Genghis Khan the GREEN: Invader killed so many people that carbon levels plummeted

Moved to: SQSwans: Julia Pongratz: Genghis Khan the GREEN: Invader killed so many people that carbon levels plummeted.

Finlands' Iltalehti.fi & Ylilauta: Linkola Ecology / Green Feminist Backs Templar Breivik

Finlands' Iltalehti.fi & Ylilauta: Linkola Ecology / Green Feminist Backs Templar Breivik

Breivik is supported by the Green movement in the scope of a Green feminist who has backed Templar Anders Behring Breivik, who supports principal Green ideology (deep ecology) of Finnish Ecologist Pentti Linkola.

Andrea Muhrrteyn | Norway v. Breivik | 18 August 2012

Identical postings in Finnish have appeared on the Finnish News forum website: Iltalehti.fi and on what appears to be a Finnish Men's Rights forum: Ylilauta, made by an Anonymous contributor stating:

Breivik saa tukea vihreän liikkeen piiristä

Vihreä feministi on asettunut tukemaan temppeliritari Anders Behring Breivikiä.

Keskeiset vihreää aatetta (syväekologia) edustavan Linkolan tavoitteet, jotka myös Breivik jakaa:
1) Ei maahanmuuttoa
2) Väestöä vähennettävä
3) Epäkelvot yksilöt tapettava
4) Liiallisen teknologian hävittäminen

http://ecofeminist-v-breivik.weebly.com/rh-13-aug-2012.html

Breivik is supported by the green movement in the scope of

Green feminist has backed Templar Anders Behring Breivik. Principal Green ideology (deep ecology) representing Linkola goals that Breivik also be divided into:
1) No immigration
2) reduce the population
3) Invalid individuals killed
4) Over-tech disposal

http://ecofeminist-v-breivik.weebly.com/rh-13-aug-2012.html

Living on a Lifeboat: What repression keeps us from discussing something as important?

Living on a lifeboat

Garrett Hardin | Garrett Hardin Society | 1974

This article appeared in BioScience, vol 24(10), pp. 561-568 and in The Social Contract, Fall 2001 issue. Currently available in Stalking the Wild Taboo.

Susanne Langer (1942) has shown that it is probably impossible to approach an unsolved problem save through the door of metaphor. Later, attempting to meet the demands of rigor, we may achieve some success in cleansing theory of metaphor, though our success is limited if we are unable to avoid using common language, which is shot through and through with fossil metaphors. (I count no less than five in the preceding two sentences.)

Since metaphorical thinking is inescapable it is pointless merely to weep about our human limitations. We must learn to live with them, to understand them, and to control them. "All of us," said George Eliot in Middlemarch, "get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them". To avoid unconscious suicide we are well advised to pit one metaphor against another. From the interplay of competitive metaphors, thoroughly developed, we may come closer to metaphor-free solutions to our problems.

No generation has viewed the problem of the survival of the human species as seriously as we have. Inevitably, we have entered this world of concern through the door of metaphor. Environmentalists have emphasized the image of the earth as a spaceship -Spaceship Earth. Kenneth Boulding (1966) is the principal architect of this metaphor. It is time, he says, that we replace the wasteful "cowboy economy" of the past with the frugal "spaceship economy" required for continued survival in the limited world we now see ours to be. The metaphor is notably useful in justifying pollution control measures.

Pentti Linkola: Can Life Prevail?: A Radical Approach to the Environmental Crisis

Pentti Linkola: Can Life Prevail?: A Radical Approach to the Environmental Crisis

Diord Fionn | Ireland First

“If there were a button I could press [to radically reduce world population], I would sacrifice myself without hesitating, if it meant millions of people would die.” - Pentti Linkola, Wall Street Journal Europe, May 1994

“A minority can never have any other effective means to influence the course of matters but through the use of violence.”

“Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent dictator, that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. Best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and government would prevent any economical growth.”

“Foreign affairs: All mass immigration and most of import-export trade must stop. Cross-border travel is allowed only for small numbers of diplomats and correspondents.”

“Science and schooling: Education will concentrate on practical skills. All competition is rooted out. Technological research is reduced to the extreme minimum. But every child will learn how to clean a fish in a way that only the big shiny bones are left over.”

“By decimating its woodlands, Finland has created the grounds for prosperity. We can now thank prosperity for bringing us – among other things – two million cars, millions of glaring, grey-black electronic entertainment boxes, and many unnecessary buildings to cover the green earth. Wealth and surplus money have led to financial gambling and rampant social injustice, whereby ‘the common people’ end up contributing to the construction of golf courses, classy hotels, and holiday resorts, while fattening Swiss bank accounts. Besides, the people of wealthy countries are the most frustrated, unemployed, unhappy, suicidal, sedentary, worthless and aimless people in history. What a miserable exchange.” – Pentti Linkola

Linkola is one of the few voices who advocates:

1. No immigration
2. Downsize population
3. Kill defectives
4. Stop rampant technology

In the eyes of the most credible sources, planet Earth can sustain a half-billion humans without any sizable destruction of our habitat, or any loss in species or stability of our ecosystem. Any numbers higher than that, no matter how much they recycle, will cause environmental chaos. The modern leftist-tinged environmental movement is terrified of telling anyone that they cannot breed and keep buying whatever strikes their fancy, but someone must do this in the future. The sooner we do it, the fewer people in the future will be left without a means of sustenance and thus require termination.

As Linkola himself has said, "We still have a chance to be cruel. But if we are not cruel today, all is lost."

Billionaire: Elite Want Two-Thirds Of The “Dumb People” Wiped Off The Planet | Bilderberg 1980 Report documents Bilderberg Overpopulation Concerns

Bilderberg 1980 Report documents Bilderberg Overpopulation Concerns

Bilderberg Report | Wikileaks

During a discussion at the 1980 Bilderberg conference in Aachen, West-Germany, one ‘participant’ stood up to make his case for depopulation and the third world. The Bilderberg notes report on page 11:

‘The speaker (a German participant) went on to say that the leaders of the LDC’s understood that the oil price explosion had hurt the Third World much more than the industrialized countries. And they were beginning to see that they did not have at all the same interests as the oil-producing countries. What they did not perhaps fully understand was what a menace the population explosion was to their countries. It seemed that no one wanted to tell them that- neither the Catholic Church nor others. It would be nearly impossible to feed and employ the future world population at the rate it was growing. This had to be faced seriously; it could not be solved by talking about “gadgets and gimmicks.”’

Source: Report: Bilderberg Meeting Report, Aachen, 1980

Depopulation of a Planet (1/6): Thinning Out The "Useless Eaters": An Unspoken NWO Agenda

Today, 6.5 billion humans depend entirely on oil for food, energy, plastics & chemicals. Population growth is on a collision course with the inevitable decline in oil production.

To think that we can advocate for human rights, peace, and social justice while ignoring their necessary ecological basis—is both intellectually dishonest and ultimately self-defeating.

The longer we put off choosing the nicer methods of achieving demographic stability, the more likely the nasty ones become, whether imposed by nature or by some fascistic regime. Urine Good Company might represent a mild version of what could actually be in store if we let the marketplace, corporations, and secretive, militaristic governments come up with eugenic solutions to our population dilemma.
~ Population, Resources, and Human Idealism, Energy Bulletin | Population Growth: Most Powerful Force on Earth, Money&Markets ~

______________________________________________________________

Depopulation of a Planet

Thinning Out The "Useless Eaters"

An Unspoken NWO Agenda

Part I: Historical Perspective
Part II: What you can’t see will hurt you!
Part III: No easy Answers!
Part IV: A Picture Emerges
Part V: U.N. Rings the Alarm
Part VI: The Final Chapter

A Report by RICK MARTIN

Part I: Historical Perspective

11/19/95

Many writers have spoken of intentional plans by certain Elite to thin-out the world's population; it's a recurring theme among so-called conspiracy theorists. There are frequent references to "useless eaters", which includes the bulk of mankind. Most, when hearing of plots to depopulate the planet, simply say under their breath, "Yeah, right," or more often, while shaking their head, "You're nuts." But when there is a careful examination of writings by prominent authors of this century, pieces of the puzzle certainly do fall into place - pieces which support the contention that there are certain individuals, if not entire governments, who have implemented a program of global genocide in an effort to salvage and corner "resources".

What you will be reading in this series on Depopulation Of A Planet are selected writings from a wide cross-section of viewpoints and political leanings. I will be using "their" own documents, their own words, to weave a fabric which, in the end, will be a tapestry of undeniable clarity for those with eyes to see.

Without the historical foundation upon which to base understanding, writing about current efforts at depopulation, through the use of viruses and microorganisms, would have far less significance. So please stay with it as you read and it will come together. I realize that some of this initial material may seem dry, but it is important for a broader understanding of this critical and timely issue.

THOMAS MALTHUS

Thomas Robert Malthus was a parson of the English State Church and an economist who lived from 1766-1834. He is best known for his writing An Essay On The Principle Of Population, published in 1798. His main idea is that populations increase more rapidly than food supplies. So, he claimed, there would always be more people in the world than can be fed, and wars and disease will be necessary to kill off the extra population.

Malthus did not claim to be the originator of this idea, although it has come to be known as the "Malthusian Theory". Malthus based his argument on the works of Condorcet, David Hume, Adam Smith, Defoe, Sir James Steuart, Townsend, Franklin, and others.

Malthus' Essay suggested to Charles Darwin the relationship between progress and the survival of the fittest. This was the basic idea in Darwin's theory of evolution.

GEORG WILHELM HEGEL

Turning to the New American Encyclopedia, we read, "Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), German philosopher of idealism who had an immense influence on 19th and 20th-century thought and history. During his life he was famous for his professorial lectures at the University of Berlin and he wrote on logic, ethics, history, religion and aesthetics. The main feature of Hegel's philosophy was the dialectical method by which an idea (thesis) was challenged by its opposite (antithesis) and the two ultimately reconciled in a third idea (synthesis) which subsumed both. Hegel found this method both in the workings of the mind, as a logical procedure, and in the workings of the history of the world, which to Hegel was the process of the development and realization of the World Spirit (Weltgeist). Hegel’s chief works were Phenomenology of the Mind (1807) and Philosophy Of Right (1821). His most important follower was Marx."

In the book edited by Carl J. Friedrich entitled The Philosophy of Hegel, Hegel writes in The Philosophy of History, "In the Christian religion God has revealed Himself, giving to men the knowledge of what He is so that He is no longer secluded and secret. With this possibility of knowing Him, God has imposed upon us the duty to so know Him. The development of the thinking spirit, which has started from this basis, from the revelation of the Divine Being, must at last progress to the point where what was at first presented to the spirit in feeling and imagination is comprehended by thought. Whether the time has come to achieve this knowledge depends upon whether the final end of the world has at last entered into actual reality in a generally valid and conscious manner."

Hegel concludes with, "World history, with all the changing drama of its histories, is this process of the development and realization of the spirit. It is the true theodicy, the justification of God in history. Only this insight can reconcile the spirit with world history and the actual reality, that what has happened, and is happening every day, is not only not 'without God', but is essentially the work of God."

In his work A History Of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell writes, "Throughout the whole period after the death of Hegel, most academic philosophy remained traditional, and therefore not very important. British empiricist philosophy was dominant in England until near the end of the century, and in France until a somewhat earlier time; then, gradually, Kant and Hegel conquered the universities of France and England, so far as their teachers of technical philosophy were concerned."

Russell continues, "[Condorcet 1743-1794]...was also the inventor of Malthus's theory of population, which, however, had not for him the gloomy consequences that it had for Malthus, because he coupled it with the necessity of birth control. Malthus's father was a disciple of Condorcet, and it was in this way that Malthus came to know of the theory."

Of Hegel, Russell writes in part, "Hegel does not mean only that, in some situations, a nation cannot rightly avoid going to war. He means much more than this. He is opposed to the creation of institutions - such as a world government - which would prevent such situations from arising, because he thinks it is a good thing that there should be wars from time to time. War, he [Hegel] says is the condition in which we take seriously the vanity of temporal goods and things. (This view is to be contrasted with the opposite theory, that all wars have economic causes.) War has a positive moral value: 'War has the higher significance that through it the moral health of peoples is preserved in their indifference towards the stabilizing of finite determinations.'"

Still quoting Bertrand Russell, "The Philosophical Radicals were a transitional school. Their system gave birth to two others, of more importance than itself, namely Darwinism and Socialism. Darwinism was an application to the whole of animal and vegetable life of Malthus's theory of population, which was an integral part of the politics and economics of the Benthamites - a global free competition, in which victory went to the animals that most resembled successful capitalists. Darwin himself was influenced by Malthus, and was in general sympathy with the Philosophical Radicals. There was, however, a great difference between the competition admired by orthodox economists and the struggle for existence which Darwin proclaimed as the motive force of evolution. 'Free competition,' in orthodox economics, is a very artificial conception, hedged in by legal restrictions. You may undersell a competitor, but you must not murder him. You must not use the armed forces of the State to help you to get the better of foreign manufacturers. Those who have not the good fortune to possess capital must not seek to improve their lot by revolution. 'Free competition,' as understood by the Benthamites, was by no means really free.

