A Quote by David Attenborough
It's coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It's not just climate change; it's sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now.
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The growth of the American food industry will always bump up against this troublesome biological fact: Try as we might, each of us can only eat about fifteen hundred pounds of food a year. Unlike many other products - CDs, say, or shoes - there's a natural limit to how much food we each can consume without exploding. What this means for the food industry is that its natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1 percent per year - 1 percent being the annual growth rate of American population. The problem is that [the industry] won't tolerate such an anemic rate of growth.
A combination of very rapid population growth over the last 50 years and reckless economic growth during the same time has stored up massive problems for societies the world over. No nation is immune. The scientific evidence tells us all we need to know: carry on with business-as-usual growth-at-all-costs, and we're stuffed
I do remain optimistic that one day the world will realise that carbon dioxide is more of a friend than an enemy to the earth's flora and fauna, and I do seriously believe that, given the extraordinary complexity of the natural forces controlling our climate, which have done so for millions of years, the only sensible policy response to the natural process of climate change is prudent and cost-effective adaptation.
You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?
In many places in the developed world, we eat or waste probably twice as many food calories as we really need. We're wasteful of food. We ship all over the world. We're now realizing that generating the energy to ship the food around the world is also ruining our climate.
The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000…. Now our food is coming from enormous assembly lines where the animals and the workers are being abused, and the food has become much more dangerous in ways that are deliberately hidden from us. This isn’t just about what we’re eating. It’s about what we’re allowed to say. What we’re allowed to know.
Why do we so mindlessly abuse our planet, our only home? The answer to that lies in each of us. Therefore, we will strive to bring about understanding that we are--each one of us--responsible for more than just ourselves, our family, our football team, our country, or our own kind; that there is more to life than just these things. That each one of us must also bring the natural world back into its proper place in our lives, and realize that doing so is not some lofty ideal but a vital part of our personal survival.
Rivers are places that renew our spirit, connect us with our past, and link us directly with the flow and rhythm of the natural world.
We modern people think of miracles as the suspension of the natural order, but Jesus meant them to be the restoration of the natural order. The Bible tells us that God did not originally make the world to have disease, hunger, and death in it. Jesus has come to redeem where it is wrong and heal the world where it is broken. His miracles are not just proofs that he has power but also wonderful foretastes of what he is going to do with that power. Jesus' miracles are not just a challenge to our minds, but a promise to our hearts, that the world we all want is coming.
No other life forms know they are alive, and neither do they know they will die. This is our curse alone. Without this hex upon our heads, we would never have withdrawn as far as we have from the natural—so far and for such a time that it is a relief to say what we have been trying with our all not to say: We have long since been denizens of the natural world. Everywhere around us are natural habitats, but within us is the shiver of startling and dreadful things. Simply put: We are not from here. If we vanished tomorrow, no organism on this planet would miss us. Nothing in nature needs us.
Without investments in research and science that will create the next Apple, create the next new innovation that will sell products around the world, we will lose. If we're not training engineers to make sure that they are equipped here in this country, then companies won't come here. Those investments are what's going to help to make sure that we continue to lead this world economy not just next year, but 10 years from now, 50 years from now, a hundred years from now.
Human beings, because we're so clever, have removed every single one of those population limiting factors... So nothing controls our increase in numbers except our own wish. Since I first started making television programs, the population of the world has increased three times. That's an extraordinary notion. Can it increase four times? Can it increase five times? The Earth is a finite size. So a point will eventually come when we run out of food, when we run out of space and when we will have destroyed most of the natural world. So ought we to do something about it before that happens?
When biblical material touches on the natural world, we can legitimately use the tools of science. Sometimes that shows us - no shock here - that biblical writers didn't know as much as we now know about the natural world - but God knew that when he picked them, so that alone tells us that "doing science" that would satisfy a 21st century - and beyond - audience wasn't what God was interested in with respect to the enterprise of producing Scripture for posterity.
It's amazing how much information is coming at us most of the time through technology, the media and the busyness of the world around us. I've decided that the world probably isn't going to change, so I have to change. I'm learning how to keep my mind on what I'm doing, rather than thinking about several things at once or what I want to do next.
I believe that virtually everyone has the ability to either grow some food at home, or to find an appropriate location to start a garden. I may sound like a kook who plants my landscape with cucumbers instead of carnations, peppers instead of petunias, and fruit trees rather than ficus, but I am convinced that wherever you go, you can grow food! Now is the time for us to join together and plant the seeds that will transform the places in which we live.
I meet so many that think population growth is a major problem in regard to climate change. But the number of children born per year in the world has stopped growing since 1990. The total number of children below 15 years of age in the world are now relatively stable around 2 billion.
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