"Harrison Brown's most remarkable book, The Challenge of Man's Future, was published more than three decades ago. By the time I read it as a high school student a few years later, the book had been widely acclaimed.... The Challenge of Man's Future pulled these interests together for me in a way that transformed my thinking about the world and about the sort of career I wanted to pursue. I have always suspected that I am not the only member of my generation whose aspirations and subsequent career were changed by this book of Harrison Brown's.... As a demonstration of the power of (and necessity for) an interdisciplinary approach to global problems, the book was a tour de force.... Thirty years after Harrison Brown elaborated these positions, it remains difficult to improve on them as a coherent depiction of the perils and challenges we face. Brown's accomplishment in writing The Challenge of Man's Future, of course, was not simply the construction of this sweeping schema for understanding the human predicament; more remarkable was (and is) the combination of logic, thoroughness, clarity, and force with which he marshalled data and argumentation on every element of the problem and on their interconnections. It is a book, in short, that should have reshaped permanently the perceptions of all serious analysts...."
— John Holdren, in Earth and the Human Future: Essays in Honor of Harrison Brown
"The feeble-minded, the morons, the dull and backward, and the lower-than-average persons in our society are outbreeding the superior ones at the present time. ... Is there anything that can be done to prevent the long-range degeneration of human stock? Unfortunately, at the present time there is little, other than to prevent breeding in persons who present glaring deficiencies clearly dangerous to society and which are known to be of a hereditary nature. Thus we could sterilize or in other ways discourage the mating of the feeble-minded. We could go further and systematically attempt to prune from society, by prohibiting them from breeding, persons suffering from serious inheritable forms of physical defects, such as congenital deafness, dumbness, blindness, or absence of limbs. ... A broad eugenics program would have to be formulated which would aid in the establishment of policies that would encourage able and healthy persons to have several offspring and discourage the unfit from breeding at excessive rates."
— Harrison Brown, in The Challenge of Man's Future

John Holdren and Harrison Brown
Lifelong intellectual infatuation with eugenics-minded futurist casts shadow over Science Czar Holdren's worldview


John Holdren, the Science Czar of the United States, has long expressed an intense admiration — one that bordered on hero-worship — of a man named Harrison Brown, a respected scientist from an earlier generation who spent his later years writing about overpopulation and ecological destruction. In fact, as Holdren has pointed out several times (including very recently), it was Harrison Brown's most famous book, The Challenge of Man's Future, which transformed the young Holdren's personal philosophy and which inspired him to later embark on a career in science and population policy which in many ways mirrored that of his idol Brown.

Holdren's regard for Brown was so high that in 1986 he edited and co-wrote an homage to Brown entitled Earth and the Human Future: Essays in Honor of Harrison Brown, in which Holdren showers Brown with accolades and unrestrained applause.

At first glance, there's nothing remarkable or amiss with this picture: one respected scientist giving credit to and paying tribute to another. Happens all the time. Except in this case, something is amiss. Grievously amiss. Because Harrison Brown, whatever good qualities Holdren might have seen in him, was also an unapologetic eugenicist who made horrifying recommendations for "sterilizing the feeble-minded" and other "unfit" substandard humans whom he thought should be "pruned from society." (See the quotes from Holdren on the left and Brown on the right for a small sampling of the evidence presented below.)

You might think that these opinions would disqualify Brown as someone deserving praise in the modern world; but not to John Holdren, it seems -- perhaps because Brown's views (as Holdren himself has stated many times) were the basis of Holdren's own worldview.

The Evidence

Like my previous essay about Holdren's book Ecoscience, this report exists for one purpose only: To provide the reader with irrefutable evidence of the claims being made and to supply the raw material for forming your own opinions and making your own posts on this topic. But in this instance we will focus not on one book but on two books:

The Challenge of Man's Future, by Harrison Brown

Earth and the Human Future: Essays in Honor of Harrison Brown, edited and co-written by John Holdren.

Below this introduction you will find direct, unaltered scans taken from each book. Next to each scan you will find an accurate transcription of the words being quoted. The passages from The Challenge of Man's Future focus on those sections in which Brown unabashedly expresses what to our modern sensibilities are the most heinous imaginable opinions about eugenics, elitism, and totalitarian population control. The quotes from Earth and the Human Future are all sections written by John Holdren himself in which he heaps enthusiastic and unreserved praise on Brown's writings, recommendations and philosophy.

But Isn't This All From a Long Time Ago?

