I dag leser jeg på Mercatornet at man «offisielt» har gitt om frykten for en befolkningsbombe på jorden – en frykt som også tilskyndet prevensjon, abort, sterilisering o.a. Slik åpner artikkelen:
It’s official. The New York Times has confirmed that the population explosion has not wreaked horrors upon the world: the apocalyptic predictions of the 1960s have fallen “as flat as ancient theories about the shape of the Earth.” Some people won’t believe that, but, if the Times says so, that’s good enough for me.
In an impressive video the Times’ Retro Report team take us back to the hysteria whipped up by Paul Ehrlich’s 1969 tract, The Population Bomb, and then sketch how it fizzled. They revisit not only Ehrlich himself (who is unrepentant) but other key figures who were believers then and have since accepted the evidence that population growth is not an unmitigated evil.
The film is frank about how extreme the population control movement became.
A young Stewart Brand, founding editor of the Whole Earth Catalogue and “totally” persuaded by Ehrlich, is interviewed at a public starve-in staged to bring home the alleged connection between children and poverty. “Maybe anyone who’s thinking about having a third child ought to go hungry for a week,” he says.
That was mild compared with Ehrlich’s proposals for blacklisting of people, organisations and companies “impeding population control”, responsibility prizes for childless marriages, a tax on children, a luxury tax on diapers and cribs, putting something in the water…
We see a newspaper article by Garrett Hardin questioning the right to have children.
There’s also an admission that the ZPG gospel was a gift to the (eugenics inspired) birth control movement.
The forced sterilisations in India under Mrs Gandhi are acknowledged – and their persistence today in some regions. …