By Robin Phillips

Population Control Guru is ‘Science Envoy’ to Muslim Nations

The Obama administration has been sending population control guru, John Holdren, to Muslim nations in what it calls ‘science diplomacy.’

The official purpose of ‘science diplomacy’ is to bridge the so called ‘cultural gap’ between the United States and the rest of the world.

John P Holdren, director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, uses these visits to meet his counterparts in foreign nations, along with his team of ‘Science Envoys.’

The man Obama has chosen to represent America is on record as saying that the world has far too many people. In a testimony before the Senate in 1974, Holdren teamed up with Paul Ehrlich to argue that overpopulation was heading the world towards a no-growth economy.

In an essay collaborated with Ehrlich in 1969, titled ‘Population and Panaceas: A Technological Perspective’, Holdren suggested that “man’s present technology is inadequate to the task of maintaining the world’s burgeoning billions, even under the most optimistic assumptions.” Even advancements to increase food supply, he argued, would be fruitless until “the population growth rate drastically reduced.”

In his 1973 book, co-authored with the Ehrlichs, calledHuman Ecology: Problems and Solutions, Holdren wrote that toddlers, let alone babies in the womb, are not fully human:

“The fetus, given the opportunity to develop properly before birth, and given the essential early socializing experiences and sufficient nourishing food during the crucial early years after birth, will ultimately develop into a human being.”

In the book he set out a pro-abortion, pro-sterilisation Doomsday scenario which could only be averted by a sudden and rapid decrease in the population.

“Humanity cannot afford to muddle through the rest of the twentieth century,” he asserted. “This may be the last opportunity to choose our own and our descendants’ destiny” (p. 944). The eco-catastrophe Holdren and Ehrlich predicted by the year 2000 failed to materialise.

Myron Ebell, director of international energy and global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has drawn attention to Holdren’s history of false predictions: “Dr. Holdren has a record only surpassed by his longtime collaborator Paul Ehrlich for spreading misinformation and making failed predictions.”

“In addition, Dr. Holdren has advocated a wide array of despicable policies, such as mandatory population control, and was a willing stooge of the Soviet Union as a member for several decades of the Pugwash Conference (and of which he was chairman when it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995),” Ebell added. “John Holdren is therefore the perfect “science diplomat” for an administration that peddles junk science and supports policies that will make poor people, and especially poor people in poor countries, poorer.  As President Obama’s science diplomat, he can now advocate for global impoverishment on a global stage.”

Obama Supports China’s One-Child Policy

Why would Obama choose a population control guru like Holdren to represent America abroad? Could it be a simple oversight? Hardly! From the day he took office, Obama has sided with the powerful population control lobby, giving tens of millions of dollars in subsidies to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which helps to fund China’s population control agenda.

The Obama Administration reflects a growing sympathy among Western politicians towards China’s family planning policies.

At the UN Climate Change Conference 2009, Chinese government’s delegation argued that their country’s one-child-only-policy should “serve as a model for integrating population programs into the framework of climate change adaptation.” Zhao Baige, vice-minister of the National Population and Family Planning Commission of China said that China’s policy of forced population control “has made a great historic contribution to the well-being of society.”

The Chinese delegates also cited the UN’s own State of World Population 2009 report, put out by UNFPA, which suggests that if the global population can be kept to 8 billion by the year 2050 (it is currently projected to increase to just over 9 billion), “it might result in 1 billion to 2 billion fewer tons of carbon emissions.”

The irony is that, despite its draconian population control measures, China leads the world in CO2 emissions. Nevertheless, this Communist nation has been praised for its contribution to the world’s ecology. Sven Burmester, a representative of the UNFPA, said, “China has had the most successful family planning policy in the history of mankind in terms of quantity and with that, China has done mankind a favor.”

Canada’s Financial Post also praised China for its contribution to the environment. “Despite its dirty coal plants,” said the Canadian equivalent of America’s Wall Street Journal, “[China] is the world’s leader in terms of fashioning policy to combat environmental degradation, thanks to its one-child-only edict.” The paper calls China’s solution a “simple” and “dramatic” fix that, if extended to other nations, would reduce global population by 50 percent by 2075.

