Halloween is traditionally a night of witches, ghosts, and monsters. But for environmentalists and their media allies, an even bigger scare is coming this Halloween: the birth of Earth's 7 billionth resident.
On Oct. 31, 2011, world population will reach 7 billion, according to the United Nations. For many people, this milestone is a cause for celebration and a human triumph. But for environmentalists on the radical left, the ever-growing legion of consuming humans is a harbinger of impending doom. The Washington Post cautioned that "ecological distortions are becoming more pronounced and widespread." Already the media are warning that population could more than double by 2100, according to a new UN report.
The media have long promoted overpopulation panic rampant among prominent voices in the environmentalist movement. James Lovelock, the founder of Gaia theory, fretted over too much economic success: "there are too many [people], doing too well economically and burning too much oil." American biologist Paul Ehrlich made a series of fantastic predictions, including the claim: "I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."
(As of 2011, England still exists.) But as recently as 2010, the New York Times quoted Ehrlich as a "population expert." And the Los Angeles Times favorably interviewed Ehrlich in February 2011.
Despite the failed predictions of Ehrlich and others, the phantom of overpopulation still haunts many on the left, and the media are happy to report every new terror. To thwart the environmentalist nightmare of too many people achieving economic success, such anti-population groups as The Population Institute, Population Connection, and Negative Population Growth lobby governments and philanthropic organizations (and more bizarrely, organize "condom campaigns") to implement policies to "stabilize" or even reduce world population.
These groups are terrified by the specter of impending environmental disaster, and loathe humanity because of that fear. Negative Population Growth takes a particularly gloomy view of the human race: "More people means more pollution, more sprawl, less green space, and even more demands on the earth's already overburdened resources."
Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/paul-wilson/2011/10/24/population-7-billion-reasons-panic-halloween#ixzz1c51ygrxG
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