David Attenborough wants to be known not just as a television nature documentary narrator but as a serious environmeddlist, and he's been banging on of late about how humans are a scourge upon the planet and the need to limit the number of people hanging about, and so on - essentially the same doom and gloom that Ehrlich was trying to popularize fifty-odd years back. People like that are always off about the need to thin the herds, so to speak, though they never volunteer to set an example.
And like all serious environmeddlists, their mindset is extremely narrow; it seems never to occur to them that there really is no problem - a cursory glance at history shows that as populations become more prosperous and less primitive, their numbers always decline. Rather than rambling on about limiting populations, they should be focusing upon efforts to lead savages from primitive to civilized life, and thus increasing their prosperity. Lift the Muzlims and the Latinos from their current primitive levels, and they'll stop breeding like bunnies - they'll be too busy checking their email and their Facebook friends to have time for that sort of other stuff.
And besides, new opportunities are being created all the time; something else routinely overlooked by the serious environmeddlists. If you can extract metals and water from asteroids, as DSI plans to do, the incentive to root around in the surface of the earth is reduced. Investing in forward-looking technologies rather than regressive technologies like windmills and streetcars and Li-ion batteries would take everyone a lot further, and with far fewer environmental issues, than the same old, tired ground that the self-styled enviros keep plowing.
