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Few will doubt that humankind has created a planet-sized problem for itself. No one wished it so, but we are the first species to become a geophysical force, altering Earth's climate, a role previously reserved for tectonics, sun flares, and glacial cycles. We are also the greatest destroyer of life since the ten-kilometer-wide meteorite that landed near Yucatan and ended the Age of Reptiles sixty-five million years ago. Through overpopulation we have put ourselves in danger of running out of food and water. So a very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.
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p. 277-278

 

E. O. Wilson

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Road to Social Justice. The first and perhaps the most important of the factors which have contributed to our failure to make real impact on poverty expressed in terms of total number who live below the poverty line has clearly been the uncontrolled growth of our population...First, we must, at all costs, make a much more earnest effort at controlling the growth of our population. As it is, we are running out of time and there is no longer any possibility of preventing it from exceeding 1,000 million souls by the end of the century. (At The International Seminar of Economic Journalists, New Delhi, December 5, 1972.)

 

J. R. D. Tata

 

The Goddess religion asserts that the earth is alive, and that everything on the earth is part of a living being. We believe that you can celebrate life in many different images and forms, that life moves in cycles of birth and growth and death and rebirth, and that the same spirit moves through nature, through the cycles of the seasons, through the birth and growth and death of plants and animals, and through our lives as human beings. There is a multiplicity of images that you can draw upon for understanding and power, but the reason we focus on the goddess is partly to counterbalance the 5,000 years worth of focus on male holy images, and partly to affirm that bringing life into the world is sacred. Our goal is not to get out of the world or to get out of life, but to integrate it, to celebrate it, to embrace it fully, and to embrace all the different cycles within it

 

Starhawk

 

Three and a half million years separate the individual who left these footprints in the sands of Africa from the one who left them on the moon. A mere blink in the eye of evolution. Using his burgeoning intelligence, this most successful of all mammals has exploited the environment to produce food for an ever-increasing population. In spite of disasters when civilisations have over-reached themselves, that process has continued, indeed accelerated, even today. Now 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, perhaps it's time we control the population to allow the survival of the environment.

 

David Attenborough

 

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century—when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all—and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

 

Thomas L. Friedman

 

"The Upholder of the Cycles which supports the whole of Life, is water. In every drop of water dwells the Godhead, whom we all serve; there also dwells Life, the Soul of the "First" substance - Water - whose boundaries and banks are the capillaries that guide it and in which it circulates."More energy is encapsulated in every drop of good spring water than an average-sized PowerStation is presently able to produce." (Callum Coats: Water Wizard)

 

Viktor Schauberger