SIR David Attenborough has become a patron of an organisation that campaigns to limit the number of people in the world, arguing that the growth in global population is frightening.
The television presenter and naturalist said the increase in population was having devastating effects on ecology, pollution and food production."There are three times as many people in the world as when I started making television programs only a mere 56 years ago," Sir David, who has two children, said after becoming a patron of the Optimum Population Trust think-tank.
"It is frightening in the sense that we can't go on as we have been. We are seeing the consequences in terms of ecology, atmospheric pollution and in terms of the space and food production.
"I've never seen a problem that wouldn't be easier to solve with fewer people, or harder, and ultimately impossible, with more. Population is reaching its optimum and the world cannot hold an infinite number of people."
The OPT counts among its patrons the environmentalist Jonathon Porritt and the academic Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta. However, Sir David's appointment has already been criticised.
Austin Williams, author of The Enemies of Progress, said: "Experts can still be stupid when they speak on subjects of which they know little. Sir David may know a sight more than I do about remote species but that does not give him the intelligence to speak on global politics.
"I have a problem with the line that people are a problem. More people are a good thing. People are the source of creativity, intelligence, analysis and problem-solving.
"If we see people as just simple things that consume and excrete carbon, then the OPT may have a point, but people are more than this and they will be the ones to find the solutions."
Sir David said the OPT was drawing attention to the issue of population and being a patron seemed a worthwhile thing to do.
Roger Martin, the chairman of the trust, said the appointment would put pressure on organisations to face up to what he said was the taboo issue of population.
"The environmental movement will not confront the fact that there is not a single problem that they deal with which would not be easier with fewer people."
The trust campaigns for global access to family planning and for couples to be encouraged to stop having more than two children. In Britain it wants to stabilise the population by bringing immigration into balance with emigration and making greater efforts to reduce teenage pregnancies.
Mr Martin said the UK population must be reduced to a sustainable level because Britain was already the most overcrowded country in Europe.
He said the world could not increase production to meet the needs of a growing population.
"We can't feed ourselves with some of the most intensive agriculture in the world - we're only 70 per cent self-sufficient."
Mr Martin said that Britain could not rely on the world food market because, when food runs short, exporters do not export it.
"It's completely cuckoo to imagine that these globalised economies are going to keep us fed when we can't do it ourselves," he said.
0 comments:
Post a Comment