"Darwinian competition was not of this limited sort; there were no rules against hitting below the belt. The framework of law does not exist among animals, nor is war excluded as a competitive method. The use of the State to secure victory in competition was against the rules as conceived by the Benthamites, but could not be excluded from the Darwinian struggle. In fact, though Darwin himself was a liberal, and though Nietzsche never mentioned him except with contempt, Darwin's Survival Of The Fittest led, when thoroughly assimilated, to something much more like Nietzsche's philosophy than like Bentham's. These developments, however, belong to a later period, since Darwin's Origin Of Species was published in 1859, and its political implications were not at first perceived."

KARL MARX

In his 1843 writing from The Kreuznach Manuscripts: Critique Of Hegel's Philosophy Of Right [from Discussion Of The Princely Power, Comments On Hegel's 279] Karl Marx writes,

"Democracy is the truth of monarchy; monarchy is not the truth of democracy. Monarchy is forced to be democracy as a non sequitur within itself, whereas the monarchical moment is not a non sequitur within democracy. Democracy can be understood in its own terms; monarchy cannot. In democracy, none of its moments acquires a meaning other than that which is appropriate to it. Each is actually only a moment within the whole demos. In monarchy, a part determines the character of the whole. The whole constitution has to take shape of this firm foundation. Democracy is the type or species of the constitution. Monarchy is a variety, and indeed a bad variety. Democracy is 'form and content'. Monarchy is supposed to be only form, but it falsifies the content.

"In monarchy, the whole, the people, is subsumed under one of its particular modes of existence, that of the political constitution. In democracy, on the other hand, the constitution itself appears as only one determination, and indeed, as the self-determination of the people. In monarchy, we have the people of the constitution; in democracy we have the constitution of the people. Democracy is the riddle of all constitutions solved. In democracy the constitution is always based on its actual foundation, on actual man and the actual people, not only in itself, according to its essence, but in its existence and actuality; it is postulated as autonomous. The constitution is seen as what it is, the freely-created product of man. One could say that in some respects this is also true of constitutional monarchy, but what specifically differentiates democracy is the fact that in democracy the constitution is only one particular moment in the existence of the people, that the political constitution does not itself constitute the state.

"Hegel begins with the state and turns man into the state subjectivized; democracy begins with man and makes the state into man objectivized. Just as religion does not create man but man creates religion, so the constitution does not create the people but the people create the constitution. In certain respects, democracy bears the same relation to all other forms of state as Christianity bears to all other religions. Christianity is religion par excellence, the essence of religion, man deified as a particular religion. Similarly, democracy is the essence of every constitution; it is socialized man as a particular constitution. Democracy is related to other constitutions as a species is related to its varieties. But in democracy the species itself appears as a particular [form of] existence, as one therefore that appears as a particular type vis-a-vis other particular [individual] existences that do not correspond to their essence. Democracy is the Old Testament in relation to all other forms of state. Man does not exist for the law, but the law exists for man. In democracy law is the existence of man, while in other forms of state man is the existence of law. This is the fundamental distinguishing mark of democracy."

Marx concludes with, "In all states other than democracy the state, the law, the constitution is dominant without actually dominating, i.e., without penetrating materially the content of the remaining non-political spheres: in democracy the constitution, the law, the state itself as a political constitution is only a self-determination of the people, a particular content of theirs.

"It is self-evident, incidentally, that all forms of state have democracy as their truth, and are therefore untrue in so far as they are not democratic."

In a correspondence of 1843, which was an exchange of letters between Marx, Ruge, and Bakunin concerning the prospects of social and political emancipation, Marx writes,

"Man's self-esteem, freedom, must be awakened once more in the heart of these men. Only this feeling, which disappeared from the world with the Greeks and vanished into the blue mists of heaven with Christianity, can once more transform society into a fellowship of men working for their highest purposes, a democratic state.

"Those people, on the other hand, who do not feel themselves to be men become appendages of their masters, like a herd of slaves or horses. The hereditary masters are the point of this whole society. This world belongs to them. They take it as it is and as it feels. They take themselves as they find themselves and stand where their feet have grown, on the necks of these political animals who know no other destiny than to be subject, loyal and at their master's service.

"The world of the Philistines is the political kingdom of animals; if we have to recognize its existence then we have no alternative but simply to accept the status quo. Centuries of barbarism created and shaped it and it now exists as a consistent system, whose principle is the dehumanized world. The perfected world of the Philistine, our Germany, naturally had to lag far behind the French Revolution, which restored man to himself. A German Aristotle, who would take his Politics from our conditions, would write on the first page: 'Man is a social, but a completely apolitical, animal’."

Further on, Marx continues,

"To be sure, in times when the political state as such is born, violently, out of civil society, when men strive to liberate themselves under the form of political self-liberation, the state can and must go on to abolish and destroy religion. But it does so only the way that it abolishes private property, by setting a maximum, providing for confiscation and progressive taxation, just as it abolished life by establishing the guillotine. In moments when political life has a specially strong feeling for its own importance, it seeks to repress its presuppositions, civil society and its elements, and to constitute itself as the real, harmonious species-life of man. It can do this only by entering into violent contradiction with its own conditions of existence; it can do so only by declaring the revolution to be permanent; and the political drama therefore necessarily ends with the restoration of religion, of private property, and of all the elements of civil society, just as war ends with peace...

"We have shown, then, that political emancipation from religion leaves religion standing, even if not as privileged religion. The contradiction in which the follower of a specific religion finds himself in relation to his citizenship is only one aspect of the universal secular contradiction between the political state and civil society. The consummation of the Christian state is a state that recognizes itself as state and abstracts itself from the religion of its members. The emancipation of the state from religion is not the emancipation of actual man from religion."

In Capital, Marx writes,

The laboring population therefore produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by which itself is made relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus-population; and it does this to an always increasing extent. This is the law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production; and in fact every specific historic mode of production has its own specific laws of population, historically valid within its limits alone. An abstract law of population exists for plants and animals only, and only insofar as man has not interfered with them.

Bertrand Russell writes in A History Of Western Philosophy,

"Marx's philosophy of history is a blend of Hegel and British economics. Like Hegel, he thinks that the world develops according to a dialectical formula, but he totally disagrees with Hegel as to the motive force of this development. Hegel believed in a mystical entity called Spirit, which causes human history to develop according to the stages of the dialectic as set forth in Hegel's Logic. Why Spirit has to go through these stages is not clear. One is tempted to suppose that Spirit is trying to understand Hegel, and at each stage rashly objectifies what it has been reading. Marx's dialectic has none of this quality except a certain inevitableness. For Marx, matter, not spirit, is the driving force. But it is a matter in the peculiar sense that we have been considering, not the wholly dehumanized matter of the atomists. This means that, for Marx, the driving force is really man's relation to matter, of which the most important part is his mode of production. In this way Marx's materialism, in practice, becomes economics."

THE FABIAN SOCIETY

In one of his Fabian Essays [The Fabian Society], entitled Economic, George Bernard Shaw wrote the following in 1889,

"All economic analyses begin with the cultivation of the Earth. To the mind's eye of the astronomer the Earth is a ball spinning in space without ulterior motives. To the bodily eye of the primitive cultivator it is a vast green plain, from which, by sticking a spade into it, wheat and other edible matters can be made to spring." Shaw continues, "It was the increase of population that spread cultivation and civilization from the center to the snow line, and at last forced men to sell themselves to the lords of the soil: it is the same force that continues to multiply men so that their exchange value fails slowly and surely until it disappears altogether - until even black chattel slaves are released as not worth keeping in a land where men of all colors are to be had for nothing. This is the condition of our English laborers today: they are no longer even dirt cheap; they are valueless, and can be had for nothing."

On overpopulation Shaw writes,

"The introduction of the capitalistic system is a sign that the exploitation of the laborer toiling for a bare subsistence wage has become one of the chief arts of life among the holders of tenant rights. It also produces a delusive promise of endless employment which blinds the proletariat to those disastrous consequences of rapid multiplication which are obvious to the small cultivator and peasant proprietor. But indeed the more you degrade the workers, robbing them of all artistic enjoyment, and all chance of respect and admiration from their fellows, the more you throw them back, reckless, on the one pleasure and the one human tie left to them - the gratification of their instinct for producing fresh supplies of men. You will applaud this instinct as divine until at last the excessive supply becomes a nuisance: there comes a plague of men; and you suddenly discover that the instinct is diabolic, and set up a cry of 'overpopulation'. But your slaves are beyond caring for your cries: they breed like rabbits; and their poverty breeds filth, ugliness, dishonesty, disease, obscenity, drunkenness, and murder. In the midst of the riches which their labour piles up for you, their misery rises up too and stifles you. You withdraw in disgust to the other end of the town from them; you appoint special carriages on your railways and special seats in your churches and theaters for them; you set your life apart from theirs by every class barrier you can devise; and yet they swarm about you still: your face gets stamped with your habitual loathing and suspicion of them: your ears get so filled with the language of the vilest of them that you break into it when you lose your self-control: they poison your life as remorselessly as you have sacrificed theirs heartlessly. You begin to believe intensely in the devil. Then comes the terror of their revolting; the drilling and arming of bodies of them to keep down the rest; the prison, the hospital, paroxysms of frantic coercion, followed by paroxysms of frantic charity. And in the meantime, the population continues to increase!"

GEORGE ORWELL

In George Orwell's classic Animal Farm, he writes,

"Now, comrades, what is the nature of this life of ours? Let us face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short. We are born, we are given just so much food as will keep the breath in our bodies, and those of us who are capable of it are forced to work to the last atom of our strength; and the very instant that our usefulness has come to an end we are slaughtered with hideous cruelty. No animal in England knows the meaning of happiness or leisure after he is a year old. No animal in England is free. The life of an animal is misery and slavery: that is the plain truth.

"But is this simply part of the order of nature? Is it because this land of ours is so poor that it cannot afford a decent life to those who dwell upon it? No, comrades, a thousand times no! The soil of England is fertile, its climate is good, it is capable of affording food in abundance to an enormously greater number of animals than now inhabit it. This single farm of ours would support a dozen horses, twenty cows, hundreds of sheep - and all of them living in a comfort and a dignity that are now almost beyond our imagining. Why then do we continue in this miserable condition? Nearly the whole of the produce of our labour is stolen from us by human beings. There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word - Man. Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished for ever.

"Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself. Our labour tills the soil, our dung fertilizes it, and yet there is not one of us that owns more than his bare skin. You cows that I see before me, how many thousands of gallons of milk have you given during this last year? And what has happened to that milk which should have been breeding up sturdy calves? Every drop of it has gone down the throats of our enemies. And you hens, how many eggs have you laid in this last year, and how many of those eggs ever hatched into chickens? The rest have all gone to market to bring in money for Jones and his men. And you, Clover, where are those four foals you bore, who should have been the support and pleasure of your old age? Each was sold at a year old - you will never see one of them again. In return for your four confinements and all your labour in the fields, what have you ever had except your bare rations and a stall?

"And even the miserable lives we lead are not allowed to reach their natural span. For myself I do not grumble, for I am one of the lucky ones. I am twelve years old and have had over four hundred children. Such is the natural life of a pig. But no animal escapes the cruel knife in the end. You young porkers who are sitting in front of me, every one of you will scream your lives out at the block within a year. To that horror we all must come - cows, pigs, hens, sheep, everyone. Even the horses and the dogs have no better fate. You, Boxer, the very day that those great muscles of yours lose their power, Jones will sell you to the knacker, who will cut your throat and boil you down for the foxhounds. As for the dogs, when they grow old and toothless, Jones ties a brick around their neck and drowns them in the nearest pond.

"Is it not crystal clear, then, comrades, that all the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings? Only get rid of Man, and the produce of our labour would be our own. Almost overnight we could become rich and free. What then must we do? Why, work night and day, body and soul, for the overthrow of the human race. That is my message to you, comrades: Rebellion! I do not know when that Rebellion will come, it might be in a week or in a hundred years, but I know, as surely as I see this straw beneath my feet, that sooner or later justice will be done. Fix your eyes on that, comrades, throughout the short remainder of your lives! And above all, pass on this message of mine to those who come after you, so that future generations shall carry on the struggle until it is victorious.

"And remember, comrades, your resolution must never falter. No argument must lead you astray. Never listen when they tell you that Man and the animals have a common interest, that the prosperity of the one is the prosperity of the others. It is all lies. Man serves the interests of no creature except himself. And among us animals let there be perfect unity, perfect comradeship in the struggle. All men are enemies. All animals are comrades."

