David Attenborough Quotes

Politically it would be terribly repressive to prevent people from having as many children as they want. But something's got to prevent it; and it won't be pleasant... We're still behaving in ways that have become disastrous... I don't think this helps us to survive... We're very species-centric... and now exist at the expense of every other form of life on Earth.

A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero.

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.

We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can't support many more people.

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?

There's this thing that you're not meant to have too many children - for global warming, it's bad. But I know lots of crappy people, and I would rather that good people have lots of kids and outnumber the baddies.

My first policy move would be to try to get a conversation going in the US about what people stand for and what we really want. Do we want to keep adding people to the world and to our country until we move to a battery-chicken kind of existence and then collapse? Or do we want to think hard about what really is valuable to us, and figure out how many people we can supply that to sustainably?

The population explosion is an ecological phenomenon of displacement. Unless we solve that ecological problem of displacing people - to build huge dams, to build motorways, to take away what people need in order to survive - we will keep pumping more and more money into population programs. We will have more and more coercive and violent methods through which women's bodies are treated as experimental grounds for new contraceptives. Yet we will not have a solution to the problem of numbers.

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

I've always been opposed to population control. In climate terms, population is not the biggest problem going forward.

Either a species learns to control its own population, or something like disease, famine, war, will take care of the issue.

Life and families and babies are all joyous gifts. But if we do not begin to truly account for our numbers, we will surely create an ecological crisis that will only lead to anguish and despair.

Man tends to increase at a greater rate than his means of subsistence.

I've been working a lot with Dick Smith on overpopulation.

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.

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

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

It's alright all of us all living saying 'oh well there's enough of us so we won't have anymore, don't let anybody else live.' I don't believe in that.

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.

Overpopulation in various countries has become a serious threat to the health of people and a grave obstacle to any attempt to organise peace on this planet

There is a single theme behind all our work-we must reduce population levels.

More people need to inhabit this world.