From The Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/apr/26/world-population-resources-paul-ehrlich
Nuclear disaster or plague likely unless population shrinks and natural resources are reassigned to poor, says Prof Paul Ehrlich
The world's most renowned population
analyst has called for a massive reduction in the number of humans and
for natural resources to be redistributed from the rich to the poor.
Paul Ehrlich,
Bing professor of population studies at Stanford University in
California and author of the best-selling Population Bomb book in 1968,
goes much further than the Royal Society in London which this morning said that physical numbers were as important as the amount of natural resources consumed.
The
optimum population of Earth – enough to guarantee the minimal physical
ingredients of a decent life to everyone – was 1.5 to 2 billion people
rather than the 7 billion who are alive today or the 9 billion expected
in 2050, said Ehrlich in an interview with the Guardian.
"How many
you support depends on lifestyles. We came up with 1.5 to 2 billion
because you can have big active cities and wilderness. If you want a
battery chicken world where everyone has minimum space and food and
everyone is kept just about alive you might be able to support in the
long term about 4 or 5 billion people. But you already have 7 billion.
So we have to humanely and as rapidly as possible move to population
shrinkage."
"The question is: can you go over the top without a
disaster, like a worldwide plague or a nuclear war between India and
Pakistan? If we go on at the pace we are there's going to be various
forms of disaster. Some maybe slow motion disasters like people getting
more and more hungry, or catastrophic disasters because the more people
you have the greater the chance of some weird virus transferring from
animal to human populations, there could be a vast die-off."
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