United Methodist Church Quotes

The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.

We have to stabilize the population of this planet.

People who are not addressing the issues of population control are not seriously addressing the environment.

The best "gift" anyone can give to humankind is to remain birth-free. It is a SIN for any person to birth while earth births exceed deaths. For what purpose would the world need more than 50,000 new Homo sapiens every year?

Shouldn't we be against procreation at this point in time? With overpopulation and the strain on the resources on this planet? Shouldn't we reward people who don't spawn?

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

When I was born, the world's population was 3.5 billion. There are now 6.8 billion people on the planet. By 2050, that's expected to rise to 9.4 billion. What's more, the Earth's resources aren't growing; they're decreasing - and rapidly.

Most of us feel some kind of uncertainty, with the population increasing and resources decreasing. We have to face these issues.

Family planning is the only exit point of the land problem. No other solution is possible.

The United States has consumed in the last 50 years more natural resources than the rest of the entire human race for all of history.

No country has reduced its population growth without resorting to abortion.... Indeed, abortion, legal and illegal, now has become the most widespread fertility control method in use in the world today...

One of the most serious challenges to human destiny in the last third of this century will be the growth of population …. When future generations evaluate the record of. our time, one of the most important factors in their judgment will be the way in which we respond to population growth

We have grown up in a culture thinking that our energy resources were inexhaustible and without impact.

You only have to ask yourself, "What would happen if the entire population of India and China had two-car garages and were living at the technological and the economic standard that the American middle class is today?" The planet would become very rapidly uninhabitable.

Can you name an environmental problem that would NOT be easier to solve with fewer people, or harder (and ultimately impossible) with more? Nobody can.

It has been acknowledged for many years the current level of human population growth is unsustainable and places acute pressure on global resources. Human activity is exacerbating global warming, and higher population levels inevitably mean higher emissions and more climate change victims.

Population growth is a global problem affecting all of us.

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

… 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.

How much longer, for instance, can we continue to crowd more and more people into this world? …. How long can we permit the uncontrolled use of the earth's resources when there is no possibility of replacing them? Indeed, how long will it be before we have completely used up everything our lives depend on? These issues are the politics of the future. Neither Republicans nor Democrats have begun to spell out in substantive fashion the means by which we can control population growth, environmental problems, and the conservation of our natural resources.

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

Earth was not built for six billion people all running around and being passionate about things. The world was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs.

I don't think anybody has the right to a huge family. There's already more people on the planet than our natural resources can even support, and if everybody were to have a high standard of living, we need three or four or five new planets to provide the resources. And this cannot be, so something has to change.

One always returns to the fact that there are just too many of us, the population continues to rise and it's unsustainable.

We're the ones causing global warming. In fact, what we ought to be saying is population growth is a major cause of it, so I hope to have a T-shirt out very, very soon: Stop global warming, use condoms.