David Attenborough
Sir David Attenborough is the most respected Englishman alive. He is admired, respected and loved across the world. He, almost alone among his peers, has had the courage to repeatedly speak out about human population growth and its devastating impact on the planet.
In 2019 he told the Davos audience:
‘The garden of Eden is no more. What we do now, and in the next few years, will profoundly affect the next few thousand years. We’re now so numerous, so powerful, so all-pervasive, the mechanisms we have for destruction are so wholesale and so frightening, that we can actually exterminate whole ecosystems without even noticing it ’
In a 2013 interview (Furness, 2013) about human population, Attenborough said:
‘We should be talking more about our impact through our numbers. Because - you obviously can see it just as I can - you know, that we are heading for disaster unless we do something.
And if we don't do something, the natural world will do something. And you say that, but of course they've been doing it for a long time, the natural world. They've been having... what are all these famines in Ethiopia, what are they about? They're about too many people for too little piece of land. That's what it's about.
We say, get the United Nations to send them bags of flour. That's barmy.’
In 2011 Attenborough gave a lecture at the 2011 RSA President’s Lecture, introduced by the Duke of Edinburgh. Here is selected text of the ‘People and Planet’ lecture:
‘Fifty years ago, a group of far-sighted people in this country got together to warn the world of an impending disaster. Among them were a distinguished scientist, Sir Julian Huxley; a bird-loving painter, Peter Scott; an advertising executive, Guy Mountford; and a powerful and astonishingly effective civil servant, Max Nicholson. They were all, in addition to their individual professions, dedicated naturalists, fascinated by the natural world not just in this country but internationally. And they noticed what few others had done – that all over the world, charismatic animals that were once numerous were beginning to disappear.
Wherever you looked there were examples of animals whose populations were falling rapidly. This planet was in danger of losing a significant number of its inhabitants – both animals and plants.
Something had to be done. And that group determined to do it. They would need scientific advice to discover the causes of these impending disasters and to devise ways of slowing them and hopefully, stopping them. They would have to raise the awareness of the threat to get the support of people everywhere; and – like all such enterprises – they would need money to take practical action. They set about raising all three. They called the organisation they created the World Wildlife Fund.
As well as the international committee, separate action groups would be needed in individual countries. A few months after that inaugural meeting in Switzerland, this country established one – and was the first country to do so. And you, Sir, (nods towards the Duke of Edinburgh) became its first president. Then, after x years, you became President of the entire organisation which is known today as the Worldwide Fund for Nature.
The movement as a whole went from strength to strength. Existing conservation bodies – of which there were a number in many parts of the world but which had been working largely in isolation – acquired new zest and international links. New ones, focussing on particular areas or particular species were founded. Twenty four countries established their own national appeals. The world awoke to conservation. Millions – billions of dollars were raised. And now fifty years on, conservationists who have worked so hard and with such foresight can justifiably congratulate themselves on having responded magnificently to the challenge.
Yet now, in spite of a great number of individual successes, the problem remains. True, thanks to the vigour and wisdom of conservationists, no major charismatic species has yet disappeared. Many are still trembling on the brink, but are still hanging on. But overall, today there are more problems not less, more species at risk of disappearance than ever before. Why?
Fifty years ago, when the WWF was founded there were about three billion people on earth. Now there are almost seven billion. Over twice as many – and every one of them needing space. Space for their homes, space to grow their food (or to get others to grow it for them), space to build schools and roads and airfields. A little of that space might be taken from land occupied by other people but most of it could only come from the land which, for millions of years, animals and plants had to themselves.
The impact of these extra millions of people has spread even beyond the space they physically occupy. Their industries have changed the chemical constituency of the atmosphere. The oceans that cover most of the surface of the planet have been polluted and increasingly acidified. We now realise that the disasters that continue increasingly to afflict the natural world have one element that connects them all – the unprecedented increase in the number of human beings on the planet.
There have been prophets who have warned us of this impending disaster, of course. One of the first was Thomas Malthus. His surname – Malthus – leads some to think that he was some continental European savant, a German perhaps. But he was not. He was an Englishman, born in Guildford in Surrey in the middle of the eighteenth century. His most important book, An Essay on the Principle of Population was published over two hundred years ago in 1798. In it, he argued that the human population would increase inexorably until it was halted by what he termed ‘misery and vice’. Today, for some reason, that prophecy seems to be largely ignored – or at any rate, disregarded. But the fundamental truth that Malthus proclaimed remains the truth. There cannot be more people on this earth than can be fed.
