Support For Population Control
Population control is also increasingly being featured in many environmental documentaries and films. An example is The Planet-documentary, which describes the ongoing rising human population, its effects on the planet, and the necessity of population control.
As early as 1798, Thomas Malthus stated in his Essay on the Principle of Population that population control needed to be implemented into society. Around the year 1900, Sir Francis Galton said in his publication called "Hereditary Improvement" that, "The unfit could become enemies to the State, if they continue to propagate." In 1968, Paul Ehrlich noted in The Population Bomb that, "We must cut the cancer of population growth," and that, "if this was not done, there would be only one other solution, namely the ‘death rate solution’ in which we raise the death rate through war-famine-pestilence etc.”
In the same year, another prominent modern advocate for mandatory population control was Garrett Hardin, who proposed in his landmark 1968 essay The Tragedy of the Commons that society must relinquish the "freedom to breed" through "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon." Later on, in 1972, he reaffirmed his support in his new essay “Exploring New Ethics for Survival”, by stating that, “We are breeding ourselves into oblivion.” Many prominent personalities, such as Bertrand Russell, Margaret Sanger (1939), John D. Rockefeller, Frederick Osborn (1952), Isaac Asimov and Jacques Cousteau have also advocated for population control.
Today, a number of influential people advocate population control. They are:
- David Attenborough
- Michael E. Arth
- Jonathon Porritt, UK sustainable development commissioner
- Sara Parkin
- Crispin Tickell
- Christian de Duve, Nobel laureate
The head of the UN Millennium Project Jeffrey Sachs is also a heavy proponent of decreasing the effects of overpopulation. In 2007, Jeffrey Sachs gave a number of lectures (2007 Reith Lectures) about population control and overpopulation. In his lectures, called "Bursting at the Seams", he featured an integrated approach that would deal with a number of problems associated with overpopulation and poverty reduction. For example, when criticized for advocating mosquito nets he argued that child survival was, "by far one of the most powerful ways," to achieve fertility reduction, as this would assure poor families that the smaller number of children they had would survive.
Read more about this topic: Human Population Control
Famous quotes containing the words support, population and/or control:
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—Deborah J. Swiss (20th century)
“The paid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The general fact is that the most effective way of utilizing human energy is through an organized rivalry, which by specialization and social control is, at the same time, organized co-operation.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)