rim. There were visionaries in the last century who dreamt of populating the inland with peasant farmers, every family with a statutory cow and a few goats. And our early soldier settlement schemes attempted something similar - small-scale family farming. But it didn't work. Historically, most Australians opt to live near the coast, or, at any rate, east of the Great Divide.

There is nothing sentimental in a policy that seeks to preserve as much of the beauty of our coast as possible. The course I advocate isin fact a rather tough, pragmatic and self-interested one: its about preserving economic competitiveness in the world markets. Lets keep Australia affluent and beautiful, especially in those parts of it where most of us want to live.

Bob Carr, former NSW Premier, 2003
'What Australia Means to Me', Penguin Books

We must alert and organise 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. Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau

...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

Professor Short, of the Departments of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and Zoology is a long-time champion of the world's 'megafauna', including elephants, gorillas and chimpanzees, whose future is threatened by human overpopulation and consequent habitat destruction.

"Working on elephant populations in Zambia, I was visited by Sir Peter Scott, founder of the World Wildlife Fund," says Professor Short.

"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."

Prof. Roger Short & Sir Peter Scott, founder of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)

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: The Population Bomb, p. 17

For too long have we supposed that technology would solve the "population problem." It won't. I first became fully aware of this hard truth when I wrote my essay "The Tragedy of the commons," ... Never have I found anything so difficult to work into shape. I wrote at least seven significantly different versions before resting content with this one, ... . It was obvious that the internal resistance to what I found myself saying was terrific. 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: Preface of "Exploring New Ethics for Survival" (1972)

One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.

Erica Goode, New York Times, 18 Jan 2000

Since the circumference of the globe is given and does not expand with the increase number of its inhabitants, and as travel to other planets thought to be inhabitable has not yet been invented; since the earth's fertility cannot be extended beyond a given point, and since human nature will presumably remain unchanged, so that a given number will hereafter require the same quantity of the fruits of the earth for their support as now, and as now, and as their rations cannot be arbitrarily reduced, it follows that the proposition "that the world's inhabitants will be happier, the greater their number" cannot be maintained, for as soon as the number exceeds that which our planet with all its wealth of land and water can support, they must needs starve one another out, not to mention other necessarily attendant inconveniences.

Rev. Otto Diederich Lutken, rector of a parish on the Danish island of Fyn, 1858

The majority of men...are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and...are not accessible to reason, but only to authority.

Arthur Schopenhauer: Supplements to the World as Will and Idea