Holdren's alarming views about overpopulation, and his connection with Harrison Brown, cannot be easily dismissed as something "in the past" which can be set aside and forgotten as no longer relevant. That's because Holdren has never publicly changed his views on this topic nor ever explicitly disavowed his earlier statements; rather, he simply stopped writing about the topic of population. Since the late 1980s, Holdren has turned his attention to other concerns (primarily arms control and global warming), while for the most part falling silent about overpopulation. So the opinions he expressed in the '70s and mid-'80s still stand as his only opinions on the subject. In fact, the 1986 book discussed in this report (Earth and the Human Future) is Holdren's most recent book touching on the topic of overpopulation. After that date, he simply let the topic drop except for occasional passing references -- all of which confirmed rather than denied his earlier views. (And the brief one-sentence retraction Holdren made during his confirmation hearing was about one specific claim in a different book of his, as we will see in my next report; it was most definitely not a blanket disavowal of all his previous writings.)

But as for his admiration of Harrison Brown -- well, that's still going strong. As recently as 2007 Holdren was still praising Brown as his original inspiration and mentor: As pointed out by Jonathan Adler and Michelle Malkin, in 2007 John Holdren gave a speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in the notes for which he cites Harrison Brown as his mentor:
"I owe thanks for insight and inspiration to several late mentors (among them Harrison Brown, Roger Revelle, Gilbert White, Jerome Wiesner, Harvey Brooks, and Joseph Rotblat)..."
Holdren then calls The Challenge of Man's Future "prescient":
"This was the key insight in Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (Ballantine, New York, 1968), as well as one of those in Harrison Brown's prescient earlier book, The Challenge of Man's Future (Viking, New York, 1954). The elementary but discomfiting truth of it may account for the vast amount of ink, paper, and angry energy that has been expended trying in vain to refute it."
At the AAAP site news story about Holdren's speech, you can download his PowerPoint presentation, the very first slide of which glowingly quotes Harrison Brown, and on which Holdren says,
"My pre-occupation with the great problems at the intersection of science and technology with the human condition—and with the interconnectedness of these problems with each other—began when I read The Challenge of Man's Future in high school. I later worked with Harrison Brown at Caltech."
Remember -- all these statements are very recent, from 2007. So the connection between the two scientists remains deep and is still current.

Incredibly, when Michelle Malkin asked Holdren's spokesman Rick Weiss about Harrison Brown, Weiss claimed he had never heard of him -- as if one dismissive denial would somehow erase a lifetime of publicly expressed idolization.

Population Control Is Not a Sideshow — It's the Whole Point

The eugenics proposals outlined in The Challenge of Man's Future are not some peripheral component of an otherwise admirable thesis. They are, in fact, the heart of the book. Brown writes extensively about the overwhelming problems we face, but spends only a few brief pages discussing how to solve those problems. Much of the book surveys in great detail the "challenges" in our future, all of which serves as a set-up for the solution -- which is to stop growth and limit the population. And since we need to cut back on the population, we also at the same time need to "improve" our "genetic stock" by preventing "biologically unsound" people from "breeding." Otherwise, the "feeble-minded" will cause a "long-range degeneration of human stock." Without these proposals, the book would be pointless -- what would be the purpose of highlighting our problems without recommending solutions?

The real problem -- at least from Holdren's point of view -- is that Harrison Brown was too honest, too frank. He had not yet learned to use the weasel words and politicized euphemisms now de rigeuer for Holdren and his contemporaries. By the 1970s, it was no longer acceptable to speak openly of eugenics in a direct manner, so thenceforth such things were only hinted at -- never discussed overtly, as Harrison Brown did so naively back in the 1950s.

Harrison Brown, it should be noted, was also a member of the International Eugenics Society alongside his friend and colleague Charles Galton Darwin, another famed eugenicist whose work Brown praises and quotes (as we shall see later in this essay).

Does all of this amount to nothing more than "guilt by association"? Perhaps. That's up to you the reader to decide. But consider this: If someone had expressed his deep admiration for Mein Kampf, and in fact edited and co-wrote a volume which spelled out in elaborate detail just how wonderful Mein Kampf was as a book, would you want that person to control science and technology policy in the United States? Probably not. But that too would be just "guilt by association," since this putative person wouldn't have actually written Mein Kampf; he would merely have praised the book and its author. And if you think that's an unfair analogy, I dare you to read the passages from The Challenge of Man's Future below and you'll see that in certain respects Mein Kampf seems mild by comparison.

