Editor’s note: For decades, critics of Agenda 21 and its successor, Agenda 2030, have warned that the global push for “sustainable development” reaches far beyond environmental protection. They argue that population control, restrictions on private property, changes in land use, and greater centralized authority are intertwined with a much larger vision for reshaping society. Those warnings were once widely dismissed as conspiracy theories. But decades of statements from influential population advocates, environmental leaders, international organizations, and policymakers raise a question worth examining: What have the architects and supporters of these ideas actually said about population, resources, and the future of human society?

Submission by Kathleen Marquardt

This article was originally written when COVID-19 hit. At the time, we knew far less about U.S.-funded coronavirus research and the government’s aggressive promotion of COVID-19 vaccines. The questions surrounding those decisions have only grown.

Since 1992, we at American Policy Center have argued that one of the major goals behind Agenda 21 and the broader sustainable development movement is to reduce the human population by more than 90%. Many people have dismissed that warning as a conspiracy theory. Yet the claim that the world is overpopulated, running out of room and unable to feed everyone has circulated openly for decades.

While Americans were reading Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and The Population Explosion, along with the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth, the United States was also known as the breadbasket of the world. American farmers were sending food across the globe.

California’s once-great agricultural regions no longer produce anywhere near what they once did. In my view, environmental policies have contributed to that decline, including dam removals in Oregon and Northern California, restrictions on farmland involving endangered species and the conversion of agricultural land into wind and solar facilities made from materials that are difficult to recycle.

The deeper conflict concerns property and liberty. Constitutional protections stand in the way of anyone who wants to take private land, sharply reduce the world’s population and impose a centralized vision of society. Katy Christian Magazine has explored the erosion of private property rights in America through land-use rules and government programs.

Because we continued warning that a catastrophic reduction in the world’s population was part of the plan, we were treated as nut cases. By then, many people either believed the dystopian scenario or considered such a reduction impossible.

Governments and powerful institutions have pursued population-control policies for decades. None has been as sweeping as the response to COVID-19. Remember the Tuskegee experiment, which ran from 1932 to 1972? For 40 years, the U.S. Public Health Service observed untreated syphilis in Black men who had not given informed consent and had been told they were receiving treatment for “bad blood.” Even after penicillin became the standard treatment, researchers withheld it.

Critics have also questioned the overlap between international vaccination campaigns backed by major foundations and programs intended to influence fertility. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the public was assured that the vaccines were safe and necessary. At what point do people begin questioning institutions that have violated public trust before?

Then there are the thousands of abortions performed in the United States each day, a substantial number regardless of one’s views on abortion. Gender-transition treatments can also impair fertility.

I could discuss the Food Pyramid, school lunch programs and other examples of how the public has been misled about health and diet. I will leave that subject for another time. Readers interested in it can explore Bedrock Living or Natural News.

Bill Gates and Chinese-linked buyers have acquired American farmland, while data centers are consuming growing amounts of land, water and energy. These trends have accelerated in recent years. I fear that the result could be increasing pressure on food production and a stronger push toward “smart city” living under government-defined health and environmental rules.

America is the only nation founded with a Constitution expressly written to protect the individual and his or her God-given rights from other people and from the government.

The sad truth is that Americans are not yet leading a revolt against the unconstitutional laws, edicts and orders being imposed here and across much of the world. I see three reasons:

• Much of the population under 40 has been brainwashed and poorly served by an education system designed to shape ideology rather than develop independent thought. For more on this argument, read “Education or Indoctrination? It’s Now or Never. You Choose.”
• The asymmetrical warfare directed at us for decades is now operating in overdrive, and many people are struggling to cope with it psychologically.
• Many people who understand at least part of the problem do not recognize that we are in a war for the mind rather than a conventional armed conflict. They are waiting for a moment when they can begin firing. By then, it will probably be too late. Whatever is used to ignite such a conflict could also reduce the human population.

I want to address the thinking behind population reduction and the influential people who have promoted it.

