News As Talked About On The Harry Thomas Special Report 07/21/09 Eugenics

===============================================================================

    Harry Thomas Show RSS Podcast Subscribe Today 

===============================================================================

Eugenics

===============================================================================

Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.

One way to carry out this disapproval might be to insist that all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption—especially those born to minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone. If a single mother really wished to keep her baby, she might be obliged to go through adoption proceedings and demonstrate her ability to support and care for it. Adoption proceedings probably should remain more difficult for single people than for married couples, in recognition of the relative difficulty of raising children alone. It would even be possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement for adoption, depending on the society.

Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.

Involuntary fertility control ... A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men. ... The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.

If some individuals contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children, and if the need is compelling, they can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility—just as they can be required to exercise responsibility in their resource-consumption patterns—providing they are not denied equal protection.

In today's world, however, the number of children in a family is a matter of profound public concern. The law regulates other highly personal matters. For example, no one may lawfully have more than one spouse at a time. Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?

Toward a Planetary Regime ... Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market. The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries' shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.

If this could be accomplished, security might be provided by an armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force. Many people have recognized this as a goal, but the way to reach it remains obscure in a world where factionalism seems, if anything, to be increasing. The first step necessarily involves partial surrender of sovereignty to an international organization.

Another related issue that seems to encourage a pronatalist attitude in many people is the question of the differential reproduction of social or ethnic groups. Many people seem to be possessed by fear that their group may be outbred by other groups. White Americans and South Africans are worried there will be too many blacks, and vice versa. The Jews in Israel are disturbed by the high birth rates of Israeli Arabs, Protestants are worried about Catholics, and lbos about Hausas. Obviously, if everyone tries to outbreed everyone else, the result will be catastrophe for all. This is another case of the "tragedy of the commons," wherein the "commons" is the planet Earth. Fortunately, it appears that, at least in the DCs, virtually all groups are exercising reproductive restraint.

Humanity cannot afford to muddle through the rest of the twentieth century; the risks are too great, and the stakes are too high. This may be the last opportunity to choose our own and our descendants' destiny. Failing to choose or making the wrong choices may lead to catastrophe. But it must never be forgotten that the right choices could lead to a much better world.

Senator David Vitter: In 1973, you encouraged "a decline in fertility well below replacement" in the United States because "280 million in 2040 is likely to be too many." What would your number for the right population in the US be today?

John Holdren: I no longer think it's productive, Senator, to focus on the optimum population of the United States. I dont think any of us know what the right answer is. When I wrote those lines in 1973, uh, I was preoccupied with the fact that many problems the United States faced appeared to be being made more difficult by the greater population growth that then prevailed. I think everyone who studies these matters understands that population growth brings some benefits and some liabilities, its a tough question to determine which will prevail in a given time period.

I challenge John Holdren to publicly renounce and disavow the opinions and recommendations he made in the book Ecoscience; and until he does so, I will hold him responsible for those statements.

To date, there has been no serious attempt in Western countries to use laws to control excessive population growth, although there exists ample authority under which population growth could be regulated. For example, under the United States Constitution, effective population-control programs could be enacted under the clauses that empower Congress to appropriate funds to provide for the general welfare and to regulate commerce, or under the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Such laws constitutionally could be very broad. Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society. Few today consider the situation in the United States serious enough to justify compulsion, however.

Social pressures on both men and women to marry and have children must be removed. As former Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall observed, "All lives are not enhanced by marital union; parenthood is not necessarily a fulfillment for every married couple." If society were convinced of the need for low birth rates, no doubt the stigma that has customarily been assigned to bachelors, spinsters, and childless couples would soon disappear. But alternative lifestyles should be open to single people, and perhaps the institution of an informal, easily dissolved "marriage" for the childless is one possibility. Indeed, many DC societies now seem to be evolving in this direction as women's liberation gains momentum. It is possible that fully developed societies may produce such arrangements naturally, and their association with lower fertility is becoming increasingly clear. In LDCs a childless or single lifestyle might be encouraged deliberately as the status of women approaches parity with that of men. Although free and easy association of the sexes might be tolerated in such a society, responsible parenthood ought to be encouraged and illegitimate childbearing could be strongly discouraged. One way to carry out this disapproval might be to insist that all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption—especially those born to minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone. If a single mother really wished to keep her baby, she might be obliged to go through adoption proceedings and demonstrate her ability to support and care for it. Adoption proceedings probably should remain more difficult for single people than for married couples, in recognition of the relative difficulty of raising children alone. It would even he possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement for adoption, depending on the society. Somewhat more repressive measures for discouraging large families have also been proposed, such as assigning public housing without regard for family size and removing dependency allowances from student grants or military pay. Some of these have been implemented in crowded Singapore, whose population program has been counted as one of the most successful.

Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock. Physiologist Melvin Ketchel, of the Tufts University School of Medicine, suggested that a sterilant could be developed that had a very specific action—for example, preventing implantation of the fertilized ovum. He proposed that it be used to reduce fertility levels by adjustable amounts, anywhere from five to 75 percent, rather than to sterilize the whole population completely. In this way, fertility could be adjusted from time to time to meet a society's changing needs, and there would be no need to provide an antidote. Contraceptives would still be needed for couples who were highly motivated to have small families. Subfertile and functionally sterile couples who strongly desired children would be medically assisted, as they are now, or encouraged to adopt. Again, there is no sign of such an agent on the horizon. And the risk of serious, unforeseen side effects would, in our opinion, militate against the use of any such agent, even though this plan has the advantage of avoiding the need for socioeconomic pressures that might tend to discriminate against particular groups or penalize children. Most of the population control measures beyond family planning discussed above have never been tried. Some are as yet technically impossible and others are and probably will remain unacceptable to most societies (although, of course, the potential effectiveness of those least acceptable measures may be great). Compulsory control of family size is an unpalatable idea, but the alternatives may be much more horrifying. As those alternatives become clearer to an increasing number of people in the 1980s, they may begin demanding such control. A far better choice, in our view, is to expand the use of milder methods of influencing family size preferences while redoubling efforts to ensure that the means of birth control, including abortion and sterilization, are accessible to every human being on Earth within the shortest possible time. If effective action is taken promptly against population growth, perhaps the need for the more extreme involuntary or repressive measures can be averted in most countries.

Involuntary fertility control The third approach to population limitation is that of involuntary fertility control. Several coercive proposals deserve discussion, mainly because some countries may ultimately have to resort to them unless current trends in birthrates are rapidly reversed by other means. Some involuntary measures could be less repressive or discriminatory, in fact, than some of the socioeconomic measure suggested. ... A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men. This of course would be feasible only in countries where the majority of births are medically assisted. Unfortunately, such a program therefore is not practical for most less developed countries (although in China, mothers of three children are commonly "expected" to undergo sterilization). The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births. No capsule that would last that long (30 years or more) has yet been developed, but it is technically within the realm of possibility.

It is accepted that the law has as its proper function the protection of each person and each group of people. A legal restriction on the right to have more than a given number of children could easily be based on the needs of the first children. Studies have indicated that the larger the family, the less healthy the children are likely to be and the less likely they are to realize their potential levels of achievement. Certainly there is no question that children of a small family can be cared for better and can be educated better than children of a large family, income and other things being equal. The law could properly say to a mother that, in order to protect the children she already has, she could have no more. (Presumably, regulations on the sizes of adopted families would have to be the same.) A legal restriction on the right to have children could also be based on the right not to be disadvantaged by excessive numbers of children produced by others. Differing rates of reproduction among groups can give rise to serious social problems. For example, differential rates of reproduction between ethnic, racial, religious, or economic groups might result in increased competition for resources and political power and thereby undermine social order. If some individuals contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children, and if the need is compelling, they can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility—just as they can be required to exercise responsibility in their resource-consumption patterns—providing they are not denied equal protection.

Individual rights. Individual rights must be balanced against the power of the government to control human reproduction. Some people—respected legislators, judges, and lawyers included—have viewed the right to have children as a fundamental and inalienable right. Yet neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution mentions a right to reproduce. Nor does the UN Charter describe such a right, although a resolution of the United Nations affirms the "right responsibly to choose" the number and spacing of children (our emphasis). In the United States, individuals have a constitutional right to privacy and it has been held that the right to privacy includes the right to choose whether or not to have children, at least to the extent that a woman has a right to choose not to have children. But the right is not unlimited. Where the society has a "compelling, subordinating interest" in regulating population size, the right of the individual may be curtailed. If society's survival depended on having more children, women could he required to bear children, just as men can constitutionally be required to serve in the armed forces. Similarly, given a crisis caused by overpopulation, reasonably necessary laws to control excessive reproduction could be enacted. It is often argued that the right to have children is so personal that the government should not regulate it. In an ideal society, no doubt the state should leave family size and composition solely to the desires of the parents. In today's world, however, the number of children in a family is a matter of profound public concern. The law regulates other highly personal matters. For example, no one may lawfully have more than one spouse at a time. Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?

Toward a Planetary Regime ... Should a Law of the Sea be successfully established, it could serve as a model for a future Law of the Atmosphere to regulate the use of airspace, to monitor climate change, and to control atmospheric pollution. Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus, the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and the oceans but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market. The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries' shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime should have some power to enforce the agreed limits. As with the Law of the Sea an other international agreements, all agreements for regulating population sizes, resource development, and pollution should be subject to revision and modification in accordance with changing conditions. The Planetary Regime might have the advantage over earlier proposed world government schemes in not being primarily political in its emphasis—even though politics would inevitably be a part of all discussions, implicitly or explicitly. Since most of the areas the Regime would control are not now being regulated or controlled by nations or anyone else, establishment of the Regime would involve far less surrendering of national power. Nevertheless it might function powerfully to suppress international conflict simply because the interrelated global resource-environment structure would not permit such an outdated luxury.

If this could be accomplished, security might be provided by an armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force. Many people have recognized this as a goal, but the way to reach it remains obscure in a world where factionalism seems, if anything, to be increasing. The first step necessarily involves partial surrender of sovereignty to an international organization. But it seems probable that, as long as most people fail to comprehend the magnitude of the danger, that step will be impossible.

Front cover

Back cover

Title page

Page 749

Page 786

Page 787

Page 788

Page 789

Page 837

Page 838

Page 839

Page 917

Page 942

Page 943

Page 944

Page 1001

Page 1002

Page 1003

Photographs of Ecoscience, inside and out

Any finally, for the final proof that this is a real book co-authored by John Holdren -- and that these are real quotes from that book -- and not some elaborate hoax, here are some photographs (as opposed to scans) of the book itself:







===============================================================================

Obama Science Advisor Called For “Planetary Regime” To Enforce Totalitarian Population Control Measures

In 1977 book, John Holdren advocated forced abortions, mass sterilization through food and water supply and mandatory bodily implants to prevent pregnancies

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Saturday, July 11, 2009

President Obama’s top science and technology advisor John P. Holdren co-authored a 1977 book in which he advocated the formation of a “planetary regime” that would use a “global police force” to enforce totalitarian measures of population control, including forced abortions, mass sterilization programs conducted via the food and water supply, as well as mandatory bodily implants that would prevent couples from having children.

The concepts outlined in Holdren’s 1977 book Ecoscience, which he co-authored with close colleagues Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich, were so shocking that a February 2009 Front Page Magazine story on the subject was largely dismissed as being outlandish because people couldn’t bring themselves to believe that it could be true.

It was only when another Internet blog obtained the book and posted screenshots that the awful truth about what Holdren had actually committed to paper actually began to sink in.

This issue is more prescient than ever because Holdren and his colleagues are now at the forefront of efforts to combat “climate change” through similarly insane programs focused around geoengineering the planet. As we reported in April, Holdren recently advocated “Large-scale geoengineering projects designed to cool the Earth,” such as “shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays,” which many have pointed out is already occurring via chemtrails.

Ecoscience discusses a number of ways in which the global population could be reduced to combat what the authors see as mankind’s greatest threat – overpopulation. In each case, the proposals are couched in sober academic rhetoric, but the horrifying foundation of what Holdren and his co-authors are advocating is clear. These proposals include;

- Forcibly and unknowingly sterilizing the entire population by adding infertility drugs to the nation’s water and food supply.

- Legalizing “compulsory abortions,” ie forced abortions carried out against the will of the pregnant women, as is common place in Communist China where women who have already had one child and refuse to abort the second are kidnapped off the street by the authorities before a procedure is carried out to forcibly abort the baby.

- Babies who are born out of wedlock or to teenage mothers to be forcibly taken away from their mother by the government and put up for adoption. Another proposed measure would force single mothers to demonstrate to the government that they can care for the child, effectively introducing licensing to have children.

- Implementing a system of “involuntary birth control,” where both men and women would be mandated to have an infertility device implanted into their body at puberty and only have it removed temporarily if they received permission from the government to have a baby.

