Remembering Five Departed Giants on Population and Environment

... Here we pay tribute to five giants whose life achievements in fields related to environmental conservation merited recognition by the nation's elite legacy news media, but who also distinguished themselves by showing the bravery, honesty, and smarts it takes to publicly recognize the threat posed by human overpopulation...

Dave Foreman, 1946-2022

Legendary wilderness warrior, rewilding pioneer, and CAPS advisory board member Dave Foreman passed away from a long illness in September 2022 at the age of 75 in Albuquerque, New Mexico...

When Dave died, Mother Earth and her wild creatures lost a diehard defender and America a formidable fighter for sensible population and immigration policies informed by environmental limits...

Dave and fellow kindred spirits founded Earth First! in 1980 on a wilderness sojourn in the Pinacate Desert of northern Mexico. They shared a belief in deep ecology, the philosophy that all evolved life forms have a right to exist and that wild nature - untrammeled wilderness - should be safeguarded regardless of its instrumental value to human beings...

Herman E. Daly, 1938 – 2022

Herman Daly, the "father of ecological economics," died in Virginia in October 2022 at the age of 84. Over a lengthy career which spanned more than half a century, Herman was the pioneering, indefatigable champion of the steady-state economy. This is one in which all physical human activity - economic "throughput" of resources and energy - is considered a subset of the ecosphere, and thus constrained by it...

About population and immigration, Herman wrote: "We should be working toward a balance in which births plus in-migrants equals deaths plus out-migrants... And while each nation can debate whether it should accept many or few immigrants, and who should get priority, such a debate is rendered moot if immigration laws are not enforced."...

Edward O. Wilson, 1929 – 2021

Eminent entomologist, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author, "Heir to Darwin's Legacy," and passionate biodiversity advocate E.O. Wilson passed in December 2021 at the age of 92...

He wrote in Scientific American in 2002: "The pattern of human population growth in the 20th century was more bacterial than primate. When Homo sapiens passed the six-billion mark we had already exceeded by perhaps as much as 100 times the biomass of any large animal species that ever existed on the land. We and the rest of life cannot afford another 100 years like that." He referred to humanity's "reproductive folly."...

Thomas Lovejoy, 1941 – 2021

Noted tropical and conservation biologist and National Geographic Explorer, Tom Lovejoy, "the godfather of biodiversity," left us on Christmas Day, 2021 in McLean, Virginia, at the age of 80...

Tom was influential in the origin of the new field of conservation biology, the study of the conservation of nature and of Earth's biodiversity with the aim of preserving species, their habitats, and ecosystems. He also had a pioneering role in so-called debt-for-nature swaps, in which environmental groups purchase precarious foreign debt on the secondary market at the market rate, which is considerably discounted...

Like most conservation biologists, Tom understood and saw firsthand the adverse impacts of the human population irruption on habitats and wild species...

Richard D. Lamm, 1935 – 2021

Former 3-term Colorado governor and long-time CAPS advisory board member Dick Lamm passed away unexpectedly of a pulmonary embolism in July 2021, just days before his 86th birthday...

Stepping back from politics, for many years he was the Co-Director of the Institute for Public Policy Studies at the University of Denver. In 2004 he ran for the Sierra Club board of directors but was defeated, in a bitter campaign he called one of the dirtiest he had ever seen...