Sapient adjective 1. Wise, or attempting to appear wise.
A collective of sapient humans (species: Homo sapiens) over the years have been expressing concerns about human population.
Date: 1798 Author: Thomas Malthus “An Essay on the Principle Population “
Summary: positing incorrectly that humans’ proclivity for procreation would exhaust the global food supply within a matter of decades.
Results: Population growth has remained an issue among those collective wise (intellectual) minds contemplating humankind’s future and how to solve the human overpopulation problem.
Skipping ahead to the second half of the 1960’s...
Date: 1966 Author: Harry Harrison “Make Room!Make Room!” Sketching a dystopian world in which too many people scrambled for too few resources.
Date:1968 Author: Paul R Ehrlich a Stanford University biologist “The Population Bomb”
Book sold in the millions. Summary: humankind stood on the brink of apocalypse because there were simply too many of us. over.”
Followed by later forecasts... hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970’s. 65 million would be Americans. Crowded India was essentially doomed. Odds were fair that England would not exist in the year 2000. Dr. Ehrlich warned in 1970 that sometime in the next 15 years...the end would come.
Date:1969 the pop duo Zager and Evans reached the top of the charts with a number called “In the Year 2525” which postulated that humans were on a clear path to doom.
United Nations Population Division | Department of Economic and Social Affairs
Human Rights Day 10 December 1966 Declaration on Population by World Leaders signed by 12 Heads of State.
Human Rights Day 10 December 1967 1966 Declaration on Population by World Leaders signed by 30 Heads of State. Statement on population by the UN Secretary-General, U Thant.
International Conference on Human Rights Tehran, Republic of Iran, 22 April to 13 May 1968
1969 Declaration on Social Progress and Development Adopted by the General Assembly in resolution 2542
For years compulsory legal sterilization occurred around the world until it was deemed illegal.
STERILIZED in the Name of Public Health
Providing a single example in The United States of America.
Date: Early 1970’s... STERILIZATION in the Name of Public Health.
Alexandra Minna Stern M.D.
ABSTRACT
“In exploring the history of involuntary sterilization in California, I connect the approximately 20 000 operations performed on patients in state institutions between 1909 and 1979 to the federally funded procedures carried out at a Los Angeles County hospital in the early 1970s.”
Continued in my next post...