- Permanently sterilizing people who the authorities deem have already had too many children or who have contributed to “general social deterioration”.

- Formally passing a law that criminalizes having more than two children, similar to the one child policy in Communist China.

- This would all be overseen by a transnational and centralized “planetary regime” that would utilize a “global police force” to enforce the measures outlined above. The “planetary regime” would also have the power to determine population levels for every country in the world.

The quotes from the book are included below. We also include comments by the author of the blog who provided the screenshots of the relevant passages. Screenshots of the relevant pages and the quotes in their full context are provided at the end of the excerpts. The quotes from the book appear as text indents and in bold. The quotes from the author of the blog are italicized.

Page 837: Compulsory abortions would be legal

“Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.”

As noted in the FrontPage article cited above, Holdren “hides behind the passive voice” in this passage, by saying “it has been concluded.” Really? By whom? By the authors of the book, that’s whom. What Holdren’s really saying here is, “I have determined that there’s nothing unconstitutional about laws which would force women to abort their babies.” And as we will see later, although Holdren bemoans the fact that most people think there’s no need for such laws, he and his co-authors believe that the population crisis is so severe that the time has indeed come for “compulsory population-control laws.” In fact, they spend the entire book arguing that “the population crisis” has already become “sufficiently severe to endanger the society.”

Page 786: Single mothers should have their babies taken away by the government; or they could be forced to have abortions

“One way to carry out this disapproval might be to insist that all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption—especially those born to minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone. If a single mother really wished to keep her baby, she might be obliged to go through adoption proceedings and demonstrate her ability to support and care for it. Adoption proceedings probably should remain more difficult for single people than for married couples, in recognition of the relative difficulty of raising children alone. It would even be possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement for adoption, depending on the society.”

Holdren and his co-authors once again speculate about unbelievably draconian solutions to what they feel is an overpopulation crisis. But what’s especially disturbing is not that Holdren has merely made these proposals — wrenching babies from their mothers’ arms and giving them away; compelling single mothers to prove in court that they would be good parents; and forcing women to have abortions, whether they wanted to or not — but that he does so in such a dispassionate, bureaucratic way. Don’t be fooled by the innocuous and “level-headed” tone he takes: the proposals are nightmarish, however euphemistically they are expressed.

Holdren seems to have no grasp of the emotional bond between mother and child, and the soul-crushing trauma many women have felt throughout history when their babies were taken away from them involuntarily.

This kind of clinical, almost robotic discussion of laws that would affect millions of people at the most personal possible level is deeply unsettling, and the kind of attitude that gives scientists a bad name. I’m reminded of the phrase “banality of evil.”

Not that it matters, but I myself am “pro-choice” — i.e. I think that abortion should not be illegal. But that doesn’t mean I’m pro-abortion — I don’t particularly like abortions, but I do believe women should be allowed the choice to have them. But John Holdren here proposes to take away that choice — to force women to have abortions. One doesn’t need to be a “pro-life” activist to see the horror of this proposal — people on all sides of the political spectrum should be outraged. My objection to forced abortion is not so much to protect the embryo, but rather to protect the mother from undergoing a medical procedure against her will. And not just any medical procedure, but one which she herself (regardless of my views) may find particularly immoral or traumatic.

There’s a bumper sticker that’s popular in liberal areas which says: “Against abortion? Then don’t have one.” Well, John Holdren wants to MAKE you have one, whether you’re against it or not.

Page 787-8: Mass sterilization of humans though drugs in the water supply is OK as long as it doesn’t harm livestock

“Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.”

OK, John, now you’re really starting to scare me. Putting sterilants in the water supply? While you correctly surmise that this suggestion “seems to horrify people more than most proposals,” you apparently are not among those people it horrifies. Because in your extensive list of problems with this possible scheme, there is no mention whatsoever of any ethical concerns or moral issues. In your view, the only impediment to involuntary mass sterilization of the population is that it ought to affect everyone equally and not have any unintended side effects or hurt animals. But hey, if we could sterilize all the humans safely without hurting the livestock, that’d be peachy! The fact that Holdren has no moral qualms about such a deeply invasive and unethical scheme (aside from the fact that it would be difficult to implement) is extremely unsettling and in a sane world all by itself would disqualify him from holding a position of power in the government.

Page 786-7: The government could control women’s reproduction by either sterilizing them or implanting mandatory long-term birth control

Involuntary fertility control

“A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men.

The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.”

Note well the phrase “with official permission” in the above quote. John Holdren envisions a society in which the government implants a long-term sterilization capsule in all girls as soon as they reach puberty, who then must apply for official permission to temporarily remove the capsule and be allowed to get pregnant at some later date. Alternately, he wants a society that sterilizes all women once they have two children. Do you want to live in such a society? Because I sure as hell don’t.

Page 838: The kind of people who cause “social deterioration” can be compelled to not have children

“If some individuals contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children, and if the need is compelling, they can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility—just as they can be required to exercise responsibility in their resource-consumption patterns—providing they are not denied equal protection.“

To me, this is in some ways the most horrifying sentence in the entire book — and it had a lot of competition. Because here Holdren reveals that moral judgments would be involved in determining who gets sterilized or is forced to abort their babies. Proper, decent people will be left alone — but those who “contribute to social deterioration” could be “forced to exercise reproductive responsibility” which could only mean one thing — compulsory abortion or involuntary sterilization. What other alternative would there be to “force” people to not have children? Will government monitors be stationed in irresponsible people’s bedrooms to ensure they use condoms? Will we bring back the chastity belt? No — the only way to “force” people to not become or remain pregnant is to sterilize them or make them have abortions.

But what manner of insanity is this? “Social deterioration”? Is Holdren seriously suggesting that “some” people contribute to social deterioration more than others, and thus should be sterilized or forced to have abortions, to prevent them from propagating their kind? Isn’t that eugenics, plain and simple? And isn’t eugenics universally condemned as a grotesquely evil practice?

We’ve already been down this road before. In one of the most shameful episodes in the history of U.S. jurisprudence, the Supreme Court ruled in the infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell case that the State of Virginia had had the right to sterilize a woman named Carrie Buck against her will, based solely on the (spurious) criteria that she was “feeble-minded” and promiscuous, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes concluding, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Nowadays, of course, we look back on that ruling in horror, as eugenics as a concept has been forever discredited. In fact, the United Nations now regards forced sterilization as a crime against humanity.

The italicized phrase at the end (”providing they are not denied equal protection”), which Holdren seems to think gets him off the eugenics hook, refers to the 14th Amendment (as you will see in the more complete version of this passage quoted below), meaning that the eugenics program wouldn’t be racially based or discriminatory — merely based on the whim and assessments of government bureaucrats deciding who and who is not an undesirable. If some civil servant in Holdren’s America determines that you are “contributing to social deterioration” by being promiscuous or pregnant or both, will government agents break down your door and and haul you off kicking and screaming to the abortion clinic? In fact, the Supreme Court case Skinner v. Oklahoma already determined that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment distinctly prohibits state-sanctioned sterilization being applied unequally to only certain types of people.

No no, you say, Holdren isn’t claiming that some kind of people contribute to social deterioration more than others; rather, he’s stating that anyone who overproduces children thereby contributes to social deterioration and needs to be stopped from having more. If so — how is that more palatable? It seems Holdren and his co-authors have not really thought this through, because what they are suggesting is a nightmarish totalitarian society. What does he envision: All women who commit the crime of having more than two children be dragged away by police to the government-run sterilization centers? Or — most disturbingly of all — perhaps Holdren has thought it through, and is perfectly OK with the kind of dystopian society he envisions in this book.

Sure, I could imagine a bunch of drunken guys sitting around shooting the breeze, expressing these kinds of forbidden thoughts; who among us hasn’t looked in exasperation at a harried mother buying candy bars and soda for her immense brood of unruly children and thought: Lady, why don’t you just get your tubes tied already? But it’s a different matter when the Science Czar of the United States suggests the very same thing officially in print. It ceases being a harmless fantasy, and suddenly the possibility looms that it could become government policy. And then it’s not so funny anymore.

Page 838: Nothing is wrong or illegal about the government dictating family size

“In today’s world, however, the number of children in a family is a matter of profound public concern. The law regulates other highly personal matters. For example, no one may lawfully have more than one spouse at a time. Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?”

Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?

Why?

I’ll tell you why, John. Because the the principle of habeas corpus upon which our nation rests automatically renders any compulsory abortion scheme to be unconstitutional, since it guarantees the freedom of each individual’s body from detention or interference, until that person has been convicted of a crime. Or are you seriously suggesting that, should bureaucrats decide that the country is overpopulated, the mere act of pregnancy be made a crime?

I am no legal scholar, but it seems that John Holdren is even less of a legal scholar than I am. Many of the bizarre schemes suggested in Ecoscience rely on seriously flawed legal reasoning. The book is not so much about science, but instead is about reinterpreting the Constitution to allow totalitarian population-control measures.

Page 942-3: A “Planetary Regime” should control the global economy and dictate by force the number of children allowed to be born

Toward a Planetary Regime

“Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market.”

“The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.”

In case you were wondering exactly who would enforce these forced abortion and mass sterilization laws: Why, it’ll be the “Planetary Regime”! Of course! I should have seen that one coming.

The rest of this passage speaks for itself. Once you add up all the things the Planetary Regime (which has a nice science-fiction ring to it, doesn’t it?) will control, it becomes quite clear that it will have total power over the global economy, since according to Holdren this Planetary Regime will control “all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable” (which basically means all goods) as well as all food, and commerce on the oceans and any rivers “that discharge into the oceans” (i.e. 99% of all navigable rivers). What’s left? Not much.

Page 917: We will need to surrender national sovereignty to an armed international police force

“If this could be accomplished, security might be provided by an armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force. Many people have recognized this as a goal, but the way to reach it remains obscure in a world where factionalism seems, if anything, to be increasing. The first step necessarily involves partial surrender of sovereignty to an international organization.”

The other shoe drops. So: We are expected to voluntarily surrender national sovereignty to an international organization (the “Planetary Regime,” presumably), which will be armed and have the ability to act as a police force. And we saw in the previous quote exactly which rules this armed international police force will be enforcing: compulsory birth control, and all economic activity.

It would be laughable if Holdren weren’t so deadly serious. Do you want this man to be in charge of science and technology in the United States? Because he already is in charge.

Page 749: Pro-family and pro-birth attitudes are caused by ethnic chauvinism

“Another related issue that seems to encourage a pronatalist attitude in many people is the question of the differential reproduction of social or ethnic groups. Many people seem to be possessed by fear that their group may be outbred by other groups. White Americans and South Africans are worried there will be too many blacks, and vice versa. The Jews in Israel are disturbed by the high birth rates of Israeli Arabs, Protestants are worried about Catholics, and lbos about Hausas. Obviously, if everyone tries to outbreed everyone else, the result will be catastrophe for all. This is another case of the “tragedy of the commons,” wherein the “commons” is the planet Earth. Fortunately, it appears that, at least in the DCs, virtually all groups are exercising reproductive restraint.”

This passage is not particularly noteworthy except for the inclusion of the odd phrase “pronatalist attitude,” which Holdren spends much of the book trying to undermine. And what exactly is a “pronatalist attitude”? Basically it means the urge to have children, and to like babies. If only we could suppress people’s natural urge to want children and start families, we could solve all our problems!

What’s disturbing to me is the incredibly patronizing and culturally imperialist attitude he displays here, basically acting like he has the right to tell every ethnic group in the world that they should allow themselves to go extinct or at least not increase their populations any more. How would we feel if Andaman Islanders showed up on the steps of the Capitol in Washington D.C. and announced that there were simply too many Americans, and we therefore are commanded to stop breeding immediately? One imagines that the attitude of every ethnic group in the world to John Holdren’s proposal would be: Cram it, John. Stop telling us what to do.

Page 944: As of 1977, we are facing a global overpopulation catastrophe that must be resolved at all costs by the year 2000

“Humanity cannot afford to muddle through the rest of the twentieth century; the risks are too great, and the stakes are too high. This may be the last opportunity to choose our own and our descendants’ destiny. Failing to choose or making the wrong choices may lead to catastrophe. But it must never be forgotten that the right choices could lead to a much better world.”

This is the final paragraph of the book, which I include here only to show how embarrassingly inaccurate his “scientific” projections were. In 1977, Holdren thought we were teetering on the brink of global catastrophe, and he proposed implementing fascistic rules and laws to stave off the impending disaster. Luckily, we ignored his warnings, yet the world managed to survive anyway without the need to punish ourselves with the oppressive society which Holdren proposed. Yes, there still is overpopulation, but the problems it causes are not as morally repugnant as the “solutions” which John Holdren wanted us to adopt.