So there you have it: The Science Czar of the United States based his entire worldview on and continues to highly praise someone who was an unreconstructed eugenicist, and whose totalitarianistic philosophy is unacceptable in the modern world.

Are you OK with that?

Direct quotes from Harrison Brown's The Challenge of Man's Future and John Holdren's Earth and the Human Future

Below you will find a series of sixteen short passages: twelve from The Challenge of Man's Future and four from Earth and the Human Future. On the left in each case is a scanned image taken directly from the pages of the book itself; on the right is an exact transcription of each passage, with noteworthy sections highlighted. To help readers distinguish between the two books, passages by Harrison Brown are in red; passages by John Holdren are in blue. Below each quote is a brief commentary by me.

Following these short quotes, I provide the full extended passages from which most of the shorter quotes were excerpted, to provide the full textual context.

And at the bottom of this report, I provide untouched scans of the full pages from which all of these passages were taken, to quash any doubts anyone might have that these are absolutely real, and to forestall any claims that the quotes were taken "out of context."

Now: Let's read.

Page 104 of The Challenge of Man's Future by Harrison Brown
Is there anything that can be done to prevent the long-range degeneration of human stock? Unfortunately, at the present time there is little, other than to prevent breeding in persons who present glaring deficiencies clearly dangerous to society and which are known to be of a hereditary nature. Thus we could sterilize or in other ways discourage the mating of the feeble-minded. We could go further and systematically attempt to prune from society, by prohibiting them from breeding, persons suffering from serious inheritable forms of physical defects, such as congenital deafness, dumbness, blindness, or absence of limbs.
As shocking as these words might be to our 21st-century sensibilities, we need to remember that they should have been equally shocking back when they were first written in 1954. Although eugenics may have had a certain vogue among the intelligentsia in the late 19th century up through the 1920s, everything changed in the wake of World War II when the world learned of what went on under the Nazi regime. Starting in the 1930s, the Germans used eugenics as a justification for mass sterilization and incarceration programs, and later for mass exterminations of anyone deemed to have a genetic flaw. Hence, after 1945 eugenics was completely discredited as a philosophy once the world realized where such policies inevitably led.

And yet, even after all that, here comes Harrison Brown in 1954 reviving this most loathsome of ideologies, going so far as to use the same kind of language and terminology ("degeneration of human stock") employed by the Nazis and earlier eugenics extremists. Which is all the more bizarre considering that Brown helped America win the war by working on the Manhattan Project and was known to be a loyal patriot who did not have any sympathies for the Axis powers in WWII.

Considering what the world had just witnessed in occupied Europe, it's a mystery how Brown managed to justify to himself the grotesque eugenics advocacy he expressed in The Challenge of Man's Future. Even more disturbing is how popular the book was with the American public -- including a young John Holdren who said (as we will see below) that this book "transformed my thinking about the world."

Page 105 of The Challenge of Man's Future by Harrison Brown
First, man can discourage unfit persons from breeding. Second, he can encourage breeding by those persons who are judged fit on the basis of physical and mental testing and examinations of the records of their ancestors.
Brown takes his eugenics proposals even further on the following page; now, not only will you yourself be judged on your own qualities as to whether or not you will be allowed to "breed," but your ancestry will also be examined to see if it is acceptable to the authorities. If you are not descended from good breeding stock, then presumably you will not be judged "fit" and not be allowed to breed.

Page 263 of The Challenge of Man's Future by Harrison Brown
Priorities for artificial insemination could be given to healthy women of high intelligence whose ancestors possessed no dangerous genetic defects. Conversely, priorities for abortions could be given to less intelligent persons of biologically unsound stock.

Such steps would undoubtedly contribute substantially to a slowing down of species deterioration. But it is clear that they would by no means be sufficient. A broad eugenics program would have to be formulated which would aid in the establishment of policies that would encourage able and healthy persons to have several offspring and discourage the unfit from breeding at excessive rates.
Yes, that's correct -- Harrison Brown comes right out and says it, unashamedly calling his proposals "a broad eugenics program." And he freely admits that it's not just based on obvious genetic defects, but also on "intelligence." So that smart, attractive people will be given "priorities" for allowed inseminations, whereas stupid people with the wrong ancestry ("biologically unsound stock") will be given "priorities" for abortions.

Have you ever, in your entire life, read something more horrifying and morally repulsive? It's difficult to even imagine ideas more repugnant than these proposals put forward by Harrison Brown in his book The Challenge of Man's Future as the solution to mankind's problems.