ALDOUS HUXLEY

In the Foreword to the 1946 (second printing) of the classic novel Brave New World, first published in 1932, author Aldous Huxley writes,

"There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarians should resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely inhumane (nobody cares much about that nowadays); it is demonstrably inefficient and in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and school teachers. But their methods are still crude and unscientific. The old Jesuits' boast that, if they were given the schooling of the child, they could answer for the man's religious opinions, was a product of wishful thinking. And the modern pedagogue is probably rather less efficient at conditioning his pupils' reflexes than were the reverend fathers who educated Voltaire. The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering what Mr. Churchill calls an "iron curtain" between the masses and such facts or arguments as the local political bosses regard as undesirable, totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most compelling of logical rebuttals. But silence is not enough. If persecution, liquidation and the other symptoms of social friction are to be avoided, the positive sides of propaganda must be made as effective as the negative. The most important Manhattan Projects of the future will be vast government-sponsored enquiries into what the politicians and the participating scientists will call "the problem of happiness" - in other words, the problem of making people love their servitude. Without economic security, the love of servitude cannot possibly come into existence; for the sake of brevity, I assume that the all-powerful executive and its managers will succeed in solving the problem of permanent security. But security tends very quickly to be taken for granted. Its achievement is merely a superficial, external revolution. The love of servitude cannot be established except as the result of a deep, personal revolution in human minds and bodies. To bring about that revolution we require, among others, the following discoveries and inventions. First, a greatly improved technique of suggestion - through infant conditioning and, later, with the aid of drugs, such as scopolamine. Second, a fully developed science of human differences, enabling government managers to assign any given individual to his or her proper place in the social and economic hierarchy. (Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and to infect others with their discontents.) Third (since reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays), a substitute for alcohol and the other narcotics, something at once less harmful and more pleasure-giving than gin or heroin. And fourth (but this would be a long-term project, which it would take generations of totalitarian control to bring to a successful conclusion) a foolproof system of eugenics, designed to standardize the human product and so to facilitate the task of the managers. In Brave New World this standardization of the human product has been pushed to fantastic, though not perhaps impossible, extremes. Technically and ideologically we are still a long way from bottled babies and Bokanovsky groups of semi-morons. But by A.F. 600, who knows what may not be happening? Meanwhile the other characteristic features of that happier and more stable world - the equivalents of soma and hypnopaedia and the scientific caste system - are probably not more than three or four generations away. Nor does the sexual promiscuity of Brave New World seem so very distant. [Let me remind you this was written in 1946.] There are already certain American cities in which the number of divorces is equal to the number of marriages. In a few years, no doubt, marriage licenses will be sold like dog licenses, good for a period of twelve months, with no law against changing dogs or keeping more than one animal at a time. As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and families with which to colonize empty or conquered territories) will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.

"All things considered it looks as though Utopia were far closer to us than anyone, only fifteen years ago, could have imagined. Then, I projected it six hundred years into the future. Today it seems quite possible that the horror may be upon us within a single century. That is, if we refrain from blowing ourselves to smithereens in the interval. Indeed, unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms, having as their root the terror of the atomic bomb and as their consequence the destruction of civilization (or, if the warfare is limited, the perpetuation of militarism); or else one supra-national totalitarianism, called into existence by the social chaos resulting from rapid technological progress in general and the atomic revolution in particular, and developing, under the need for efficiency and stability, into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia. You pays your money and you takes your choice."

Mark Twain in The Mysterious Stranger writes,

"And what does it amount to?" said Satan, with his evil chuckle. "Nothing at all. You gain nothing: you always come out where you went in. For a million years the race has gone on monotonously propagating itself and monotonously re-performing this dull nonsense to what end? No wisdom can guess! Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping little monarchs and nobilities who despise you; would feel defiled if you touched them; would shut the door in your face if you proposed to call; whom you slave for, fight for, die for, and are not ashamed of it, but proud; whose existence is a perpetual insult to you and you are afraid to resent it; who are mendicants supported by your alms, yet assume toward you the airs of benefactor toward beggar; who address you in the language of master toward slave, and are answered in the language of slave toward master; who are worshipped by you with your mouth, while in your heart if you have one you despise yourselves for it. The First man was a hypocrite and a coward, qualities which have not failed yet in his line; it is the foundation upon which all civilizations have been built."

In a lecture titled The Population Explosion, delivered at Santa Barbara, California. in 1959, Aldous Huxley said,

"Today I want to pass on to what is happening to the human species and to think a little about what our philosophy and our ethical outlook on the subject should be. This lecture is essentially about human numbers and their relation to human well-being and human values in general.

"Needless to say, any accurate estimation of human numbers is very recent, but we can extrapolate into the past and come to what seem to be fairly good conclusions. Although there are some fairly wide margins of difference among the experts, the numbers they come to are roughly in agreement. They agree that in pre-agricultural days, for example in the lower Palaeolithic times, when man was a food-gathering creature, there were probably not more than twenty million humans on this whole planet. In later Palaeolithic times, after organized hunting had been invented, the number probably doubled. We can make a rough estimate of what an organized hunting people could do because we know how many Indians were present in North America when the white man arrived - not more than one million in the entire North American continent east of the Rockies - and this gives one an indication of the extremely low density of population possible in a hunting economy.

"The Great Revolution came about 6000 B.C. with the invention of agriculture, and the creation of cities in the next millennia. By about 1000 B.C., after five thousand years of agriculture, there were probably about one hundred million people in the world.

"By the beginning of the Christian era, this figure had a little more than doubled: it was somewhere between two hundred million and two hundred and fifty million - less than half the present population of China. The population increased very gradually in the following years; sometimes there were long periods of standstill and sometimes there were even periods of decrease, as in the years immediately following 1348, when the Black Death killed off 30 percent of the population of Europe and nobody knows how much of the population of Asia.

"By the time the Pilgrim fathers arrived in this country, it is estimated that the population of the world was about twice what it had been on the first Christmas Day - that is to say, it had doubled in sixteen hundred years, an extremely slow rate of increase. But from that time on, from the middle of the seventeenth century, with the beginnings of the industrial revolution and the first importation of food from the newly developed lands of the New World, population began rising far more rapidly than it had ever risen before.

"By the time the Declaration of Independence was signed, the figure for the human population of the world was probably around seven hundred million; it must have passed the billion mark fairly early in the nineteenth century and stood at about fourteen hundred million around the time when I was born in the 1890s. The striking fact is that since that time the population of the planet has doubled again. It has gone from fourteen hundred million, which is already twice what it was at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, to twenty-eight hundred million. And the rate of increase now is such that it will probably double again in rather less than fifty years.

"Thus the rates of increase have been increasing along with the absolute increase in numbers."

[Please remember, this was written in 1959. The world's current population is rapidly approaching the 7 Billion figure - those are not "official" numbers, however.]……… [and 8 billion now in the year 2000 - update]

Still quoting Huxley:

"Let us now ask ourselves what the practical alternatives are as we confront this problem of population growth. One alternative is to do nothing in particular about it and just let things go on as they are, but the consequences of that course are quite clear: the problem will be solved by nature in the way that nature always solves problems of over-population - when any animal population tends (a) to starve and (b) to suffer from severe epidemic and epizootic diseases.

"In the human population, we can envisage that the natural check on the unlimited growth of population will be precisely this: there will be pestilence, famine, and, since we are human beings and not animals, there will be organized warfare, which will bring the numbers down to what the Earth can carry. What nature teaches us is that it is extraordinarily dangerous to upset any of its fundamental balances, and we are in the process of upsetting a fundamental balance in the most alarming and drastic manner. The question is: Are we going to restore the balance in the natural way, which is a brutal and entirely anti-human way, or are we going to restore it in some intelligent, rational, and humane way? If we leave matters as they are, nature will certainly solve the problem in her way and not in ours.

"Another alternative is to increase industrial and agricultural production so that they can catch up with the increase in population. This solution, however, would be extremely like what happens to Alice in Through The Looking Glass. You remember that Alice and the Red Queen are running a tremendous race. To Alice's astonishment, when they have run until they are completely out of breath they are in exactly the same place, and Alice says, 'Well, in our country...you'd generally get to somewhere else - if you ran very fast for a long time as we've been doing.'

'A slow sort of country!' says the Queen. 'Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!'

"This is a cosmic parable of the extremely tragic situation in which we now find ourselves. We have to work, to put forth an enormous effort, just to stand where we are; and where we are is in a most undesirable position because, as the most recent figures issued by the United Nations indicate, something like two-thirds of the human race now lives on a diet of two thousand calories or less per day, which - the ideal being in the neighborhood of three thousand - is definitely a diet of undernourishment."

Further into the speech, quoting Huxley again:

"The third alternative is to try to increase production as much as possible and at the same time to try to re-establish the balance between the birth rate and the death rate by means less gruesome than those which are used in nature - by intelligent and humane methods. In this connection it is interesting to note that the idea of limiting the growth of populations is by no means new. In a great many primitive societies, and even in many of the highly civilized societies of antiquity, where local over-population was a menace, although less fearful than the natural means, the most common was infanticide - killing or exposing by leaving out on the mountain unwanted children, or children of the wrong sex, or children who happened to be born with some slight deficiency or other. Abortion was also very common. And there were many societies in which strict religious injunctions imposed long periods of sexual continence between the birth of each child. But in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries various methods of birth control less fearful in nature have been devised, and it is in fact theoretically conceivable that such methods might be applied throughout the whole world.

"What is theoretically possible, however, is often practically almost impossible. There are colossal difficulties in the way of implementing any large-scale policy of limitation of population; whereas death control is extremely easy under modern circumstances, birth control is extremely difficult. The reason is very simple: death control - the control, for example, of infectious diseases - can be accomplished by a handful of experts and quite a small labour force of unskilled persons and requires a very small capital expenditure."

.....

"The problem of control of the birth rate is infinitely complex. It is not merely a problem of medicine, in chemistry, in biochemistry, in physiology; it is also a problem in sociology, in psychology, in theology, and in education. It has to be attacked on about ten different fronts simultaneously if there is to be any hope of solving it."

.....

"Merely from a technical and temporal point of view, we are obviously in a very tight spot. But we have also to consider the political point of view. There would undoubtedly have to be either world-wide agreement or regional agreements on a general population policy in order to have any satisfactory control of the situation at all. But there is absolutely no prospect at the present time of our getting any such political agreement."

"Now we have to ask ourselves what our attitude should be towards these problems. We come to the other end of the bridge. We pass from the world of facts to the world of values. What we think about all this depends entirely on what we regard as the end and purpose of human life. If we believe the end and purpose of human life is to foster power politics and nationalism, then we shall probably need a great deal of cannon fodder, although even this proposition becomes rather dubious in the light of nuclear warfare. But if, as I think most of us would agree, the end of human life is to realize individual potentialities to their limits and in the best way possible, and to create a society which makes possible such a realization and philosophical way about the population problem. We see that in very many cases the effort to raise human quality is being thwarted by the mere increase of human quantity, that quality is very often incompatible with quantity. We have seen that mere quantity makes the educational potentialities of the world unrealizable. We have seen that the pressure of enormous numbers upon resources makes it almost impossible to improve the material standards of life, which after all have to raise to a minimum if any of the higher possibilities are to be realized: although it is quite true that man cannot live by bread alone, still less can he live without bread, and if we simply cannot provide adequate bread, we cannot provide anything else. Only when he has bread, only when his belly is full, is there some hope of something else emerging from the human situation.

"Then there is the political problem. It is quite clear that as population presses more and more heavily upon resources, the economic situation tends to become more and more precarious. As there is a tendency in precarious situations for centralized government to assume more and more control, there is therefore now a tendency towards totalitarian forms of government, which certainly we in the West find very undesirable. But when you ask whether democracy is possible in a population where two-thirds of the people are living on two thousand calories a day, and one-third is living on over three thousand, the answer is no, because the people living on less than two thousand calories will simply not have enough energy to participate in the political life of the country, and so they will be governed by the well-fed and energetic. Again, quantity militates against quality."

And later, "Finally, the unlimited increase in human numbers practically guarantees that our planetary resources will be destroyed and that within a hundred or two hundred years an immensely hypertrophied human species will have become a kind of cancer on this planet and will ruin the quasi-organism on which it lives. It is a most depressing forecast and possibility.

"I think one can say from this last point that the problem of quality and quantity is really a religious problem. For, after all, what is religion but a preoccupation with the destiny of the individual and with the destiny of society and the race at large? This is summed up very clearly in the Gospel when we are told that the Kingdom of God is within us but at the same time it is our business to contribute to the founding of the Kingdom of God upon Earth. We cannot neglect either of these two aspects of human destiny. For if we neglect the general, quantitative, population aspect of destiny, we condemn ourselves, or certainly our children and grandchildren, as individuals. We condemn them to the kind of life which we should find intolerable and which presumably they will find intolerable too.

