Each person added to the population in the future will likely on average cause more damage to humanity’s critical life-support systems than did the previous person.
It will be necessary to farm ever poorer lands use more dangerous and expensive agricultural inputs win metals from ever-poorer ores drill wells deeper or tap increasingly remote or more contaminated sources to obtain water then spend more energy to transport that water ever-greater distances and soon.
It is much easier to make a 70-year-old economically productive than a seven-year-old.
Perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell.
The human enterprise is already too large to be sustained.
Excerpts from: Paul Ehrlich is the Bing professor of population studies at Stanford University. This is an edited version of the Jack Beale Lecture on the Global Environment delivered at University of NSW last night.