SCREENSHOTS OF PAGES FROM ECOSCIENCE (CLICK FOR ENLARGEMENTS)

Front cover	Back cover	Title page
Page 749	Page 786	Page 787
Page 788	Page 789	Page 837
Page 838	Page 839	Page 917
Page 942	Page 943	Page 944
Page 1001	Page 1002	Page 1003

===============================================================================

Alex Jones & Paul Joseph Watson: Obama Czar’s Nightmarish Sterilization Plan

The Alex Jones Channel
July 14, 2009

Alongside John P. Holdrens advocacy for a global planetary regime to enforce forced abortion, government `seizure of children born out of wedlock, and mandatory bodily implants designed to prevent pregnancy, Obamas top advisor also called for, “Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods.”

http://www.youtube.com/v/Nw3mpStq4jc

http://www.youtube.com/v/-cqHhw8AYNQ

http://www.youtube.com/v/CJkfBUu1oc4

http://www.youtube.com/v/5nfNyw9BkuM

http://www.youtube.com/v/uAh3cTpcz8Q

===============================================================================

More Examples Of Holdren’s Spectacularly Wrong Alarmist Rhetoric

John Holdren, Ideological Environmentalist

Ronald Bailey
Forbes
Wednesday, July 15, 2009

President Barack Obama has nominated a Green Dream Team to guide the implementation of his ambitious climate and energy policies. John Holdren, a fierce ideological environmentalist, will be the leader of this team as the assistant to the president for science and technology and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Holdren’s political environmentalism has been amply rewarded over the years. Today, he is the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, director of environmental research group the Woods Hole Research Center and a past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In his salad days, Holdren was a fully paid-up member of The Limits to Growth club. For example, in his 1971 Sierra Club book, Energy: A Crisis in Power, Holdren declared that “it is fair to conclude that under almost any assumptions, the supplies of crude petroleum and natural gas are severely limited. The bulk of energy likely to flow from these sources may have been tapped within the lifetime of many of the present population.” This sounds very much like contemporary prognostications of “peak oil.”

In keeping with his dogmatic limits-to-growth convictions, Holdren joined his frequent co-author, eco-doomster Paul Ehrlich, in a famous bet against cornucopian economist Julian Simon.

In 1980, Holdren, Ehrlich and Stanford colleague John Harte picked a basket of five commodities–chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten–that they were sure were going to rise in price as they became increasingly scarce. They drew up a futures contract obligating Simon to sell Holdren, Ehrlich and Harte the same quantities of five metals that could be purchased for $1,000 10 years later at 1980 prices.

If the combined prices rose above $1,000, Simon would pay the difference. If they fell below $1,000, Ehrlich would pay Simon. Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07 in October 1990. Simply put, the combined real prices of the metals selected by Holdren and his colleagues fell by more than 50% during the 1980s, confirming cornucopian claims that the supply of resources over time becomes more abundant, not scarcer.

Despite his early peak-oil proclivities, Holdren did acknowledge in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists back in 1975 that “civilization is not running out of energy; but it is running out of cheap energy.” But even then, he was clearly convinced that energy supplies would become ever more expensive. More recently, Holdren has declared that even “peak oil” is debatable.

Also near the beginning of his career, Holdren introduced in 1971–with his colleague and perennial population-alarmist, Ehrlich–the concept of the I=PAT identity. Human Impact on the environment is equal to Population x Affluence/consumption x Technology. All of which are supposed to intensify and worsen humanity’s impact on the natural world.

History shows that the I=PAT identity largely gets it backward. Population is at worst neutral, while affluence and technology actually promote environmental flourishing. It is in the rich, developed countries that the air becomes clearer, the streams cleaner and the forests more expansive.

Full story here.

===============================================================================

Obama’s Science Czar: Traditional family is obsolete, punish large families

David Freddoso
Washington Examiner
Wednesday, July 15, 2009

President Obama’s Science Czar, John Holdren, took a controversial and amoral approach to the science of population by recommending mass compulsory sterilization and even forced abortion (and/or forced marriages) under certain circumstances. His 1977 tome, Ecoscience, which he co-authored with Paul and Anne Ehrlich, also displays a revealing disregard for the institution of the traditional human family.

Holdren and the Ehrlichs write:

Radical changes in family structure and relationships are inevitable, whether population control is instituted or not. Inaction, attended by a steady deterioration in living conditions for the poor majority, will bring changes everywhere that no one could consider beneficial. Thus, it is beside the point to object to population-control measures simply on the grounds that they might change the social structure or family relationships.

Holdren, with a blithe “of course,” encourages government to wage an effective war on the family in America. It begins with the abolition of “pronatalist” policies and continues with their complete reversal:

As United States taxpayers know, income tax laws have long implicitly encouraged marriage and childbearing…Such a pronatalist bias of course is no longer appropriate. In countries that are affluent enough for the majority of citizens to pay taxes, tax laws could be adjusted to favor (instead of penalize) single people, working wives, and small families. Other tax measures might also include high marriage fees, taxes on luxury baby goods and toys, and removal of family allowances where they exist. Other possibilities include the limitation of maternal or educational benefits to two children per family.

Holdren notes that some of these proposals “have the potential disadvantage of heavily penalizing children (and in the long run society as well).” This is not a disqualifier, though, as long as the proposals are “carefully adjusted to avoid denying at least minimum care for poor families, regardless of the number of children they may have.” Even here, the objection is practical, not ethical. It’s fine to level stiff penalties against those who choose families and children, but not to the point that this policy exacerbates the original problem (unwanted children, living in squalor) that population control purports to combat.

Some Americans might cite the Founding Fathers and argue that a government whose policy is to make war on the family in the name of science has clearly overstepped its mandate. That was not the opinion expressed by John Holdren, the man President Obama has put in charge in the nation’s science policy.

===============================================================================

Liberal Website Claims Source Of Holdren Controversy Is “Radical Right Wing”

When in fact the source is Holdren’s own book

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, July 13, 2009

Liberal website News Hounds attempts to giggle and guffaw at the controversy of Obama’s top science advisor John P. Holdren’s plans to mass sterilize the population and carry out forced abortions by claiming that the entire story is an invention of the “radical right wing,” when in fact it comes straight from Holdren’s own 1977 book Ecoscience.

The left-wing website claims that the story is a product of “the black helicopter crowd….doing their usual frothing at the mouth,” despite the fact that giant screenshots of the pages where Holdren makes the statements are available for anyone to view online.

News Hounds snickers at the fact that Fox News ran with the story, adding, “What’s really worth a chuckle is the source of Fox Nation’s fear and loathing and that is the publication of red diaper baby and former left wing radical turned right wing shouter at clouds – David Horowitz.”

Here’s a newsflash for the partisan hacks running News Hounds – the source of the story is not Fox News, it’s not Front Page Magazine, it’s not David Horowitz and it’s not Prison Planet – the source is Holdren’s own book that he co-authored in 1977 and proudly stands by today.

If you visit our original article, you will find screenshots of the book in question. Not Fox News, Not Horowitz, not the “radical right wing,” – Holdren’s own book, you know, the one he wrote. That is the source of the story. Get it?

Of course, News Hounds are fully aware that the source is Holdren’s own book, but they are trying to turn the issue into a left-right circus sideshow in order to distract from the real issue – that Holdren openly advocated a totalitarian system of government control run by a “planetary regime” and enforced by a “global police force” that would carry out forced abortions, mass sterilization of the public through the food and water supply, as well as mandatory implantation of birth control devices at puberty. Again, that’s not coming from Fox News or Front Page Magazine, those are the proposals in Holdren’s own book, you know, the one he wrote.

News Hounds claim that the whole issue is “A view into the bizarro world of the Obama haters (and that’s “straight up” what it’s all about),” linking to Prison Planet.com. We’d therefore like to point out the fact that Alex Jones’ film Endgame, which is largely about this very issue of eugenics, was produced and released more than a year before Obama even came to office – before he was even selected as the Democratic nominee. This has nothing to do with ‘hating Obama’ – that’s nothing more than a partisan copout and News Hounds knows it.

The page from Holdren’s own book, not Fox News, not Front Page Magazine, not Prison Planet, Holdren’s own book, that proposes “compulsory” or ‘forced’ abortion.

The kind of liberals who read News Hounds are likely to be “pro-choice,” they believe it’s a woman’s right to do with her body what she wants without government interference. Deliciously ironic therefore it is that one of Holdren’s proposals – which is contained in his own book and not on a “radical right wing” website – to carry out forced abortions – would remove that “choice” altogether.

News Hounds claims the contention that Holdren advocates forced abortion is a “smear,” despite the fact that in his own book, that’s his own book, you know, the one he wrote, not something written by Fox News or Front Page Magazine, he writes that, “Compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution.”

We’ve come to accept the fact that people who call themselves “liberal” will still vehemently support the same racist, elitist and inhumane eugenics policies that were once embraced by Adolf Hitler in the context of “overpopulation,” but to see them claim that the Holdren story was an invention of insane, frothing, black helicopter fearing radical right wing extremists, when the quotes come directly from Holdren’s own book, is reaching a level of denial beyond fantasy.

===============================================================================

Predictions Of The ‘Overpopulation’ Alarmists: Wrong, Wrong, & Wrong Again

Earth Day, Then and Now
The planet’s future has never looked better. Here’s why.

Ronald Bailey
Reason Online
Monday, July 13, 2009 (Originally posted May 2000)

Thirty Years ago, 20 million Americans participated in the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Fifth Avenue in New York City was closed to automobiles as 100,000 people joined in concerts, lectures, and street theater. More than 2,000 colleges and universities across America paused their anti-war protests to rally instead against pollution and population growth. Even Congress recessed, acknowledging that the environment was now on a political par with motherhood. Since that first Earth Day, the celebrations have only gotten bigger, if somewhat less dramatic: The organizers of Earth Day 2000, to be held April 22, expect 500 million people around the globe to participate in celebrations, workshops, and demonstrations. This year’s theme is “clean energy” and the master of ceremonies for the big celebration on the Washington Mall is none other than Leonardo Di Caprio.

The first Earth Day was the brainchild of Gaylord Nelson, the Democratic senator from Wisconsin. The moment was obviously ripe. Nelson had proposed a national “teach-in” on the environment in September 1969 and only eight months later, everything was in place for the single largest national demonstration in American history. Dramatic events such as the Cuyahoga River bursting into flame in 1969, the blowout of an oil well off Santa Barbara, and the “death” of Lake Erie due to pollution all fed Americans’ concerns. The sorry state of America’s environment hit home for me when, as a 16-year-old high school student from the mountains of Virginia, I visited George Washington’s home, Mt. Vernon, on a marching band trip. Bobbing in the nearby Potomac was a sign warning visitors not to come in contact with the water.

Earth Day 1970 provoked a torrent of apocalyptic predictions. “We have about five more years at the outside to do something,” ecologist Kenneth Watt declared to a Swarthmore College audience on April 19, 1970. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment. The day after Earth Day, even the staid New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” Very Apocalypse Now.

Three decades later, of course, the world hasn’t come to an end; if anything, the planet’s ecological future has never looked so promising. With half a billion people suiting up around the globe for Earth Day 2000, now is a good time to look back on the predictions made at the first Earth Day and see how they’ve held up and what we can learn from them. The short answer: The prophets of doom were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong.

More important, many contemporary environmental alarmists are similarly mistaken when they continue to insist that the Earth’s future remains an eco-tragedy that has already entered its final act. Such doomsters not only fail to appreciate the huge environmental gains made over the past 30 years, they ignore the simple fact that increased wealth, population, and technological innovation don’t degrade and destroy the environment. Rather, such developments preserve and enrich the environment. If it is impossible to predict fully the future, it is nonetheless possible to learn from the past. And the best lesson we can learn from revisiting the discourse surrounding the very first Earth Day is that passionate concern, however sincere, is no substitute for rational analysis.

Soylent Greens

Imminent global famine caused by the explosion of the “population bomb” was the big issue on Earth Day 1970. Then–and now–the most prominent prophet of population doom was Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich. Dubbed “ecology’s angry lobbyist” by Life magazine, the gloomy Ehrlich was quoted everywhere. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” he confidently declared in an interview with then-radical journalist Peter Collier in the April 1970 Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Ehrlich in an essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe!,” which ran in the special Earth Day issue of the radical magazine Ramparts. “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

Although Ehrlich was certainly the most strident doomster, he was far from alone in his famine forecasts. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness. In that same issue, Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, wrote, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine” (emphasis in original). Ehrlich and others were openly contemptuous of the “Green Revolution,” underway in countries such as India and Pakistan, that had already nearly doubled crop yields in developing nations between 1965 and 1970. Ehrlich sniffed that such developments meant nothing, going so far as to predict that “the Green Revolution…is going to turn brown.” Such fears took form in such popular Zeitgeist movies as Soylent Green (1973), which envisioned a future of hungry masses jammed into overcrowded cities.