Who in their right mind could praise such a book? Who would cite it as the source of their own philosophy? Who would model themselves after its author?

Here's who:

John Holdren -- Science Czar of the United States. Read the following passage written by John Holdren in 1986:

Page 73 of Earth and the Human Future; Introduction by John Holdren
INTRODUCTION

JOHN P. HOLDREN

Harrison Brown's most remarkable book, The Challenge of Man's Future (Viking, 1954; reprinted by Westview, 1984), was published more than three decades ago. By the time I read it as a high school student a few years later, the book had been widely acclaimed as a monumental survey of the human prospect, illuminated through analysis of the interaction of population, technology, and the resources of the physical world. I knew even before high school that science and technology held special interest for me, and I suppose I also had some prior interest in the larger human condition. But The Challenge of Man's Future pulled these interests together for me in a way that transformed my thinking about the world and about the sort of career I wanted to pursue. I have always suspected that I am not the only member of my generation whose aspirations and subsequent career were changed by this book of Harrison Brown's.

What was so special about the book? Perhaps most impressive at the time was the combination of audacity and erudition with which Brown wove together insights from anthropology, history, economics, geochemistry, biology, and the study of technology to provide a coherent, multidimensional picture of his subject—how humans have provided themselves with the physical ingredients of existence in the past, their prospects for doing so in the future, and the connections between these matters and the sociopolitical dimensions of the human condition. As a demonstration of the power of (and necessity for) an interdisciplinary approach to global problems, the book was a tour de force.
So, the man in control of science and technology policy in this country freely admits that a book which strongly advocates eugenics "transformed my thinking about the world." Moreover, he describes the book as "remarkable," "special" and a "tour de force" which possessed "audacity and erudition." And remember that he didn't just say this once in 1986: Holdren has been praising the book and its ideas continuously throughout his career, citing it as his inspiration as far back as the 1970s and as recently as 2007.

We'll hear more praise from John Holdren later; now, let's get back to the book he's praising, with more quotes from the pages of Brown's The Challenge of Man's Future:

Page 263-4 of The Challenge of Man's Future by Harrison Brown
Precise control of population can never be made completely compatible with the concept of a free society; on the other hand, neither can the automobile, the machine gun, or the atomic bomb. Whenever several persons live together in a small area, rules of behavior are necessary. Just as we have rules designed to keep us from killing one another with our automobiles, so there must be rules that keep us from killing one another with our fluctuating breeding habits and with our lack of attention to the soundness of our individual genetic stock.
In this passage, Brown states quite openly that his eugenics policies "can never be made completely compatible with the concept of a free society" -- i.e. that they would lead to totalitarianism. So you can't defend him by claiming that he was simply naive and didn't grasp the implications of what he was proposing. He knew full well that his "broad eugenics program" would mean the end of "a free society." What's disturbing is that he was OK with that.

Later in the paragraph he writes an equally disturbing passage about how "fluctuating breeding habits" are killing us, so there need to be rules to prevent the wrong kinds of people from multiplying. He seems to be admonishing the unfit inferior people that if they only paid proper "attention to the soundness of [their] individual genetic stock" they'd realize that they should stop breeding for the good of the human race.

Page 103 of The Challenge of Man's Future by Harrison Brown
Although there are admittedly numerous individual fluctuations, it does appear that the feeble-minded, the morons, the dull and backward, and the lower-than-average persons in our society are outbreeding the superior ones at the present time. Indeed, it has been estimated that the average Intelligence Quotient of Western population as a whole is probably decreasing significantly with each succeeding generation.
This crucial passage shows how eugenics programs are the slipperiest of slopes. We saw in the first quote above that Brown is in favor of "sterilizing the feeble-minded." But here in this passage the concept of "feeble-minded" suddenly becomes very loosely defined, and Brown broadens the definition to potentially include "the morons, the dull and backward, and the lower-than-average persons." So — where will this lead us? How long before Brown's proposed forced sterilization programs will expand to include the "backward" kids, or even the "lower-than-average persons"? Which bureaucrats get to determine the dividing line between the "feeble-minded" and the merely "dull," or between the "morons" and the simply "backward"? Will your performance on an intelligence test determine whether you get permission to reproduce?