"There are no certain theological objections to population limitation. Most religious organizations in the world today, both within and outside the Christian pale, accept it. But the Roman Catholic church does not accept any method of population control except that which was promulgated and made permissible in 1932 - the so-called rhythm method. Unfortunately, where the rhythm method has been tried on a considerable scale in an undeveloped country such as India, it has not been found to be very effective. The fact that the Church recognizes this problem was brought home very clearly in 1954 at the time of the first united Nations Population Congress, which took place in Rome, when the late Pope, in an allocution to the delegates, made it quite clear that the problem of population was a very grave one which he recommended to the consideration of the faithful."

And later, "We can conclude, then, by saying that over-population is quite clearly one of the gravest problems which confront us, and the choice before us is either to let the problem be solved by nature in the most horrifying possible way or else to find some intelligent and humane method of solving it, simultaneously increasing production and balancing the birth rate and the death rate, and in some way or other forming an agreed international policy on the subject. To my mind, the most important prerequisites to such a solution are first of all an awareness of the problem, and then a realization that it is a profoundly religious problem, a problem of human destiny. Our hope, as always, is to be realistically idealistic."

LETTER TO U.N. SECRETARY GENERAL U THANT

August 30, 1965 - My Dear Mr. Secretary General: The United States Government recognizes the singular importance of the meeting of the second United Nations World Population Conference and pledges its full support to your great undertaking.

As I said to the United Nations in San Francisco, we must now begin to face forthrightly the multiplying problems of our multiplying population. Our government assures your conference of our wholehearted support to the United Nations and its agencies in their efforts to achieve a better world through bringing into balance the world's resources and the world's population.

In extending my best wishes for the success of your conference, it is my fervent hope that your great assemblage of population experts will contribute significantly to the knowledge necessary to solve this transcendent problem. Second only to the search for peace, it is humanity's greatest challenge. This week, the meeting in Belgrade carries with it the hopes of mankind.

Sincerely,
Lyndon B. Johnson [President]

POPE PAUL VI
HUMANAE VITAE (1968)

"The changes which have taken place are in fact noteworthy and of varied kind. In the first place, there is the rapid demographic development. Fear is shown by many that world population is growing more rapidly than the available resources, with growing distress to many families and developing countries, so that the temptation for authorities to counter this danger with radical measures is great. Moreover, working and lodging conditions, as well as increased exigencies both in the economic field and in that of education, often make the proper education of an elevated number of children difficult today.

"This new state of things gives rise to new questions. Granted the conditions of life today, and granted the meaning which conjugal relations have with respect to the harmony between husband and wife and to their mutual fidelity, would not a revision of the ethical norms in force up to now seem to be advisable, especially when it is considered that they cannot be observed without sacrifices, sometimes heroic sacrifices?

"...conjugal love requires in husband and wife an awareness of their mission of "responsible parenthood," which today is rightly much insisted upon, and which also must be exactly understood. Consequently it is to be considered under different aspects which are legitimate and connected with one another.

"In relation to the biological processes, responsible parenthood means the knowledge and respect of their functions; human intellect discovers in the power of giving life biological laws which are part of the human person.

"In relation to the tendencies of instinct or passion, responsible parenthood means that necessary dominion which reason and will must exercise over them.

"In relation to physical, economic, psychological and social conditions, responsible parenthood is exercised, either by the deliberate and generous decision to raise a numerous family, or by the decision, made for grave motives and with due respect for the moral law, to avoid for the time being, or even for an indeterminate period, a new birth.

"These acts, by which husband and wife are united in chaste intimacy and by means of which human life is transmitted, are, as the council recalled, "noble and worthy" and they do not cease to be lawful if, for causes independent of the will of husband and wife, they are foreseen to be infecund, since they always remain ordained toward expressing and consolidating their union. In fact, as experience bears witness, not every conjugal act is followed by a new life. God has wisely disposed natural laws and rhythms of fecundity which, of themselves, cause a separation in the succession of births. Nonetheless the church, calling men back to the observance of the norms of the natural law, as interpreted by her constant doctrine, teaches that each and every marriage act ("qui libet matrimonii usus") must remain open to the transmission of life.

"In conformity with these landmarks in the human and Christian vision of marriage, we must once again declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun, and, above all, directly willed and procured abortion, even if for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as licit means of regulating birth.

"Equally to be excluded, as the teaching authority of the church has frequently declared, is direct sterilization, whether perpetual or temporary, whether of the man or of the woman.

"Similarly excluded is every action which, either in anticipation of the conjugal act or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible.

"To rulers, who are those principally responsible for the common good, and who can do so much to safeguard moral customs, we say: Do not allow the morality of your peoples to be degraded; do not permit that by legal means practices contrary to the natural and divine law be introduced into that fundamental cell, the family. Quite other is the way in which public authorities can and must contribute to the solution of the demographic problem: namely, the way of a provident policy for the family, of a wise education of peoples in respect of the moral law and the liberty of citizens.

"We are well aware of the serious difficulties experienced by public authorities in this regard, especially in the developing countries. To their legitimate preoccupations we devoted our encyclical letter "Populorum Progressio." But, with our predecessor Pope John XXIII, we repeat: No solution to these difficulties is acceptable "which does violence to man's essential dignity" and is based only "on an utterly materialistic conception of man himself and of his life" The only possible solution to this question is one which envisages the social and economic progress both of individuals and of the whole of human society, and which respects and promotes true human values.

"Neither can one, without grave injustice, consider Divine Providence to be responsible for what depends, instead, on a lack of wisdom in government, on an insufficient sense of social justice, on selfish monopolization or again on blameworthy indolence in confronting the efforts and the sacrifices necessary to insure the raising of living standards of a people and of all its sons."
Paulus PP.VI.

U THANT

"I do not wish to seem over dramatic, but I can only conclude from the information that is available to me as Secretary-General, that the Members of the United Nations have perhaps ten years left in which to subordinate their ancient quarrels and launch a global partnership to curb the arms race, to improve the human environment, to defuse the population explosion, and to supply the required momentum to development efforts. If such a global partnership is not forged within the next decade, then I very much fear that the problems I have mentioned will have reached such staggering proportions that they will be beyond our capacity to control."

U Thant, 1969.

UNITED NATIONS WORLD POPULATION CONFERENCE(1974)

Resolutions and Recommendations

The World Population Conference, having due regard for human aspirations for a better quality of life and for rapid socio-economic development, and taking into consideration the interrelationship between population situations and socio-economic development, decides on the following World Population Plan of Action as a policy instrument within the broader context of the internationally adopted strategies for national and international progress.

POPULATION GOALS AND POLICIES
Recommendations for Action

Population growth: According to the United Nations medium population projections, little change is expected to occur in average rates of population growth either in the developed or in the developing regions by 1985. According to the United Nations low variant projections, it is estimated that as a result of social and economic development and population policies as reported by countries in the Second United Nations Inquiry on Population and Development, population growth rates in the developing countries as a whole may decline from the present level of 2.4 percent per annum to about 2 percent by 1985; and below 0.7 percent per annum in the developed countries. In this case the world-wide rate of population growth would decline from 2 percent to about 1.7 percent.

Countries which consider that their present or expected rates of population growth hamper their goals of promoting human welfare are invited, if they have not yet done so, to consider adopting population policies, within the framework of socioeconomic development, which are consistent with basic human rights and national goals and values.

Countries which aim at achieving moderate or low population growth should try to achieve it through a low level of birth and death rates. Countries wishing to increase their rate of population growth should, when mortality is high, concentrate efforts on the reduction of mortality, and where appropriate, encourage an increase in fertility and encourage immigration.

Recognizing that per capita use of world resources is much higher in the developed than in the developing countries, the developed countries are urged to adopt appropriate policies in population, consumption and investment, bearing in mind the need for fundamental improvement in international equity.

Consistent with the Proclamation of the International Conference on Human Rights, the Declaration of Social Progress and Development, the relevant targets of the Second United Nations Development Decade and the other international instruments on the subject, it is recommended that all countries:

(a) Respect and ensure, regardless of their overall demographic goals, the right of persons to determine, in a free, informed and responsible manner, the number and spacing of their children;
(b) Encourage appropriate education concerning responsible parenthood and make available to persons who so desire advice and means of achieving it;
(c) Ensure that family planning, medical and related social services aim not only at the prevention of unwanted pregnancies but also at elimination of involuntary sterility and sub-fecundity in order that all couples may be permitted to achieve their desired number of children, and that child adoption be facilitated;
(d) Seek to ensure the continued possibility of variations in family size when a low fertility level has been established or is a policy objective;
(e) Make use, wherever needed and appropriate, of adequately trained professional and auxiliary health personnel, rural extension, home economics and social workers, and non-governmental channels, to help provide family planning services and to advise users of contraceptives;
(f) Increase their health manpower and health facilities to an effective level, redistribute functions among the different levels of professional and auxiliaries in order to overcome the shortage of qualified personnel and establish an effective system of supervision in their health and family planning services;
(g) Ensure that information about, and education in, family planning and other matters which affect fertility are based on valid and proven scientific knowledge, and include a full account of any risk that may be involved in the use or non-use of contraceptives.

It is recommended that countries wishing to affect fertility levels give priority to implementing development programs and educational and health strategies which, while contributing to economic growth and higher standards of living, have a decisive impact upon demographic trends, including fertility. International co-operation is called for to give priority to assisting such national efforts in order that these programs and strategies be carried into effect.

While recognizing the diversity of social, cultural, political and economic conditions among countries and regions, it is nevertheless agreed that the following development goals generally have an effect on the socio-economic context of reproductive decisions that tends to moderate fertility levels:

(a) The reduction of infant and child mortality, particularly by means of improved nutrition, sanitation, maternal and child health care, and maternal education;
(b) The full integration of women into the development process, particularly by means of their greater participation in educational, social, economic and political opportunities, and especially by means of the removal of obstacles to their employment in the non-agricultural sector wherever possible. In this context, national laws and policies, as well as relevant international recommendations, should be reviewed in order to eliminate discrimination in, and remove obstacles to, the education, training, employment and career advancement opportunities for women;
(c) The promotion of social justice, social mobility, and social development particularly by means of a wide participation of the population in development and a more equitable distribution of income, land, social services and amenities;
(d) The promotion of wide educational opportunities for the young of both sexes, and the extension of public forms of preschool education for the rising generation;
(e) The elimination of child labour and child abuse and the establishment of social security and old age benefits;
(f) The establishment of an appropriate lower limit for age at marriage.

The projections of future declines in rates of population growth, and those concerning increased expectation of life, are consistent with declines in the birth rate of the developing countries as a whole from the present level of 38 per thousand to 30 per thousand by 1985; in these projections, birth rates in the developed countries remain in the region of 15 per thousand. To achieve by 1985 these levels of fertility would require substantial national efforts, by those countries concerned, in the field of socio-economic development and population policies, supported, upon request, by adequate international assistance. Such efforts would also be required to achieve the increase in expectation of life.

In the light of the principles of this Plan of Action, countries which consider their birth rates detrimental to their national purposes are invited to consider setting quantitative goals and implementing policies that may lead to the attainment of such goals by 1985. Nothing herein should interfere with the sovereignty of any Government to adopt or not to adopt such quantitative goals.

JIMMY CARTER'S MESSAGE TO CONGRESS
MAY 23rd 1977

World Population

"Rapid population growth is a major environmental problem of world dimensions. World population increased from three to four billion in the last 15 years, substantially canceling out expansion in world food production and economic growth of the same period.

"Without controlling the growth of population, the prospects for enough food, shelter, and other basic needs for all the world's people are dim. Where existence is already poor and precarious, efforts to obtain the necessities of life often degrade the environment for generations to come.

"It is, of course, up to each nation to determine its own policies, but we are prepared to respond promptly and fully to all requests for assistance in population and health care programs. At my direction, the Department of State and the Agency for International Development stand ready to cooperate through international organizations, through private voluntary organizations, or through direct contacts with other governments."

CONSIDER THIS

On page 65 of Population: Opposing Viewpoints, we read,

"According to the United Nations, which follows these things closely, some 5.3 billion people enlivened our planet by 1990. By November 1992, that number will have increased to 5.5 billion, an addition nearly equal to the population of the United States. Or course no one, including the UN, has a reliable crystal ball that reveals precisely how human numbers will change. Still, people have to plan for the future, and so the UN's analysts and computers have been busy figuring what might happen. One possibility they consider is that future world fertility rates will remain what they were in 1990. The consequences of this, with accompanying small declines in death rates, are startling. By 2025, when my now-16-year-old daughter will have finished having whatever children she will have, the world would have 11 billion people, double its number today. Another doubling would take only a bit more than 25 years, as the faster-growing segments of the population become a larger proportion of the total. At my daughter's centennial, in 2076, the human population would have more than doubled again, passing 46 billion. By 2150 there would be 694,213,000,000 of us, a little over 125 times our present population."

