by Rick Pearcey
April 6, 2006

from ThePearceyReport Website

 

Relying on a transcript from audio recorded during Dr. Eric Pianka's presentation at the 109^th meeting of the Texas Academy of Science March 2-4, The Pearcey Report has first-hand documentation on what the controversial ecologist said regarding a number of issues, including taxes, children, forced sterilization, overpopulation, economic growth, and more.

"I watched in amazement as a few hundred members of the Texas Academy of Science rose to their feet and gave a standing ovation to a speech that enthusiastically advocated the elimination of 90 percent of Earth's population by airborne Ebola."

On March 31, Dr. Pianka spoke to students and parents at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas.

"A University of Texas professor says the Earth would be better off with 90 percent of the human population dead," is how the Gazette-Enterprise led its coverage of the talk.

[Editor's Note: The Pearcey Report noticed April 8, 2006, that the Gazette-Enterprise story no longer appears on the newspaper's website. Update: As of April 10, the link is reestablished.]

DR. PIANKA TRANSCRIPT
From Recorded Audio at speech

March 3, 2006
Texas Academy of Science 

 

 

Note: Brackets indicate possible wording. Two sets of remarks follow. Set 1 is based on audio from the speech itself. Set 2 is from the question and answer period that followed.
 
 

 

SET ONE

From the Speech
 
We've got an airborne 90 percent mortality human killing [agent]. Think about that.
 
Now, so far, it's been down, down, down. Let's start up. But we can't get up very far. Aldo Leopold is one of the greatest ecologists of all times. He was really the first conservation biologist.
 
And here's quotes from Aldo. If you haven't read his Sand County Almanac, I encourage you to read it.
 
It was published after he died by his children [unclear]… a bunch of short stories they assembled and put together. It's a really powerful book. It makes me cry when I read it.
 
He says the land ethic changes the role of homosapiens from conqueror to steward...
 
It implies that we respect our fellow members and respect the community, and we respect other things on this earth.
 
Now, this came out of a conservation biology book.
 
Aldo didn't draw this. But it's an ethical sequence based on Aldo.
 
And here you can see what you're really familiar with: Your own self - you take care of your money, you take care of your possessions, and maybe you're a little bit altruistic towards your brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts.
 
And I think if we went back 2,000 years when we were living in a cave, we'd have these little social groups - tribes - where everybody knew everybody, and we met in caves that were like this room and older individuals told stories and younger individuals learned from them. And there was some degree of altruism and respect, mutual respect there.
 
Now we're up to the point where we have a nation and religious groups and we're at odds within America. 50-50 split right down the middle between Democrats and Republicans.
 
Let's go out a little bit further and think about people of other [races] and other nations. We're not doing very well.
 
What about other sentient animals? Our closest relatives are chimpanzees and gorillas. We don't treat them very well.
 
They're hunting gorillas, which are on the edge of extinction, and eating them - they call it "bush meat" - in Africa.
 
We subject chimps to all kinds of things in labs to create pharmaceuticals that can help us.
 
I always wonder how we would feel if natural selection hadn't taken a route that it has and if in fact chimps or gorillas or both of them were superior to us and treated us the way we treat them. I think that would be fair.
 
And finally, if we keep going out [up] and talk about all other species - and then the whole earth.
 
And the point here is that this is where everything is focused. And you can't move out from it. At least we don't seem able to.
 
Now here's a voice crying in the wilderness. It's been widely ignored by everybody.
 
Herman Daly, who wrote 4 books on steady-state economics - Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development. He coined those terms.
 
And by sustainable development, I first thought those were antonyms just strung together… they couldn't be… it weren't possible.
 
He means something a little different. He means using renewable resources and leaving the earth the way it was when we came into it, each and everyone of us. Which would mean population control.
 
We should be born with the right to reproduce but not to over-reproduce.
 
We need to change our tax system so that you're taxed for having kids rather than getting a reward. [Applause.]
 
Daly is being completely ignored by mainstream ecologists. They're all into this grow, grow, grow - the principle of a ponzi… you know, growth, a chain letter, a ponzi scheme.
 
You can't do it.
 
When you hear politicians say, "We're going to grow the economy," think about it. Money is debt. For economies to grow, debt has to increase. What we have done in spending in the last 4, 5, 6 years is put our grandchildren into debt, and their grandchildren. And they're never going to be able to work it off. 
 
If Japan, Japan finally call in all those American dollars in debt, America is going to go under.  That could happen any time.
 
Here's another sort of upside to it. Actually, Dennis Meadows at the bottom there was asked to write this book - to do a study - using systems ecology - back in the days before PCs, and he did it in 1972, and the book was called Limits to Growth. 
 
And then in 1992, he and some other co-authors did a Beyond the Limits book and showed that we were over carrying capacity.
 
