Gates, Sanger, “overpopulation,” and the real facts
In previous articles, I have written about Bill Gates’s obsession with population control, his several on-the-record gaffes/reveals attributing vaccines to population reduction, his direct family connection to Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood, and their eugenicist, white supremacist and Nazi promotions, and even a possible connection to the “Lucifer Trust.”
The motive for Bill Gates and the world’s top oligarchs insisting on the need to reduce population may be varied and complex, but for most people who think overpopulation is valid, the issue is a genuine concern over sustainability, resources, and the ability for billions of people to live with safety and health on a small planet.
But the concern is simply not warranted. Firstly, some mental pictures to help overcome the propaganda: today’s population, all 7 billion, could each have 5 acres of land for themselves. Of course, not all land can grow food (that problem hasn’t been solved yet!), so every person on the planet can have their own half-acre of arable land. The entire world population can fit into Texas with each family of four owning a nice house and yard. Standing three feet apart, the entire world can fit into the city of Jacksonville, Florida.
Secondly, we are not in a unique, unprecedented situation. Demographers estimate that at least 20 billion people lived on earth between the years 8000 B.C. and the time of Christ (see Berkeley scientist Kenneth Wachter’s Essential Demographic Methods). The notion that half of all people who have ever lived are alive currently is a myth.
Thirdly, there is plenty of food. The world grows enough food today for three billion more people than now exist, as Eric Holt-Gimenez writes in the Journal of Sustainable Agriculture in his paper, “We already grow enough food for 10 billion people . . . and still can’t end hunger.” Exactly. The Oxford based humanitarian group Oxfam stated, “Famines are not natural phenomena, they are catastrophic political failures.” Or, as the Population Research Institute put it: “’Overpopulation is not to blame. It’s the policy, stupid.” [1]
Fourthly, there is plenty of water. Of course, two-thirds of the globe is covered in water and looks blue from outer space. Sure, that’s saltwater, but, again, some creative person may figure out a simple way to convert it. Regarding the kind of water you can currently drink, freshwater withdrawals have increased seven-fold since 1900 while the world population has increased only four-fold. People figure out a way to garner the abundance of freshwater on our planet, according to scientist Dr. Peter Gleick’s piece, “A look at twenty-first century water resources development,” in the journal Water International. [2]
Then why all this Chicken Little fearmongering about overpopulation? The dubious school of thought began in the early 19th century with anti-population doomsday writer Thomas Malthus, an Anglican clergyman, not a scientist. In 1925, Margaret Sanger hosted a “Neo-Malthusian” conference at the McAlpin Hotel in New York in honor of Malthus. At the conference she stated: “Year by year more money is expended . . . to maintain an increasing race of morons which threatens the very foundations of our civilization.”
Malthusianism made little sense, and is denounced by many scholars today. A “monstrous doctrine of unreason,” notes widely-published British historian Paul Johnson, who criticized the Malthusians as “not men of action” but “relentless” and “hardheaded” men who sat in their studies creating “mumbo jumbo.”
Malthus’s premise was that population doubles every 25 years while food and resources grow by only a few percentage points. He failed to account for human ingenuity and higher production rates. But his views fit perfectly with Sanger’s desire to make birth control legal for women, as she promoted “weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives,” and decried war, which kills “not the weak and the helpless, but the strong and the fit.” [3]
Paul Johnson, British historian
As historian Paul Johnson noted, for 200 years the Malthusian advocates have never been taken seriously by the larger public. The big change emerged when Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich wrote a book in 1968 called The Population Bomb. It didn’t sell that well until his handlers discovered the real secret to success—he appeared on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, nearly a dozen times. The book sold 2 million copies and appeared in several languages. Ehrlich created “the unlikely category of superstar scientist,” according to geopolitical analyst James Corbett, who calls Ehrlich a “pseudo-science charlatan.”
That sounds rather harsh. Examine the evidence: Ehrlich, in the late 60s and early 70s predicted the following:
“there will never be seven billion people in the year 2000”
“as far as petroleum goes . . . we’re running out rapidly, some estimates are that it will all be gone by the year 2000.”
“sometime in the next 15 years the end will come, and by the end I mean the utter breakdown of the planet to support humanity.”
“the collapse of civilization itself is a near certainly in the next few decades.” [4]
He also predicted 4 billion people would starve in the 1980s, including 65 million Americans. In the first line of The Population Bomb he writes: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” He also said “he would take even money” that England would not exist in the year 2000. This one prediction he got right, although off by a couple of centuries, except it will happen for the opposite reason. As I demonstrated in my book Unknown Empire, demographic winter will eventually destroy England and all of Europe, but this collapse of population will take a couple hundred years. The United States will follow, but on a slower pace due to immigration. [5]
Paul Ehrlich
Ehrlich’s solutions to the so called “problem” of overpopulation? Forced sterilization and world government. Addressing a student’s question on China’s one child policy, he said: “. . . one of the things that might be good … is to add something to the water supply that makes you have to take an antidote in order to have a baby . . . In the U.S. you can’t even dare discuss it.”
