"We, in the green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which killing a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year-old children to Asian brothels." [Carl Amery] ------- "....if we don't overthrow capitalism, we don't have a chance of saving the world ecologically. I think it is possible to have an ecologically sound society under socialism. I don't think it's possible under capitalism." [Judy Bari, Earth First!] ------- "The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state." [Kenneth Boulding, originator of the "Spaceship Earth" concept (quoted by William Tucker in Progress and Privilege, 1982)] ------- "We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion-guilt-free at last!" [Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalogue] ------- "While the death of young men in war is unfortunate, it is no more serious than the touching of mountains and wilderness areas by humankind." [David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth and former executive director of the Sierra Club] ------- "Building an environmentally sustainable future requires restricting the global economy, dramatically changing human reproductive behavior, and altering values and lifestyles. Doing this quickly requires nothing short of a revolution." [Lester Brown, President of Worldwatch Institute] ------- "The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population." [Reid Bryson, "Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man", (1971)] ------- "The facts have emerged, in recent years and months, from research into past ice ages. They imply that the threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind." [Nigel Calder, "International Wildlife", Jul. 1975] ------- "Free Enterprise really means rich people get richer. They have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process.. Capitalism is destroying the earth." [Helen Caldicott, Union of Concerned Scientists] ------- "Every time you turn on an electric light, you are making another brainless baby." [Helen Caldicott, Union of Concerned Scientists] ------- "One popular textbook, "Secondary Math: An Integrated Approach; Focus on Algebra," begins by extolling the virtues of teamwork, offers the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in three languages, mentions that in the future, computers will do all of our math computations for us, and asks the kids what role they suppose teamwork plays in conserving natural resources. The text then introduces characters named Taktuk, Esteban and Minh, who offer thoughts on life, environmentalism and such. But equations don't show up until page 165." [Mona Charen, nationally syndicated columnist. Washington Times, August 4, 1997] ------- "To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem." [Lamont Cole] ------- "Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs." [John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal] ------- "I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems." [John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal] ------- "If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS." [Earth First! newsletter, December 1989, Vol. 17, No. 4, Access to Energy] ------- "The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing....This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run." [Economist editorial] ------- "This vast tragedy, however, is nothing compared to the nutritional disaster that seems likely to overtake humanity in the 1970s (or, at the latest, the 1980s) ... A situation has been created that could lead to a billion or more people starving to death." [Paul Ehrlich, "The End of Affluence" (1974), p.21] ------- "By September 1979, all important life in the sea was extinct. Large areas of coastline had to be evacuated... A pretty grim scenario. Unfortunately we're a long way into it already...based on projections of trends already appearing..." [Paul Ehrlich, "Eco-Catastrophe" _Environmental Handbook_ 1970, pp 174] ------- "In ten years 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." [Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day (1970)] ------- "We must institute the Chinese Communist system of compulsory abortion in various forms of infanticide so that each couple will have only one child. We must hope that our government doesn't wait until it, too, decides that coercive measures can solve America's population problem.... The price of personal freedom in making childbearing decisions may be the destruction of the world." [Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University] ------- "....we must go back to the spinning wheel, returning to a beatific state of endless drudge labor, six days a week, and exhaustion on Sunday." [Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University] ------- "The 'rich and the intelligent' must not propagate. They are dangerous because they promote overproduction [and have] the heaviest impact on the planet. The rich are the cause of most of the world's ills. Poverty is beautiful." [Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University] ------- "The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer." [Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (1968)] ------- "I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." [Paul Ehrlich in (1969)] ------- "Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity.in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion." [Paul Ehrlich in (1976)] ------- "We advocate biodiversity for biodiversity's sake. It may take our extinction to set things straight." [David Foreman, Earth First!] ------- "Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental." [Dave Foreman, Founder of Earth First!] ------- "We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects.. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settled land." [David Foreman, Earth First!] ------- ".... central to the task of strengthening global environmental governance is reform of the vast United Nations system. ....What is needed is a transfer of financial and technological support from North to South, from wealthy developed countries to debt-ridden, trade-starved developing countries." [Hilary F. French, co-author of Worldwatch's ANNUAL REPORT] ------- "Human happiness and certainly human fecundity [fertility] are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are a part of nature, but it isn't true. Somewhere along the line at about a billion years ago and maybe half that we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil energy consumption and the Third World its suicidal consumption of the landscape. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along." [David M. Graber, research biologist of the National Park Service] ------- "This [cooling] trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century." [Peter Gwynne, Newsweek 1976] ------- "Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed." [Pentti Linkola] ------- "If you ask me, it'd be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won't give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other." [Amory Lovins in The Mother Earth-Plowboy Interview, Nov/Dec 1977, p.22] ------- "There are ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production - with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth. The drop in food production could begin quite soon... The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it." [Newsweek, on global cooling, April 28, 1975] ------- "The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans." [Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project] ------- "The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States: We can't let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the U.S. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are. And it is important to the rest of the world to make sure that they don't suffer economically by virtue of our stopping them." [Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund] ------- "If I could be reincarnated, I would return as a killer virus to lower human population levels." [Prince Phillip of England, World Wildlife Fund ] ------- "This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000." [Lowell Ponte in "The Cooling", 1976] ------- "The only real good technology is no technology at all. Technology is taxation without representation, imposed by our elitist species (man) upon the rest of the natural world." [John Shuttleworth] ------- "If there is going to be electricity, I would like it to be decentralized, small, solar-powered." [Gar Smith, editor of the Earth Island Institute's online magazine The Edge] ------- "What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? The group's conclusion is "no." The rich countries won't do it. They won't change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about? This group of world leaders form a secret society to bring about an economic collapse. " [Maurice Strong, secretary general, 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development] ------- "Given the total, absolute, and final disappearance of Homo Sapiens - not only would the Earth's Community of Life continue to exist but - the ending of the human epoch on Earth would be greeted with a hearty 'good riddance.'" [Dr. Paul Taylor, Professor of Philosophy, City College of New York] ------- "If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. . This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age." [Kenneth E.F. Watt on air pollution and global cooling, Earth Day (1970)] ------- "What we've got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy." [Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator (D-Colorado)] ------- "There are too many people and [banning DDT] is as good a way to get rid of them as any." [Charles Wurster, chief scientist, Environmental Defense Fund] -------