Many people would like to deny this. They would like to believe in that oxymoron ‘sustainable growth.’ Kenneth Boulding, President Kennedy’s environmental advisor forty-five years ago said something about this:
‘Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet is either mad – or an economist.’
The population of the world is now growing by nearly 80 million a year.
One and a half million a week.
A quarter of a million a day.
Ten thousand an hour.
In this country it is projected to grow by ten million in the next twenty two years. That is equivalent to ten more Birminghams. Not only that, but every one of us in this country consumes far more of the earth’s resources than an average African.
All these people, in this country and worldwide, rich or poor, need and deserve food, water, energy and space. Will they be able to get it? I don’t know. I hope so. But the Government’s Chief Scientist and the last President of the Royal Society have both referred to the approaching ‘perfect storm’ of population growth, climate change and peak oil production, leading inexorably to more and more insecurity in the supply of food, water and energy.
Consider food. Very few of us here, I suspect have ever experienced real hunger. For animals, of course, it is a regular feature of their lives. The stoical desperation of the cheetah cubs whose mother failed in her last few attempts to kill prey for them and who consequently face starvation is very touching. But that happens to human beings too. All of us who have travelled in poor countries have met people for whom hunger is a daily background ache in their lives. There are about a billion such people today – that is four times as many as the entire human population of this planet a mere two thousand years ago at the time of Christ.
Climate change tops the environmental agenda at present. We all know that every additional person will need to use some carbon energy, if only firewood for cooking and will therefore create more carbon dioxide – though of course a rich person will produce vastly more than a poor one. Similarly, we can all see that every extra person is – or will be – an extra victim of climate change – though the poor will undoubtedly suffer more than the rich. Yet not a word of it appeared in the voluminous documents emerging from the Copenhagen and Cancun Climate Summits.
Why this strange silence? I meet no one who privately disagrees that population growth is a problem. No one can deny that the planet is finite. So why does hardly anyone say so publicly? There seems to be some bizarre taboo around the subject. 'It’s not quite nice, not PC, possibly even racist to mention it.' And this taboo doesn’t just inhibit politicians and civil servants who attend the big conferences. It even affects the people who claim to care most passionately about a sustainable and prosperous future for our children, the environmental and developmental Non-Government Organisations. Yet their silence implies that their admirable goals can be achieved regardless of how many people there are in the world or the UK, even though they all know that it can’t.
I simply don’t understand it. It is all getting too serious for such fastidious niceties. It remains an obvious and brutal fact that on a finite planet human population will quite definitely stop at some point. And that can only happen in one of two ways. It can happen sooner, by fewer human births – in a word by contraception. This is the humane way, the powerful option which allows all of us to deal with the problem, if we collectively choose to do so. The alternative is an increased death rate – the way in which all other creatures must suffer, through famine or disease or predation. That translated into human terms means famine or disease or war – over oil or water or food or minerals or grazing rights or just living space. There is, alas, no third alternative of indefinite growth.
The sooner we stabilise our numbers, the sooner we stop running up the ‘down’ escalator. To do that requires several things. First and foremost it needs a much wider understanding of the problem and that will not happen while the absurd taboo on discussing it retains such a powerful grip on the minds of so many worthy and intelligent people. Then it needs a change in our culture so that while everyone retains the right to have as many children as they like, they understand that having large families means compounding the problems their children and everyone else’s children will face in the future.
It needs action by Governments. In my view all countries should develop a population policy – some 70 countries already have them in one form or another – and give it priority. The essential common factor is to make family planning and other reproductive health services freely available to everyone and empower and encourage them to use it – though of course without any kind of coercion.
According to the Global Footprint Network, there are already over a hundred countries whose combination of numbers and affluence have already pushed them past the sustainable level. They include almost all developed countries. The UK is one of the worst. There the aim should be to the aim to reduce over time both the consumption of natural resources per person and the number of people while, needless to say, using the best technology to help maintain living standards. It is tragic that the only current population policies in developed countries are, perversely, attempting to increase their birth-rate in order to look after the growing number of old people. The notion of ever more old people needing ever more young people, who will in turn grow old and need ever more young people and so on ad infinitum, is an obvious ecological Ponzi scheme.
