Eco-Extremist Wants World Population to Drop below 1 Billion

[Quibus_Licet]

Eco-Extremist Wants World Population to Drop below 1 Billion
Sea Shepherd founder says mankind is a 'virus' and we need to 're-wild
the planet.'

By Dan Gainor
The Boone Pickens Free Market Fellow
Business & Media Institute
5/6/2007 7:41:33 PM

Apparently, saving the whales is more important than saving 5.5
billion people. Paul Watson, founder and president of the Sea Shepherd
Conservation Society and famous for militant intervention to stop
whalers, now warns mankind is “acting like a virus” and is harming
Mother Earth.

Watson’s May 4 editorial asked the question “The Beginning of the
End for Life as We Know it on Planet Earth?” Then he left no doubt
about the answer. “We are killing our host the planet Earth,” he
claimed and called for a population drop to less than 1 billion.

The commentary reminded readers that Watson had called humans a
disease before and he wasn’t sorry. “I was once severely criticized
for describing human beings as being the ‘AIDS of the Earth.’ I make
no apologies for that statement,” the column continued.

Watson was invoking the worst of Robert Malthus, an English
political economist who claimed that mankind was overpopulating the
earth. That claimed first appeared in the late 1700s. Watson urged
some solutions for mankind as part of a process to “need to re-wild
the planet”:

· “No human community should be larger than 20,000 people and
separated from other communities by wilderness areas.” New York,
London, Paris, Moscow are all too big. Then again, so are Moose Jaw,
Timbuktu and even Annapolis, Md.
· “We need vast areas of the planet where humans do not live at
all and where other species are free to evolve without human
interference.”
· “We need to radically and intelligently reduce human
populations to fewer than one billion.”
· “Sea transportation should be by sail. The big clippers were
the finest ships ever built and sufficient to our needs. Air
transportation should be by solar powered blimps when air
transportation is necessary.”
· At least Watson was generous and said people could still talk
with one another across great distances. “Communication systems can
link the communities,” he proclaimed from on high.

The Watson rant kept on going calling for everything from cutting
down on the population of domesticated dogs and cats to cutting down
on everything else in what he called “simplify, simplify, simplify.”

Watson essentially called for humans to return to primitive
lifestyles. “We need to stop flying, stop driving cars, and jetting
around on marine recreational vehicles. The Mennonites survive without
cars and so can the rest of us.”

http://www.businessandmedia.org/printer/2007/20070506180903.aspx