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Your Children Should Have It Impressed Upon Them That Their Adult Life-style Will Bear Very Little Resemblance To Yours And That They Should Now Be Acquiring Knowledge, Skills, Values, And Tastes That Will Sustain Them In Less Materially Affluent Circumstances. On The Other Hand, The Fresh Insights And Imaginations Of Your Children May Help You Find A Viable Future While There's Still Time.

-Paul R. Ehrlich

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Your Children Should Have

Paul R. Ehrlich

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Your Children Should Have It Impressed Upon Them That Their Adult Life-style Will Bear Very Little Resemblance To Yours And That They Should Now Be Acquiring Knowledge, Skills, Values, And Tastes That Will Sustain Them In Less Materially Affluent Circumstances. On The Other Hand, The Fresh Insights And Imaginations Of Your Children May Help You Find A Viable Future While There's Still Time.

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I Thought If The Climate Was Heating That Co2 Was The Only Forcing, And It Would Be Late In The Century Before We Had Trouble. Now That We Know About The Other Half Of The Forcing, It's Obvious That The Trouble Is Coming Much Sooner.

The Main Thing Is, And Of Course This Is A Pedant Talking, We Should Start Our Education On These Issues In Kindergarten. Instead Of Saying, "see Spot Run," We Ought To Say, "see The Plant Grow In The Sun." We Ought To Explain What Runs The Weather In The Third Or Fourth Grade To Start Out With.

After The Bomb We Developed A Fairly Good System For Moving Food Around And Have Avoided The Kind Of Massive Famines That Attract The Media. Although Of Course We've Had A Fair Number Of Them, Particularly In Africa, Since The Bomb Was Written. But We Have Had A Steady Level Of Attrition Of Malnutrition And Malnutrition-related Disease. Probably Something On The Order Of 5 To 10 Million People Starve To Death Each Year, But They're Spread Out; They're Not Dramatic News Events.

We've All Got To Get Together And Demand Something Better Out Of Our Government And Out Of Each Other. We've Got A System That's Making Us Working Harder, And Isn't Giving Us Satisfaction. We've Got To Sit Down And Decide What The Hell We Really Want To Be As Human Beings.

Sometimes I Think The Congress Feels That If You Only Decided Tomorrow To Switch To Wind Power That In Two Years We'd Be Getting 80 Percent Of Our Electricity From Wind Power. It's Nonsense. Normally It Takes 20 To 30 Years After A New Technology Is Demonstrated And Deployed Before It Powers Even 15 Or 20 Percent Of The Grid. There's This Long Lag Time, And We Haven't Even Decided Which Directions To Go.

In Ten Years [i.e., 1980] All Important Animal Life In The Sea Will Be Extinct. Large Areas Of Coastline Will Have To Be Evacuated Because Of The Stench Of Dead Fish.

We Know That If You Have $20 Million, It's Better To Buy A Van Gough Print Than It Is Buy An Executive Jet, From The Point Of View Of The Environment. But When You Start Getting Down, It's Like The Recycling Question: What Are Things We Can Really Afford To Do, And How Much Pleasure Do We Get Out Of Them? We Haven't Even Started To Have That Discussion, And It's Getting Awfully Late.

The National Academy Of Sciences Would Be Unable To Give A Unanimous Decision If Asked Whether The Sun Would Rise Tomorrow.

Organisms Are Starting To Move In Response To Climate Change All Over The Place. Bees Are Disappearing And We Don't Have Many Of The Native Pollinators Left To Replace Them. We're In Deep Trouble; There's No Question About It. But Ecologists Tend To Think Of Something That's Going To Be Bad In Ten Years As Very Fast, And Of Course, Politicians Only Think Of Things In A Two-, Four-, Six-year Cycle.

Most Of The Scientists I Know Think Civilization Is Teetering On The Brink Of A Global Disaster. They Just Don't Know When It's Going To Hit. I Don't Have The Answer To That Either. I'm Scared As Hell.

