So writes New Scientist reporter Fred Pearce at his Fred’s Footprint blog. Pearce is worried that ideological environmentalism might once again embrace coercive population control. Pearce knows whereof he speaks:

... the unpalatable truth is that a lot of environmental thinking over the past half century has been underpinned by an unhealthy preoccupation with the breeding propensity of Asians and Africans. They were, it was often held, polluting the human gene pool as well as the planet. Such thinking was not fringe: it involved some of the great names of the environment movement.

So the American academic Garrett Hardin said in his classic and still-revered environment text Tragedy of the Commons in 1968, “Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all.” It must be “relinquished to preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms.” Lest we have any doubt who should do the relinquishing, he wrote elsewhere about how college students should have more children than those with low IQs.

Or take Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb from the same era. That book said the world could no longer feed itself and called for population control “by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.”

Meanwhile the British book Blueprint for Survival, published by the Ecologist magazine, sided with the demagogue-of-the-day Enoch Powell in calling for “an end to immigration”. Far from being ostracised as a right-wing tract, its recipe was supported by Friends of the Earth and Peter Scott, the TV wildlife king and founder of the World Wildlife Fund.