PRINCE PHILIP OF GREAT BRITAIN

On March 30, 1990, The Washington Post reported Prince Philip as making the following statement:

"We are constantly being reminded of the plight of the poor, the hungry, the homeless and the diseased. What does not make the headlines is that even if the proportion of those unfortunate people remains the same in relation to the total population, their number is bound to increase as the size of the population as a whole increases ... The best hope of limiting the increase in the number of such people would be if the world population could be stabilized."

I: Historical Perspective II: What you can’t see will hurt you!
III: No easy Answers! IV: A Picture Emerges
V: U.N. Rings the Alarm VI: The Final Chapter

Source: Rick Martin

Depopulation of a Planet (2/6): If You Thought It Was Bad... It's Worse Than You Think!

Today, 6.5 billion humans depend entirely on oil for food, energy, plastics & chemicals. Population growth is on a collision course with the inevitable decline in oil production.

To think that we can advocate for human rights, peace, and social justice while ignoring their necessary ecological basis—is both intellectually dishonest and ultimately self-defeating.

The longer we put off choosing the nicer methods of achieving demographic stability, the more likely the nasty ones become, whether imposed by nature or by some fascistic regime. Urine Good Company might represent a mild version of what could actually be in store if we let the marketplace, corporations, and secretive, militaristic governments come up with eugenic solutions to our population dilemma.
~ Population, Resources, and Human Idealism, Energy Bulletin | Population Growth: Most Powerful Force on Earth, Money&Markets ~

______________________________________________________________

Depopulation Of A Planet

If You Thought It Was Bad…

It's Worse Than You Think!

Part I: Historical Perspective
Part II: What you can’t see will hurt you!
Part III: No easy Answers!
Part IV: A Picture Emerges
Part V: U.N. Rings the Alarm
Part VI: The Final Chapter

A Report by RICK MARTIN

Part II: What You Can't See Will Hurt You!

11/22/95

Roger Walsh, M.D., Ph.D., in a chapter titled Human Survival: A Psycho-Evolutionary Analysis appearing in the book, Human Survival & Consciousness Evolution, writes

"The great experiment in consciousness, human evolution, now stands at a precipice of its own making. The same consciousness which struggled for millions of years to ensure human survival is now on the verge of depleting its planet’s resources, rendering its environment uninhabitable, and fashioning the instruments of its own self-annihilation. Can this consciousness (we) develop the wisdom not to do these things? Can we foster sufficient self-understanding to reduce our destructiveness, and mature rapidly enough to carry us through this evolutionary crisis? These are surely the most crucial questions of our time, or of any time. Today we face a global threat of malnutrition, overpopulation, lack of resources, pollution, a disturbed ecology, and nuclear weapons. At the present time, from fifteen to twenty million of us die each year of malnutrition and related causes; another six hundred million are chronically hungry and billions live in poverty without adequate shelter, education, or medical care (Brandt, 1980; Presidential Commission on World Hunger, 1979). The situation is exacerbated by an exploding population that adds another billion people every thirteen years, depletes natural resources at an ever-accelerating rate, affects "virtually every aspect of the Earth's ecosystem (including) perhaps the most serious environmental development ... an accelerating deterioration and loss of the resources essential for agriculture" (Council on Environmental Quality, 1979). Desertification, pollution, acid rain, and greenhouse warming are among the more obvious effects.

Overshadowing all this hangs the nuclear threat, the equivalent of some twenty billion tons of TNT (enough to fill a freight train four million miles long), controlled by hair-trigger warning systems, and creating highly radioactive wastes for which no permanent storage sites exist, consuming over $660 billion each year in military expenditure, and threatening global suicide (Schell, 1982; Sivard, 1983; Walsh, 1984). By way of comparison, the total amount of TNT dropped in World War II was only three million tons (less than a single large nuclear warhead). The Presidential Commission on World Hunger (1979) estimated that $6 billion per year, or some four days' worth of military expenditures could eradicate world starvation. While not denying the role of political, economic, and military forces in our society, the crucial fact about these global crises is that all of them have psychological origins. Our own behavior has created these threats, and, thus, psychological approaches may be essential to understanding and reversing them. And to the extent that these threats are determined by psychological forces within us and between us, they are actually symptoms - symptoms for our individual and collective state of mind. These global symptoms reflect and express the faulty beliefs and perceptions, fears and fantasies, defenses and denials, that shape and mis-shape our individual and collective behavior. The state of the world reflects our state of mind; our collective crises mirror our collective consciousness."

In the book entitled Population - Opposing Viewpoints is a chapter written by Jacques-Yves Cousteau which first appeared in the Nov. 1992 edition of Populi. In this article, Cousteau writes:

MALTHUS'S PREDICTION HAS COME TRUE

"What is happening now is a consequence of the exponential nature of population growth while available resources obey a linear progression and are ultimately limited, as the British economist Thomas Robert Malthus prophesied almost 200 years ago. The warnings were repeated by the Club of Rome after World War II, and substantiated by Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution; in his acceptance speech of the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, addressed to the leaders of the world, he insisted that they had only 30 years to harness the demographic threat.

"Twenty years have passed since, Borlaug told me, and not only have the leaders taken no action whatsoever, they have even avoided discussing the subject. Since then, the situation has worsened."

SOLUTIONS MUST BE FOUND TO CURB POPULATION GROWTH

If we want our precarious endeavor to succeed, we must convince all human beings to participate in our adventure, and we must urgently find solutions to curb the population explosion that has a direct influence on the impoverishment of the less-favoured communities. Otherwise, generalized resentment will beget hatred, and the ugliest genocide imaginable, involving billions of people, will become unavoidable.

We must have the courage to face the situation: either the leaders of the world, having participated in thc Rio Conference, understand that what is at stake is literally to save the human species, and accept the need to take drastic, unconventional, unpopular decisions, or the impending disaster dreaded by the British and American scientific academies will precipitate"

Cousteau concludes with: "Uncontrolled population growth and poverty must not be fought from inside, from Europe, from North America or any nation or group of nations; it must be attacked from the outside - by international agencies helped in the formidable job by competent and totally independent non-governmental organizations.

"A world policy inspired by eco-biology and eco-sociology is the only one capable of steering our perilous course towards a golden age, and protecting cultural and biological diversity while proudly hoisting the colors of humankind."

CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE

In the 1982 book, Higher Form Of Killing - The Secret Story Of Chemical And Biological Warfare [Hill and Wang Publishers, 19 Union Square West, New York 10003 - to order, call 800-788-6262], which is a research masterpiece, Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman write,

"In no future war will the military be able to ignore poison gas. It is a higher form of killing. [Professor Fritz Haber, pioneer of gas warfare, on receiving the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1919.]

"The world's oldest chemical warfare installation occupies 7,000 gently rolling acres of countryside on the southern edge of Salisbury Plain, known as Porton Down [England]. Over 700 men and women work there in labs and offices scattered through 200 buildings. There are police and fire stations, a hospital, a library, a branch of Lloyds Bank, a detailed archive with thousands of reports and photographs; there is even a cinema to screen the miles of film taken during experiments. They are the residue of more than six decades of research, generally at the forefront of contemporary scientific knowledge. Though there have been many political storms, and several attempts to close it down, Porton has survived them all - proof of the military's enduring fascination with poison gases, even in a country which now officially has no chemical weapons.

"It was in January 1916 that the War Office compulsorily purchased an initial 3,000 acres of downland between the tiny villages of Porton and Idmiston, and began to clear a site for what was then known as the War Department Experimental Ground."

...

"This was a crucial admission. No matter how loudly the British, or any other nation, renounced gas warfare in public, in secret they felt bound to give their scientists a free hand to go on devising the deadliest weapons they could, on the grounds that they had first to be invented, before counter-measures could be prepared.

"Porton Down made use of this logic between 1919 and 1939 to carry out a mass of offensive research, developing gas grenades and hand contamination bombs; a toxic air smoke bomb charged with a new arsenic code-named "DM" was tested; anti-tank weapons were produced; and Porton developed an aircraft spray tank capable of dispersing mustard gas from a height of 15,000 feet. At the same time the weapons of the First World War - the Livens projector, the mortar, the chemical shell and even the cylinder - were all modified and improved."

Several paragraphs later, "Mustard gas, 'the King of Gases', employed the most human volunteers. Just one experiment in 1924 involved forty men."

And, In October 1929, "two subjects received copious applications of crude Mustard which practically covered the inner aspect of the forearm. After wiping the liquid mustard off roughly with a small tuft of grass the ointment (seven weeks old) was lightly rubbed with the fingers over the area ..."

This is just a random selection of the sort of work which was done in Britain. Similar research was being carried out throughout the world. Italy established a Servizio Chemico Militate in 1923 with an extensive proving ground in the north of the country. The main French chemical warfare installation was the Atelier de Pyrotechnic du Bouchet near Paris. The Japanese Navy began work on chemical weapons in 1923, and the Army followed suit in 1925. In Germany, despite the fact that Haber's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute had been closed down in 1919, limited defensive work continued, later to form the basis of Germany's offensive effort. And in 1924, the Military-Chemical Administration of the Red Army was established and Russian chemical troops were stationed at each provincial army headquarters.

Chemical weapons were not merely researched and developed - they were used. At the beginning of 1919 the British employed the "M" device (which produced clouds of arsenic smoke) at Archangel when they intervened in the Russian Civil War, dropping the canisters from aeroplanes into the dense forests. The anti-Bolshevik White Army was equipped with British gas shells, and the Red army was also alleged to have used chemicals.

Later in 1919, Foulkes was dispatched to India, and in August urged the War Office to use chemicals against the Afghans and rebellious tribesmen on the North-West Frontier: "Ignorance, lack of instruction and discipline and the absence of protection on the part of Afghans and tribesmen will undoubtedly enhance the casualty producing value of mustard gas in frontier fighting."

.....

"Finally, in May 1925, under the auspices of the League of Nations, a conference on the international arms trade was convened in Geneva. Led by the United States, the delegates agreed to try and tackle the problem of poison gas, "with", as the Americans put it, "the hope of reducing the barbarity of modern warfare." After a month of wrangling in legal and military committees - during which the Polish delegation farsightedly suggested that they also ban the use of germ weapons, then little more than a theory - the delegates came together on 17th June to sign what remains to this day the strongest legal constraint on chemical and biological warfare:

The undersigned Plenipotentiaries, in the name of their respective Governments:

Whereas the use of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices, has been justly condemned by the general opinion of the civilized world; and
Whereas the prohibition of such use has been declared in Treaties to which the majority of Powers of the world are Parties; and
To the end that this prohibition shall be universally accepted as a part of International Law, binding alike the conscience and practice of nations;
Declare: That the High Contracting Parties, so far as they are not already Parties to Treaties prohibiting such use, accept this prohibition, agree to extend this prohibition to the use of bacteriological methods of warfare and agree to be bound as between themselves according to thc terms of this declaration..."

Thirty-eight powers signed the Geneva Protocol, among them the United States, the British Empire, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada; the fledgling USSR did not attend.

"The signing of the Geneva Protocol of 1925" as one expert has put it, "was the high-water mark of the hostility of public opinion towards chemical warfare."

Unfortunately, the anti-gas lobby had underestimated the strength of the interests ranged against them. Merely signing the Protocol was not enough to make it binding - individual governments had to ratify it. In many cases this meant a time lag of at least a year, and it was in this period that the supporters of chemical weapons struck back.

The United States Chemical Warfare Service [CWS] launched a highly effective lobby. They enlisted the support of veterans' associations and of the American Chemical Society (whose Executive declared that "the prohibition of chemical warfare meant the abandonment of humane methods for the old horrors of battle"). As has often happened since, the fight for chemical weapons was represented as a fight for general military preparedness. Senators joined the CWS campaign, among them the Chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs who opened his attack on ratification in the Senate debate with a reference to the 1922 Washington Treaty: "I think it is fair to say that in 1922 there was much of hysteria and much of misinformation concerning chemical warfare." Other Senators rose to speak approvingly of resolutions which they had received attacking the Geneva Protocol - from the Association of Military Surgeons, the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, the Reserve Officers Association of the United States and the Military Order of the World War. Under such heavy fire, the State Department saw no alternative but to withdraw the Protocol, and reintroduce it at a more favorable moment. It was not to be until 1970, forty-five years after the Geneva conference, that the Protocol was again submitted to the Senate for ratification; it took another five years for this to be achieved.

Japan followed America's example and refused to ratify (they finally did so in May 1970). In Europe, the various countries eyed one another cautiously. France ratified first, in 1926. Two years later in 1928, Italy followed suit and a fortnight after her, the Soviet Union declared that she, too, considered herself bound by the Protocol. Only after Germany ratified in 1929 did Britain feel able at last to accept the Protocol: on 9 April 1930, five years after the Conference, Britain at last fell into line.

