Aldous Huxley Quotes

The key to understanding overpopulation is not population density but the numbers of people in an area relative to its resources and the capacity of the environment to sustain human activities; that is, to the area’s carrying capacity. When is an area overpopulated? When its population can’t be maintained without rapidly depleting nonrenewable resources.... By this standard, the entire planet and virtually every nation is already vastly overpopulated

We think there is an ecological problem, but the real problem is irresponsible growth of human population.

Malthus has been buried many times, and Malthusian scarcity with him. But as Garrett Hardin remarked, anyone who has to be reburied so often cannot be entirely dead.

Our numbers expand, but Earth's natural systems do not.

The strong evidence is that we're running out of space. We're collectively affecting the world's climate. This is due to the still-growing human population and our increase in consumption.

If the world is presented as resources to be exploited, then, more than likely, you're going to exploit the world.

The cost of our success is the exhaustion of natural resources, leading to energy crises, climate change, pollution, and the destruction of our habitat. If you exhaust natural resources, there will be nothing left for your children. If we continue in the same direction, humankind is headed for some frightful ordeals, if not extinction.

Pollution and the exhaustion of natural resources depend and will depend in the future on the absolute level of total economic activity. This means that is necessary to restrain both the rate of growth of population and, at least in the developed countries, the rate of growth of consumption per head.

One problem in Africa has been a small population. And the natural resources were large. So you could be as foolish as possible. But you didn’t die. You just remained there eating mangoes and bananas. Now the population in Africa is growing. So the idea that you can go on with idiotic policies is not sustainable. Because a big population needs answers.

Humanity is consuming the resources of the earth and life in an excessive and disordered way, forgetting the earth's own needs

For every person in the world to reach the present U.S. level of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet earths.

… human population growth within the ecosystem was closely analogous to the growth of malignant tumor cells within an organism: that man was acting like a cancer on the biosphere. The multiplication of human numbers certainly seems wild and uncontrolled... Four million a month - the equivalent of the population of Chicago... We seem to be doing all right at the moment; but if you could ask cancer cells, I suspect they would think they were doing fine. But when the organism dies, so do they; and for our own, selfish, practical, utilitarian reasons, I think we should be careful about how we influence the rest of the ecosystem.

Since the mid-1970s, people have been consuming more resources than the planet’s natural capital can replenish.

We're at peak oil, peak water, peak resources, and so either we figure it out and let science lead or we head down a very bad, dark trail to where a lot of people aren't going to make it.

Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today

The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.

The civilized nations--Greece, Rome, England--have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.

The prodigious waste of human life occasioned by this perpetual struggle for room and food, was more than supplied by the mighty power of population, acting, in some degree, unshackled, from the constant habit of emigration.

Throughout all of human history we've enjoyed certain benign circumstances: an envelope of atmosphere, an envelope of temperature. A kind of resilience that if you cut down trees, then they'll grow back. You take fish, they recover. You put stuff into the atmosphere that you know is not good for us, but we can still breathe. We haven't awakened, generally, to the sense of urgency that does exist.

Does this planet have enough resources so seven or eight billion can have the same level of consumption and waste that today is seen in rich societies? It is this level of hyper-consumption that is harming our planet.

If, in our haste to 'progress,' the economics of ecology are disregarded by citizens and policy makers alike, the result will be an ugly America. We cannot afford an America where expedience tramples upon esthetics and development decisions are made with an eye only on the present.

Some global hazards are insidious. They stem from pressure on energy supplies, food, water and other natural resources. And they will be aggravated as the population rises to a projected nine billion by mid-century, and by the effects of climate change. An 'ecological shock' could irreversibly degrade our environment.

In a finite world this means that the per capita share of the world's goods must steadily decrease.

Both the United States and the world economy have already reached - and surpassed - their sustainable physical limits. Ground water is being drawn down, soils eroded, forests cut faster than they grow, fish caught faster than they reproduce, non-renewable fossil fuels burnt without developing substitutes.

The destruction of our environment and resources cannot be stemmed unless the growth of the world's population is stemmed and ultimately reduced.