The Soylent Green crowd didn’t simply predict mass starvation. They argued that even trying to feed so many people was itself a recipe for disaster. As Lester Brown, a former U.S. Department of Agriculture agronomist who would later become far more prominent as the founder of the Worldwatch Institute, put it in Scientific American, “There is growing doubt that the agricultural ecosystem will be able to accommodate both the anticipated increase of the human population to seven billion by the end of the century and the universal desire of the world’s hungry for a better diet. The central question is no longer `Can we produce enough food?’ but `What are the environmental consequences of attempting to do so?’”

Even if somehow famine were avoided, what would the world’s population be in 2000? Peter Gunter predicted 7.2 billion. Ehrlich foresaw that “by the end of the century we’ll have well over 7 billion people if something isn’t done.” Brown agreed that “world population at the end of the century is expected to be twice the 3.5 billion of today.” In the April 21, 1970, Look, Rockefeller University biologist and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Rene Dubos made the shocking suggestion that, “To some overcrowded populations, the bomb may one day no longer seem a threat, but a release.”

Time has not been gentle with these prophecies. It’s absolutely true that far too many people remain poor and hungry in the world–800 million people are still malnourished and nearly 1.2 billion live on less than a dollar a day–but we have not seen mass starvation around the world in the past three decades. Where we have seen famines, such as in Somalia and Ethiopia, they are invariably the result of war and political instability. Indeed, far from turning brown, the Green Revolution has never been so verdant. Food production has handily outpaced population growth and food today is cheaper and more abundant than ever before. Since 1970, the amount of food per person globally has increased by 26 percent, and as the International Food Policy Research Institute reported in October 1999, “World market prices for wheat, maize, and rice, adjusted for inflation, are the lowest they have been in the last century.” According to the World Bank’s World Development Report 2000, food production increased by 60 percent between 1980 and 1997. At the same time, the amount of land devoted to growing crops has barely increased over the past 30 years, meaning that millions of acres have been spared for nature–acres that would have been plowed down had agricultural productivity lagged the way Ehrlich and others believed it would.

What’s the world population? Rather than 7 billion people inhabiting the earth by 2000, there are 6 billion–nearly 30 percent fewer than predicted. That’s because total fertility (the number of children a woman has over the course of her lifetime) has been dropping nearly everywhere on the planet since 1970. In fact, it has dropped from around 6 children per woman in the 1960s to around 2.8 today–and shows no signs of stopping. Total fertility rates for 79 countries, including the United States, are below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. If present trends continue, it looks like the U.N. low-variant population growth projection is likely, which means that world population will like-ly peak at around 8 billion in 2040 and then begin to decline. It is true that the AIDS pandemic has cut average life expectancy in more than 30 countries since 1990, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite AIDS, however, the World Health Organization expects life expectancy in the developing countries to increase from 65 years to 73 years by 2020. (It’s worth noting that any effective treatment for AIDS–a vaccine, say–will most likely emerge from laboratories and pharmaceutical companies, two stock villains in the standard environmentalist morality play, in the rich countries.)

Where did the doomsters go wrong? They assumed that overpopulation drives world hunger. To the extent that such conditions exist in certain places, the real culprit was–and is–poverty. “The images evoked by the term overpopulation–hungry families, squalid, overcrowded living conditions, early death–are real enough in the modern world, but these are properly described as problems of poverty,” explains Harvard population researcher Nicholas Eberstadt. “Poverty, like all other possible human attributes, is represented in individual members of a population. It is an elementary lapse in logic to conclude that poverty is a `population problem’ simply because it exists.”

Polluted Thinking

Pollution was the other big issue on Earth Day 1970. Smog choked many American cities and sludge coated the banks of many rivers. People were also worried that we were poisoning the biosphere and ourselves with dangerous pesticides. DDT, which had been implicated in the decline of various bird species, including the bald eagle, the peregrine falcon, and the brown pelican, would soon be banned in the United States. Students wearing gas masks buried cars and internal combustion engines as symbols of our profligate and polluting consumer society. The Great Lakes were in bad shape and Lake Erie was officially “dead,” its fish killed because oxygen supplies had been depleted by rot-ting algae blooms that had themselves been fed by organic pollutants from factories and municipal sewage. Pesticides draining from the land were projected to kill off the phytoplankton in the oceans, eventually stopping oxygen production.

In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….” Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” Barry Commoner cited a National Research Council report that had estimated “that by 1980 the oxygen demand due to municipal wastes will equal the oxygen content of the total flow of all the U.S. river systems in the summer months.” Translation: Decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.

Of course, the irrepressible Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in his Mademoiselle interview that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” In Ramparts, Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

So has air pollution gotten worse? Quite the contrary. In the most recent National Air Quality Trends report, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency–itself created three decades ago partly as a response to Earth Day celebrations–had this to say: “Since 1970, total U.S. population increased 29 percent, vehicle miles traveled increased 121 percent, and the gross domestic product (GDP) increased 104 percent. During that same period, notable reductions in air quality concentrations and emissions took place.” Since 1970, ambient levels of sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide have fallen by 75 percent, while total suspended particulates like smoke, soot, and dust have been cut by 50 percent since the 1950s.

In 1988, the particulate standard was changed to account for smaller particles. Even under this tougher standard, particulates have declined an additional 15 percent. Ambient ozone and nitrogen dioxide, prime constituents of smog, are both down by 30 percent since the 1970s. According to the EPA, the total number of days with air pollution alerts dropped 56 percent in Southern California and 66 percent in the remaining major cities in the United States between 1988 and 1997. Since at least the early 1990s, residents of infamously smogged-in Los Angeles have been able to see that their city is surrounded by mountains.

Why has air quality improved so dramatically? Part of the answer lies in emissions targets set by federal, state, and local governments. But these need to be understood in the twin contexts of rising wealth and economic efficiency. As a Department of Interior analyst concluded after surveying emissions in 1999, “Cleaner air is a direct consequence of better technologies and the enormous and sustained investments that only a rich nation could have sunk into developing, installing, and operating these technologies.” Today, American businesses, consumers, and government agencies spend about $40 billion annually on air pollution controls.

It is now evident that countries undergo various environmental transitions as they become wealthier. Fortune’s special “ecology” edition in February 1970 was far more prescient than the doomsters when it noted, “If pollution is the brother of affluence, concern about pollution is affluence’s child.” In 1992, a World Bank analysis found that concentrations of particulates and sulfur dioxide peak at per capita incomes of $3,280 and $3,670, respectively. Once these income thresholds are crossed, societies start to purchase increased environmental amenities such as clean air and water.

In the U.S., air quality has been improving rapidly since before the first Earth Day–and before the federal Clean Air Act of 1970. In fact, ambient levels of particulates and sulfur dioxide have been declining ever since accurate records have been kept. Between 1960 and 1970, for instance, particulates declined by 25 percent; sulfur dioxide decreased by 35 percent between 1962 and 1970. More concretely, it takes 20 new cars to produce the same emissions that one car produced in the 1960s.

Similar trends can be found when it comes to water pollution. The warning sign is gone from the Potomac and I can swim and fish in that river again. Lake Erie once again supports a $600 million fishing industry, and an upscale shopping and entertainment district now lines the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. The EPA estimates that between 60 percent and 70 percent of lakes, rivers, and streams meet state quality goals. That’s up from about 30 percent to 40 percent 30 years ago.

Since 1972, the United States has invested more than $540 billion in water pollution control efforts, according to the Pacific Research Center. In 1972, only 85 million Americans were served by sewage treatment plants. Since then, some 14,000 municipal waste treatment plants have been built and 173 million Americans are served by them. Similar air and water quality trends can be found in other developed countries as well.

Most environmental problems occur in what are called “open-access commons”–that is, any member of the public may use the resource without paying anyone else for it. Typically, open-access commons still exist as relics of a time when the resource was abundant relative to the number of people using it. If only you and a couple of neighbors lived along a river, you could all dump your sewage in the river because it would naturally purify itself. The same goes for forests–homesteaders could chop them down because there were millions of acres more to be had.

With open-access commons, if you don’t use the resource for your own benefit, other people will and you’ll simply lose out. The prototypical example of an open-access commons is the old-fashioned village sheep meadow. Because everyone in the village has the right to put sheep on the meadow, each villager has an incentive to put extra sheep on the meadow in order to enrich himself. However, if every villager chooses to add sheep, then the meadow will be destroyed by overgrazing and all villagers will suffer the consequences.

In a related way, people dump sewage into rivers or pump smoke into the air because no one “owns” a river or the air in a traditional sense. We might say that the public “owns” rivers and airsheds, but none of us individually has much of an incentive (or an ability) to stop others from emitting excessive pollutants. Such open-access commons are at the center of most instances of environmental problems today, from the deforestation of tropical rainforests to the potential loss of biodiversity to the depletion of open-sea fisheries.

There are two basic ways to address the environmental problems caused by open-access commons. The favored way has been traditional, top-down political regulation, in which an agency prescribes specific pollution-control technology and monitors output. Depending on the situation, this method can score some quick improvements–the shift from leaded to unleaded gasoline had a huge impact on air quality, for instance. But it’s more typically slow, costly, and subject to the endless wrangling of interest groups seeking special exemptions and protections. What’s more, because it enforces a single standard, it discourages the innovation and experimentation that often lead to new, more environmentally sound ways of doing things. For example, the Clean Air Act effectively mandated that electric utilities use smokestack scrubbers to reduce their sulfur dioxide emissions when other alternatives, such as a switch to burning cleaner coal, would have reduced emissions even further and more cheaply, too.

The other approach to open-access commons harnesses both the creativity of markets and the power of privatization. An overall level of acceptable pollution is set, a market is created through tradeable permits, and then firms are allowed to pursue various means to reach the goal. We find fast, cheap, and efficient environmental improvements where this approach has been tried. In the U.S., for instance, sulfur dioxide emissions have been cut much faster and at less cost since the creation of a (very imperfect) market for such emissions (see “Selling Air Pollution,” May 1996). Fisheries in New Zealand and Iceland have dramatically rebounded since they were essentially privatized. And one of the chief reasons that forests are expanding in the U.S. and Europe is because landowners have secure property rights to them. Such gains are not mysterious: If you own a resource, you’re far more likely to use it efficiently.

Perversely, many environmental activists still fault markets for not properly valuing “natural capital” or “ecosystem services” and they continue to call for placing more resources in public hands. In effect, they want more open-access commons. But if no one has to pay for the use of a resource, then they consider it to be free. The way to take environmental goods into account is exactly the way we take all other goods into account–we put them into the market where people have to pay for what they use.

Synthetic Arguments

At Earth Day 1970, many Americans feared that synthetic chemicals, especially pesticides, were killing them. No culprit was more singled out than DDT, a pesticide that had been first used in 1946. The World Health Organization originally hailed it as a miracle that had drastically reduced deaths from malaria; its inventor, Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Muller, was honored with a Nobel Prize in 1948.

By 1970, however, DDT had emerged as the symbol of all that was wrong with the modern world. DDT had been implicated in the decimation of several bird species due to egg-shell thinning. It was also alleged to cause several human cancers, including breast cancer. DDT was banned in the U.S. by the EPA in 1972; other countries soon followed suit.

Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” In his “Eco-Catastrophe!” scenario, Ehrlich put a finer point on these fears by envisioning a 1973 Department of Health, Education, and Welfare study which would find “that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out.”

Keying off of Rachel Carson’s claims about the dangers of synthetic chemicals in Silent Spring (1962), Look claimed that many scientists believed that residual DDT would lead to an increase in liver and other cancers. Cornell University ecologist Lamont Cole warned an Earth Day audience at Kearney State College in Nebraska that, “We are releasing into the environment more than 500,000 different chemicals.” “There is one good thing about the blighting of our environment, that is, that Americans don’t have to worry about cannibals anymore,” said social critic Herbert Muller in The New York Times. “We’ve all become inedible, there’s too much DDT in us.”

Contrary to the conventional wisdom at Earth Day 1970, there’s a broad consensus that exposure to synthetic chemicals, even pesticides, does not seem to be a problem. In 1996, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, in a comprehensive report called Carcinogens and Anticarcinogens in the Human Diet, concluded that levels of both synthetic and natural carcinogens are “so low that they are unlikely to pose an appreciable cancer risk.” The National Cancer Institute reports that “increasing exposure to general environmental hazards seems unlikely to have had a major impact on the overall trends in cancer rates.” “Pollution appears to account for less than 1 percent of cancer,” concludes University of California biologist and cancer researcher Bruce Ames.

To be sure, the total number of cancer cases in the population did go up from 1973 to 1990, but cancer death rates declined owing to better medical treatments. Cancer incidence went up for some very prosaic reasons: We smoke too much tobacco, we eat too much fat, and we sunbathe excessively. We also live longer and cancer is primarily a disease of old age. In the U.S. since the early 1990s, both the incidence of cancer and deaths from cancer have been declining, not rising. Some analysts, such as Gregg Easterbrook, have recently hinted that this decline in cancer rates is the result of reductions in the amount of toxins released into the environment. Actually, a good bit of the improvement in cancer rates can be attributed to the decline in the number of smokers in the U.S.

