In 2011 at a meeting of the Royal Society presided by Prince Philip, at which the British naturalist, Sir David Attenborough, delivered a lecture titled People and Planet, in which he celebrated the 50th anniversary of the founding of the World Wildlife Fund by Prince Philip in 1961, in collaboration with his dear friend Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, an affirmed Nazi. In his lecture, Attenborough elaborates the full neo-Malthusian ideology still preached by the British Empire today: Fifty years ago, when the WWF was founded, there were about three billion people on earth. Now there are almost seven billion. Over twice as many and every one of them needing space for their homes, land to grow food, space to build schools and roads and airfields. Where could that come from? A little might be taken from land occupied by other people but most of it could only come from the land which, for millions of years, animals and plants had had to themselves the natural world. But the impact of these extra millions of people has spread even beyond the space they physically claimed. The spread of industrialisation has changed the chemical constituency of the atmosphere. The oceans that cover most of the surface of the planet have been polluted and increasingly acidified. And the earth is warming. 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 our planet.
Posted on: Sun, 06 Apr 2014 04:55:48 +0000
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