And then he enlisted his daughter, Donella, to do the 30-year update, which just came out a couple of years ago. She's dead now, but she was the most optimistic of all the people that wrote this book. And you can see it in her chapter at the very end, where she talks about what we could do if we just had the will...
 
But anyway, he estimated that we crossed the maximum number of humans the earth could support back about 1978. But up until then we could have eased into a sustainable world, but now we're 20% above. 
 
I think it's actually much worse than that. We could not have reached six and a half billion if it weren't for fossil fuels, to do agriculture and feed the hordes of humans around the earth. And the fossil fuels are running out. So I think we might have to cut back to, say, two billion, which would be about one-third as many people.
 
This is an old figure from the Meadows 1992 Beyond the Limits book and you are here in 1999 - we're actually out here now. We're starting to experience the world oil crash, and you know that every time you fill up your car.
 
Here's the most optimistic projection: Is we don't have a collapse.
 
But here's what's going to happen. And after the human population collapses, there's going to be a lot fewer of us. Food's going to be diminished. Pollution's going to go down, which will be good. But there's not going to be much to recover from. Our descendants are going to curse us for the party we took, the party we had, and I really recommend Richard Heinberg's book the [sic] Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies. This man has thought about these things deeply.
 
The End of Oil is good, too. But it's not anywhere as good as the Party's Over.
 
There have been wise people for a long time - John Stuart Mill in 1858 took issue with the whole business of grow, grow, grow. And he said he thought stationary systems made sense, stable systems. Where you don't have bubbles that are going to burst or you're going to go bankrupt.
 
He said he didn't think the people had to elbow their way to the top, to fight, struggle with each other to get the resources.

 

That if we could just live in a stable world where we didn't continue to grow, and weren't based on this grow, grow, grow thing. That we could work on the art of living, and we could become better human beings for it.
 
And these are some of the things that Donella Meadows says in the end of the Limits to Growth.
 

 

***

 
So, this is the end. In the 1960s when I started studying ecology, there was a lot of sand in the top of the hourglass. But in my short stint of 40, 45 years as an ecologist. Most of that sand has run out.

 

There's not much time left to get on an airplane, go to Madagascar, and study something while you still can.

 

Thank you.

 

[Applause.]
 
 

 

SET TWO

From the Question Session
 
AUDIENCE: ...nonproliferation, but after your talk I [assess] these things in a whole different light now. [Laughter.]
 
PIANKA: You know the bird flu's good, too. [Laughter.]
 

QUESTIONER: …Do you have any hope for these so-called voluntary ... Are you involved in trying to design...
 
PIANKA: Actually, I really hope we do. I think we ought to get to Mars while we still can. Some of you brave pioneering... should be on a one-way spaceship to Mars. You'll have to build yourself a greenhouse to grow your own [laughter] a hundred degrees, whatever it takes.

 

I think we should take the Library of Congress up with us on DVDs and so when we wink out in this little sphere, there will be a little bit of a record of what happened on Earth somewhere else.

 

And I think in that new plan, the books kids read in kindergarten will say "The Rape of the Earth, Let's treat our planet a little better."

 

But I don't think we can [unintelligible].
 

QUESTIONER: I don't think that we as an audience accurately represent society at large. [Laughter] What kind of reception have you received as you have presented these ideas to other audiences that are not representative of us?
 
PIANKA: I speak to the converted! [Considerable laughter.] [We're not going to be all in agreement.] I know that. But we have to speak to the people that aren't. That's our - a real challenge.
 
And convincing ‘em when the government's telling ‘em to keep their head buried in the sand and pretend everything's OK isn't going to be easy. The government's just lying to ‘em, and they're accepting it.
 

QUESTIONER: I had a similar point. What can we do to correct this problem? It's, it all has to come from policy level because of the way human society is structured when the governments represent people.
 
PIANKA: Politicians can't win elections with views like this. I could never run for office. [Laughter] [Unintelligible] [Laughter]

 

They have to present good news to win, and they deceive themselves and deceive the public in every way they can to stay in power. Even Al Gore, who wrote the environment book, never faced overpopulation. No politician ever has.
 
The reason China was able to turn the corner and is going to become the new super power in the world is because they got a police state and they can force people to stop reproducing. That's the only reason they were able to turn the corner.
 

QUESTIONER: [Unintelligible.]
 
PIANKA: ...Well, there's cheating going on. You can pay in China and have more. I know all that. But there's a solution that's theoretically possible. I call it the Johnny Anti-Appleseed Solution.

 

Instead of being cursed with our fertility, I would bless us with infertility. Now this could happen because male sperm counts are falling because of plastics and the estrogen [unintelligible] naturally.
 
But I asked a reproductive physiologist years ago about this. I said, "Could you design a molecule that you could administer once that would bind to the DNA to turn off reproduction and make people sterile?" And he said, yeah, theoretically. And I said, well, if you did that could you design an antidote that would unmask it just briefly for as few seconds? And he said, yeah, probably.