I am not an economist, nor a sociologist nor a politician. I am a naturalist. But being one means that I do know something of the factors that keep populations of different species of animals within bounds. I am aware that every pair of blue tits nesting in my garden is able to lay over twenty eggs a year but as a result of predation or lack of food, only one or two will, at best, survive.
But we are human beings. We have ways of escaping such brutalities. We have medicines that prevent our children from dying of disease. We have developed ways of growing increasing amounts of food. That has been a huge and continuing advance that started several thousand years ago, a consequence of our intelligence, our increasing skills and our ability to look ahead. But none of these great achievements will be of any avail if we do not control our numbers.
And we can do so. Wherever women have the vote, wherever they are literate, and have the medical facilities to control the number of children they bear, the birth rate falls. All those civilised conditions exist in the southern Indian state of Kerala. The total fertility rate there in 2007 was 1.7 births per woman. In India as a whole it is 2.8 per woman. In Thailand in 2010, it was 1.8 per woman, similar to that in Kerala. But compare that with the Catholic Philippines where it is 3.3.
But what can each of us do – you and I? Well, there is just one thing that I would ask. Break the taboo, in private and in public – as best you can, as you judge right. Until it is broken there is no hope of the action we need. Wherever and whenever we speak of the environment - add a few words to ensure that the population element is not ignored. If you are a member of a relevant NGO, invite them to acknowledge it. If you belong to a Church – and especially if you are a Catholic because its doctrine on contraception is a major factor in this problem – suggest they consider the ethical issues involved. Big empty Australia has appointed a Sustainable Population Minister so why can’t small, crowded Britain?
Make a list of all the environmental and social problems that today afflict us and our poor battered planet – not just the extinction of species and animals and plants, that fifty years ago was the first signs of impending global disaster, but traffic congestion, oil prices, pressure on the health service, the growth of mega-cities, migration patterns, immigration policies, unemployment, the loss of arable land, desertification, famine, increasingly violent weather, the acidification of the oceans, the collapse of fish stocks, rising sea temperatures, the loss of rain forest. The list goes on and on. But they all share an underlying cause.
Every one of these global problems, environmental as well as social, becomes more difficult - and ultimately impossible - to solve with ever more people.’
Songs
Musicians have always sung about the world heading for destruction, with one below even singing about the consequences of having a large family. Even Michael Jackson sang ‘What have they done to the world? This crying Earth, these weeping shores’.
Here are edits of my personal favourites. They all have a similar message, but are sung in very different ways.
The Specials: ‘Too Much Too Young’‘
Released in 1980, the song was based on a 1969 Lloyd Charmer song called ‘Birth Control’. The song includes a great rant about the ‘starving millions, state control of the population boom! (It’s in your living room!)’.
You've done too much, much too young
Now you're married with a kid
When you could be having fun with me
Ain't he cute? No he ain't
He's just another burden on the welfare state
You've done too much, much too young
Now you're married with a kid
When you could be having fun with me
Gi we de birth control, we no want no pickni
Ain't you heard of the starving millions?
Ain't you heard of contraception?
You really want a program of sterilization?
Take control of the population boom
It's in your living room!
Keep a generation gap!
Try wearing a cap!
REM: ‘It’s The End of the World As We Know It’
Written in 1987, ‘It’s the End of the World as we know it’ is stream of consciousness exploding in an outpouring of words about where the planet is heading - the constant bombardment of news happening in the world around us as we speed toward the unknown.
‘Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself churn
Lock him in uniform, book burning, bloodletting
Every motive escalate, automotive incinerate
Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives, and I decline
It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine (It's time I had some time alone)’
Singer Michaele Stipe, in his world, listens to this background noise with a bewilderment as he is happily continuing in his oblivious state, ‘and I feel fine’. Underlying the feelings of helplessness, one of the lines is ‘World serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed’, followed by: ‘Uh-oh, overflow, population, common group’. A subconscious realisation of overpopulation ending the world?
Joni Mitchell: ‘Big Yellow Taxi’
A beautiful song about nature disappearing as we pave the world with concrete, as relevant today as it was in 1970.
They took all the trees
Put 'em in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see 'em
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
Dead Kennedys: ‘Moon Over Marin’
From 1982, this dystopian epic of a song is by the greatest unsung US punk band Dead Kennedys. The moon in the song is the one thing that will still be there long after the ‘crowded future’ passes.
