Population Crisis? Too Few People

Environmentalist Stewart Brand: ‘By Second Half of the Century the Population Crisis Will Be Seen As Not Enough People’ [Excerpts]

(CNSNews.com) - Environmentalist and author Stewart Brand, an advocate of geoengineering to combat climate change, told CNSNews.com that “human technology” has been “disturbing the atmosphere and climate” for the last “10,000 years,” but also rejected the prescription of some environmentalists who have argued that economic development needs to be stopped, an idea Brand called “unjust.”

Brand also predicted that a declining, not an increasing, human population will be seen as the problem of the future, saying that "by the second half of the century the population crisis will be seen as not enough people."

“Human technology is disturbing the atmosphere and the climate, but we’ve been doing that for about 10,000 years since we started doing agriculture and have been affecting the climate in a big way all that time and it’s gotten a lot more significant in the last 200 years and even more significant than that in the last 50 years and so on,” Brand told CNSNews.com on Monday after a panel discussion on geoengineering at the New America Foundation.

“Right now, you’re getting a lot of economic take off in the developing world. They are going to be using a lot more energy. So far a lot is being used in coal," said Brand. "Greenhouse gases are multiplying and the climate is responding, pretty much as predicted it would. So now the question is: Can we move technology ahead to offset what the previous technology acceleration has unleashed? And I think we can.”

White House science adviser John Holdren, an early and highly influential leader of the environmentalist movement, called in the 1973 book he co-authored with Paul and Anne Ehrlich for a “massive campaign” to “de-develop." Holdren, Ehrlich and Gretchen Daily of Stanford University also wrote in a 1995 essay published by the World Bank that mankind must face up to a “world of zero net physical growth” and reduce “material consumption” and limit population growth. CNSNews.com asked Brand if he agreed with Holdren's ideas.

“All of that’s happening anyway," Brand said. "We’re doing more with less all the time. Everything that is in the information technology domain gets lots more done with a lot less energy and materials than it was back in the strictly mechanical industrial period.

“Population is leveling off rapidly and by the second half of the century the population crisis will be seen as not enough people, as we’re already seeing in many European countries," said Brand. "So, in a sense, what John Holdren was saying should be a program back 30 years ago has actually come to pass without it actually even being a program.”

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/76047

[TBC: The stated desire of the Lord was expressed very clearly in Genesis:1:28And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
See All...: “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”