‘We should be scared stiff’

Renowned scientist James Lovelock thinks mainland Europe will soon be desert – and millions of people will start moving north to Britain.

…Where did we go wrong? “If we were hunter-gatherers and this was a bigger planet we would be all right. But we’re not: we’re farmers and that’s what’s screwed us up. There are just too many of us living the way we do. Our wrongdoing has been to take energy hundreds of times faster than it is made naturally available.”

How can we reduce human population to more sustainable levels? “We can’t solve the problem. There’s no human way of cutting numbers. You can empower women and persuade them to have fewer children but we don’t have the time for that.”


His diagnosis may be grim, but Lovelock’s prognosis is much more bleak. He suggests that the current population of six billion humans will be cut to a more ecologically sustainable half-to-one billion people. “How will this mass cull happen? “It’ll be worse than Hitler – Gaia’s going to do it,” says Lovelock. He writes about this chillingly at the outset of the Revenge of Gaia, where he considers the December 2004 tsunami. “That awful event starkly revealed the power of the earth to kill. The planet we live on has merely to shrug to take some fraction of a million people to their deaths. But that is nothing compared with what may soon may happen; we are now so abusing the Earth that it may rise and move back to the hot state it was in 55 million years ago, and if it does, most of us, and our descendants, will die.”

The Guardian