A crowded future stings my eyes
I still find time to exercise
In a uniform with two white stripes
Another tanker's hit the rocks
Abandoned to spill out its guts
The sand is laced with sticky glops
O' Shimmering moonlight sheen upon
The waves and water clogged with oil
White gases steam up from the soil
My own beach at night
Electric Moonlight
There Will Always be a Moon Over Marin
Neil Young: ‘After the Goldrush’
A heart-rending poem of a song, lamenting ‘Mother Nature on the run in the nineteen seventies’
Well, I dreamed I saw the knights
In armour coming,
Saying something about a queen.
There were peasants singing and
Drummers drumming
And the archer split the tree.
There was a fanfare blowing
To the sun
That was floating on the breeze.
Look at Mother Nature on the run
In the nineteen seventies.
The Doors: ‘When the Music’s Over’Released in 1967, by Jim Morrison, performed by the Doors. Morrison reads this out as a painful reprimand for ripping, biting and dragging down our fair sister, the Earth.
What have they done to the Earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her
Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn
And tied her with fences and dragged her down
The Kinks ‘Apeman’The last song on the list is the more cheery, but no less salient 1970 classic ‘Apeman’, by Ray Davies from the Kinks. The song perfectly sums up how we have a self-perception of sophistication, but in fact life would be better as an apeman rather than living with ‘overpopulation and inflation and starvation’.
I think I'm sophisticated 'cause I'm living my life
Like a good homo sapiens
But all around me everybody's multiplying and
They're walking round like flies man
So I'm no better than the animals sitting
In the cages in the zoo man
'Cause compared to the flowers and the birds and the trees
I am an apeman
I think I'm so educated and I'm so civilized
'Cause I'm a strict vegetarian
But with the over-population and inflation and starvation
And the crazy politicians
I don't feel safe in this world no more
I don't want to die in a nuclear war
I want to sail away to a distant shore and make like an apeman
In man's evolution he's created the city
And the motor traffic rumble
But give me half a chance and I'd be taking off my clothes
And living in the jungle
'Cause the only time that I feel at ease
Is swinging up and down in the coconut trees
Oh what a life of luxury to be like an apeman
Sir David Attenborough is the most respected Englishman alive. He is admired, respected and loved across the world. He, almost alone among his peers, has had the courage to repeatedly speak out about human population growth and its devastating impact on the planet.
In 2019 he told the Davos audience:
‘The garden of Eden is no more. What we do now, and in the next few years, will profoundly affect the next few thousand years. We’re now so numerous, so powerful, so all-pervasive, the mechanisms we have for destruction are so wholesale and so frightening, that we can actually exterminate whole ecosystems without even noticing it ’
In a 2013 interview (Furness, 2013) about human population, Attenborough said:
‘We should be talking more about our impact through our numbers. Because - you obviously can see it just as I can - you know, that we are heading for disaster unless we do something.
And if we don't do something, the natural world will do something. And you say that, but of course they've been doing it for a long time, the natural world. They've been having... what are all these famines in Ethiopia, what are they about? They're about too many people for too little piece of land. That's what it's about.
We say, get the United Nations to send them bags of flour. That's barmy.’
In 2011 Attenborough gave a lecture at the 2011 RSA President’s Lecture, introduced by the Duke of Edinburgh. Here is selected text of the ‘People and Planet’ lecture:
‘Fifty years ago, a group of far-sighted people in this country got together to warn the world of an impending disaster. Among them were a distinguished scientist, Sir Julian Huxley; a bird-loving painter, Peter Scott; an advertising executive, Guy Mountford; and a powerful and astonishingly effective civil servant, Max Nicholson. They were all, in addition to their individual professions, dedicated naturalists, fascinated by the natural world not just in this country but internationally. And they noticed what few others had done – that all over the world, charismatic animals that were once numerous were beginning to disappear.
Wherever you looked there were examples of animals whose populations were falling rapidly. This planet was in danger of losing a significant number of its inhabitants – both animals and plants.
Something had to be done. And that group determined to do it. They would need scientific advice to discover the causes of these impending disasters and to devise ways of slowing them and hopefully, stopping them. They would have to raise the awareness of the threat to get the support of people everywhere; and – like all such enterprises – they would need money to take practical action. They set about raising all three. They called the organisation they created the World Wildlife Fund.