 

So this is what we need. We need to sterilize everybody on the Earth [laughter] and make the antidote freely available to anybody who's willing to work for it.
 
Immediately you'd get responsible parenthood. No more juvenile delinquents, unwanted kids. You have a kid, you had to work, and you had only a few seconds to do it in. [Extended laughter]
 
 
QUESTIONER: People who are educated seem to have less children.
 
PIANKA: Right. Right. Definitely, smarter people have fewer kids. I think [unintelligible] pointed this out.

 

He said those who don't have any conscience about the Earth are going to inherit the Earth, because those who cared made fewer babies and those who didn't care made more babies. And so we're [going to evolve...] uncaring. And I think that's probably happening. I think IQs are falling for the same reason, too.
 

MODERATOR: I think I'm going to [unintelligible] on that. If you would like to talk to Dr. Pianka afterwards [unintelligible].
 
[Prolonged standing ovation]

Meeting Doctor Doom

by Forrest M. Mims III.

April 07, 2006

from SAS Website

Recovered through WayBackMachine Website

There is always something special about science meetings.

The 109^th meeting of the Texas Academy of Science at Lamar University in Beaumont on 3-5 March 2006 was especially exciting for me, because a student and his professor presented the results of a DNA study I suggested to them last year.

How fulfilling to see the baldcypress (Taxodium distichum) leaves we collected last summer and my tree ring photographs transformed into a first class scientific presentation that's nearly ready to submit to a scientific journal (Brian Iken and Dr. Deanna McCullough, "Bald Cypress of the Texas Hill Country: Taxonomically Unique?" 109th Meeting of the Texas Academy of Science Program and Abstracts [PDF], Poster P59, p. 84, 2006).

But there was a gravely disturbing side to that otherwise scientifically significant meeting, for I watched in amazement as a few hundred members of the Texas Academy of Science rose to their feet and gave a standing ovation to a speech that enthusiastically advocated the elimination of 90 percent of Earth's population by airborne Ebola.

The speech was given by Dr. Eric R. Pianka (Fig. 1), the University of Texas evolutionary ecologist and lizard expert who the Academy named the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist.

Figure 1.

Dr. Eric R. Pianka and an unidentified woman from the University of Texas at Arlington

following a recent speech before the Texas Academy of Science

in which Pianka endorsed airborne Ebola as an efficient means

for eliminating 90 percent of the world's population.

Pianka received an enthusiastic and prolonged standing ovation.

Later he received more applause from a banquet hall filled with more than 400 people

when the president of the Texas Academy of Science presented him

with a plaque naming him 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist.

Photograph 2006 by Forrest M. Mims III.
 

Something curious occurred a minute before Pianka began speaking.

An official of the Academy approached a video camera operator at the front of the auditorium and engaged him in animated conversation. The camera operator did not look pleased as he pointed the lens of the big camera to the ceiling and slowly walked away.

This curious incident came to mind a few minutes later when Professor Pianka began his speech by explaining that the general public is not yet ready to hear what he was about to tell us. Because of many years of experience as a writer and editor, Pianka's strange introduction and the TV camera incident raised a red flag in my mind.

Suddenly I forgot that I was a member of the Texas Academy of Science and chairman of its Environmental Science Section. Instead, I grabbed a notepad so I could take on the role of science reporter.

One of Pianka's earliest points was a condemnation of anthropocentrism, or the idea that humankind occupies a privileged position in the Universe. He told a story about how a neighbor asked him what good the lizards are that he studies.

He answered,

"What good are you?"

Pianka hammered his point home by exclaiming,

"We're no better than bacteria!"

Pianka then began laying out his concerns about how human overpopulation is ruining the Earth.

He presented a doomsday scenario in which he claimed that the sharp increase in human population since the beginning of the industrial age is devastating the planet.

He warned that quick steps must be taken to restore the planet before it's too late.

Saving the Earth with Ebola

Professor Pianka said the Earth as we know it will not survive without drastic measures. Then, and without presenting any data to justify this number, he asserted that the only feasible solution to saving the Earth is to reduce the population to 10 percent of the present number.

He then showed solutions for reducing the world's population in the form of a slide depicting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:

War and famine would not do, he explained. Instead, disease offered the most efficient and fastest way to kill the billions that must soon die if the population crisis is to be solved.

Pianka then displayed a slide showing rows of human skulls, one of which had red lights flashing from its eye sockets.

AIDS is not an efficient killer, he explained, because it is too slow. His favorite candidate for eliminating 90 percent of the world's population is airborne Ebola ( Ebola Reston ), because it is both highly lethal and it kills in days, instead of years. However, Professor Pianka did not mention that Ebola victims die a slow and torturous death as the virus initiates a cascade of biological calamities inside the victim that eventually liquefy the internal organs.