Never mind. Cancer is scary enough (and ubiquitous enough–about one-third of Americans will get some sort of cancer during their lifetimes) that it still serves as a good tool for frightening people about alleged environmental contamination. Just this past January, Worldwatch Institute founder Lester Brown ominously noted, “Every human being harbors in his or her body about 500 synthetic chemicals that were nonexistent before 1920.” So what? Considering that American lifespans have increased by 20 years, from an average of 56 years in 1920 to 71 years in 1970 to 76 years today, one might be tempted to argue that those synthetic chemicals are prolonging our lives. Certainly, they’re not causing damage. Just last year, the National Research Council issued yet another report that found no evidence that synthetic chemicals are causing higher rates of cancer, birth defects, and other problems alleged by Brown.

Meanwhile, banning DDT allowed a resurgence of malaria-carrying mosquitos worldwide. The Malaria International Foundation estimates that there are between 600 to 900 million cases of malaria a year and that about 2.7 million people die of it annually. Spraying DDT had cut malaria deaths from 4 million annually in the early 1940s to 1 million in the 1960s.

Nonrenewable Anxiety

Beyond anxiety over population, pollution, and pesticides, even more speculative concerns were on display at the first Earth Day. Many of these fears–especially the supposed depletion of nonrenewable resources, ostensibly disappearing biodiversity, and apparent global climate change due to human activity–have come to figure far more prominently in our current environmental debates.

The depletion of nonrenewable resources wouldn’t take center stage until the publication of the infamous Limits to Growth report to the Club of Rome in 1972. The limits-to-growth thesis got a huge boost when oil prices spiked during the Arab oil embargo. But on Earth Day 1970, there were already intimations that this would become a major theme of subsequent celebrations.

“We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones,” warned Sierra Club director Martin Litton in Time’s February 2, 1970, special “environmental report.” Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” Later that year, Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

Of course this didn’t happen. The prices of all metals and minerals have dropped by more than 50 percent since 1970, according to the World Resources Institute. As we all know, lower prices mean that things are becoming more abundant, not less. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that at present rates of mining, reserves of copper will last 54 years; zinc, 56 years; silver, 26 years; tin, 55 years; gold, 30 years; and lead, 47 years. What about oil? The survey estimates that global reserves could be as much as 2.1 trillion barrels of crude oil–enough to supply the world for the next 90 years. These reserve figures are constantly moving targets–as they get drawn down, miners and drillers find new sources of supply or develop more efficient technologies for exploiting the resources.

Worries about declining biodiversity have become popular lately. On the first Earth Day, participants were concerned about saving a few particularly charismatic species such as the bald eagle and the peregrine falcon. But even then some foresaw a coming holocaust. As Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” Writing just five years after the first Earth Day, Paul Ehrlich and his biologist wife, Anne Ehrlich, predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

There’s only one problem: Most species that were alive in 1970 are still around today. “Documented animal extinctions peaked in the 1930s, and the number of extinctions has been declining since then,” according to Stephen Edwards, an ecologist with the World Conservation Union, a leading international conservation organization whose members are non-governmental organizations, international agencies, and national conservation agencies. Edwards notes that a 1994 World Conservation Union report found known extinctions since 1600 encompassed 258 animal species, 368 insect species, and 384 vascular plants. Most of these species, he explains, were “island endemics” like the Dodo. As a result, they are particularly vulnerable to habitat disruption, hunting, and competition from invading species. Since 1973, only seven species have gone extinct in the United States.

What mostly accounts for relatively low rates of extinction? As with many other green indicators, wealth leads the way by both creating a market for environmental values and delivering resource-efficient technology. Consider, for example, that one of the main causes of extinction is deforestation and the ensuing loss of habitat. According to the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, what drives most tropical deforestation is not commercial logging, but “poor farmers who have no other option for feeding their families than slashing and burning a patch of forest.” By contrast, countries that practice high yield, chemically assisted agriculture have expanding forests. In 1920, U.S. forests covered 732 million acres. Today they cover 737 million acres, even though the number of Americans grew from 106 million in 1920 to 272 million now. Forests in Europe expanded even more dramatically, from 361 million acres to 482 million acres between 1950 and 1990. Despite continuing deforestation in tropical countries, Roger Sedjo, a senior fellow at the think tank Resources for the Future, notes that “76 percent of the tropical rain forest zone is still covered with forest.” Which is quite a far cry from being nine-tenths gone. More good news: In its State of the World’s Forests 1999, the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization documents that while forests in developing countries were reduced by 9.1 percent between 1980 and 1995, the global rate of deforestation is now slowing.

“The developed countries in the temperate regions appear to have largely completed forestland conversion to agriculture and have achieved relative land use stability. By contrast, the developing countries in the tropics are still in a land conversion mode. This suggests that land conversion stability correlates strongly with successful economic development,” concludes Sedjo, in his chapter on forestry in The True State of the Planet, a collection of essays I edited. In other words, if you want to save forests and wildlife, you had better help poor people become wealthy.

Of course, the biggest environmental crisis facing humanity nowadays is supposed to be global warming. Not surprisingly, worries about the future climate were a common theme among alarmists on the first Earth Day. However, they couldn’t agree on what direction the earth’s temperature was going to take.

“The greenhouse theorists contend the world is threatened with a rise in average temperature, which if it reached 4 or 5 degrees, could melt the polar ice caps, raise sea level by as much as 300 feet and cause a worldwide flood,” explained Newsweek in its special January 26, 1970, report on “The Ravaged Environment.” In the service of balance, however, the magazine also noted that many other scientists saw temperatures dropping: “This theory assumes that the earth’s cloud cover will continue to thicken as more dust, fumes, and water vapor are belched into the atmosphere by industrial smokestacks and jet planes. Screened from the sun’s heat, the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.”

Kenneth Watt was less equivocal in his Swarthmore speech about Earth’s temperature. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

Watt was wrong. Global temperatures didn’t fall, and fears of a new ice age dissolved like frost on an early-autumn morning. Since 1988, when government climatologist James Hansen testified before the Senate Energy and Natural Resource committee that he had detected global warming, climate doomsters have switched almost entirely to worrying about global warming. The theory is straightforward–burning fossil fuels like coal and oil puts excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; the carbon dioxide traps heat from the sun and re-radiates it, heating up the atmosphere.

It’s generally agreed that the earth’s average temperature has indeed gone up by 1 degree Fahrenheit or so in the past century. The question now is, How much man-made warming can we expect in the 21st century? Computer climate models originally predicted that atmospheric temperatures might increase between 3 to 5 degrees centigrade by 2100. However, as the models have been refined, their estimates of how much warming might occur have been declining–the range is now down to 1.5 degrees centigrade to 3.5 by 2100. A recent report from the National Research Council noted that “the surface apparently warmed by 0.25 C to 0.4 C since 1979.” Remarkably, the NRC panel also estimates the change in the temperature of the atmosphere as being between 0 C to 0.2 C during the same period. In other words, the atmosphere may not have warmed at all since 1979. This is an odd conclusion because the climate computer models have never predicted that the surface would warm first or faster than the atmosphere–in fact, they predict the opposite. Consequently, this gap between surface temperatures and atmospheric temperatures calls the predictive accuracy of the models into serious question.

That doesn’t give many doomsters pause. In February, climatologist Tom Karl of the National Climate Data Center issued a study suggesting that global warming is speeding up. In 1997 and 1998, argues Karl, there were 16 consecutive months in which “we were breaking the previous year’s all-time global high temperature record.” However, University of Virginia climatologist Patrick Michaels (who receives some funding from fossil fuel companies) points out that those 16 months of record high temperatures occurred during the big 1997-1998 El Niño in the Pacific Ocean. During El Niños, water from the western Pacific Ocean spreads eastward, dramatically warming the normally cold waters off the coast of South America and thus boosting average global temperatures. Temperatures have now dropped back to where they were before the El Niño occurred. El Niños are not predicted to be affected by any man-made global warming.

In any case, whatever global warming is occurring is apparently being channeled into winter nights. Summer daytime temperatures do not appear to be warming. Warmer winter nights are far less of a threat to the natural world and humanity than higher summer temperatures. Are our coasts about to be inundated by rising seas due to melting ice caps? The best guess from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is that the sea level might rise about 8 inches by 2100. While this may seem troubling, keep in mind that sea levels rose by about 6 inches over the last century.

Indeed, a far greater threat for the next century comes from environmental activists. To counteract global warming, they essentially want to plan the energy future of the entire world for the next 100 years. They are enacting the plan through the U.N. Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol. The absurdity (and arrogance) of that type of planning becomes clear when one imagines the same exercise taking place in 1900. The best scientific panel available in 1900 would simply not have been able to plan for millions of automobiles and trucks, ubiquitous electric lighting in millions of houses and office buildings, fuel for thousands of jet planes, and millions of refrigerators, air-conditioners, and the like. Virtually none of the devices on this nearly endless list had even been invented by 1900. Given the increasing rate of technological innovation, we undoubtedly have even less chance of foreseeing the future than people in 1900.

Why So Wrong?

How did the doomsters get so many predictions so wrong on the first Earth Day? Their mistake can be handily summed up in Paul Ehrlich and John Holdern’s infamous I=PAT equation. Impact (always negative) equals Population x Affluence x Technology, they declared. More people were always worse, by definition. Affluence meant that rich people were consuming more of the earth’s resources, a concept that was regularly illustrated by claiming that the birth of each additional baby in America was worse for the environment than 25, 50, or even 60 babies born on the Indian subcontinent. And technology was bad because it meant that humans were pouring more poisons into the biosphere, drawing down more nonrenewable resources and destroying more of the remaining wilderness.

We now know that Ehrlich and his fellow travelers got it backwards. If population were necessarily bad, then Brazil, with less than three-quarters the population density of the U.S., should be the wealthier society. As far as affluence goes, it is clearly the case that the richer the country, the cleaner the water, the clearer the air, and the more protected the forests. Additionally, richer countries also boast less hunger, longer lifespans, lower fertility rates, and more land set aside for nature. Relatively poor people can’t afford to care overmuch for the state of the natural world.

With regards to technology, Ehrlich and other activists often claim that economists simply don’t understand the simple facts of ecology. But it’s the doomsters who need to update their economics–things have changed since the appearance of Thomas Malthus’ 200-year-old An Essay on the Principle of Population, the basic text that continues to underwrite much apocalyptic rhetoric. Malthus hypothesized that while population increases geometrically, food and other resources increased arithmetically, leading to a world in which food was always in short supply. Nowadays, we understand that wealth is not created simply by combining land and labor. Rather, technological innovations greatly raise positive outputs in all sorts of ways while minimizing pollution and other negative outputs.

Indeed, if Ehrlich wants to improve his sorry record of predictions and his understanding of how to protect the natural world, he should walk across campus to talk with his Stanford University colleague, economist Paul Romer. “New Growth Theory,” devised by Romer and others, shows that wealth springs from new ideas and new recipes. Romer sums it up this way: “Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. The difficulty is the same one we have with compounding. Possibilities do not add up. They multiply.” In other words, new ideas and technological recipes grow exponentially at a rate much faster than population does.

“I’m scared,” confessed Paul Ehrlich in the 1970 Earth Day issue of Look. “I have a 14 year old daughter whom I love very much. I know a lot of young people, and their world is being destroyed. My world is being destroyed. I’m 37 and I’d kind of like to live to be 67 in a reasonably pleasant world, and not die in some kind of holocaust in the next decade.” Ehrlich didn’t die in a holocaust, and the world is far more pleasant than he thought it would be. It is probably too much to hope that abashed humility will strike him and he’ll desist in bedeviling the world with his dire and consistently wrong predictions. He’s like a reverse Cassandra –Cassandra made true prophecies but no one would listen to her. Ehrlich makes false prophecies and everyone listens to him.

There’s much to celebrate on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. Indeed, one of the chief things to get happy about is that the doomsters were so wrong. Civilization didn’t collapse, hundreds of millions didn’t die in famines, pesticides didn’t cause epidemics of cancer, and the air and water didn’t get dirtier in the industrialized countries.

On the occasions when they admit things have gotten better, doomsters will claim whatever environmental progress has been made over the past 30 years is only a result of the warnings that they sounded. One of the more annoying characteristics of activists such as Ehrlich and Lester Brown is the way in which these prophets of doom get out ahead of a parade that has already started. When things get better, they claim that it’s only because people heeded their warnings, not because of longstanding trends and increased efficiencies. As a result, there is always the danger that governments may actually enact their policies, thereby stifling technological progress and economic growth–and making the world worse off. Then the doomsters would be able to say “I told you so.” So good or bad, they get to claim that they were right all along.

