It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
The origins of the Royal Society lie in an 'invisible college' of natural philosophers who began meeting in the mid-1640s to discuss the new philosophy of promoting knowledge of the natural world through observation and experiment, which we now call science.
Its official foundation date is 28 November 1660, when a group of 12 met at Gresham College after a lecture by Christopher Wren, then the Gresham Professor of Astronomy, and decided to found 'a Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning'. This group included Wren himself, Robert Boyle, John Wilkins, Sir Robert Moray, and William, Viscount Brouncker.
The Society was to meet weekly to witness experiments and discuss what we would now call scientific topics. The first Curator of Experiments was Robert Hooke. It was Moray who first told the King, Charles II, of this venture and secured his approval and encouragement. At first apparently nameless, the name The Royal Society first appears in print in 1661, and in the second Royal Charter of 1663 the Society is referred to as 'The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge'.
Sir Patrick Bateson FRS Emeritus Professor of Ethology, University of Cambridge
Professor Cai Fang Director of the Institute of Population and Labor Economics,
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
Professor Suzana Cavenaghi Council member and ex-President of the Latin America
Population Association, Brazil
Professor Parfait M Eloundou-Enyegue Associate Professor Department of Development Sociology at Cornell
University, and Associate Director of Cornell Population Program
Professor Roger Short FRS Honorary Professorial Fellow in Reproductive Biology,
University of Melbourne, Australia
Dr Eliya Zulu Executive Director, African Institute for Development Policy and
Past President, Union for African Population Studies
The UN will unveil its plans for the new “ green economy ” at the conference on “Sustainable Development” (UN CSD or Rio+20) in Rio de Janeiro this year. The UN plans to reshape global society, the world’s economy and give itself new encompassing powers that will march the international body toward one world governance.
The UN will disburse a global carbon tax , redistribute the world’s wealth and install programs that will place all issues concerning humanity, poverty, the securitization of resources and education under its control and command.
They want to oversee all aspects of human activity as part of their social re-engineering.
The UN published a paper entitled “Working towards a Balanced and Inclusive Green Economy: A United Nations System-wide Perspective” where they outline their agenda. More than 35 UN agencies and international institutions were employed to create this document. They functioned under the title, the UN “Environmental Management Group” (UNEMG).
This conference spawned the infamous Agenda 21 .
The document by UNEMG discusses “transitioning to a green economy” that demands a “shift in the way we think and act”. They want to use education, information and “awareness” to “change individual and collective behavior”. They also want to take a concerted look at the “lifestyles in developed countries” to alter “consumption and production patterns”.
Jules Pretty of the Royal Society working group is proposing,
“When we slow down population growth we empower women and provide more money for least developed countries to invest in education. The majority of women want fewer children.”
Women bear the main physical burden of
reproduction: pregnancy, breastfeeding and
childcare. They also bear the main responsibility
for contraception as most methods are designed
for their use. Men, it may be argued, reap the
benefits of children without incurring an equal
share of the cost. It follows that women may be
more favourable to the idea of small families and
family planning than their partners but unable
to express their inclinations in male-dominated
systems. Such views received international
endorsement in the Program of Action resulting
from the UN conference on population in 1994.
Paragraph 4.1 states that “improving the status of
women is essential for the long-term success of
population programs”.
Jonathon Porritt told the London Times this week that he will tell the annual conference of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), to be held at the Royal Statistical Society, that in order to reduce "pressure" on the world’s ecosystems, Britain must halve its population to 30 million inhabitants.
"Each person in Britain has far more impact on the environment than those in developing countries so cutting our population is one way to reduce that impact."
As a longstanding member of the Green party, and a patron of the Optimum Population Trust, Porritt has become one of the most public faces in the radical environmentalist movement. The son of Lord Porritt, he is one of Britain’s leading advisors to Parliament as well as an advisor to the Prince of Wales.
The Optimum Population Trust, for those of you who haven't yet come across them, are an odd bunch. Bluntly, they believe the best way to save the planet is to get rid of as many human beings as possible.
On the plus side, at least they are being more honest than most greens in their open contempt for human beings. The reality of many in the environmentalist movement is at core a deep anti-humanism, an arrogant dislike for people who are somehow too stupid to see the problem with their pursuit of a happy life and a healthy family.
On the down side, the OPT's aims are actually pretty worrying - verging on sinister, even. Buried in their website is a detailed spreadsheet [Excel link] laying out their ideal "sustainable" populations for each country. And those "ideal" populations are a little worrying, if you try to imagine the reality of them.
For example, the UK should shrink to 29 million people, from the 60 million we currently have. We are of course a small island, but ask yourself which half of your friends you would rather did not exist?
And we get things comparatively easy in the OPT's dystopian vision of the future.
Only one in six of the current Algerian population should really be allowed. Bosnians are unlikely to be overjoyed that 3 million of their 4 million people are, in the OPT's eyes, an inconvenience. Rwanda should apparently go from 7 million people to only 2 million.
What the OPT seem to forget is that these aren't just statistics. They aren't just "emitters", as their website terms them. They are real human beings, who live, love and laugh. It is peculiar that Sir David Attenborough, the Patron of the Trust, can show so much compassion for animals but is apparently happy to back such a dispassionate dismissal of the value of our fellow humans.
Yesterday, the OPT released the results of a Yougov opinion poll [Excel link] which they trumpeted as showing public support for their aims. "Public want smaller UK population", announces their website. However, when you actually read the tables for the polling results, it turns out that the public are bothered about far more real world, centre right issues than greenie pipe dreams.
Jonathon Porritt, member of the Royal Society and former chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission has stated on record that the British population must be reduced from 60 million to 30 million to remain a sustainable society.
Professor Paul Ehrlich, who co-authored Ecoscience with Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren, was quoted in the Guardian as supporting a drastic population reduction before the population rises to 9 billion in 2050.
Ehrlich said:
How many you support depends on lifestyles. We came up with 1.5 to 2 billion because you can have big active cities and wilderness.
If you want a battery chicken world where everyone has minimum space and food and everyone is kept just about alive you might be able to support in the long term about 4 or 5 billion people. But you already have 7 billion.
So we have to humanely and as rapidly as possible move to population shrinkage... The question is: can you go over the top without a disaster, like a worldwide plague or a nuclear war between India and Pakistan? If we go on at the pace we are there’s going to be various forms of disaster.
Some maybe slow motion disasters like people getting more and more hungry, or catastrophic disasters because the more people you have the greater the chance of some weird virus transferring from animal to human populations, there could be a vast die-off.