After praising the Ebola virus for its efficiency at killing, Pianka paused, leaned over the lectern, looked at us and carefully said,

"We've got airborne 90 percent mortality in humans. Killing humans. Think about that."

With his slide of human skulls towering on the screen behind him, Professor Pianka was deadly serious. The audience that had been applauding some of his statements now sat silent.

After a dramatic pause, Pianka returned to politics and environmentalism. But he revisited his call for mass death when he reflected on the oil situation.

"And the fossil fuels are running out," he said, "so I think we may have to cut back to two billion, which would be about one-third as many people."

So the oil crisis alone may require eliminating two-third's of the world's population.

How soon must the mass dying begin if Earth is to be saved? Apparently fairly soon, for Pianka suggested he might be around when the killer disease goes to work. He was born in 1939, and his lengthy obituary appears on his web site.

When Pianka finished his remarks, the audience applauded. It wasn't merely a smattering of polite clapping that audiences diplomatically reserve for poor or boring speakers. It was a loud, vigorous and enthusiastic applause.

Questions for Dr. Doom

Then came the question and answer session, in which Professor Pianka stated that other diseases are also efficient killers.

The audience laughed when he said,

"You know, the bird flu's good, too."

They laughed again when he proposed, with a discernable note of glee in his voice that,

"We need to sterilize everybody on the Earth."

After noting that the audience did not represent the general population, a questioner asked,

"What kind of reception have you received as you have presented these ideas to other audiences that are not representative of us?"

Pianka replied,

"I speak to the converted!"

Pianka responded to more questions by condemning politicians in general and Al Gore by name, because they do not address the population problem and,

"...because they deceive the public in every way they can to stay in power."

He spoke glowingly of the police state in China that enforces their one-child policy.

He said,

"Smarter people have fewer kids."

He said those who don't have a conscience about the Earth will inherit the Earth,

"...because those who care make fewer babies and those that didn't care made more babies." He said we will evolve as uncaring people, and "I think IQs are falling for the same reason, too."

With this, the questioning was over.

Immediately almost every scientist, professor and college student present stood to their feet and vigorously applauded the man who had enthusiastically endorsed the elimination of 90 percent of the human population. Some even cheered. Dozens then mobbed the professor at the lectern to extend greetings and ask questions. It was necessary to wait a while before I could get close enough to take some photographs (Fig. 1).

I was assigned to judge a paper in a grad student competition after the speech. On the way, three professors dismissed Pianka as a crank. While waiting to enter the competition room, a group of a dozen Lamar University students expressed outrage over the Pianka speech.

Yet five hours later, the distinguished leaders of the Texas Academy of Science presented Pianka with a plaque in recognition of his being named 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist.

When the banquet hall filled with more than 400 people responded with enthusiastic applause, I walked out in protest.

Corresponding with Dr. Doom

Recently I exchanged a number of e-mails with Pianka. I pointed out to him that one might infer his death wish was really aimed at Africans, for Ebola is found only in Central Africa.

He replied that Ebola does not discriminate, kills everyone and could spread to Europe and the the Americas by a single infected airplane passenger.

In his last e-mail, Pianka wrote that I completely fail to understand his arguments. So I did a check and found verification of my interpretation of his remarks on his own web site.

In a student evaluation of a 2004 course he taught, one of Professor Pianka's students wrote,

"Though I agree that convervation [sic] biology is of utmost importance to the world, I do not think that preaching that 90% of the human population should die of ebola [sic] is the most effective means of encouraging conservation awareness."

(Go here and scroll down to just before the Fall 2005 evaluation section near the end.)

Yet the majority of his student reviews were favorable, with one even saying,

"I worship Dr. Pianka."

The 45-minute lecture before the Texas Academy of Science converted a university biology senior into a Pianka disciple, who then published a blog that seriously supports Pianka's mass death wish.

Dangerous Times

Let me now remove my reporter's hat for a moment and tell you what I think.

We live in dangerous times. The national security of many countries is at risk. Science has become tainted by highly publicized cases of misconduct and fraud.

Must now we worry that a Pianka-worshipping former student might someday become a professional biologist or physician with access to the most deadly strains of viruses and bacteria? I believe that airborne Ebola is unlikely to threaten the world outside of Central Africa.

But scientists have regenerated the 1918 Spanish flu virus that killed 50 million people.

There is concern that small pox might someday return. And what other terrible plagues are waiting out there in the natural world to cross the species barrier and to which scientists will one day have access?

Meanwhile, I still can't get out of my mind the pleasant spring day in Texas when a few hundred scientists of the Texas Academy of Science gave a standing ovation for a speaker who they heard advocate for the slow and torturous death of over five billion human beings.