Media mogul and philanthropist Ted Turner has been widely quoted as saying, “A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”

Prince Philip, who served as president of the World Wildlife Fund, said: “Human population growth is probably the single most serious long-term threat to survival. We’re in for a major disaster if it isn’t curbed. We have no option. If it isn’t controlled voluntarily, it will be controlled involuntarily by an increase in disease, starvation and war.”

Photo by Dulana Kodithuwakku on Unsplash

In a December 1981 interview with People magazine, he also discussed a United Nations malaria-eradication project in Sri Lanka: “What people didn’t realize was that the malaria was actually controlling the growth of the population. The consequence was that within about 20 years the population doubled.” He plainly regarded that growth as a serious problem.

In 1971, the U.N. Population Commission designated 1974 as World Population Year and asked the U.N. secretary-general to “study the possibilities of developing a global population strategy, including population movements, for promoting and coordinating population policy in Member States with the objective of achieving a balance between population and other natural resources,” according to Claire Chambers’ 1977 book, The SIECUS Circle: A Humanist Revolution.

Herman Daly and John Cobb later discussed a “transferable birth quota plan” in For the Common Good:

“The transferable birth quota plan proposes that scale and distribution of the rights to bear children be determined by the community at large, but that these rights then be traded in the free market.

“This plan is based on the perception that the right to reproduce can no longer be treated as a free good. It must be seen as a scarce good in a full world.”

Paul Ehrlich was even more direct in the prologue to The Population Explosion: “Our position requires that we take immediate action at home and promote effective action worldwide. We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail. … We can no longer afford merely to treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth; the cancer itself must be cut out.”

They told us much of this decades ago. When will people listen?

How many people would remain if the most radical environmentalists, deep-state actors and globalists had their way? Consider their own words:

• MIT professor Penny Chisholm: “The real trick is, in terms of trying to level off at someplace lower than that 9 billion, is to get the birthrates in the developing countries to drop as fast as we can. And that will determine the level at which humans will level off on earth.”
• Mikhail Gorbachev: “We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren’t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.”
• Jacques Cousteau: “In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it is just as bad not to say it.”
• Earth First co-founder and Rewilding Institute founder Dave Foreman: “My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with its full complement of species, returning throughout the world.”

These statements show that population reduction is not a peripheral concern within this ideology. It is tied to efforts to rewild large portions of the earth, weaken private property rights and establish more centralized forms of global governance. Katy Christian Magazine has examined those concerns in its coverage of the Columbia River Basin plan and the global debate over land ownership and UNDRIP.

Most people consider themselves environmentalists. I would argue that the true environmentalists are farmers, ranchers, landowners, loggers, fishermen and others who live close to the land and work in partnership with it. That perspective also appears in KCM’s arguments for caring for God’s creation without surrendering human stewardship and restoring sound science, reason and common sense to environmental policy.

People who live in high-rise buildings, fight to protect nature from nearly every form of human use and, as Ted Nugent once put it, “never put their hands in a gut pile” often possess little practical understanding of the biological systems they seek to manage. Human beings are part of nature and part of the food chain. If every species matters to the stability of an ecosystem, how much more attention should we give to the place of humanity within it?

Sound science, critical thinking and logic should force us to confront two points. First, human extinction would likely collapse the very systems environmentalists claim to protect. Second, the people dismissed as “useless eaters” are the people who grow food and produce housing, clothing, computers and nearly everything else that sustains modern life.

We are approaching civilizational collapse, though not for the reasons anti-human environmentalists and globalists often give. The danger comes from schemes that concentrate control over land, food, resources and human life. Now is the time to disrupt those plans and restore the Great American Experiment.

People must recognize that a sweeping restructuring of the world could arrive soon. When global figures speak openly about population reductions on a scale almost impossible to comprehend, their words deserve attention rather than dismissal.

The age of artificial intelligence could accelerate and multiply what centralized institutions are able to accomplish. KCM has separately examined the warnings from AI scientists and executives who fear humanity could lose control of increasingly powerful systems.

It is up to us — you and me. What are you going to do?

 

Feature photo by Owen Cannon on Unsplash