As well as the international committee, separate action groups would be needed in individual countries. A few months after that inaugural meeting in Switzerland, this country established one – and was the first country to do so. And you, Sir, (nods towards the Duke of Edinburgh) became its first president. Then, after x years, you became President of the entire organisation which is known today as the Worldwide Fund for Nature.
The movement as a whole went from strength to strength. Existing conservation bodies – of which there were a number in many parts of the world but which had been working largely in isolation – acquired new zest and international links. New ones, focussing on particular areas or particular species were founded. Twenty four countries established their own national appeals. The world awoke to conservation. Millions – billions of dollars were raised. And now fifty years on, conservationists who have worked so hard and with such foresight can justifiably congratulate themselves on having responded magnificently to the challenge.
Yet now, in spite of a great number of individual successes, the problem remains. True, thanks to the vigour and wisdom of conservationists, no major charismatic species has yet disappeared. Many are still trembling on the brink, but are still hanging on. But overall, today there are more problems not less, more species at risk of disappearance than ever before. Why?
Fifty years ago, when the WWF was founded there were about three billion people on earth. Now there are almost seven billion. Over twice as many – and every one of them needing space. Space for their homes, space to grow their food (or to get others to grow it for them), space to build schools and roads and airfields. A little of that space might be taken from land occupied by other people but most of it could only come from the land which, for millions of years, animals and plants had to themselves.
The impact of these extra millions of people has spread even beyond the space they physically occupy. Their industries have changed the chemical constituency of the atmosphere. The oceans that cover most of the surface of the planet have been polluted and increasingly acidified. We now realise that the disasters that continue increasingly to afflict the natural world have one element that connects them all – the unprecedented increase in the number of human beings on the planet.
There have been prophets who have warned us of this impending disaster, of course. One of the first was Thomas Malthus. His surname – Malthus – leads some to think that he was some continental European savant, a German perhaps. But he was not. He was an Englishman, born in Guildford in Surrey in the middle of the eighteenth century. His most important book, An Essay on the Principle of Population was published over two hundred years ago in 1798. In it, he argued that the human population would increase inexorably until it was halted by what he termed ‘misery and vice’. Today, for some reason, that prophecy seems to be largely ignored – or at any rate, disregarded. But the fundamental truth that Malthus proclaimed remains the truth. There cannot be more people on this earth than can be fed.
Many people would like to deny this. They would like to believe in that oxymoron ‘sustainable growth.’ Kenneth Boulding, President Kennedy’s environmental advisor forty-five years ago said something about this:
‘Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet is either mad – or an economist.’
The population of the world is now growing by nearly 80 million a year.
One and a half million a week.
A quarter of a million a day.
Ten thousand an hour.
In this country it is projected to grow by ten million in the next twenty two years. That is equivalent to ten more Birminghams. Not only that, but every one of us in this country consumes far more of the earth’s resources than an average African.
All these people, in this country and worldwide, rich or poor, need and deserve food, water, energy and space. Will they be able to get it? I don’t know. I hope so. But the Government’s Chief Scientist and the last President of the Royal Society have both referred to the approaching ‘perfect storm’ of population growth, climate change and peak oil production, leading inexorably to more and more insecurity in the supply of food, water and energy.
Consider food. Very few of us here, I suspect have ever experienced real hunger. For animals, of course, it is a regular feature of their lives. The stoical desperation of the cheetah cubs whose mother failed in her last few attempts to kill prey for them and who consequently face starvation is very touching. But that happens to human beings too. All of us who have travelled in poor countries have met people for whom hunger is a daily background ache in their lives. There are about a billion such people today – that is four times as many as the entire human population of this planet a mere two thousand years ago at the time of Christ.
Climate change tops the environmental agenda at present. We all know that every additional person will need to use some carbon energy, if only firewood for cooking and will therefore create more carbon dioxide – though of course a rich person will produce vastly more than a poor one. Similarly, we can all see that every extra person is – or will be – an extra victim of climate change – though the poor will undoubtedly suffer more than the rich. Yet not a word of it appeared in the voluminous documents emerging from the Copenhagen and Cancun Climate Summits.