Many of the states which ratified the Protocol - including France, Great Britain and the USSR - did so only after adding two significant reservations: (1) that the agreement would not be considered binding unless the country they were fighting had also ratified the Protocol; (2) that if any other country attacked them using chemical or biological weapons, they reserved the right to reply in kind.

.....

This "defensive" work included "improvements to many First World War weapons, including gas shells, mortar bombs, the Livens Projector and toxic smoke generators" and the development of "apparatus for mustard gas spray from aircraft, bombs of many types, airburst mustard gas shells, gas grenades and weapons for attacking tanks." The various inventions were tested in north Wales, Scotland, and in installations scattered throughout the Empire, notably northern India, Australia and the Middle East.

The commitment by most of the world's governments never to initiate the use of poison gas did not stop research: it simply made the whole subject that much more sensitive, and thus more secret. In 1928, the Germans began to collaborate with the Russians in a series of top secret tests called "Project Tomka" at a site in the Soviet Union about twenty kilometers west of Volsk. For the next five years, around thirty German experts lived and worked alongside "a rather larger number of Soviet staff," mainly engaged in testing mustard gas. The security measures surrounding Project Tomka "were such that any of its participants who spoke about it to outsiders risked capital punishment."

In Japan, experimental production of mustard gas was begun in 1928 at the Tandanoumi Arsenal. Six years later the Japanese were manufacturing a ton of Lewisite a week; by 1937 output had risen to two tons per day. Extensive testing - including trials in tropical conditions on Formosa in 1930 - resulted in the development of a fearsome array of gas weapons: rockets able to deliver ten liters of agent up to two miles; devices for emitting a "gas fog"; flame throwers modified to hurl jets of hydrogen cyanide; mustard spray bombs which released streams of gas while gently floating to Earth attached to parachutes; remotely-controlled contamination trailers capable of laying mustard in strips seven meters wide; and the "Masuka Dan", a hand-carried anti-tank weapon loaded with a kilogram of hydrogen cyanide."

And then, "There is now little doubt that from 1937 onwards the Japanese made extensive use of poison gas in their war against the Chinese. In October 1937 China made a formal protest to the League of Nations."

.......

"The Italians made use of chemicals in their invasion of Abyssinia in much the same way. In 1935 and 1936, 700 tons of gas were shipped out, most of it for use by the Italian air force. First came torpedo-shaped mustard bombs."

........

"The noise of fourteen thousand aeroplanes advancing in open order. But in the Kurfurstendamm and the Eight Arrondissement, the explosion of anthrax bombs is hardly louder than the popping of a paper bag." Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932).

The history of chemical and biological warfare has thrown up some strange stories, but few are as bizarre as those which surround a small island off the northwest coast of Scotland. It lies in its own well-protected bay, close to the fishing village of Aultbea - an outcrop of rock, well-covered with heather, three hundred feet high, one and a half miles long and a mile wide.

"It takes about twenty minutes to reach by fishing boat from Aultbea. As you draw closer it's possible to make out the shapes of hundreds of sea birds nesting on its craggy shore-line. Their calls are the only sounds which break the silence. Once upon a time the island is said to have supported eleven families. Today, the only sign of human habitation is the ruin of a crofter's cottage.

"This utterly abandoned island is Gruinard. Thanks to a series of secret wartime experiments - the full details of which are still classified - no one is allowed to live, or even land here."

Again, later in the chapter, "Anthrax had long been considered the most practicable filling for a biological weapon. A decade earlier, Aldous Huxley had predicted a war involving anthrax bombs. Even before that, in 1925, Winston Churchill wrote of 'pestilences methodically prepared and deliberately launched upon man and beast...' Blight to destroy crops, Anthrax to slay horses and cattle, Plague to poison not armies only but whole districts - such are the lines alone which military science is remorselessly advancing."

........

"In July 1942 the Chinese allegations were passed on to Winston Churchill. Two days later he had them placed on the agenda of the Pacific War Council.

"The growing alarm in London and Washington that the Japanese were on the verge of initiating biological warfare gave an added urgency to the first anthrax bomb tests on Gruinard that summer. Up to then the Allied germ warfare effort had lagged significantly behind the Japanese, but from 1942 onwards the Anglo-American biological programme began to vie with the Manhattan Project for top development priority.

The British biological warfare project was born on 12 February 1934 at a meeting of the Chiefs of Staff. For two years, a Disarmament Conference in Geneva had been discussing means of finally ridding the world of chemical weapons. Germ warfare had also been included, and in view of this, Sir Maurice Hankey told the Service Chiefs, he "was wondering whether it might not be right to consider the possibilities and potentialities of this form of war."

From the same chapter, "In October the CID approved, and Hankey became Chairman of the newly-created Microbiological Warfare Committee.

"In March 1937 the Committee submitted its first report, specifically on plague, anthrax and foot-and-mouth disease. Though they concluded that 'for the time being ... the practical difficulties of introducing bacteria into this country on a large scale were such as to render an attempt unlikely', they urged that stocks of serum be built up to meet any potential threat. From 1937 to 1940, Britain began to stockpile vaccines, fungicides and insecticides against biological attack.

"In April 1938 the Committee produced a second report, and in June Hanley circulated 'Proposals for an Emergency Bacteriological Service to operate in War': the emphasis was on defence, the tone still low-key."

Winston Churchill in a "Most Secret" minute to the Chiefs of Staff. 6 July 1944:

"... It may be several weeks or even months before I shall ask you to drench Germany with poison gas, and if we do it, let us do it one hundred percent. In the meanwhile, I want the matter studied in cold blood by sensible people and not by the particular set of psalm-singing uniformed defeatists which one runs across now here now there."

Again from A Higher Form Of Killing,

"At the end of the war, the British alone had manufactured 70 million gas masks, 40 million tins of anti-gas ointment and stockpiled 40,000 tons of bleach for decontamination; 10 million leaflets had been prepared for immediate distribution in the event of a chemical attack, and by a long-standing arrangement the BBC would have interrupted programmes with specially prepared gas warnings. Contingency planning ran down to the smallest details."

...

"On Christmas Eye 1949, Moscow Radio announced that twelve Japanese prisoners of war were to be charged with waging biological warfare in China. The Russians claimed that the Japanese had been producing vast quantities of bacteria, and had planned to wage biological warfare against the Allies. The allegations became more specific the next week. Three days later Moscow Radio claimed that Detachment 731 of the Kwantung Army had used prisoners of war for horrific biological warfare experiments, and then, the following day, that one of the prisoners had confessed to his interrogators that the unit had been established on the orders of the Emperor himself. On 29 December Pravda came to the point. The United States was protecting other Japanese war criminals, and engaging in biological warfare research herself."

......

"In the early days after the Second World War it was extremely difficult for the British or Americans to check many of the astonishing claims they came upon in the captured German flies. They concluded, however, that there was more than adequate evidence that the Soviet Union had been, and was still, engaged in some form of biological warfare research. Although little was known of the nature of contemporary work, it was thought that the Russians maintained some six sites for biological warfare research, most of them in the Urals.

The British and Americans recognized that their intelligence was inadequate. But the evidence was judged more than sufficient to justify continuing similar work in the West. When they came to assess the vulnerability of the United Kingdom to a potential germ attack they discovered that London, containing over 12 percent of the population, was only 500 miles from airbases in Soviet-occupied eastern Germany. When the Joint Technical Warfare committee assessed how easy a retaliatory strike with biological weapons might be, they realized that the civilian targets against which bacterial devices would be most effective were dispersed across the huge expanse of the Soviet Union. Even using British Empire airbases in Nicosia (Cyprus) and Peshawar (India), there was only one Soviet city of more than 100,000 population within 500 miles range, and only thirty-five such centers of population within 1,000 miles range. Clearly, at the very least, there should be a major research programme aimed at developing some defense. Intelligence, it was freely admitted, was inadequate. But no such reticence found its ways into the stories which began appearing in the press,

RUSSIA REPORTED PRODUCING 'DISEASE AGENTS' FOR WAR

In eight "military bacterial stations", one of them on a ghost ship in the Arctic Ocean, the Soviet Union is mass-producing enormous quantities of "disease agents" for aggressive use against the soldiers and civilians of the free world. In particular, the Red Army is stockpiling two specific "biological weapons", with which it expects to strike a strategic blow and win any future war decisively, even before it gets started officially.

.....

"There seems little doubt that the Soviet Union did conduct extensive research into germ warfare in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It was felt legitimate to conclude that such research was unlikely to have stopped at some arbitrary point after the Second World War. But firm intelligence to suggest the nature of the work was notably lacking.

"For most of the post-war years military microbiologists developed 'retaliatory' germ weapons against threats they did not know to exist, and then attempted to develop defenses not against the weapons of a potential future enemy, but against the diseases they themselves had refined."

.........

Certainly during the 1950s, the Russians were expecting chemical and biological weapons to be used against them by the West. In 1956 Marshall Zhukov told the Twentieth Party Congress: "Future war, if they unleash it, will be characterized by the massive use of air-forces, various rocket weapons, and various means of mass destruction, such as atomic, thermonuclear, chemical and bacteriological weapons." Zhukov did not say that the Soviet Union planned to use these weapons herself. By 1960 the head of US Army Research was telling a Congressional inquiry: "We know that the Soviets are putting a high priority on the development of lethal and non-lethal weapons, and that this weapons stockpile consists of about one-sixth chemical munitions." If it was true that one sixth of the total amount of weapons available to the Soviet Union was made up of chemical shells and bombs, it represented an alarming threat to the United States and her NATO allies. Some years after this estimate had concluded that the United States was "highly vulnerable" to germ warfare attack. They pointed out that since the end of the war very little new work had been done to produce a biological bomb. It would, they believed, take "approximately one year of intensive effort" before America could wage biological warfare. True, there was no hard evidence that any potential enemy had developed a biological weapon, but could the United States afford to take the risk of not having her own, should one later be developed elsewhere?

The argument was persuasive. In October 1950 the Secretary for Defense accepted a proposal to build a factory to manufacture disease. Congress secretly voted ninety million dollars, to be spent renovating a Second World War Arsenal near the small cotton town of Pine Bluff, in the mid-west state of Arkansas. The new biological warfare plant had ten stories, three of them built underground. It was equipped with ten fermentors for the mass production of bacteria at short notice, although the plant was never used to capacity. Local people in the town of Pine Bluff had some idea of the purpose of the new army factory being built down the road, but in general there was, as the Pentagon put it later "a reluctance to publicize the program."

The first biological weapons were ready the following year, although they were designed to attack not humans but plants. In 1950 Camp Detrick [Maryland] scientists had submitted a Top Secret report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on work they had carried out on a "pigeon bomb". In an attempt to discover a technique of destroying an enemy's food supplies, the scientists had dusted the feathers of homing pigeons with cereal rust spores, a disease which attacks crops. The researchers discovered that even after a one hundred mile flight, enough spores remained on the birds' feathers to infect oats left in their cages. Then they had experimented in dropping pigeons out of aircraft over the Virgin Islands. Finally, they dispensed with live birds altogether and simply filled a "cluster bomb" with contaminated turkey feathers. In each of these bizarre tests the men from Camp Derrick concluded that enough of the disease survived the journey to infect the target crop. In 1951 the first anti-crop bombs were placed in production for the US Air Force.

The United States had established the first peace-time biological weapon production line.

.....

Fort Detrick scientists discovered a Trinidadian who had been infected with yellow fever in 1954 and had later recovered. They took serum from the Trinidadian and injected it into monkeys. From the monkeys they removed infected plasma, into which they dropped mosquito larvae. The infected mosquitoes were then encouraged to bite laboratory mice and pass on the disease. This ingenious technique of public health research in reverse worked. The mice duly contracted yellow fever.

Laboratories were built at Fort Detrick where colonies of the aedes aegypti mosquitoes were fed on a diet of syrup and blood. They laid their eggs on moist paper towels. The eggs would later turn into larvae, and eventually into a new generation of mosquitoes. The Fort Detrick laboratories could produce half a million mosquitoes a month, and by the late fifties a plan had been drawn up for a plant to produce one hundred and thirty million mosquitoes a month. Once the mosquitoes had been infected with yellow fever, the Chemical Corps planned to fire them at an enemy from "cluster bombs" dropped from aircraft and from the warhead of the "Sergeant" missile.

To test the feasibility of this extraordinary weapon, the army needed to know whether the mosquitoes could be relied upon to bite people. During 1956 they carried out a series of tests in which uninfected female mosquitoes were released first into a residential area of Savannah, Georgia, and then dropped from an aircraft over a Florida bombing range. "Within a day", according to a secret Chemical Corps report, "the mosquitoes had spread a distance of between one and two miles, and bitten many people". The effects of releasing infected mosquitoes can only be guessed at. Yellow fever, as the Chemical Corps noted, is "a highly dangerous disease", at the very least causing high temperatures, headache, and vomiting. In about a third of the recorded cases at that time, yellow fever had proved fatal.