From Eugenics to Environmentalism

Population control has an impressive pedigree among the sages of the West. In fact, until the early twentieth century, it was politically fashionable for liberals to talk about finding ways to reduce the “surplus population.” Twentieth-century advocates of population control often drew on the social theories of men like Thomas Malthus and Charles Darwin’s cousin Sir Francis Galton, who, a century earlier, had argued that the poor were draining the world’s recourses. (One of Malthus’s solutions for reducing the “surplus population” was to introduce policies specifically designed to bring death to large numbers of peasants. For example, he encouraged poor people to move near swamps, so they would catch diseases and begin dying off.)

In the early twentieth century, Malthusian ideas on population control were linked to theories of eugenics and social Darwinism. It was not until Hitler tried to move these ideas out of the anthropology class and into the gas chamber that population control stopped being a politically correct topic—for a while.

But it didn’t take long for the spectre of Hitler to wear off. Following the huge birth explosion that occurred in the decades after World War II, the issue of population control gradually returned to the national limelight. But this time, instead of being explicitly linked to theories like eugenics and social Darwinism, it was propelled by the emerging ideology of environmentalism.

While it was no longer politically correct to appeal specifically to social planners like Galton and Malthus, the basic concern of these men—namely, that because the resources on earth remain limited, there will be a demographic Armageddon if the human population continues to expand—was revived but packaged as ecological responsibility. Thus, it became politically correct once again to advocate population control. The American Eugenics Society (founded in 1922, as social Darwinism was laying the foundations for the Nazi experiment) jumped on this bandwagon but attempted to garner more respectability in 1972 by changing its name to the Society for the Study of Social Biology.

As the twentieth century wore on, however, something happened to change the tide once again. The key factor this time was not that the world’s population had stopped growing, but that it had stopped growing in the West. (Many factors contributed to this. It became fashionable for women to marry late, while books like The Feminine Mystique helped make women feel guilty if their greatest ambition was to be a wife and mother. These things, together with the rise in abortion and homosexuality, meant that the birthrate in the West began to decline steadily.)

This fact alone would not have been sufficient to change the direction of the population debate, since population continued to grow worldwide (though at a significantly lower rate). However, by this time the specter of racism loomed large in the background of almost every debate. It did not take long before people began realizing that if Western populations were decreasing while non-Western ones were growing, and if the former are primarily white and the latter primarily brown, then calling for a lower international birthrate was equivalent to calling for fewer brown babies. And that left one open to charges of racism.

Thus did population control become politically incorrect once again. English journalist Anthony Browne lamented this shift in his 2006 book The Retreat of Reason: “Now that the population of the West has stopped growing, concern about overpopulation has become very unfashionable because, as Tony Benn put it, it means wanting fewer brown babies. The combination of Western guilt and fear of racism has all but killed off public concern about overpopulation in the last few decades.”

But even as Browne was writing, the wheels of one more paradigm shift slowly began to turn. Thanks to the increased hysteria about global warming, talk about overpopulation has become politically correct once again. As Garry Egger of the New South Wales Centre for Health Promotion and Research insists, “The debate [about population control] needs to be reopened as part of a second ecological revolution” The UNFPA has framed the issue like this on its website: “Greenhouse gases would not be accumulating so hazardously had the number of earth’s inhabitants not increased so rapidly, but remained at 300 million people, the world population of 1,000 years ago, compared with 6.8 billion today.”

The connection between global warming and a renewed interest in population control was evident in a report commissioned by the Optimum Population Trust in August 2009. Titled “Fewer Emitters, Lower Emissions, Less Cost,” the report argued that the best way to combat global warming would be to reduce the population through contraception and abortion. The utilitarian logic was simple: Fewer people = fewer polluters.

