Paul R. Ehrlich Quotes

Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticides, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide - all can be traced easily to too many people.

In ten years [i.e., 1980] all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.

By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth's population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.

I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.

Solving the population problem is not going to solve the problems of racism, of sexism, of religious intolerance, of war, of gross economic inequality. But if you don't solve the population problem, you're not going to solve any of those problems. Whatever problem you're interested in, you're not going to solve it unless you also solve the population problem. Whatever your cause, it's a lost cause without population control.

In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches.

The mother of the year should be a sterilized woman with two adopted children

To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer.

There are substitutes for oil; there is no substitute for fresh water.

Anyone who opposes methods to control the birth rate, is automatically voting in favour having the death rate go up.

We ought to take good care of everybody we have on the planet, but we ought to regulate the rate at which people join us. The old saying is, "It's the top of the ninth inning, and humanity has been hitting nature hard, but you've always got to remember that nature bats last."

Actually, the problem in the world is that there are too many rich people.

There's no question at all that the population explosion will come to an end. The two basic choices are it'll come to an end because we control our reproduction, and in many areas we have started to do so, or we'll end up with a high death rate. You have to take a personal moral stand on this.

Overall, The Population Bomb was probably too optimistic. I was writing about climate change - Anne and I actually wrote the book. We discussed whether or not you'd have to take a gondola to the Empire State Building, and that sort of thing, but we didn't know at the time whether the climate change would be in the direction of heating or cooling. We just didn't know enough about it.

We're never all going to agree with each other. We have to learn to value the diversity. It's one of the presumable principles of our government that isn't followed nearly enough - one of the jobs of the majority is to try and make the minority feel comfortable.

Organisms are starting to move in response to climate change all over the place. Bees are disappearing and we don't have many of the native pollinators left to replace them. We're in deep trouble; there's no question about it. But ecologists tend to think of something that's going to be bad in ten years as very fast, and of course, politicians only think of things in a two-, four-, six-year cycle.

People have not made the connection that the more of us there are, the more greenhouse gases go into the atmosphere. The Chinese have. They, unlike us, have a population policy. The right wingers just don't understand that the country they're in is probably the most overpopulated in the world, the one doing most of the destruction, and the one with horrendously bad leadership.

Chinese are already more on board than we are. China is the only country that actually discussed in formal government documents how important it is to control the size of your populations if you’re going to limit emissions.

Recycling helps make people feel involved, and in some cases can be useful. Although you've got to do careful life history studies of what you're recycling. If all you're doing is recycling - if you've got three automobiles, and 10 children, and a 7,000-square-foot dot-com palace and second home up in the mountains that has to be heated - the recycling isn't making much difference.

All scientists who've looked at it know we have to phase away from burning fossil fuels. That means we've got to put a lot of effort into alternate energy technologies, but we're still subsidizing fossil fuels and not subsidizing most of the alternatives. It's not going to be an easy transition.

So, regarding the time frame, I'm only too willing to admit that my crystal ball, like everybody else's, is cracked. If I could predict precisely, I would have started predicting the stock market and would now be living with a bunch of young women on Bora Bora, having bought it.

If we were redesigning around people instead of around automobiles, which I think the market is more or less going to do, although too slowly, than I'd be a lot cheerier.

With taxes, if they aren't working right, we can change them with a stroke of the pen. It's basically a market-type mechanism. People make their own choices. You run the taxes, and you get the results.

People have to decide, first of all, how they'd like to live, and how secure they want to be from disaster. After that, scientists can help determine what would be necessary to achieve that.

Your children should have it impressed upon them that their adult life-style will bear very little resemblance to yours and that they should now be acquiring knowledge, skills, values, and tastes that will sustain them in less materially affluent circumstances. On the other hand, the fresh insights and imaginations of your children may help you find a viable future while there's still time.