Nor were mosquitoes the only insects conscripted into the service of the army. In 1956 the army began investigating the feasibility of breeding fifty million fleas a week, presumably to spread plague. By the end of the fifties the Fort Detrick laboratories were said to contain mosquitoes infected with yellow fever, malaria and dengue (an acute viral disease also known as Breakbone Fever for which there is no cure); fleas infected with plague; ticks contaminated with tularemia; and flies infected with cholera, anthrax and dysentery.

......

"The Vietnam War might have represented the perfect field laboratory for men like General Rothschild to test their theories about seeding clouds with anthrax. But there was by now sufficient evidence of the way in which American and South Vietnamese troops would also be affected to rule it out. Instead the germ warfare laboratories concentrated their efforts on the development of incapacitating diseases which would bring an enemy down with sickness for days and weeks. For some years the Fort Detrick laboratories had been working on enterotoxins causing food poisoning, on the military theory, as one proponent put it, that "a guy shitting away his stomach can't aim a rifle at you". By 1964, they believed a weapon based on the theory was feasible. But by now, another disabling disease looked a better candidate."

.......

"The results of the continuing research could be seen in the maps of Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, part of which were marked "permanent bio-contaminated area", after anthrax experiments in the mid-sixties. In the Pacific more tests were carried out with "hot" agents - the jargon for real biological weapons - on a number of deserted islands. The results of the tests are still classified on the grounds that they reveal weaknesses in American defenses. By March 1967 Fort Detrick had developed a bacteriological warhead for the Sergeant missile capable of delivering disease up to 100 miles behind enemy lines.

The Defense Department had justified the accelerating rush into biological weapons in the early sixties by saying that there was no prospect of any treaty being arrived at which would be acceptable to the United States. Since any argument to ban biological weapons was unlikely, they argued, the United States was bound to continue her research work.

"They were wrong. In 1968 the subject of chemical and biological warfare came up for discussion at the standing Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee in Geneva. Previous attempts to get agreement on an international treaty to ban the weapons had floundered, because of an insistence that both chemical and biological weapons be included in the same treaty. Since gas weapons had already been used in war, been proved effective, and were stockpiled on a large scale, they would be much more difficult to outlaw than germ weapons, which as far as could satisfactorily be proved had never been used in war. The British proposed that the two subjects be separated, and introduced a draft Biological Weapons Convention which would commit all signatory states to renouncing the weapons for all time.

There was heavy initial opposition from the Russians and their eastern European allies, and little overt enthusiasm from Washington. The British and Canadians, who had shared their germ warfare expertise with the Americans, nevertheless argued to President Nixon that an international treaty was now a real possibility. What was needed, they said, was a gesture of goodwill.

Nixon was already under pressure on the subject of chemical and biological weapons, and facing mounting domestic opposition. On 25 November 1969 he issued a statement: "Mankind", he said, "already carries in its own hands too many of the seeds of its own destruction." The United States was taking a step in the cause of world peace. "The United States", he went on, "shall renounce the use of lethal biological agents and weapons, and all other methods of biological warfare." It was a brave gesture, which proved the spur for which the British had been hoping.

The laborious negotiations in the Palais des Nations, Geneva, received a considerable boost with Nixon's announcement. Within two years the Soviet Union had abandoned its opposition to a germ warfare convention. On 4 April 1972 representatives of the two countries signed an undertaking that they would "never in any circumstances develop, produce, stockpile, or otherwise acquire or retain any biological weapons." Over eighty other countries followed suit. The Biological Weapons Convention was a triumph, because unlike many other arms control agreements which merely restricted the development and deployment of new weapons, it removed one category of armaments from the world arsenals altogether.

By the time agreement was finally signed, the research which had begun with a small group of biologists pondering their contribution to the war against Hitler had produced a host of diseases capable of spreading sickness throughout the world. In addition to infections which would destroy wheat and rice, anthrax, yellow fever, tularemia, brucellosis, Q fever and Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis had all been "standardized" for use against man. Plans had been laid for their use behind enemy lines in the event of another war in Europe.

At Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas the machinery which for twenty years had been mass-producing disease was used to turn the germs into a harmless sludge, which was spread upon the ground as an army public relations officer explained what a good fertilizer it would make. And, on a small, bleak island off the Scottish coast the warning signs were due to be repainted.

.....

Despite the fact that such major powers as France and China have still (by early 1982) not signed it, largely because they consider the verification procedures to be inadequate, the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention was a major achievement. One of the provisions of the treaty committed the eighty-seven signatory countries to "continue negotiations on good faith" with a view to obtaining a similar agreement to ban chemical weapons. The United Nations General Assembly optimistically dubbed the 1970s "The Disarmament Decade". In the field of chemical warfare it might more properly have been named "The Distrust Decade".

......

In January 1978, a correspondent with Reuters' news agency reported from NATO headquarters that "scientific experts" had informed him that the Russians were developing "three horrific new diseases for warfare …. Lassa fever, which according to the sources, kills 35 out of every 100 people it strikes; Ebola fever, which kills 70 out of every 100; and the deadly Marburg fever (Green Monkey Disease)".

Not surprisingly, the effect of these allegations was to throw serious doubt on the value of attempting to negotiate a second treaty with the Soviet Union to ban gas warfare. Indeed, in the summer of 1978 a story appeared suggesting that Nixon's original decision to stop developing new chemical and biological weapons had been the result of work by Soviet spies. "According to US intelligence officials", said the NEW YORK TIMES, "the Soviet Union attempted to influence then-President Richard Nixon in 1969 to halt chemical and biological weapons development by transmitting information through double agents working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation." The paper maintained that the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, had conveyed the information to Nixon personally. While none of Nixon's White House staff was able to recall having been given any information about chemical or biological weapons by FBI agents, the NEW YORK TIMES report was sufficient nonetheless to add to the growing disquiet over what the Russians might be up to.

Soon there was a positive cascade of stories about Soviet preparations for germ warfare. A Polish army officer claimed to have been told that KGB specialists in biological warfare had been posted to Cuba. Then in October 1979 came perhaps the most sensational allegation of all.

The fledgling British news magazine Now! splashed across its front cover the headline "Exclusive. Russia's secret germ warfare disaster". It reported that "Hundreds of people are reported to have died, and thousands to have suffered serious injury as a result of an accident which took place this summer in a factory involved in the production of bacteriological weapons in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk". The Soviet authorities had attempted to hush up the accident, said the magazine, but information had been obtained from a "traveller who was in the city at the time". This "traveller" claimed that bodies of the dead were delivered to their relatives in sealed coffins. Those few who had managed to glimpse the bodies had described them as being "covered in brown patches".

......

In the latter half of the 1970s there emerged a group of military theorists who believed the threat of Russian chemical warfare to be one of the great unrecognized dangers facing the West. In increasingly strident tones they began to argue in favor of chemical rearmament within NATO. One of the more restrained analyses of the Soviet threat was made by Professor John Erickson, an acknowledged authority on the Soviet Army.

Erickson estimated that there were eighty thousand specialists troops in the Red Army, commanded by Lieutenant General V.K. Pikalov, whose battlefield job it was to decontaminate men, machines and weaponry of chemicals. There were a thousand ranges where Soviet troops trained to fight on a contaminated battlefield. Soviet tanks and armored cars were equipped with elaborate seals and pressurization systems to keep out gas. Chemical training was taken so seriously that Soviet soldiers, he discovered, had been burned by real gas used in training.

Erickson noted that the Russians "constantly emphasize the likely use by the enemy - presumably NATO - of chemical weapons", yet NATO, as Erickson remarked, had only a small number of such weapons. Furthermore, Russian training emphasized defense not only against nerve gas, but also against blood and lung agents first developed during the First World War, and now unimportant in the NATO stockpile. Erickson decided that "the attraction of the chemical weapon would appear to be growing for the Soviet Command".

.......

The conviction was growing among the "hawks" in NATO that the decision to stop expanding the chemical arsenal had given a dangerous hostage to fortune. In 1980 the British opened a purpose designed 7,000 acre chemical warfare "Battle Run" training area in the Wiltshire hills alongside Porton Down. The US Army opened a specialist chemical training school in Alabama. The US Chemical Corps, reduced to 2,000 in the early 1970s, was built up to nearly 6,000 by 1981.

In 1979 NATO commanders played out of their biennial war games simulating the outbreak of World War Three. Code-named "Wintex", the exercise involved only the generals, civil servants and politicians who would make the critical decisions about how the war should be fought. In Operations Rooms in Europe and North America they acted out how they would respond to an escalating international crisis which finally pitted NATO and Warsaw Pact against each other in open war. As hostilities intensified, someone in NATO headquarters fed new information into the war plan being flashed to the decision makers in their concrete bunkers: the Soviet army had launched an attack with chemical weapons. What should be the NATO response? The choice alarmed everyone - both the small NATO members who disliked gas but wanted to avoid nuclear war at all costs, and the NATO nuclear powers, where many felt that the appropriate response was an attack with battlefield nuclear weapons, which itself ran the danger of inviting full scale Soviet nuclear counter-strike.

The then NATO Supreme Commander, General Alexander Haig, soon to become President Reagan's Secretary of State, told reporters in 1978 that NATO's ability to wage war with chemicals was "very weak". "Sometime in the near future," he said, "this will have to be reassessed". His successor as Supreme Commander went further. "We ought to be able to respond with chemical weapons," he said, "and they ought to know we have that capacity to respond." Ten years after Nixon's decision to suspend the manufacture of chemical weapons, by the end of the so-called Disarmament Decade, the advocates of chemical rearmament included some of the most senior figures in the military establishment.

There was already a weapon developed to make up for the deficiencies the generals saw all around them. The idea was simple, and, by the 1970s, some twenty years old.

......

Increasing cynicism about Soviet intentions had already led in the late 1970s to a more aggressive stance. Remembering the opposition to chemical weapons which had arisen during the late 1960s, and recognizing that any new generation would need to be based in Europe, the Pentagon began discussions with the British. Although initial negotiations with the Callaghan government came to nothing, discussions on the possible basing of chemical weapons in Britain were resumed after the 1979 election brought Margaret Thatcher to power. By the spring of 1980 the British Defence Secretary was publicly ruminating about the size and power of the Soviet chemical arsenal. That summer the British held a series of meetings with their American counterparts which resulted in British support for Pentagon proposals to begin producing a new generation of gas weapons. By December 1980 the British Defence Secretary had been finally converted to the cause of chemical rearmament.

Even before the T2 allegations, the climate had changed so much that in 1980 the Pentagon did not include proposals for a new binary gas weapon plant in its request for funds for the coming year. There was no need. When the budget proposal came before Congress for approval, eager politicians endorsed a suggestion to write into the budget plans to begin work on a new factory capable of turning out 20,000 rounds of 155 mm binary nerve agent shells every month. The entire debate in both houses of Congress took less than three hours.

By the time the T2 allegations surfaced even Richard Nixon, the man who seemed to have halted the chemical arms race in 1969, believed that his efforts had been in vain and that the Russians had rearmed while the United States stood still. In the past governments have justified continuing gas and germ research by pointing to the weapons they believe the enemy to possess. Plans for. chemical rearmament in the West are already well advanced. Unless disarmament negotiations suddenly bear fruit, the present climate of suspicion may provide the perfect culture in which to breed a new generation of weapons.

REPORT FROM IRON MOUNTAIN

In 1967, Report From Iron Mountain On The Possibility And Desirability Of Peace was published.

The report said, in part:

"As we have indicated, the preeminence of the concept of war as the principal organizing force in most societies has been insufficiently appreciated. This is also true of its extensive effects throughout the many non-military activities of society. These effects are less apparent in complex industrial societies like our own than in primitive cultures, the activities of which can be more easily and fully comprehended."

Another possible surrogate for the control of potential enemies of society is the reintroduction, in some form consistent with modern technology and political processes, of slavery. Up to now, this has been suggested only in fiction, notably in the works of Wells, Huxley, Orwell, and others engaged in the imaginative anticipation of the sociology of the future. But the fantasies projected in Brave New World and 1984 have seemed less and less implausible over the years since their publication. The traditional association of slavery with ancient pre-industrial cultures should not blind us to its adaptability to advanced forms of social organization, nor should its equally traditional incompatibility with Western moral and economic values. It is entirely possible that the development of a sophisticated form of slavery may be an absolute prerequisite for social control in a world at peace. As a practical matter, conversion of the code of military discipline to a euphemized form of enslavement would entail surprisingly little revision; the logical first step would be the adoption of some form of "universal" military service.

From the Iron Mountain report, under the heading of Ecological,

Considering the shortcomings of war as a mechanism of selective population control, it might appear that devising substitutes for this function should be comparatively simple. Schematically this is so, but the problem of timing the transition to a new ecological balancing device make the feasibility of substitution less certain.