What will Earth look like when Earth Day 60 rolls around in 2030? Here are my predictions: As the International Food Policy Research Institute projects, we will be able to feed the world’s additional numbers and to provide them with a better diet. Because they are ultimately political in nature, poverty and malnutrition will not be eliminated, but economic growth will make many people in the developing world much better off. Technological improvements in agriculture will mean less soil erosion, better management of freshwater supplies, and higher productivity crops. Life expectancy in the developing world will likely increase from 65 years to 73 years, and probably more; in the First World, it will rise to more than 80 years. Metals and mineral prices will be even lower than they are today. The rate of deforestation in the developing world will continue to slow down and forest growth in the developed economies will increase.

Meanwhile, as many developing countries become wealthier, they will start to pass through the environmental-transition thresholds for various pollutants, and their air and water quality will begin to improve. Certainly air and water quality in the United States, Europe, Japan, and other developed countries will be even better than it is today. Enormous progress will be made on the medical front, and diseases like AIDS and malaria may well be finally conquered. As for climate change, concern may be abating because the world’s energy production mix is shifting toward natural gas and nuclear power. There is always the possibility that a technological breakthrough–say, cheap, efficient, non-polluting fuel cells–could radically reshape the energy sector. In any case a richer world will be much better able to cope with any environmental problems that might crop up.

One final prediction, of which I’m most absolutely certain: There will be a disproportionately influential group of doomsters predicting that the future–and the present–never looked so bleak.

===============================================================================

Undermining Human Nature: Mass Media & Eugenics

Jurriaan Maessen
Infowars
July 16, 2009

Throughout the last half of the 20th century, the Unesco eugenicists have left no means unused to control the growth of populations worldwide. The mass media, they reckoned, was by far the most effective instrument through which population control policies could be distributed and implemented. But where to test the effectiveness of such a campaign? Surely not in the western world, where outright propaganda and trickery would backfire on the propagandists in a hurry. They would have to find another testing ground, one more poverty-stricken and needy; and therefore easily overwhelmed by Unesco and UNFPA-personnel with their textbooks of tyranny.

	Unesco represents the transnational eugenicists’ goal of reducing population worldwide.

By the mid-seventies, the program was well underway, with money to spare and lots of ‘human resources’ to scale back. The justification that could be given to the Western middleclass was wonderfully simple and cunningly devised: under the guise of developing the undeveloped, they could impose the concept of population as a plague on the environment and thereby convince our former colonies to surrender their birthright to procreate and multiply- two things our species is prone to do.

Crucial in delivering this message, was to constantly emphasize the concepts of ‘development’ and ‘human rights’ and ‘fighting discrimination’. Only with the help of some philanthropic pretexts, could the population control-programs be sold, both to the target audience in the nations of interest and to the folks back home. This process could only prove effective with the help of a widespread mass media campaign that would combine Bernays-style propaganda with a touch of crude Rupert Murdoch tactics.

In the year 1974, the World Population Conference was organized by Unesco and the UNFPA, starting off several ‘seminars’ organized by the transnationalists, directed specifically at representatives of mass media in the countries involved. One such seminar for press and media outlets was organized by Unesco’s regional office for education in Thailand to “discuss and exchange ideas on the best methods of propagating the small family norm to the general public” and “brief Thai press and media practitioners about population matters so that hopefully media coverage of population news may become more accurate and sophisticated.”

“The reason for such a seminar”, the report explains, “is the fact that the population growth rates in Thailand are among the highest of the world.”

In those countries, Unesco is usually the first to step in, representing the transnational eugenicists’ goal of reducing population worldwide. Kicking off the seminar, the thoroughly bought off deputy prime-minister of Thailand turned to the gathering of media people, stating that:

“You, representing the mass media, have a very important role to play in presenting population information to large numbers of people. (…) The mass media can act as a very important bridge between the population/family planning programme and the general public.”

In the same year, 1974, a mirror seminar was held for Sri Lankan media representatives, organized by the ministry of Information and Broadcasting and sponsored by Unesco and the UNFPA. In the segment ‘Sociological factors in Family Planning publicity programmes’, mr. Sarath Amunugama of the Sri Lankan ministry of Public Administration and Home Affairs complains about the ineffectiveness of the population control programmes so far:

“There has been a consistent underplaying of the potential of induced abortions as a significant means of population control.”

With regards to the role of the mass media, Amunugama says:

“The press, radio and film are perhaps the only mechanisms through which a highly fragmented population can be drawn speedily, efficiently and at relatively little cost into the national development effort.”

“Perhaps more than any other media”, Amunugama continued, “the cinema can recreate the immediacy of person-to-person communication. It can therefore used in cinema vertité style, for instance, to record the reactions of people to the programmes of the national centre. The best publicity for a programme is obtained when target audiences themselves feel a change for the better and are able to express this change verbally. In the field of family planning (…), the image of real people involved in and satisfied with change is likely to be highly effective.”

Among the recommendations of the media participants for effectively disseminate population control-matters, they list:

“The seminar recommends that the ministry of Information and Broadcasting and the Film Corporation of Sri Lanka be co-sponsors for a seminar-workshop in 1974 to plan for the use of film and theatre media for the active dissemination of population information.”

In a 1979 report of a ‘regional workshop’, ‘population education: innovative structures and approaches’, the authors underline the effectiveness of mass-media to distribute ‘population-issues’:

“In some countries’, the report states, ‘radio and television have been used as educational media ranging from the use of radio- spot announcement, musical programmes, playlets to full-length feature films.”

The seminars were held in Third World countries worldwide and continue to this very day. Now that the program had proven remarkably easy to sell, it was prolonged into the 80s and 90s, incrementally phasing in environmental issues in general, and the global warming swindle in particular.

In 1993, the United Nations Population Fund proudly boasted:

“Mass media are prime carriers of population information. Both the medium and the message should be adapted to social and cultural realities. Population education is now available in 80 countries in the developing world. Aims vary from country to country but are generally designed to introduce a sense of responsibility regarding population issues.”

Every argument given by people opposing Unesco’s top-down system of control, was branded as hostile to the human right to limit one’s household to one child. Everyone defending the God-given right to own land and have children, was characterized as a scourge on the environment. Because the eugenicists have an enemy that is not easily defeated, namely human instinct and dignity, it was crucial to discredit human nature, undermine it, while replacing it with a ‘shadow nature’ which rejects the notion of life and liberty, embracing eugenics and tyranny instead.

===============================================================================

1973 Document Outlines Blueprint for ‘Family Planning’ Propaganda

Jurriaan Maessen
Infowars
July 21, 2009

A 1973 document has emerged called Mass Media, Family Planning and Development: Country Case Studies on Media Strategy, wherein we learn something about the strategies to be implemented in the eugenics-based family planning project of the future. Based on case studies in third world countries, the document proposes the creation of a ‘family planning communication resource unit’ for every nation concerned. The reason being, so the report states, that “culturally, there is an emphasis on fertility, and the birth of children to the family is celebrated, as a symbol of prosperity and for status for women.” Because the Unesco-chieftains can’t have that, the reduction of a population should be accomplished through an elaborate media campaign, utilizing all possible avenues. Ancient tribal instincts, revolving around procreation and creativity, become suspect- as does religion and tribal mythology.

A family planning tract from the late 1940s.

The writers however, mean not to destroy these human tendencies, they mean to use them to their own advantage and that of their masters instead. “The religion”, they say, “supports the idea that children are ‘God’s Greatest Blessing’ but can also be used to encourage the idea that every child should be given the best opportunities parents can offer. There is also a favourable attitude to economic development, a desire to raise living standards, and a desire for education. These factors are helpful in the development of a Preliminary Media Strategy.”

“A Communication Resource Unit”, the document continues, “is responsible for the implementation of media policy for one, or more than one field.” The document proceeds with outlining the functions of such a unit in regards to family planning messages: “The integration of messages is a matter which concerns the Communication Resource Unit, in that an integrated approach to family planning needs to be worked out. (…) These (messages) may be ‘family planning for maternal health’, ‘family planning for family prosperity’, ‘family planning for your figure’, ‘family planning for national prosperity’, family planning for child development.’ These messages will be pretested to find those which seem to appeal most to the eligible age groups.”

One of the many case studies (country case study nr.1) involves an unnamed “small island”, total population 3,000,000. Describing the current situation, the report states: “Mass media approaches to family planning are wholly financed by the Government and, since 1968, radio, television and the press have been used to give information about family planning and to create an awareness of the need for population control.” One of the chief objectives for the ‘resource unit’, will be to “extend(ing) the family planning coverage to 90% of the eligible population. The aim at this point is to bring the number of children per family nearer to three rather than four, and to gradually reduce this to two children per family at a later stage.”

As one of the first proposed ‘phases’ of the programme, the document describes several messages to be embedded within television commercials. “A couple are shown over one of the new Government flats. They are unable to take it, because the accommodation provided is for families with two or three children. Preference is given to smaller families. They (the large family) will have to wait longer.” Another example: “The picture shows a married woman with one child. She is stopped by a voice saying “Do you know about family planning?” “Your local clinic has all the information.”" Or: “(Picture changes to a smiling woman with clinic appearing) “Family planning is free in all clinics (…)”". How about this one: “Don’t put off family planning. Tomorrow may be too late. See your clinic today.” You gotta also love this one: “A picture on the screen could show a woman talking to a consultant about family planning. She turns to the viewers and says: “I’m glad I made up my mind about family planning.””

Cartoons, say the authors, could also help implant a family planning message, for example “a cartoon in the most widely read newspaper could take the opportunity to ridicule those who cling to the old ways to the detriment of their families.”

Both television and radio advertisements are subject to the strategies of the Communication Resource Unit: “Advertising on television will be in the evenings, between popular programmes, when a broader audience (both male and female) is expected.” With regards to radio advertising, the report says: “The commercials can be played into record request programmes, women’s programmes, at programme junctions, before and after news breaks, popular serials and plays. The message should be simple, sympathetic, catchy.”

“Personality shows”, the report mentions, “can be useful in the reinforcement phase. (…) A well known personality who demonstrates an interest in family planning, or remarks on the success of the campaign, can often add credibility to the family planning message.” The report would like to see these personalities follow the script word for word, for example in response to a woman, who recently gave birth to her first child: “Well, that’s marvellous”, the radio personality should respond, “Congratulations Mrs……… I suppose you won’t be having any more children for a bit. You want that boy of yours to grow healthy and strong and I know you need time to recover- Children take up a lot of your time, don’t they?” The document states that personality alone cannot fully carry the message through to the listening audience: “Jingles and spot announcements, jokes and quick comments, can be included in the programmes, which will then have the effect of keeping the subject of family planning firmly in mind.”

How would the Unesco-people arrange all this, just by voluntary compliance of the media-people involved? “There may be some scheme whereby those people will be paid for their work (…)”- says the document. In other words: bribery is being proposed as an acceptable means of bringing the media into the strategy.

Also community plays should be used to convey the message: “The afternoon play can carry the theme, skillfully woven into the story. It is possible that some plays could be specially written for the purpose, but it is probable that the message can be incorporated into plays by those writers who have been briefed well enough in advance.” Music and pamphlets are another way of doing it, the report says: “Songs can be useful in this phase, (…). They must be professionally composed and recorded, and the messages must be reasonably subtle if it is to be acceptable to programmers.”

But the Resource Unit won’t restrict itself to just radio, TV and plays. Feature films are considered perhaps to be the most effective tools in conveying the message to unsuspecting audiences: “(…) There are two ways in which the family planning message can be included in feature films. The first is for the family organisation to commission a film specifically for the campaign. (…) if it is to be successful, well known and popular actors must be chosen, and the scripting and direction has to be professionally executed. Another method is for the family planning theme to be introduced into feature films which are already planned and prepared by local commercial production companies. In this case, the family planning organisers must be aware of the possible ways in which the theme can be subtly incorporated, as producers are not likely to respond to a suggestion which involves the total re-thinking of the plot. (…) Suitable opportunities can be found in love stories, in stories based on conflicts between men and women (…).”

And the document- thoroughly immersed in deceit- continues on, listing example after example- and illustrating quite vividly the willingness on the part of the Malthusian-minded elite to lie, cheat and deceive in order to convince people that ‘less is more’. In the 1970s, air pollution and global cooling were thrown into the equation, nowadays it’s anthropogenic global warming. As this document shows, nation after nation is methodically bombarded with predictive programming-propaganda, requiring of the receiver an almost superhuman set of defence mechanisms to fence off the pitchforks of the eugenicists, poking at them from all sides.

===============================================================================

Too Many (Other) People

William Norman Grigg
LewRockwell.com
July 20, 2009

As a left-leaning Rutgers law professor in the early 1970s, Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought that the Roe v. Wade abortion decision was the product of "concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations we don’t want too many of," she recalled in a recent New York Times Magazine interview.