Page 103 of The Challenge of Man's Future by Harrison Brown
Traffic accidents tend to remove the reckless, the inattentive, and persons unable to judge time and distance at high speeds. Among children as well as adults, accidents of all types tend to remove from society persons who cannot obey instructions or heed warnings. General pressures of living tend to select in favor of persons who can adjust themselves to city and to factory life. Among the laboring groups, selection effects favor those who can work with groups and who can follow instructions meticulously.
With every paragraph, the dawning horror grows. Now we see it's not just about intelligence and genetics -- it's also about class. Brown seriously believes that "laboring groups" (i.e. the working class) have evolved to "follow instructions meticulously" so they can "adjust to factory life." Up until now, he implies, natural selection has weeded out those poor working-class slobs who were not genetically predisposed to "follow instructions" in the factory, and so were presumbly ground up by the machinery before they could breed and pass on their inferior genes.

So — what does John Holdren have to say about all this? Here's another quote from U.S. Science Czar Holdren's introduction to Earth and the Human Future:

Page 75 of Earth and the Human Future; Introduction by John Holdren
Thirty years after Harrison Brown elaborated these positions, it remains difficult to improve on them as a coherent depiction of the perils and challenges we face.

Brown's accomplishment in writing The Challenge of Man's Future, of course, was not simply the construction of this sweeping schema for understanding the human predicament; more remarkable was (and is) the combination of logic, thoroughness, clarity, and force with which he marshalled data and argumentation on every element of the problem and on their interconnections. It is a book, in short, that should have reshaped permanently the perceptions of all serious analysts about the interactions of the demographic, biological, geophysical, technological, economic, and soclopolitical dimensions of contemporary problems. That it failed to do so—that the world is still full of analysts who are generally regarded as serious despite their insistence that problems of population, resources, the rich-poor gap, and the prospects for war or peace are all separate issues—must be an even greater disappointment to Harrison Brown than to those of us who have been restating his points (usually less eloquently) in the three decades since he first made them.
Wait -- is John Holdren really talking about the same book? Indeed he is. He says it "remains difficult to improve on" the positions Brown elaborated in The Challenge of Man's Future, and that Holdren himself has been "restating [Brown's] points (usually less eloquently)" for three decades. (I think "more euphemistically" rather than "less eloquently" is a better way to characterize how Holdren has been restating Brown's points.)

I can already hear Holdren's defenders crying out that Holdren was referring to the other parts of The Challenge of Man's Future, not the stuff about eugenics. But read once again what Holdren says: "this sweeping schema for understanding the human predicament; more remarkable was (and is) the combination of logic, thoroughness, clarity, and force with which he marshalled data and argumentation on every element of the problem and on their interconnections." Holdren is talking about the whole book, every aspect of it. He obviously has read the entire book very carefully, many times. It's not as if Holdren can claim he didn't notice all that stuff about eugenics in there. He noticed it alright. He's just hoping that we don't notice it.

More importantly, as I pointed out in the introduction to this essay, the eugenics proposals are not some minor aspect of Brown's overall argument: They are the core of the book. The Challenge of Man's Future is like a giant equation taking into account many variables: and the solution to this equation is population control -- including eugenics. Saying that one can simply ignore the eugenics part of The Challenge of Man's Future is like saying one can simply ignore the "4" part of 2+2=4.

Page 106 of The Challenge of Man's Future by Harrison Brown
We cannot hope to carry out a planned evolution of our species for the simple reason that we haven't the slightest idea of what we want, and no mechanism is available that will permit us to determine what we want. A "super-race" of men or a panel of gods could examine us objectively and plan a wise pattern. But in the absence of either, we will probably remain pretty much as we are for hundreds of thousands of years.
How in good conscience could Harrison Brown nonchalantly use the phrase "super-race" in reference to eugenics, just nine years after the fall of the Nazi regime which obsessed over creating a "super-race" of superior men as the end goal of their eugenics program? Perhaps one could forgive another author in another setting for accidentally using this "unfortunate turn of phrase," but in this case — considering all the quotes above — I'm having a hard time letting this one go and giving Brown the benefit of the doubt.

Page 260 of The Challenge of Man's Future by Harrison Brown
In the first place, it is amply clear that population stabilization and a world composed of completely independent sovereign states are incompatible. Populations cannot be stabilized by agreement any more than levels of armament can be stabilized by agreement. And, as in the latter case, a world authority is needed which has the power of making, interpreting, and enforcing, within specified spheres, laws which are directly applicable to the individual. Indeed, population stabilization is one of the two major problems with which a world government must necessarily concern itself.