Historically, Things Were Moving In A Pretty Good Direction Until The Reagan Presidency. And Then It All Got Reversed. The Mexico City Policy Was Instituted - The Idea Of Wrecking The Environment For This Generation's Profit And Forgetting About Our Gets Got Firmly Embedded. I'm Sad To Say The Clinton Administration Didn't Turn It Around And The Bush Administration, Well, I Think They're The Worst Administration We've Ever Had, And I Used To Be A Republican.

It Turns Out The Population Issue Is An Easier Thing To Deal With Than The Consumption Issue. Some Obvious Extremes In Consumption We Can Deal With. The Standard Cure For A Stuttering Economy Is To Go Out And Buy An Suv And Three More Refrigerators. That's Obviously Not The Way To Go.

There's All Of This Stuff Where We Have So Much Debate Over Nonsense; It Could Be Cured If We Had A Better Educational System, If We Trained People To Really Try And Look Into Things On Their Own. That's A Tough Thing To Do, Particularly With The Educational System Staggering.

All Scientists Who've Looked At It Know We Have To Phase Away From Burning Fossil Fuels. That Means We've Got To Put A Lot Of Effort Into Alternate Energy Technologies, But We're Still Subsidizing Fossil Fuels And Not Subsidizing Most Of The Alternatives. It's Not Going To Be An Easy Transition.

Too Many Cars, Too Many Factories, Too Much Detergent, Too Much Pesticides, Multiplying Contrails, Inadequate Sewage Treatment Plants, Too Little Water, Too Much Carbon Dioxide - All Can Be Traced Easily To Too Many People.

My First Policy Move Would Be To Try To Get A Conversation Going In The Us About What People Stand For And What We Really Want. Do We Want To Keep Adding People To The World And To Our Country Until We Move To A Battery-chicken Kind Of Existence And Then Collapse? Or Do We Want To Think Hard About What Really Is Valuable To Us, And Figure Out How Many People We Can Supply That To Sustainably?

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I Don't Like The Idea Of Teaching Religion In Schools, And Creation Is Not My Thing, But That's A Trivial Point Compared To Saving The Creation. I'd Much Rather Have Half Of The People In The Country Be Creationists And Work Really Hard To Save The Creation Than Have Everybody Be Evolutionists And Be Destroying The Planet.

With Taxes, If They Aren't Working Right, We Can Change Them With A Stroke Of The Pen. It's Basically A Market-type Mechanism. People Make Their Own Choices. You Run The Taxes, And You Get The Results.

I See Harm Reduction As A Way Of Engaging People As Part Of That Path To Recovery.

Woman Should Have The Choice Whether To Have An Abortion Or Not, But I Like What Bill Clinton Said: It Ought To Be Safe And Rare. You Don't Want To Offend People With It. You Try And Do As Much As You Can To Let People Be Different, But Also To Try And Protect Them From Things That They Think Are Bad. And It's Worth All Of Us Giving A Little.

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Overall, The Population Bomb Was Probably Too Optimistic. I Was Writing About Climate Change - Anne And I Actually Wrote The Book. We Discussed Whether Or Not You'd Have To Take A Gondola To The Empire State Building, And That Sort Of Thing, But We Didn't Know At The Time Whether The Climate Change Would Be In The Direction Of Heating Or Cooling. We Just Didn't Know Enough About It.

I Would Take Even Money That England Will Not Exist In The Year 2000.

We're One Of The Most Highly Regulated Industries, And We Have To Pay Attention To What Government Is Doing.

People Have Not Made The Connection That The More Of Us There Are, The More Greenhouse Gases Go Into The Atmosphere. The Chinese Have. They, Unlike Us, Have A Population Policy. The Right Wingers Just Don't Understand That The Country They're In Is Probably The Most Overpopulated In The World, The One Doing Most Of The Destruction, And The One With Horrendously Bad Leadership.

The Mother Of The Year Should Be A Sterilized Woman With Two Adopted Children

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For Example, I'm A Great Fan Of Pornography, But I Don't See Any Reason Not To Restrict It So That People Walking Down The Street Who Hate Pornography Don't Have Full Color Pictures Outside Of Movie Theaters. Let Them Be In A Different District. I'm Kidding About Pornography, But You Get The Point.

Actually, The Problem In The World Is That There Are Too Many Rich People.

To Err Is Human, But To Really Foul Things Up You Need A Computer.