Why this strange silence? I meet no one who privately disagrees that population growth is a problem. No one can deny that the planet is finite. So why does hardly anyone say so publicly? There seems to be some bizarre taboo around the subject. 'It’s not quite nice, not PC, possibly even racist to mention it.' And this taboo doesn’t just inhibit politicians and civil servants who attend the big conferences. It even affects the people who claim to care most passionately about a sustainable and prosperous future for our children, the environmental and developmental Non-Government Organisations. Yet their silence implies that their admirable goals can be achieved regardless of how many people there are in the world or the UK, even though they all know that it can’t.
I simply don’t understand it. It is all getting too serious for such fastidious niceties. It remains an obvious and brutal fact that on a finite planet human population will quite definitely stop at some point. And that can only happen in one of two ways. It can happen sooner, by fewer human births – in a word by contraception. This is the humane way, the powerful option which allows all of us to deal with the problem, if we collectively choose to do so. The alternative is an increased death rate – the way in which all other creatures must suffer, through famine or disease or predation. That translated into human terms means famine or disease or war – over oil or water or food or minerals or grazing rights or just living space. There is, alas, no third alternative of indefinite growth.
The sooner we stabilise our numbers, the sooner we stop running up the ‘down’ escalator. To do that requires several things. First and foremost it needs a much wider understanding of the problem and that will not happen while the absurd taboo on discussing it retains such a powerful grip on the minds of so many worthy and intelligent people. Then it needs a change in our culture so that while everyone retains the right to have as many children as they like, they understand that having large families means compounding the problems their children and everyone else’s children will face in the future.
It needs action by Governments. In my view all countries should develop a population policy – some 70 countries already have them in one form or another – and give it priority. The essential common factor is to make family planning and other reproductive health services freely available to everyone and empower and encourage them to use it – though of course without any kind of coercion.
According to the Global Footprint Network, there are already over a hundred countries whose combination of numbers and affluence have already pushed them past the sustainable level. They include almost all developed countries. The UK is one of the worst. There the aim should be to the aim to reduce over time both the consumption of natural resources per person and the number of people while, needless to say, using the best technology to help maintain living standards. It is tragic that the only current population policies in developed countries are, perversely, attempting to increase their birth-rate in order to look after the growing number of old people. The notion of ever more old people needing ever more young people, who will in turn grow old and need ever more young people and so on ad infinitum, is an obvious ecological Ponzi scheme.
I am not an economist, nor a sociologist nor a politician. I am a naturalist. But being one means that I do know something of the factors that keep populations of different species of animals within bounds. I am aware that every pair of blue tits nesting in my garden is able to lay over twenty eggs a year but as a result of predation or lack of food, only one or two will, at best, survive.
But we are human beings. We have ways of escaping such brutalities. We have medicines that prevent our children from dying of disease. We have developed ways of growing increasing amounts of food. That has been a huge and continuing advance that started several thousand years ago, a consequence of our intelligence, our increasing skills and our ability to look ahead. But none of these great achievements will be of any avail if we do not control our numbers.
And we can do so. Wherever women have the vote, wherever they are literate, and have the medical facilities to control the number of children they bear, the birth rate falls. All those civilised conditions exist in the southern Indian state of Kerala. The total fertility rate there in 2007 was 1.7 births per woman. In India as a whole it is 2.8 per woman. In Thailand in 2010, it was 1.8 per woman, similar to that in Kerala. But compare that with the Catholic Philippines where it is 3.3.
But what can each of us do – you and I? Well, there is just one thing that I would ask. Break the taboo, in private and in public – as best you can, as you judge right. Until it is broken there is no hope of the action we need. Wherever and whenever we speak of the environment - add a few words to ensure that the population element is not ignored. If you are a member of a relevant NGO, invite them to acknowledge it. If you belong to a Church – and especially if you are a Catholic because its doctrine on contraception is a major factor in this problem – suggest they consider the ethical issues involved. Big empty Australia has appointed a Sustainable Population Minister so why can’t small, crowded Britain?
Make a list of all the environmental and social problems that today afflict us and our poor battered planet – not just the extinction of species and animals and plants, that fifty years ago was the first signs of impending global disaster, but traffic congestion, oil prices, pressure on the health service, the growth of mega-cities, migration patterns, immigration policies, unemployment, the loss of arable land, desertification, famine, increasingly violent weather, the acidification of the oceans, the collapse of fish stocks, rising sea temperatures, the loss of rain forest. The list goes on and on. But they all share an underlying cause.
Every one of these global problems, environmental as well as social, becomes more difficult - and ultimately impossible - to solve with ever more people.’