Given a world authority with jurisdiction over population problems, the task of assessing maximum permissible population levels on a regional basis need not be prohibitively difficult.
Moving away from eugenics for the moment, we turn to a different topic which John Holdren discussed in Ecoscience and which we now see possibly had its origins in ideas Holdren first encountered in The Challenge of Man's Future: world government. Or, as Holdren less-eloquently phrased it, "the Planetary Regime." In this quote, Brown once again is brutally frank about the consequences of his proposals, saying that it would be impossible to have "a world composed of completely independent sovereign states" if we are to institute the necessary population control. In other words -- no national independence, no local self-governance. The end of nationhood, to be replaced by a "world authority" which would have the power to enforce certain population control laws which take away individual human rights.

No national sovereignty. No United States. A world government controlling the most intimate details of your life. Are you OK with that? Harrison Brown was -- and by extension so is John Holdren, if his unmitigated praise for this book and its ideas is to be believed.

Page 258 of The Challenge of Man's Future by Harrison Brown
In the world of my imagination there is organization, but it is as decentralized as possible, compatible with the requirements for survival. There is a world government, but it exists solely for the purpose of preventing war and stabilizing population, and its powers are irrevocably restricted. The government exists for man rather than man for the government.
Here, Brown takes it to the next level, saying that he doesn't simply resign himself to the necessity of a world government which enforces population control laws, but rather that he would prefer it to the way things currently are (i.e. independent nation-states). Though he seems to be overly optimistic that such a scenario would be utopian rather than dystopian.

One wonders: Did the young John Holdren absorb this idea into his personal philosophy when he read The Challenge of Man's Future (as he has stated frequently), and if so, which other ideas from the book did he also take to heart? Holdren over and over has cited this book as the touchstone of his own worldview, and evidence of that claim is to be found everywhere in Holdren's later writings. Just how far did this influence go? And to what extent did Holdren find it necessary to re-phrase and euphemise these ideas with flowery words for modern consumption?

Page 262 of The Challenge of Man's Future by Harrison Brown
Briefly, such a control system would operate in the following manner. Let us suppose that in a given year the birth rate exceeds the death rate by a certain amount, thus resulting in a population increase. During the following year the number of permitted inseminations is decreased, and the number of permitted abortions is increased, in such a way that the birth rate is lowered by the requisite amount. If the death rate exceeds the birth rate, the number of permitted inseminations would be increased while the number of abortions would be decreased. The number of abortions and artificial inseminations permitted in a given year would be determined completely by the difference between the number of deaths and the number of births in the year previous.

It can be argued that such a procedure would be ruthless and would deprive many people of their individual liberties. Yet would it be any more ruthless than the policy which is now followed in the United States?
In this passage Brown fantasizes about an authoritarian government dictating the number of "inseminations" and abortions to be performed every year, as the only workable way to enforce population control. And once again he freely admits that his proposal would "deprive many people of their individual liberties" -- but then makes the stupefying claim that this would be no more "ruthless" than the current American legal system (as of 1954). Now, 1954 America was certainly not perfect in every regard, but the freedoms enjoyed by Americans at that time were broad-ranging and almost unparalleled in history compared to just about every other society. And we didn't have a micro-managing fascistic central government dictating whether or not you were going to have an insemination or an abortion. The fact that Brown tried to justify such a repressive system by comparing it favorably to the then-existing social structure reveals once again that he was indeed advocating for compulsory population control.

Let's turn once more to John Holdren's take on the book. Surely he rejected this type of attitude and reserved his praise solely for some of the technical details of Brown's work. Right? Think again.

Pages 78, 79, 156 and 159 of Earth and the Human Future; passages by John Holdren
I should emphasize, therefore, that my contribution is written in what I take to be the spirit in which Harrison wrote The Challenge of Man's Future—that is, the conviction that it is necessary to dwell on the perils in order to stimulate timely action to avoid or minimize them.

...

To put too much emphasis on the correctness or incorrectness of particular predictions, however, is to miss the main point of writing usefully about the future. The idea is not to be "right," but to illuminate the possibilities in a way that both stimulates sensible debate about the sort of future we want and facilitates sound decisions about getting from here to there. This philosophy has informed Harrison Brown's writing about the human future throughout the four decades in which he has been doing it. Our understanding of the dimensions of the human predicament—and of what might be done to alleviate it—is much the better for his effort.

...

The mid-twentieth-century revival of Malthus's insight that no combination of good technology and good management can cope with unlimited population growth on a finite planet (a revival to which Harrison Brown's 1954 book, The Challenge of Man's Future, was the most eloquent and comprehensive contribution) is more relevant in the 1980s than ever.

...