Her expectation was that the purported right to abortion created in Roe "was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them."

Ginsburg doesn’t specify which parts of the human population "we" should cull, or how the creation of an abortion "right" would necessarily be a prelude to creation of a system in which abortion would be required in some circumstances. She told the Times that the question was effectively rendered moot by the Supreme Court’s Harris v. McRae decision, which upheld a ban on Medicaid funding of abortion. That decision, handed down in 1980, indicated that her "perception" of the issue "had been altogether wrong,” Ginsburg concludes.

But this means that there was an interval of roughly seven years during which Ginsburg, a well-informed and influential academic, believed that America was creating a eugenicist system in which abortion would help reduce "undesirable" populations – however those populations would be defined. This was what Roe had wrought, Ginsburg believed for several years, and if she ever experienced misgivings about it, she managed to keep them private.

Another question worth examining is this: Where did Ginsburg – a rising star in academe long before being tapped to fill the Rosa Klebb seat on the Supreme Court – get the impression that American policy-making elites were discussing the use of welfare subsidies to bring about the attrition of "undesirable" populations?

If I may be permitted a modest venture in speculation, I’d suggest that Ginsburg, sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, became at least superficially acquainted with the writings of John Holdren or of like-minded people in the most militant branch of the population control movement.

In 1977, Mr. Holdren was a young academic who helped anti-natalist guru Paul Ehrlich and his wife Anne write an arrestingly horrible book entitled Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment. Today, Holdren is Barack Obama’s "Science Czar," in which capacity he counsels the president regarding the role of science in public policy. This relationship has a certain Strangelovian undercurrent, given Holdren’s enthusiasm for eugenicist and totalitarian methods of population "management."

In a passage that reads eerily like the direct counterpoint to Ginsburg’s musings about the reduction of undesirable populations, Holdren and the Ehrlichs wrote:

The book offers similarly casual endorsements of "involuntary" and "coercive" fertility control," including the mandatory implantation of a Norplant-style capsule that "might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births."

The authors endorse the creation of "a Planetary regime" in charge of regulating all human economic activity and interactions with the environment and the "power to enforce the agreed limits" on human population growth through whatever means might be necessary – including compelled abortion, involuntary individual sterilization, or even mass involuntary sterilization through the infiltration of sterilizing agents into public water supplies.

That last deranged suggestion appears in several of Paul Ehrlich’s other books, including his (if you will excuse the expression) seminal 1967 alarmist tract The Population Bomb.

As someone who shared a full authorial credit on the book, Holdren bears full responsibility for the content of Ecoscience. His militantly anti-natalist views are easily as repulsive as anything promoted by white supremacist groups, albeit all the more dangerous for being more inclusive in their misanthropy. His writings would have been uncovered in the routine vetting process following his nomination, but they never came up during his confirmation hearing.

What is genuinely unsettling, however, is this: The totalitarian prescriptions offered in Ecoscience were squarely in the mainstream of the Stygian sewer called the population control movement.

In 1967, sociologist, demographer, and population control heavyweight Kingsley Davis published an essay in Science magazine observing that "the social structure and economy must be changed before a deliberate reduction in the birthrate can be achieved" in the West. He urged governments to subsidize voluntary abortion and sterilization and restructure their tax systems to discourage both marriage and childbirth.

Davis’s recommendations apparently inspired Frederick Jaffe, Vice President of Planned Parenthood, when he composed a 1969 memorandum intended for use as a template for anti-natalist efforts.

Jaffe’s memorandum, a version of which was published in the October 1970 issue of Family Planning Perspectives, organized recommended social policies under four headings: "Social Constraints," "Economic Deterrents/Incentives," "Social Controls," and "Housing Policies."

Like Paul Ehrlich, Jaffe suggested the placement of "fertility control agents in [the] water supply"; this recommendation was filed, oddly enough, under "Social Constraints." "Social Controls," on the other hand, included such measures as "compulsory abortion of all out-of-wedlock pregnancies," "compulsory sterilization of all who have two children except for a few who would be allowed three," and the issuance of "stock certificate-type permits for children." (Nearly every radical population control system is built around the idea of a government-issued “permit” or “license” to have children.)

These totalitarian measures were widely and unabashedly promoted in the literature of the population control movement at precisely the time that the Roe decision was (if, once again, you’ll excuse the expression) gestating in the court system.

"How can we reduce reproduction?" wrote Garrett Hardin in a 1970 Science magazine article entitled "Parenthood: Right or Privilege?" "Persuasion must be tried first…. Mild coercion may soon be accepted – for example, tax rewards for reproductive non-proliferation. But in the long run, a purely voluntary system selects for its own failure: noncooperators out-breed cooperators. So what restraints shall we employ? A policeman under every bed? Jail sentences? Compulsory abortion? Infanticide?… Memories of Nazi Germany rise and obscure our vision."

Oh, those dreadful Nazis: If only they hadn’t given totalitarian eugenics such a bad name….

Hardin was one of many anti-natalist luminaries – the list included Kingsley Davis, Margaret Mead, Paul Ehrlich, and sundry Planned Parenthood leaders – who endorsed the 1971 manifesto The Case for Compulsory Birth Control by Edgar R. Chasteen. That book offered one-stop shopping for policy-makers seeking draconian population management methods.

Chasteen was emphatic on two points: First, ruling elites had to indoctrinate the public into accepting the idea that "parenthood [is] a privilege extended by society, rather than a right"; and second, that in the interests of public relations, supporters of that totalitarian perspective needed to settle on "a name other than compulsory birth control."

Essentially the same program was endorsed by Dr. Norman Myers, an adviser to the World Bank and various UN agencies, in his peculiar 1990 volume The Gaia Atlas of Future Worlds.

“Government population-control policies using strong economic and social incentives have been effective in China and Singapore,” wrote Myers, who commended China in particular for using “strong social pressure” to control its population. Myers didn’t to dwell on the fact that the Chinese government employs severe punishments – prison time, destruction of homes, retaliation against family members and co-workers – for women who have “unauthorized” children.

Myers suggested a variation on the same concept behind the “cap-and-trade” carbon credit system employing government-issued birth permits. Under his plan, couples would “be issued with a warrant entitling them to have a single child…. This warrant might even carry commercial value, allowing individuals to decide not to have children at all and to sell their entitlements to others wanting larger families.”

Arguably the most astonishing variant on this approach was proposed in 1994, just prior to the UN’s International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt.

In a book entitled Too Many People, Sir Roy Calne, a noted British physician, proposed a universal minimum childbearing age of 25, and a strict two-child quota. Those seeking the government-dispensed “privilege” of having children would have to pass a state-mandated parenting class and receive the appropriate “reproduction license.” Those who violate those restrictions would lose their children and face Chinese-style economic sanctions and criminal punishments.

Calne also suggested the development of an engineered sterility pathogen – he called it the “O virus” – that could be administered to women world-wide as a vaccine.

These malignant proposals are not just flatulent thought-bubbles blown in languid speculation by fringe eccentrics in the academic realm: With the exception – as far as we know – of mass involuntary sterilization through covert chemical or biological warfare, every method of coercive population control described above has been implemented somewhere with the material aid of the United Nations and its affiliates, and the practical support of organizations such as Planned Parenthood and Marie Stopes International.

Every argument on behalf of state-imposed population control rejects the concept of individual self-ownership and assumes that human lives – individually and in the aggregate – are a resource to be managed by society’s supervisors on behalf of the "common good." And, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg correctly intuited in 1973, the Roe vs. Wade decision was a triumph, albeit an incomplete one, for the cause of eugenicist population control.

Although it was swaddled in the language of individual empowerment, the Roe decision was a dramatic victory for collectivism: It enshrined, in what our rulers are pleased to call the "law," the assumption that a human individual is a "person" only when that status is conferred by the government.

While Harry Blackmun’s opinion in Roe pointedly avoided the question of when "personhood" begins, it emphatically made it clear that, for purposes of "law," that the term doesn’t apply to any human individual in his or her pre-natal stage of development. This, not the liberty to procure an abortion, is the real gravamen, or central legal finding, in the Roe decision: It put the government in charge of defining who is, and isn’t a person.

As judges like to say, the matter of reducing “undesirable” populations is reaching “ripeness” now. Barack Obama’s administration is eagerly expanding the government-dependent population and preparing to impose centralized “universal” health care on our society. And while all of this is going on, John Holdren, unabashed advocate of totalitarian population control, is in a position to whisper unthinkable thoughts into Obama’s ear.

===============================================================================

ADHD Drugs Proven Absolutely Useless for Children – Plus, They Stunt Growth

David Gutierrez
Natural News
Friday, July 10, 2009

(NaturalNews) Stimulant drugs such as Ritalin provide no long-term benefit in the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to the latest findings of the ongoing Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD (MTA), published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

According to previous analysis of MTA data, stimulant drugs do improve the social functioning and reduce symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity in children with ADHD for the first year of treatment. In the current analysis, however, researchers followed 485 children for eight years and found that children who remained on medication for that entire time showed no improvement in symptoms over those who had stopped taking the drugs.

“If you put a child on medication, he or she is far better right at that time. The question for parents is: Is this going to make a benefit for my child long term?” said researcher William Pelham, of the University of Buffalo. “The answer is no. Behavioral treatments are going to have much better benefit in the long term.”

Another analysis of MTA data, published in the same journal, found that use of ADHD drugs appeared to stunt children’s growth. Children who had never taken stimulant drugs were an average of six pounds heavier and 0.75 inches taller than children of the same age who had taken the drugs for three years. This height and weight difference was permanent.

According to Pelham, behavioral treatments for ADHD can be harder to find than drugs, and often insurers will not cover them. Nevertheless, such treatments are available and have been proven to work without the side effect risk of pharmaceuticals.

“It’s wrong for a doctor to say to a parent, this treatment is harder to find, so instead we’re going to put your child on a drug that will have no long-term benefit,” he said.

===============================================================================

Panel Says ALL Teens Should be Screened for “Depression”

David Gutierrez
Natural News
Thursday, July 9, 2009

(NaturalNews) The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has issued a new recommendation, published in the journal Pediatrics, that all children between the ages of 12 and 18 be regularly screened for the symptoms of major depressive disorder (MDD).

The new recommendations surpass those of most doctors’ groups — which advise screening high-risk youths only — and even those of the of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommends only that doctors ask teens about depression, rather than giving them a full screening.

“Adolescent-onset MDD is associated with an increased risk of death by suicide, suicide attempts, … recurrence of major depression by young adulthood, … early pregnancy, decreased school performance, and impaired work, social, and family functioning during young adulthood,” the report authors wrote. “Mass screening in primary care could help clinicians identify missed cases and increase the proportion of depressed children and adolescents who initiate appropriate treatment. It could also help clinicians to identify cases earlier in the course of disease.”

The Preventive Services Task Force is a panel of independent experts given responsibility for setting national primary care treatment guidelines.

According to the panel, approximately 6 percent of U.S. teens, or two million, suffer from MDD, also known as clinical depression. Symptoms include sadness, anxiety, changes in eating or sleeping habits, hopelessness, irritability, isolation, moodiness, negativity, poor grades, risk taking, substance abuse and death wishes or suicidal thoughts.

Because depression is so common in teens, the researchers said, the majority of cases go undiagnosed.

“You will miss a lot if you only screen high-risk groups,” said task force chair Ned Calonge of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

In order to develop the recommendation, the researchers reviewed high quality studies conducted since 2002 on the effectiveness of screening in diagnosing depression in children between the ages of 7 and 18, and also on the effectiveness of various treatments. They concluded that all children between the ages of 12 and 18 should receive yearly screening, preferably in a primary care setting such as an annual physical. Patients would merely need to fill out a simple questionnaire, which could even be completed in the waiting room, the researchers said.

The panel did not recommend screening younger children, due to absence of evidence that screening was effective in that age group.

“Limited available data suggest that primary care–feasible screening tools may accurately identify depressed adolescents and treatment can improve depression outcomes,” the task force wrote.

Another report, authored by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and appearing in the same issue of Pediatrics, also calls for primary care physicians to get more involved in the treatment of mental illness, including depression. Recommendations include that pediatricians consult regularly with child psychiatrists, and try to have one working in their office if possible.

Report co-author Alan Axelson said that because parents have built up trust with pediatricians over time, these doctors may be in a better position to screen for and treat mental illness without invoking the social stigma of a visit to a therapist or psychiatrist. He noted that pediatricians are authorized to prescribe antidepressant drugs, though they may not perform psychotherapy.

Yet the Preventive Services Task Force report recommends that doctors screen for depression only in cases where psychotherapy is available as a treatment option. The selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) drugs commonly used to treat depression have been linked to increased risks of suicidal thoughts in teenagers, Calonge noted, and the panel does not want to encourage their use in the absence of therapy.

