Ed Begley Jr. Quotes
What we often fail to recognize is how efficient a vegan diet is. Less land, less water, more food for our spiraling population.
Begley, Ed, Jr. Living Like Ed: A Guide to the Eco-Friendly Life. Clarkson Potter, 2008.
From a technical and production point of view, there is no practical limit to population size that is imposed by food production. We can produce sufficient food for the world even if population increases dramatically. None the less, even today we have some starvation and much malnutrition problems. These however are political, economic and tend to be distributional. We can produce the food. Morris does NOT advocate large population growth. Although food need not be a problem with an expanding population, job availability, medical care, energy, land, natural resources, ethnic hatred, migration, violence, and other problems are produced by population growth.
In Burundi, family land is divided among the male children of a family. The average Burundian woman has 6.3 children, nearly triple the international fertility rate. With this fertility rate, the plots of land for each person inevitably get smaller and smaller over time. At 10,745 square miles, Burundi is slightly smaller than the U.S. state of Maryland, but it holds nearly twice as many people: about 10 million. The small plots of land are inefficient to farm and provide subsistence. So the nation was in a crises as there was little industrialization and land was essential for existence for most Burundians. See {35808} and {35809}.
This statement was quite controversial when it was published and remains so. Many libertarians and private sector enthusiasts see giving this power to government is too much and erodes the sanctity of private property. Nonetheless, most local and state government in America subscribes to this point of view thus allowing zoning, city planning, condemnation of private property for public use and the like. In 1976 when it was promulgated, President Ronald Reagan discussed it in his weekly radio address.
The Depression had 25% unemployment and many people lacked even food to eat. Meanwhile, there was a huge amount of unused, idle land in California.
Commenting on a drought that threatened the New York State's water supply:
Edward James Begley Jr. is an American actor and environmental activist. Begley has appeared in hundreds of films, television shows, and stage performances. He played Dr. Victor Ehrlich on the television series St. Elsewhere (1982–1988). The role earned him six consecutive Primetime Emmy Award nominations and a Golden Globe Award nomination. He also co-hosted, along with wife Rachelle Carson, the green living reality show entitled Living with Ed (2007–2010).