In the spirit in which Harrison Brown wrote The Challenge of Man's Future some thirty years ago, this chapter has been written as a contribution to the continuing effort to help create that consensus.
The first paragraph of this long quote confirms what some of Holdren's defenders claimed about his statements in Ecoscience -- namely that Holdren proposes extreme measures simply as scare tactics. When he says "it is necessary to dwell on the perils in order to stimulate timely action," it's his way of saying that we should terrify the populace into going along with his proposals by painting a dire picture of what the alternatives might be. (Global warming, anyone?)

I found the next paragraph particularly amusing, especially his claim that it's not important to make accurate predictions about the future, but simply to make any predictions at all -- the wilder, the better, apparently -- to "stimulate debate." (Global warming, anyone?)

And the rest of the quote is the by-now-familiar groveling by Holdren at the altar of Brown.

Page 221 of The Challenge of Man's Future by Harrison Brown
But a substantial fraction of humanity today is behaving as if it would like to create such a world. It is behaving as if it were engaged in a contest to test nature's willingness to support humanity and, if it had its way, it would not rest content until the earth is covered completely and to a considerable depth with a writhing mass of human beings, much as a dead cow is covered with a pulsating mass of maggots.
This is the already well-known "maggots" quote that was pointed out earlier in a column by Michelle Malkin. While this might be dismissed by Brown's defenders as a mere unfortunate turn of phrase, it actually is not the first or only time he has made this exact comparison -- likening humans to maggots. When he was a young man, Brown took an adventurous journey to Japanese-occupied China, where he was horrified by the overcrowding he witnessed. In 1937, Brown wrote in his journal about the conditions he saw in Canton:
And Canton! I long ago found that one cannot understand the word 'population' without having seen the East. I doubt if any single city in the Orient is a better example of this. The very ground seems to ooze people and the river water to breed them like flies. There are said to be half a million of this boat population alone, who live and die on the water and spend but little of their time ashore. At any hour of the day or night the streets are teeming with people, every foetid narrow alley crawls with them, every corner and wall cranny harbours them. ... If one stands for an instant on the pavement 3 or 4 ricksha's are clamouring for hire, shouting and pushing and beating each other down. Rushkin's description of mankind as a heap of maggots battening on each other for the means of substinance was never better illustrated than here.
Brown was apparently referring to this obscure passage by the writer John Ruskin who described the population of 19th-century England as "a mere heap of agonizing human maggots, scrambling and sprawling over each other for any manner of rotten eatable thing they can get a bite of." It seems this image made such an impression on Harrison Brown that he returned to it repeatedly in his later writings.

Page 236-7 of The Challenge of Man's Future by Harrison Brown
And if population growth is to stop without our having excessively high death rates, we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that artificial means must be applied to limit birth rates. This conclusion is inescapable. We can avoid talking about it, moralists may try to convince us to the contrary, laws may be passed forbidding us to talk about it, fear of pressure groups may prevent political leaders from discussing the subject, but the conclusion cannot be denied on any rational basis. Either population-control measures must be both widely and wisely used, or we must reconcile ourselves to a world where starvation is everywhere, where life expectancy at birth is less than 30 years, where infants stand a better chance of dying than of living during the first year following birth, where women are little more than machines for breeding, pumping child after child into an inhospitable world, spending the greater part of their adult lives in a state of pregnancy.
This passage is a worthy companion to the "maggots" quote, with Brown saying that unless we institute his draconian compulsory population-control measures, then women will be "little more than machines for breeding, pumping child after child into an inhospitable world." And as usual (in the manner of his follower Holdren) he paints a picture of extreme horror (mass starvation, few people living past 30 years old) unless we wise up first and adopt his recommendations.

I'm starting to sense a pattern here. Scientist A wants to impose totalitarian measures on Population B. Scientist A paints doomsday scenario as the only possible alternative to his measures, using shaky projections and worst-case scenarios to bolster his claim. Population B, faced with this dire dilemma, panics and chooses totalitarianism as the only way to avoid doomsday. (Global warming, anyone?)

Bibliographies, footnotes and references from various books by John Holdren
[These are examples of various references to and citations of The Challenge of Man's Future made by John Holdren in different books and papers he's published over the years. The top one mentions Challenge in Holdren's biography for his chapter in Earth and the Human Future; the second is a footnote referring to Challenge in a paper Holdren wrote in 1975 called Technology, Environment and Well-Being; and the last is a reference to Challenge in the 1985 book The Cassandra Conference, which Holdren edited.]
I'm including these otherwise uninteresting scans to show that John Holdren refers to The Challenge of Man's Future in nearly every work he publishes. It's not just in Earth and the Human Future that Holdren cites Harrison Brown; rather, Brown is the touchstone of Holdren's writing career, and one would be hard-pressed to find any examples of books or population-themed essays in which Holdren doesn't mention Harrison Brown or The Challenge of Man's Future somewhere in the text or footnotes.