The New York Times quoted Ehrlich: “The government might have to put sterility drugs in reservoirs and in food shipped to foreign countries in order to limit human multiplication.” The Boca Raton News, appalled at the idea, called Ehrlich “worse than Hitler.” In a 1977 textbook “Ecoscience” that Ehrlich co-authored with Obama’s future Science Czar, John Holdren, they again suggested a sterilant for the water supply to solve overpopulation, along with forced abortions. These measures “could be sustained under the existing Constitution,” they wrote. They call for a “planetary regime” to ultimately control and solve population issues. [6]
Thankfully, society has had 50 years since Ehrlich’s madness, both his predictions and his solutions, to debunk and defame him. Unfortunately, this did not happen. As the adage goes, “Repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth.” Ehrlich was made a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2012, received awards from the Swedish Academy of Sciences, the University of Missouri, the Sierra Club and continues to today as a top Professor of Biology at Stanford. He is still consulted today as an expert on population issues. [7]
In the book of Genesis, God told Adam and Eve to “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Genesis 1:28). This was the first commandment and it has never been rescinded. Having many children is God’s prescription for the best way to steward the earth.
Two chapters later, Genesis speaks of another character who, unlike God, hates life and hates children. According to Jesus, “He was a murderer from the beginning” and when this “father of lies” speaks, he talks in “his native tongue” (John 8:44). He is telling us these days that overpopulation and resources are a problem. And he is lying once again.
ENDNOTES
[1] “Debunking the Myth of Overpopulation,” Anne Roback Morse and Steven W. Mosher, Population Research Institute, Oct. 1, 2013 https://www.pop.org/debunking-the-myth-of-overpopulation/ (Retrieved April 22, 2019).
“20 billion people lived on earth” Wachter, Kenneth W. “Cohort Person-Years Lived.” Essential Demographic Methods. Berkeley: University of California, 2012.
“plenty of food” Holt-Giménez, Eric, et al. “We Already Grow Enough Food for 10 Billion People… and Still Can’t End Hunger.” Journal of Sustainable Agriculture 36.6 (2012): 595-598.
[2] Gleick, Peter H. “A look at twenty-first century water resources development.” Water International 25.1 (2000): 127-138.
[3] International Aspects of Birth Control: The International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference (New York: American Birth Control League, 1925), p. v, cited in George Grant, Killer Angel: A Biography of Planned Parenthood’s Founder Margaret Sanger (Franklin, TN: Ars Vitae Press, 1995), p. 80. This same quote can be found in “The Function of Sterilization: Part of an address delivered by Margaret Sanger before the Institute of Ethenics at Vasser College August 5th,” The Margaret Sanger Papers Project, New York University, https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=304387.xml (Retrieved April 3, 2019).
Paul Johnson, A History of the English People (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), p. 276.
“weeding out the unfit”: Sanger, Woman and the New Race, p. 229; “the strong and the fit” and “a higher race of men”: Sanger, Woman and the New Race, p. 160-1.
[4] “never 7 billion”: Dr. Paul Ehrlich at ISU Armory on April 24, 1970, Special Collections Iowa State University Library https://youtu.be/WMhR79EQQqg (Retrieved April 22, 2019).
“petroleum gone by 2000”: “WOI-TV Interviews Dr. Paul Ehrlich on April 24, 1970,” Special Collections Iowa State University Library https://youtu.be/YZWiRaIkXxg (Retrieved April 22, 2019).
“sometime in the next 15 years”: Population Bomb: the Dire Prediction that Fell Flat, RetroReport.org, June 1, 2015 https://www.retroreport.org/transcript/the-population-bomb/ (Retrieved April 22, 2019).
“next few decades”: Damian Carrington, “Paul Ehrlich: ‘Collapse of civilization is a near certainty within decades,’” The Guardian, March 22, 2018 https://www.retroreport.org/transcript/the-population-bomb/ (Retrieved April 22, 2019).
[5] “4 billion . . . 65 million Americans”: The Progressive, April, 1970, cited in “Meet Paul Ehrlich, Pseudoscience Charlatan,” The Corbett Report, June 5, 2018
Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (Cutchogue, NY: Buccaneer Books, 1968), p. xi.
“England would not exist”: Bernard Dixon, “In praise of prophets,” New Scientist and Science Journal, Sept. 16, 1971, p. 606.
[6] “add something to the water supply”: Transcript of “GST, Gonski, Population and Diversity,” ABC.net, Nov. 2, 2015 https://www.abc.net.au/qanda/gst-gonski-population-and-diversity/10653806#transcript (Retrieved April 22, 2019).
“A Sterility Drug in Food is Hinted,” Gladwin Hill, New York Times, Nov. 24, 1969; “Expert on population pleased by response,” William J. Cook, Boca Raton News, June 16, 1972. This article was part of the Newsweek Feature Service, cited in Climate Depot https://www.climatedepot.com/2010/02/19/1972-article-unearthed-worse-than-hitler-population-bomb-author-paul-ehrlich-suggested-adding-a-forced-sterilization-agent-to-staple-food-and-water-supply/ (Retrieved April 22, 2019).
Screenshots of Ecoscience at “John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar, says: Forced abortions and mass sterilization needed to save the planet,” ZombieTime.com, July 10, 2009 http://zombietime.com/john_holdren/ (Retrieved April 22, 2019).
[7] James Corbett, “Meet Paul Ehrlich, Pseudoscience Charlatan,” Episode 338, The Corbett Report, June 5, 2018.