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http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/tributes/tr_tanton_2003oct.html

Garrett and Jane Hardin: A Personal Recollection (Hemlock Society adviser to Hardin on FAIR — who with his wife committed suicide)

Tribute to Garrett Hardin - by John H. Tanton, M.D.

My interest in population developed in the late 1950s as I was finishing medical school. By 1975 I had been elected national president of Zero Population Growth, an organization inspired by Paul Ehrlich’s book “The Population Bomb.” Then in the late 1970s the US fertility rate fell to below replacement, and immigration emerged as the main source of domestic population growth. To Garrett’s dismay, ZPG declined to address these new circumstances.

When in 1979 I helped set up the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) to tackle the immigration question, Garrett served from the beginning as an advisor. Later he consented to set aside his aversion to board meetings by joining the FAIR Board. Much of his later writing was on the demographic aspects of immigration and can be found by searching under his name in the archives of a quarterly journal of the immigration reform movement, TheSocialContract.com. The bookstore at this site offers for sale three of Dr. Hardin’s books that the Social Contract Press reprinted: Stalking the Wild Taboo; Mandatory Motherhood: The True Meaning of the Right to Life; and Creative Altruism: Source and Survival. Also available is his The Immigration Dilemma: Avoiding the Tragedy of the Commons, published by FAIR.

It is hard to see one’s friends and people we admire decline physically to the point where they decide to exit this vale of tears felo de se. Garrett’s post polio syndrome had reduced him to using a wheel chair; he could no longer swim well. Macular degeneration cost him the reading vision in his right eye. Life in a nursing home was not an option for this man of letters. Jane had been diagnosed with ALS - amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease, one of the least desirable ways to leave this planet. It worsened. Both were long time members of the Hemlock Society, and decided to take matters into their own hands. This can give us a lot to think about, especially as our own infirmities come to the fore - and since my wife and I live in a state that counts Dr. Jack Kievorkian among its citizens.

Anne and Paul Ehrlich, and John P. Holdren “The Population Bomb”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_H._Ehrlich

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich

http://www.amazon.com/Dominant-Animal-Human-Evolution-Environment/dp/1597260967

http://www.heinzawards.net/recipients/paul_anne_ehrlich

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holdren [Obama’s science and technology advisor]

6. The situation has been analyzed and reanalyzed in the technical and popular literature. Two key technical papers are P. R. Ehrlich and J. P. Holdren, “The Impact of Population Growth,” Science, vol. 171 (1971), pp. 1212-17, and J. P. Holdren and P. R. Ehrlich, “Human Population and the Global Environment,” American Scientist, vol. 62 (1974), pp. 282-92. Much important information can be found in works by Lester Brown and his colleagues in the excellent State of the World series issued by Worldwatch Institute and published by W. W. Norton, New York, and in the World Resources series issued by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), (published by Basic Books, New York). Two other landmark works are the Global 2000 Report to the President, issued in 1980 by the Council on Environmental Quality and the Department of State, and the World Commission on Environment and Development’s 1987 report Our Common Future (the “Brundtland Report,” named for the commission’s chairwoman, the Prime Minister of Norway), published by Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford. A detailed exposition of the connection of population growth to the rest of the human predicament can be found in P. R. Ehrlich, A. H. Ehrlich, and J. P. Holdren, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment (W. H. Freeman, San Francisco, 1977). The most recent extensive popular treatment is A. H. Ehrlich and P. R. Ehrlich, Earth (Franklin Watts, New York, 1987).

Paul R. Ehrlich & Anne H. Ehrlich, The Population Explosion, 1990.

In 1968, The Population Bomb1 warned of impending disaster if the population explosion was not brought under control. Then the fuse was burning; now the population bomb has detonated. Since 1968, at least 200 million people — mostly children — have perished needlessly of hunger and hunger-related diseases, despite “crash programs to ‘stretch’ the carrying capacity of Earth by increasing food production.”2 The population problem is no longer primarily a threat for the future as it was when the Bomb was written and there were only 3.5 billion human beings.

http://www.ditext.com/ehrlich/preface.html

The world’s biggest problem? Too many people

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jul/21/opinion/la-oe-harte-population-20110721

Mary Ellen Harte is coauthor of “Cool the Earth, Save the Economy.” Anne Ehrlich is a senior research scientist at Stanford University. John Harte and Paul Ehrlich contributed to this piece. All are biologists involved in the study of climate change and sustainability.

http://www.masterresource.org/2011/03/holdren-malthusian/

If there is one quotation by Obama’s new science advisor John P. Holder that every American should hear, it is this:

“A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States. . . . Resources and energy must be diverted from frivolous and wasteful uses in overdeveloped countries to filling the genuine needs of underdeveloped countries. This effort must be largely political”

- John Holdren, Anne Ehrlich, and Paul Ehrlich, Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions (San Francisco; W.H. Freeman and Company, 1973), p. 279.

Holdren’s deep-seated belief of the human “predicament” as a zero-sum game–America must lose for other countries to win–was also stated by him two years before:

“Only one rational path is open to us—simultaneous de-development of the [overdeveloped countries] and semi-development of the underdeveloped countries (UDC’s), in order to approach a decent and ecologically sustainable standard of living for all in between. By de-development we mean lower per-capita energy consumption, fewer gadgets, and the abolition of planned obsolescence.”

- John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich, “Introduction,” in Holdren and Ehrlich, eds., Global Ecology, 1971, p. 3.

Holdren and the Ehrlichs paid homage to the gloomy worldview of Thomas Robert Malthus, who saw “misery or vice” as the necessary equalizer between growing population and the means of subsistence in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798):

“We find ourselves firmly in the neo-Malthusian camp. We hold this view not because we believe the world to be running out of materials in an absolute sense, but rather because the barriers to continued material growth, in the form of problems of economics, logistics, management, and environmental impact, are so formidable.”

- Paul Ehrlich, Anne Ehrlich, and John Holdren, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, and Environment (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1977), p. 954.

Holdren and Paul Ehrlich put their anti-growth philosophy into a mathematical equation, I=PAT, where a negative environmental impact was linked to any combination of population growth, increasing affluence, and improving technology. This “gloomy prognosis” required, according to the three:

“organized evasive action: population control, limitation of material consumption, redistribution of wealth, transitions to technologies that are environmentally and socially less disruptive than today’s, and movement toward some kind of world government” (1977: p. 5).

Does Dr. Doom still believe all this? He has repeatedly been challenged with some of his past quotations and he has held fast to his exaggerations. Mid-course correction not.”