Songs
Musicians have always sung about the world heading for destruction, with one below even singing about the consequences of having a large family. Even Michael Jackson sang ‘What have they done to the world? This crying Earth, these weeping shores’.
Here are edits of my personal favourites. They all have a similar message, but are sung in very different ways.
The Specials: ‘Too Much Too Young’‘
Released in 1980, the song was based on a 1969 Lloyd Charmer song called ‘Birth Control’. The song includes a great rant about the ‘starving millions, state control of the population boom! (It’s in your living room!)’.
You've done too much, much too young
Now you're married with a kid
When you could be having fun with me
Ain't he cute? No he ain't
He's just another burden on the welfare state
You've done too much, much too young
Now you're married with a kid
When you could be having fun with me
Gi we de birth control, we no want no pickni
Ain't you heard of the starving millions?
Ain't you heard of contraception?
You really want a program of sterilization?
Take control of the population boom
It's in your living room!
Keep a generation gap!
Try wearing a cap!
REM: ‘It’s The End of the World As We Know It’
Written in 1987, ‘It’s the End of the World as we know it’ is stream of consciousness exploding in an outpouring of words about where the planet is heading - the constant bombardment of news happening in the world around us as we speed toward the unknown.
‘Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself churn
Lock him in uniform, book burning, bloodletting
Every motive escalate, automotive incinerate
Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives, and I decline
It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine (It's time I had some time alone)’
Singer Michaele Stipe, in his world, listens to this background noise with a bewilderment as he is happily continuing in his oblivious state, ‘and I feel fine’. Underlying the feelings of helplessness, one of the lines is ‘World serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed’, followed by: ‘Uh-oh, overflow, population, common group’. A subconscious realisation of overpopulation ending the world?
Joni Mitchell: ‘Big Yellow Taxi’
A beautiful song about nature disappearing as we pave the world with concrete, as relevant today as it was in 1970.
They took all the trees
Put 'em in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see 'em
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
Dead Kennedys: ‘Moon Over Marin’
From 1982, this dystopian epic of a song is by the greatest unsung US punk band Dead Kennedys. The moon in the song is the one thing that will still be there long after the ‘crowded future’ passes.
A crowded future stings my eyes
I still find time to exercise
In a uniform with two white stripes
Another tanker's hit the rocks
Abandoned to spill out its guts
The sand is laced with sticky glops
O' Shimmering moonlight sheen upon
The waves and water clogged with oil
White gases steam up from the soil
My own beach at night
Electric Moonlight
There Will Always be a Moon Over Marin
Neil Young: ‘After the Goldrush’
A heart-rending poem of a song, lamenting ‘Mother Nature on the run in the nineteen seventies’
Well, I dreamed I saw the knights
In armour coming,
Saying something about a queen.
There were peasants singing and
Drummers drumming
And the archer split the tree.
There was a fanfare blowing
To the sun
That was floating on the breeze.
Look at Mother Nature on the run
In the nineteen seventies.
The Doors: ‘When the Music’s Over’Released in 1967, by Jim Morrison, performed by the Doors. Morrison reads this out as a painful reprimand for ripping, biting and dragging down our fair sister, the Earth.
What have they done to the Earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her
Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn
And tied her with fences and dragged her down
The Kinks ‘Apeman’The last song on the list is the more cheery, but no less salient 1970 classic ‘Apeman’, by Ray Davies from the Kinks. The song perfectly sums up how we have a self-perception of sophistication, but in fact life would be better as an apeman rather than living with ‘overpopulation and inflation and starvation’.
I think I'm sophisticated 'cause I'm living my life
Like a good homo sapiens
But all around me everybody's multiplying and
They're walking round like flies man
So I'm no better than the animals sitting
In the cages in the zoo man
'Cause compared to the flowers and the birds and the trees
I am an apeman
I think I'm so educated and I'm so civilized
'Cause I'm a strict vegetarian
But with the over-population and inflation and starvation
And the crazy politicians
I don't feel safe in this world no more
I don't want to die in a nuclear war
I want to sail away to a distant shore and make like an apeman
In man's evolution he's created the city
And the motor traffic rumble
But give me half a chance and I'd be taking off my clothes
And living in the jungle
'Cause the only time that I feel at ease
Is swinging up and down in the coconut trees
Oh what a life of luxury to be like an apeman