In Pushing Other Species To Extinction, Humanity Is Busy Sawing Off The Limb On Which It Perches.

We're Never All Going To Agree With Each Other. We Have To Learn To Value The Diversity. It's One Of The Presumable Principles Of Our Government That Isn't Followed Nearly Enough - One Of The Jobs Of The Majority Is To Try And Make The Minority Feel Comfortable.

I Kind Of Like Carbon Taxes Because We Already Know How To Apply Them. We Already Have Apparatus In Place. When We Talk About These Other Solutions - Like A Billion Tons Of Iron Filings In The Ocean Or Putting Sunshades Between Us And The Sun - They're Huge. We Have No Idea If They Will Work. We Have No Idea What Their Nasty Consequences Might Be. And It's Unlikely We Can Do Them Anyway.

Your Children Should Have It Impressed Upon Them That Their Adult Life-style Will Bear Very Little Resemblance To Yours And That They Should Now Be Acquiring Knowledge, Skills, Values, And Tastes That Will Sustain Them In Less Materially Affluent Circumstances. On The Other Hand, The Fresh Insights And Imaginations Of Your Children May Help You Find A Viable Future While There's Still Time.

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I'm Sort Of Optimistic About What We Could Do, But I'm Very Pessimistic About What We Will Do. I Can't Tell You That Al Gore's 10-year Plan Is Impossible. I'm Old Enough To Remember The Second World War - If We Had A World War Ii-type Mobilization, We Might Accomplish Gore's Plan. In 1940 We Were Making Tens Of Thousands Of Automobiles, And In 1941 We Were Making Tens Of Thousands Of Airplanes. We Mobilized As A Nation. If We Get That Kind Of Mobilization As A Nation Or Globally, Then We Could Solve A Lot Of These Problems.

I Don't Think Scientists Can Dictate From Above What We Should Do, Because It's Not A Matter Of Scientific Decision. If You Want To Have Everybody Living Like A Beverly Hills Millionaire, Then 2 Billion People Might Be Too Many. If We Want To Have A Battery-chicken Kind Of World, With Everybody Having An Absolute Minimum Diet, You Might Be Able To Support 10 Billion.

By 1985 Enough Millions Will Have Died To Reduce The Earth's Population To Some Acceptable Level, Like 1.5 Billion People.

Stanford May Be The Best University In The World, But You Can Get All The Way Through Here Without Knowing Where Your Food Came From, Without Being Able To Say Where We Came From, Without Being Able To Give A Coherent Description Of Why The Climate Is Changing And Why We Should Be Concerned About It. So I Started Teaching A Course In Human Evolution And The Environment That's Open To All Stanford Students, No Prerequisites.

Solving The Population Problem Is Not Going To Solve The Problems Of Racism, Of Sexism, Of Religious Intolerance, Of War, Of Gross Economic Inequality. But If You Don't Solve The Population Problem, You're Not Going To Solve Any Of Those Problems. Whatever Problem You're Interested In, You're Not Going To Solve It Unless You Also Solve The Population Problem. Whatever Your Cause, It's A Lost Cause Without Population Control.

Population Problem

People Have To Decide, First Of All, How They'd Like To Live, And How Secure They Want To Be From Disaster. After That, Scientists Can Help Determine What Would Be Necessary To Achieve That.

Anyone Who Opposes Methods To Control The Birth Rate, Is Automatically Voting In Favour Having The Death Rate Go Up.

There Are Lots Of Excellent Analysts Out There. John Holdren At The Harvard Kennedy School, Who Was Just President Of The American Association For The Advancement Of Science, Has Been Talking About This Stuff For Years. There Are Lots Of People Out There Who Understand What’s Going On. The Problem Is, They Aren’t Much Picked Up On Fox News.

Recycling Helps Make People Feel Involved, And In Some Cases Can Be Useful. Although You've Got To Do Careful Life History Studies Of What You're Recycling. If All You're Doing Is Recycling - If You've Got Three Automobiles, And 10 Children, And A 7,000-square-foot Dot-com Palace And Second Home Up In The Mountains That Has To Be Heated - The Recycling Isn't Making Much Difference.

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