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 for, support, population and/or control:
“The community and family networks which helped sustain earlier generations have become scarcer for growing numbers of young parents. Those who lack links to these traditional sources of support are hard-pressed to find other resources, given the emphasis in our society on providing treatment services, rather than preventive services and support for health maintenance and well-being.”
—Bernice Weissbourd (20th century)
“... married women work and neglect their children because the duties of the homemaker become so depreciated that women feel compelled to take a job in order to hold the respect of the community. It is one thing if women work, as many of them must, to help support the family. It is quite another thing—it is destructive of woman’s freedom—if society forces her out of the home and into the labor market in order that she may respect herself and gain the respect of others.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If someone does something we disapprove of, we regard him as bad if we believe we can deter him from persisting in his conduct, but we regard him as mad if we believe we cannot. In either case, the crucial issue is our control of the other: the more we lose control over him, and the more he assumes control over himself, the more, in case of conflict, we are likely to consider him mad rather than just bad.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)