“Treating depressed youth with [SSRIs] may be associated with a small increased risk of suicidality and should only be considered if judicious clinical monitoring is possible,” the report reads.

The task force’s study did not show any correlation between depression screening and improved physical or mental health outcomes.

===============================================================================

On April 12, 2007, an historical marker was dedicated to acknowledge and remember eugenics in Indiana. The historical marker presenting and discussing the succession of eugenic legislation in Indiana further enhances the visibility of the topic and denote its significance in the history of the state. In recent years, state governments have made official apologies to sterilization victims. Since 2002, California, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, and Virginia have publicly issued apologies. Often these apologies have spurred healing for victims, promoted extensive historical research, and engaged community, legislative, and university dialogue. In Virginia, sterilization victims were directly engaged in the commemoration of Carrie Buck, the plaintiff in Buck v. Bell. North Carolina, through the Winston-Salem Journal, gave voice to victims, family members, historians and legislators through published testimonies. The prominence of the eugenics movement in Indiana warrants public display and debate about its lasting effects and consequences. To acknowledge the one hundredth anniversary of Indiana’s eugenic sterilization law, the historical marker is intended to heighten public awareness of this chapter of our past and prompt discussion about the future uses of science in society. (From Historical Marker Application, Eugenics Legislation in Indiana, Historical Background)

The text on the marker reads as follows:

Side One

By late 1800s, Indiana authorities believed criminality, mental problems, and pauperism were hereditary. Various laws were enacted based on this belief. In 1907, Governor J. Frank Hanly approved first state eugenics law making sterilization mandatory for certain individuals in state custody. Sterilizations halted 1909 by Governor Thomas R. Marshall.

Side Two

Indiana Supreme Court ruled 1907 law unconstitutional 1921, citing denial of due process under Fourteenth Amendment. 1927 law reinstated sterilization, adding court appeals. Approximately 2,500 total in state custody were sterilized. Governor Otis R. Bowen approved repeal of all sterilization laws 1974; by 1977, related restrictive marriage laws repealed.

===============================================================================

Eugenics and Other Evils

===============================================================================

===============================================================================

Timeline 1867-2005

Date Personal & Business Life Eugenics Sacramento State 1867 Matthias Goethe, Charles Matthias Goethe's grandfather, arrives in Sacramento, California       1868 Henry John Goethe joins his father, Matthias Goethe, in Sacramento       March 28, 1875 Charles Matthias (C. M.) Goethe is born in Sacramento to Henry John (H. J.) Goethe and Louisa Denger Goethe     October 29, 1876 Mary Glide is born in Sacramento to Henry Joseph Glide and Elizabeth Helen Glide       1879 H. J. Goethe acquires a Swiss bank and starts the Goethe Company       1891 C. M. Goethe graduates from Sacramento High School     1892 C. M. Goethe begins working at his father's company     1898 H. J. Goethe begins to offer real estate loans through his company     1900 C. M. Goethe passes the bar       H. J. Goethe Company is incorporated     1902 Goethe Realty Company is incorporated     1902 C. M. Goethe is appointed to the May Queen Committee     1903 C. M. Goethe is promoted to the position of vice-president of the Goethe Company       December 3, 1903 C. M. Goethe marries Mary Louise Glide     1906 C. M. Goethe begins to serve as president of Goethe Bank C. M. Goethe and Mary Glide Goethe begin volunteer work at the Sacramento Orphanage Farm, taking the children on nature hikes     1907 The will of Mary Glide Goethe's father's is contested by her brothers. Mary receives a portion of her father's estate.       1909 Goethe Bank is dissolved California Sterilization Law is passed   Date Personal & Business Life Eugenics Sacramento State September 1909   C. M. and Mary Goethe hire a young woman to supervise the playground activities at the Sacramento Orphanage Farm     December 1910   C. M. Goethe attends the Playground Association of California's convention in San Francisco     June 1911   C. M. and Mary Goethe, along with Mr. and Mrs. Simon Lubin are asked to assist in the experimental playground established in Sacramento at Tenth and Q with M. L. Stone as director     1911-1912   C. M. and Mary Goethe travel to Japan, Korea, Burma, India, China, then to Italy, Germany and France. They also visit the Philippine Islands to promote the value of public playgrounds. During this trip abroad, C. M. Goethe is appointed by California's acting Governor Wallace, as a special commissioner representing the state in investigating and studying children's playgrounds around the world.       1912 H. J. Goethe Company is dissolved   C. M. Goethe is appointed to the Committee of City planning in Sacramento     1913   C. M. Goethe is elected Chairperson of the Committee of City planning         C. M. Goethe becomes a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)       Mary and C. M. Goethe establish the Sacramento Council of Churches   1914 Louisa Goethe, C. M. Goethe's mother, dies       1915 H. J. and C. M. Goethe buy the Elmhurst Subdivision and Lucrene Meadows near Stockton Boulevard       1917   The Goethes and friends provide financing for the first Tuberculosis Sanitarium in California, located in the city of Weimer, California     Date Personal & Business Life Eugenics Sacramento State 1918 Plans are drawn by architect Julia Morgan for the Goethe house to be built at 3731 T Street on the Elmhurst subdivision   The Save-the-Redwoods League is founded by John C. Merriam, Henry Fairfield Osborn and Madison Grant         C. M. Goethe founds the California Nature Study League     1919   C. M. Goethe publishes a nature guide to Lake Tahoe   1920   C.M. Goethe creates the park guides to Yosemite National Park and influences the growth of the interpretive parks movement. Goethe also privides funding for the rangers giving the nature tours.   1920s   Goethe establishes the Immigration Study Commission   1921   C. M. Goethe is appointed Regional Head of the Sierra Club   1924 C. M. Goethe's house is completed   C. M. Goethe successfully lobbies the Commonwealth Club to form an Eugenics Section     1928 Henry J. Goethe dies. In his will, C. M. Goethe receives $10,000 in cash and one-fourth of the residue   The Human Betterment Foundation is formed by Ezra S. Gosney and Goethe is named to the Board of Directors   1933   C. M. Goethe and Eugene Pitts found the Eugenics Society of Northern California     1935-1936   Goethe serves as President of the Eugenics Research Association   Date Personal & Business Life Eugenics Sacramento State 1936   C. M. Goethe attends the International Federation of Eugenic Organization in Scheveningen, Netherlands     1943   Human Betterment Foundation dissolves   1946 Mary Glide Goethe dies C. M. and Mary Goethe attend a meeting of the National Audubon Society in Florida, to help create a National Park out of the Everglades       War Profits... and Better Babies is published       1947     Sacramento State College (California State University, Sacramento) is established on the Sacramento Junior College (Sacramento City College) campus         C. M. Goethe becomes the first Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Sacramento State College   1948   C. M. Goethe purchases land for the Mary Glide Goethe Memorial Grove in the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, Humboldt County, California   C. M. Goethe creates the Mary Glide Goethe Memorial Fund for use on the Sacramento State campus       C. M. Goethe is appointed Honorary Chief Park Naturalist, National Park Service     1949   C. M. Goethe purchases a redwood grove in Del Norte County, California. The Jedediah Smith Memorial Grove later became part of the Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park.     Date Personal & Business Life Eugenics Sacramento State Nov. 15, 1949     C. M. Goethe speaks at Sacramento State in the Science Annex building 1950s   Goethe lobbies congress to restrict immigration into the United States based on race     1950     Sacramento State College Publications in the Natural History Series is printed.  C. M. Goethe's Mother Lode Gold Mining Stories is the first publication in the series to be printed. Oct. 25, 1952     Cornerstone laying ceremony on Sacramento State's new campus at J Street 1952     Sacramento State College moves to current location near the American River and J Street   1955 The University of the Pacific awards C. M. Goethe an honorary degree of law     C. M. Goethe receives Honorary Master of Science Degree from Sacramento State University     Garden Philosopher is published     1958 Goethe is elected as a fellow in the Royal Society of Arts of Great Britain       1959     A grove of trees is planted near the front entrance to the Sacramento State campus in honor of Goethe; the C. M. Goethe Arboretum Society is created   1960 National Conservation Citation is given to C. M. Goethe by Secretary of the Interior Fred A. Seaton; Goethe also receives the first lifetime membership in the Folsom Historical Society and the Patriotic Service Medal of the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies.     C. M. Goethe Arboretum Society is incorporated   Mar. 1961     Sacramento State College arboretum is dedicated to C. M. Goethe   Date Personal & Business Life Eugenics Sacramento State Mar. 1962     Three commemorative benches are donated to the arboretum. Donors include: the Arboretum Fund of Sacramento State College Fund, Fort Sumter Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the Western Advertising System of Sacramento.   March 31, 1962 Sacramento Mayor, James B. McKinney, issues proclamation naming this day as Charles M. Goethe Day. There are several other days dedicated to Goethe.       May 6, 1962 Dedication ceremony of Charles M. Goethe Junior High School in Sacramento City Unified School District       1963   C. M. Goethe achieves 50 years of membership in the Ameircan Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)   1965     The Board of Trustee of the California State Colleges designates a new science building at Sacramento State campus to be named the C. M. Goethe Science Building. Protests from the campus community occur over the naming of the building.   March 24, 1965 Sacramento County Board of Supervisors names the south part of the American River Parkway after C. M. Goethe       March 28, 1965 C. M. Goethe National Recognition Day on the occasion of his 90th birthday   The Save the American River Association (SARA) honors Goethe as the first patron of the organization on Oct. 16. Harold Severaid, Professor of Biology at Sacramento State, is President and serves on the Board of Directors of SARA.     July 10, 1966 C. M. Goethe dies. He left an estate valued at $24 million.   Sacramento State is named in C. M. Goethe's will. The university receives around $600,000 in cash, Goethe's house on T Street, his library, and personal papers. 1967     The C. M. Goethe Science Building is completed Fall 1967     The science building is changed from C. M. Goethe Science Building to "Science Building" Date Personal & Business Life Eugenics Sacramento State 1970s     C. M. Goethe Arboretum Society request Acting President Otto Butz to look into options to take care of the arboretum   1976   C. M. Goethe Memorial Grove is established in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park by Save the Redwoods League     1982     C. M. Goethe's house is placed in the National Register of Historic Places   1999     C. M. Goethe's house is remodeled and name is changed to Julia Morgan House 2005     C. M. Goethe Arboretum is changed to University Arboretum

===============================================================================

Click here to enter the Archive image database. The buttons below link to essays (using the Flash Player plugin) that introduce the key events, persons, and social conditions that contributed to the development of eugenics. We suggest you visit these exhibits before searching the images in the Archive. Click here for text-only versions of the virtual exhibits.	Eugenics Archive grows to 2200+ items Browse 950 new photos, papers, and data – including extensive collections from noted eugenicists. Discover Francis Galton's work on fingerprint analysis and composite portraiture, and read Charles Davenport's treatise, Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding, presented in its entirety. Explore Arthur Estabrook's field photos of subjects of his (in)famous studies: The Jukes in 1915, Mongrel Virginians, and The Nam Family. Click the "Search the Archive" button to access the image database. (New images have ID#s 1255-2320.) Examine the Chronicle of how society dealt with mental illness and other "dysgenic" traits in the final installment of our website: DNA Interactive. Meet four individuals who became objects of the eugenic movement's zeal to cleanse society of "bad" genes during the first half of the 20th century. Then meet a modern-day heroine for an account of mental illness and the lesson it holds for living in the gene age. he philosopher George Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." This adage is appropriate to our current rush into the "gene age," which has striking parallels to the eugenics movement of the early decades of the 20th century. Eugenics was, quite literally, an effort to breed better human beings – by encouraging the reproduction of people with "good" genes and discouraging those with "bad" genes. Eugenicists effectively lobbied for social legislation to keep racial and ethnic groups separate, to restrict immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and to sterilize people considered "genetically unfit." Elements of the American eugenics movement were models for the Nazis, whose radical adaptation of eugenics culminated in the Holocaust. We now invite you to experience the unfiltered story of American eugenics – primarily through materials from the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, which was the center of American eugenics research from 1910-1940. In the Archive you will see numerous reports, articles, charts, and pedigrees that were considered scientific "facts" in their day. It is important to remind yourself that the vast majority of eugenics work has been completely discredited. In the final analysis, the eugenic description of human life reflected political and social prejudices, rather than scientific facts. You may find some of the language and images in this Archive offensive. Even supposedly "scientific" terms used by eugenicists were often pervaded with prejudice against racial, ethnic, and disabled groups. Some terms have no scientific meaning today. For example, "feeblemindedness" was used as a catch-all for a number of real and supposed mental disabilities, and was a common "diagnosis" used to make members of ethnic and racial minority groups appear inferior. However, we have made no attempt to censor this documentary record – to do so would distort the past and diminish the significance of the lessons to be learned from this material. During a two-year review process, involving a 14-member Advisory Panel, this site