Albert Allen Bartlett
Albert Allen Bartlett (March 21, 1923 – September 7, 2013) was an American professor of physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. By July 2001, he had lectured over 1,742 times since September 1969 on "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy". Bartlett regarded the word combination "sustainable growth" as an oxymoron, and argued that modest annual percentage population increases could lead to exponential growth. He therefore regarded human overpopulation as the greatest challenge facing humanity.
Quotes
[edit]- We must realize that growth is but an adolescent phase of life that stops when physical maturity is reached. If growth continues after maturity, it is called obesity or cancer. Prescribing growth as the cure of the energy crisis has all the logic of prescribing gluttony as a remedy for obesity or prescribing cancer as the cure for carcinoma.
- "The Arithmetic of Energy Growth" (1977), in Mary Lou Van Deventer (ed.) Earthworks: Ten Years on the Environmental Front (San Francisco: Friends of the Earth, 1980) p. 52
- The greatest shortcoming of the human race is man's inability to understand the exponential function.
- Reported in Paul G. Hewitt, Conceptual Physics: A New Introduction to Your Environment, 4th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co, 1981) ch. 9, p. 160, footnote
- Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally?"
- The "Great Challenge" (January 8, 1996), reported in Valorie M. Allen, Growing Pains: A Planet in Distress (New York: iUniverse, 2010) p. 21
External links
[edit]
Encyclopedic article on Albert Allen Bartlett on Wikipedia