The reality is that most CO2 emissions are not the result of man-made technology at all, but occur naturally, as in the water vapor released by the oceans and through the consumption of vegetation by animals and microbes. But this “inconvenient truth” doesn’t fit the environmentalists’ story line, so they routinely ignore it. To them, the earth has a surplus population of polluters, and those polluters are the human population.

This “fact” is considered so obvious to them that only “deniers,” who are “motivated by religious-right attitudes,” could possibly think otherwise. Or so said population control advocate Morris Sullivan in a 1999 article for impactpress.com, titled “Population Control: How Many Are Too Many?” Claiming that problems such as global warming are “at least partially due to growing world population,” Sullivan wrote that “it’s hard to imagine anyone opposing restraints on population controls.” While acknowledging that “such people exist,” he asserted that the best of them “are well-meaning optimists blinded by their denial,” while the others “have more pernicious motivations—like greed and religious fanaticism.”

Paul Watson, a co-founder of Greenpeace, was even more severe. In a 2007 article for seashepherd.org, he wrote that we humans act “in the same manner as an invasive virus” and that we are “killing our host the planet Earth.” This requires, he continued, a “radical and invasive” cure. How invasive? “We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.”

Contracept for Credit

Even with the fate of planet Earth supposedly hanging in the balance, Western nations are a long way off from advocating the forced abortion policies of China. Nevertheless, global warming is continually put forward as a reason for increasing the availability of contraception, abortion, “comprehensive” sex education, and family planning services. The National Wildlife Federation, for example, put out a Population and Global Warming Fact Sheet (http://cf.nwf.org/globalwarming/pdfs/climatefactsheet.pdf) calling for better “family planning and related health care and education.” “Providing these services,” claims the federation, “will not only reduce poverty and improve the lives of many, it will reduce the danger of climate change and other environmental stressors.”

Dr. Barry Walters, a professor of obstetrics at the University of Western Australia, argued a few years ago that those who refuse to use contraception should be levied with a climate-change tax. In a 2007 article in the Medical Journal of Australia, Dr. Walters proposed that such a tax be assessed on all couples having more than two children. He suggested an initial fine of $5,000 for each “extra” child when born, with another $800 assessed every year thereafter. However, parents could redeem themselves by using contraceptives or undergoing sterilization procedures, for which they would receive carbon credits.

Those who propose these schemes are unconcerned by the obvious fact that a sparse population is, in general, a poorer population. Consider that the more people there are, the greater division of labor there can be, the more capital there will be, the more hands there will be to tend gardens, and, as a result, the more fruitful the earth and human society can become. The industrial revolution would never have been possible if Europe’s population had remained at the levels it was at during the Middle Ages.

These facts are conveniently ignored by the gurus of population control, such as John Holdren, as he and his ‘Science Envoys’ go around representing America.

‘Involuntary Fertility Control’

Thankfully, public calls for compulsory sterilization are no longer mainstream as they were in the early twentieth century. Nevertheless, the Mr Holdren’s high profile position suggests that the tide may be turning.

In 1977 Holdren helped to co-author the controversial textbook, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment. The book discussed drastic measures that could be implemented if population continued to increase. Plans discussed in the book include “coercive,” “involuntary fertility control,” including “a program of sterilizing women after their second or third child.”

They also suggest forcing single women to abort their babies, implanting sterilizing capsules in people when they reach puberty and spiking public reserves and staple foods with a chemical that would lead to sterility. To help achieve those goals, the authors suggest it might be necessary to formulate a “world government scheme” with an “armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force” to enforce population control measures.

Holdren’s controversial 1977 book declares: “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.”

“Unfortunately,” they add, “such a program therefore is not practical for most less developed countries….”

The word ‘unfortunately’ is significant, since it suggests that Holdren & co. would be quite happy to see these type of draconian measures implemented if they got the chance.

Further Reading

• Fourth Child Furor
• Social Engineering and the Dark Secret of the American Left
• Human Engineering: The New Frontier for Climate Change
• Human Beings: a plague on the earth?
• Bill Gates and the New Malthusians

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