Scary Thoughts

Opinions are like navels. Everybody has one. But some people, when they state their opinions, are more influential than others. Occasionally, some very influential people make statements that make my hair stand on end.

I remember when a former governor of Colorado said that we should not give medicine to anyone over 70 to help ease our health care burden. Hmmm. That’s a scary thought.

Well, here are some other scary ideas which some rather influential people have been asserting. Some of this would be funny, except they aren’t kidding.

The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state. —Kenneth Boulding, originator of the “Spaceship Earth” concept (as quoted by William Tucker in Progress and Privilege, 1982)

We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion—guilt-free at last! —Stewart Brand (writing in the Whole Earth Catalogue)

We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects…. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settled land. —David Foreman, Earth First!

Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed. —Pentti Linkola

If you ask me, it’d be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won’t give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other. —Amory Lovins in The Mother Earth–Plowboy Interview, Nov/Dec 1977, p.22

The only real good technology is no technology at all. Technology is taxation without representation, imposed by our elitist species (man) upon the rest of the natural world. —John Shuttleworth

What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy. —Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator, Colorado

I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems. —John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs. —John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing....This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run. —Economist editorial

Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental. —Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!

If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS —Earth First! Newsletter

Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planets…Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along. —David Graber, biologist, National Park Service

The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans. —Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project

If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels. —Prince Phillip, World Wildlife Fund

Cannibalism is a “radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation.” —Lyall Watson, The Financial Times, 15 July 1995

We, in the green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which killing a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year-old children to Asian brothels. —Carl Amery

To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem. —Lamont Cole

The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States: We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the U.S. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are. And it is important to the rest of the world to make sure that they don’t suffer economically by virtue of our stopping them. —Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund