A top White House adviser to President Barack Obama argued that mankind
eventually must face up to the need for a “world of zero net
physical growth” and “population limitation” in
an essay he co-authored that was included in a 1995 book on environmentally
“sustainable” economic activity published by the World
Bank.
John P. Holdren, who is now director of the White House Office of
Science and Technology Policy, co-authored the essay with Paul Ehrlich
and Gretchen Daily of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford.
Ehrlich has been a well-known population control advocate since he
authored the 1968 bestseller, “The Population Bomb,” in
which he advocated zero population growth. At the time the 1995 essay
was published, Holdren was a professor at the University of California.
The essay—“The Meaning of Sustainability: Biogeophysical
Aspects”—was published in the first chapter of “Defining
and Measuring Sustainability: The Biogeophysical Foundations,”
a book published in 1995 by the World Bank. The book is available
as a PDF on the World Bank’s Web site.
“We know for certain, for example, that: No form of material
growth (including population growth) other than asymptotic growth,
is sustainable,” wrote Holdren and his co-authors. “Many
of the practices inadequately supporting today’s population
of 5.5 billion people are unsustainable; and [a]t the sustainability
limit, there will be a tradeoff between population and energy-matter
throughput per person, hence, ultimately, between economic activity
per person and well-being per person.