It must be remembered that the limitation of war in this function is entirely eugenic. War has not been genetically progressive. But as a system of gross population control to preserve the species it cannot fairly be faulted. And, as has been pointed out, the nature of war is itself in transition. Current trends in warfare - the increasing strategic bombing of civilians and the greater military importance now attached to the destruction of sources of supply (as opposed to purely "military" bases and personnel) - strongly suggest that a truly qualitative improvement is in the making. Assuming the war system is to continue, it is more than probable that the regressively selective quality of war will have been reversed, as its victims become more genetically representative of their societies.

There is no question but that a universal requirement that procreation be limited to the products of artificial insemination would provide a fully adequate substitute control for population levels. Such a reproductive system would, of course, have the added advantage of being susceptible of direct eugenic management. Its predictable further development - conception and embryonic growth taking place wholly under laboratory conditions - would extend these controls to the logical conclusion. The ecological function of war under these circumstances would not only be superseded but surpassed in effectiveness.

The indicated intermediate step - total control of conception with a variant of the ubiquitous "pill" via water supplies or certain essential foodstuffs, offset by a controlled "antidote" - is already under development. There would appear to be no foreseeable need to revert to any of the outmoded practices referred to in the previous section (infanticide, etc.) as there might have been if the possibility of transition to peace had arisen two generations ago.

The real question here, therefore, does not concern the viability of this war substitute, but the political problems involved in bringing it about. It cannot be established while the war system is still in effect. The reason for this is simple: excess population is war material. As long as any society must contemplate even a remote possibility of war, it must maintain a maximum supportable population, even when so doing critically aggravates an economic liability. This is paradoxical, in view of war's role in reducing excess population, but it is readily understood. War controls the general population level, but the ecological interest of any single society lies in maintaining its hegemony vis-a-vis other societies. The obvious analogy can be seen in a free-enterprise economy. Practices damaging to the society as a whole - both competitive and monopolistic - are abetted by the conflicting economic motives of individual capital interests. The obvious precedent can be found in the seemingly irrational political difficulties which have blocked universal adoption of simple birth-control methods. Nations desperately in need of increasing unfavorable production-consumption ratios are nevertheless unwilling to gamble their possible military requirements of twenty years hence for this purpose. Unilateral population control, as practised in ancient Japan and in other isolated societies, is out of the question in today's world.

Since the eugenic solution cannot be achieved until the transition to the peace system takes place, why not wait? One must qualify the inclination to agree. As we noted earlier, a real possibility of an unprecedented global crisis of insufficiency exists today, which the war system may not be able to forestall. If this should come to pass before an agreed-upon transition to peace were completed, the result might be irrevocably disastrous. There is clearly no solution to this dilemma; it is a risk which must be taken. But it tends to support the view that if a decision is made to eliminate the war system, it were better done sooner than later.

THE CLUB OF ROME

The 1972 document entitled The Limits To Growth - A Report For The Club Of Rome's Project On The Predicament Of Mankind, says:

"The problems U Thant mentions - the arms race, environmental deterioration, the population explosion and economic stagnation - are often cited as the central, long-term problems of modern man. Many people believe that the future course of human society, perhaps even the survival of human society, depends on the speed and effectiveness with which the world responds to these issues. And yet only a small fraction of the world's population is actively concerned with understanding these problems or seeking their solutions." The report goes on, [quoting:]

The following conclusions have emerged from our work so far. We are by no means the first group to have stated them. For the past several decades, people who have looked at the world with a global, long-term perspective have reached similar conclusions. Nevertheless, the vast majority of policy-makers seems to be actively pursuing goals that are inconsistent with these results.

Our conclusions are:

1. If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limit to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.

2. It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on Earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential.

3. If the world's people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success.

These conclusions are so far-reaching and raise so many questions for further study that we are quite frankly overwhelmed by the enormity of the job that must be done. We hope that this book will serve to interest other people, in many fields of study and in many countries of the world, to raise the space and time horizons of their concerns and to join us in understanding and preparing for a period of great transition - the transition from growth to global equilibrium. [End quoting.]

Conclusion:

How do we, the sponsors of this project, evaluate the report? We cannot speak definitively for all our colleagues in The Club of Rome, for there are differences of interest, emphasis, and judgment among them. But, despite the preliminary nature of the report, the limits of some of its data, and the inherent complexity of the world system it attempts to describe, we are convinced of the importance of its main conclusions. We believe that it contains a message of much deeper significance than a mere comparison of dimensions, a message relevant to all aspects of the present human predicament. Although we can here express only our preliminary views, recognizing that they still require a great deal of reflection and ordering, we are in agreement on the following points:

1. We are convinced that realization of the quantitative restraints of the world environment and of the tragic consequences of an overshoot is essential to the initiation of new forms of thinking that will lead to a fundamental revision of human behavior and, by implication, of the entire fabric of present-day society.

It is only now that, having begun to understand something of the interactions between demographic growth and economic growth, and having reached unprecedented levels in both, man is forced to take account of the limited dimensions of his planet and the ceilings to his presence and activity on it. For the first time, it has become vital to inquire into the cost of unrestricted material growth and to consider alternatives to its continuation.

2. We are further convinced that demographic pressure in the world has already attained such a high level, and is moreover so unequally distributed, that this alone must compel mankind to seek a state of equilibrium on our planet.

Under-populated areas still exist; but, considering the world as a whole, the critical point in population growth is approaching, if it has not already been reached. There is of course no unique optimum, long-term population level; rather, there are a series of balances between population levels, social and material standards, personal freedom, and other elements making up the quality of life. Given the finite and diminishing stock of non-renewable resources and the finite space of our globe, the principle must be generally accepted that growing numbers of people will eventually imply a lower standard of living and a more complex problematique. On the other hand, no fundamental human value would be endangered by a leveling off of demographic growth.

3. We recognize that world equilibrium can become a reality only if the lot of the so-called developing countries is substantially improved, both in absolute terms and relative to the economically developed nations, and we affirm that this improvement can be achieved only through a global strategy.

Short of a world effort, today's already explosive gaps and inequalities will continue to grow larger. The outcome can only be disaster, whether due to the selfishness of individual countries that continue to act purely in their own interests, or to a power struggle between the developing and developed nations. The world system is simply not ample enough nor generous enough to accommodate much longer such egocentric and conflictive behavior by its inhabitants. The closer we come to the material limits to the planet, the more difficult this problem will be to tackle.

4. We affirm that the global issue of development is, however, so closely interlinked with other global issues that an overall strategy must be evolved to attack all major problems, including in particular those of man's relationship with his environment.

With world population doubling time a little more than 30 years, and decreasing, society will be hard put to meet the needs and expectations of so many more people in so short a period. We are likely to try to satisfy these demands by overexploiting our natural environment and further impairing the life-supporting capacity of the Earth. Hence, on both sides of the man-environment equation, the situation will tend to worsen dangerously. We cannot expect technological solutions alone to get us out of this vicious circle. The strategy for dealing with the two key issues of development and environment must be conceived as a joint one

5. We recognize that the complex world problematique is to a great extent composed of elements that cannot be expressed in measurable terms. Nevertheless, we believe that the predominantly quantitative approach used in this report is an indispensable tool for understanding the operation of the problematique. And we hope that such knowledge can lead to a mastery of its elements.

Although all major world issues are fundamentally linked, no method has yet been discovered to tackle the whole effectively. The approach we have adopted can be extremely useful in reformulating our thinking about the entire human predicament. It permits us to define the balances that must exist within human society, and between human society and its habitat, and to perceive the consequences that may ensue when such balances are disrupted.

6. We are unanimously convinced that rapid, radical redressment of the present unbalanced and dangerously deteriorating world situation is the primary task facing humanity.

Our present situation is so complex and is so much a reflection of man's multiple activities, however, that no combination of purely technical, economic, or legal measures and devices can bring substantial improvement. Entirely new approaches are required to redirect society toward goals of equilibrium rather than growth. Such a reorganization will involve a supreme effort of understanding, imagination, and political and moral resolve. We believe that the effort is feasible and we hope that this publication will help to mobilize forces to make it possible.

7. This supreme effort is a challenge for our generation. It cannot be passed on to the next. The effort must be resolutely undertaken without delay, and significant redirection must be achieved during this decade.

Although the effort may initially focus on the implications of growth, particularly of population growth, the totality of the world problematique will soon have to be addressed. We believe in fact that the need will quickly become evident for social innovation to match technical change, for radical reform of institutions and political processes at all levels the highest, that of world polity. We are confident that our generation will accept this challenge if we understand the tragic consequences that inaction may bring.

8. We have no doubt that if mankind is to embark on a new course, concerted international measures and joint long-term planning will be necessary on a scale and scope without precedent.

Such an effort calls for joint endeavor by all peoples, whatever their culture, economic system, or level of development. But the major responsibility must rest with the more developed nations, not because they have more vision or humanity, but because, having propagated the growth syndrome, they are still at the fountainhead of the progress that sustains it. As greater insights into the condition and workings of the world system are developed, these nations will come to realize that, in a world that fundamentally needs stability, their high plateaus of development can be justified or tolerated only if they serve not as springboards to reach even higher, but as staging areas from which to organize more equitable distribution of wealth and income worldwide.

9. We unequivocally support the contention that a brake imposed on world demographic and economic growth spirals must not lead to a freezing of the status quo of economic development of the world's nations.

If such a proposal were advanced by the rich nations, it would be taken as a final act of neocolonialism. The achievement of a harmonious state of global economic, socio, and ecological equilibrium must be a joint venture based on joint conviction, with benefits for all. The greatest leadership will be demanded from the economically developed countries, for the first step toward such a goal would be for them to encourage a deceleration in the growth of their own material output while, at the same time, assisting the developing nations in their efforts to advance their economics more rapidly.

10. We affirm finally that any deliberate attempt to reach a rational and enduring state of equilibrium by planned measures, rather than by chance or catastrophe, must ultimately be founded on a basic change of values and goals at individual, national, and world levels.

This change is perhaps already in the air, however faintly. But our tradition, education, current activities, and interests will make the transformation embattled and slow. Only real comprehension of the human condition at this turning point in history can provide sufficient motivation for people to accept the individual sacrifices and the changes in political and economic power structures required to reach an equilibrium state.

The question remains of course whether the world situation is in fact as serious as this book, and our comments, would indicate. We firmly believe that the warnings this book contains are amply justified, and that the aims and actions of our present civilization can only aggravate the problems of tomorrow. But we would be only too happy if our tentative assessments should prove too gloomy.

In any event, our posture is one of very grave concern, but not of despair. The report describes an alternative to unchecked and disastrous growth and puts forward some thoughts on the policy changes that could produce a stable equilibrium for mankind. The report indicates that it may be within our reach to provide reasonably large populations with a good material life plus opportunities for limitless individual and social development. We are in substantial agreement with that view, although we are realistic enough not to be carried away by purely scientific or ethical speculations.

The concept of a society in a steady state of economic and ecological equilibrium may appear easy to grasp, although the reality is so distant from our experience as to require a Copernican revolution of the mind. Translating the idea into deed, though, is a task filled with overwhelming difficulties and complexities. We can talk seriously about where to start only when the message of The Limits to Growth, and its sense of extreme urgency, are accepted by a large body of scientific, political, and popular opinion in many countries. The transition in any case is likely to be painful, and it will make extreme demands on human ingenuity and determination. As we have mentioned, only the conviction that there is no other avenue to survival can liberate the moral, intellectual, and creative forces required to initiate this unprecedented human undertaking.

But we wish to underscore the challenge rather than the difficulty of mapping out the road to a stable state society. We believe that an unexpectedly large number of men and women of all ages and conditions will readily respond to the challenge and will be eager to discuss not if but we can create this new future.

The Club of Rome plans to support such activity in many ways. The substantive research begun at MIT on world dynamics will be continued both at MIT and through studies conducted in Europe, Canada, Latin America, the Soviet Union, and Japan. And, since intellectual enlightenment is without effect if it is not also political, The Club of Rome also will encourage the creation of a world forum where statesmen, policy-makers, and scientists can discuss the dangers and hopes for the future global system without the constraints of formal intergovernmental negotiation.

The last thought we wish to offer is that man must explore himself - his goals and values - as much as the world he seeks to change. The dedication to both tasks must be unending. The crux of the matter is not only whether the human species will survive, but even more whether it can survive without falling into a state of worthless existence.
The Executive Committee Of The Club Of Rome
Alexander King, Saburo Okita, Aurelio Peccei, Eduard Pestel, Hugo Thiemann, and Carroll Wilson.

I: Historical Perspective II: What you can’t see will hurt you!
III: No easy Answers! IV: A Picture Emerges
V: U.N. Rings the Alarm VI: The Final Chapter