By Liz Thomas for The Daily Mail, 22.04.11
Sir David Attenborough has warned that population growth must be stopped in order to offer a ‘decent life’ for all.
The wildlife broadcaster said people were shying away from accepting that the world’s resources cannot sustain current levels of population growth.
‘There cannot be more people on this Earth than can be fed,’ he writes in the New Statesman.‘The sooner we stabilise our numbers, the sooner we stop running up the down escalator – and we have some chance of reaching the top; that is to say, a decent life for all.’
Sir David, 84, said the global population is over six billion and will hit nine billion in 30 years, but ‘there seems to be some bizarre taboo around the subject’.
He warned of a ‘perfect storm of population growth, climate change and peak oil production’, leading to ‘insecurity in the supply of food, water and energy’.
‘We now realise that the disasters that continue increasingly to afflict the natural world have one element that connects them all – the unprecedented increase in the number of human beings on the planet,' he added.
‘All these people, in this country and worldwide, rich or poor, need and deserve food, water, energy and space. Will they be able to get it? I don’t know.’
Sir David said there was a 'taboo' tackling the subject and that people shied away from stating the fact that a world’s resources cannot sustain current levels of population growth.
He said: ‘There seems to be some bizarre taboo around the subject. This taboo doesn’t just inhibit politicians and civil servants who attend the big conferences.
For full article:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1379376/Population-growth-stop-says-Sir-David-Attenborough.html
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