Further citations can be found, for example, in this essay that Holdren wrote in 1995, which lists Challenge first in the reference section at the end; and even as recently as 2007 in a speech Holdren gave to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in which named Brown and Challenge as his primary influences.



Before you read any further...

If you accept the self-evident veracity of these quotations, and are outraged enough already, then you can stop reading here. Very little new information is presented below.

(And if you'd like to comment on this report, you can do so HERE at zomblog.)

But if you want more proof, then read on. The following section gives the complete extended passages from which the previous short quotes were taken -- not only proving they're real, but also providing the full syntactical context. And at the bottom of this report you will find full-page unaltered scans of each of the pages from the various books cited here, proving beyond any doubt that they exist, and also providing maximum context.

For the most part, I will make no further analysis, except for the final extended passage below, in which I comment on the connection between Holdren, Brown, and earlier famed eugenicist Charles Galton Darwin (not the Charles Darwin, but rather his grandson who had a different set of ideas altogether).

More Context: Complete extended passages from which the quotes above were taken



Pages 104-5 full-length extended passage from The Challenge of Man's Future by Harrison Brown
Is there anything that can be done to prevent the long-range degeneration of human stock? Unfortunately, at the present time there is little, other than to prevent breeding in persons who present glaring deficiencies clearly dangerous to society and which are known to be of a hereditary nature. Thus we could sterilize or in other ways discourage the mating of the feeble-minded. We could go further and systematically attempt to prune from society, by prohibiting them from breeding, persons suffering from serious inheritable forms of physical defects, such as congenital deafness, dumbness, blindness, or absence of limbs. But all these steps would be negligible when compared with the ruthless pruning of man that was done by nature prior to the rise of civilization.

Unfortunately man's knowledge of human genetics is too meager at the present time to permit him to be a really successful pruner. The science of human genetics is not very old, and reliable facts and figures which enable one to differentiate satisfactorily between genetic effects and environmental effects are few and far between. Nevertheless, there is at present sufficient information to permit man to make a start toward pruning, however small it may be. And it is quite possible that by the time another ten or fifteen generations have passed, understanding of human genetics will be sufficient to permit man to do a respectable job of slowing down the deterioration of the species.

This can be accomplished in two ways. First, man can discourage unfit persons from breeding. Second, he can encourage breeding by those persons who are judged fit on the basis of physical and mental testing and examinations of the records of their ancestors. A small start has been made in this direction in the cases of childless couples where the male is sterile and artificial insemination is utilized to impregnate the female. It is quite likely that artificial insemination will be used with increasing frequency during the coming decades, and increasing care will be taken to insure the genetic soundness of the sperm.

If civilization survives, it is likely that in the long run we will be able to slow down and perhaps even to halt deterioration of the species. The methods that will be employed would probably not be palatable to many of us who are alive today. Nevertheless, the human animal is a flexible creature and has thus far been able to adjust his outlook to his needs with remarkable agility.


Pages 263-4 full-length extended passage from The Challenge of Man's Future by Harrison Brown
Control of aids to conception and of abortions could also provide a mechanism for slowing down the deterioration processes associated with the elimination of biological competition. Priorities for artificial insemination could be given to healthy women of high intelligence whose ancestors possessed no dangerous genetic defects. Conversely, priorities for abortions could be given to less intelligent persons of biologically unsound stock.

Such steps would undoubtedly contribute substantially to a slowing down of species deterioration. But it is clear that they would by no means be sufficient. A broad eugenics program would have to be formulated which would aid in the establishment of policies that would encourage able and healthy persons to have several offspring and discourage the unfit from breeding at excessive rates. Here, of course, we encounter numerous difficulties—what would constitute "fit" and what would constitute "unfit'? Where is the boundary between the mentally deficient person and the genius?

These are indeed grave problems, and the probability is high that they will never be solved. Yet the possibility cannot be excluded that solutions may be found. Our knowledge of human genetics, of human behavior, and of human biochemistry is fragmentary. Two or three generations of intensive research aimed at understanding the functioning of the human machine might well enable us to define terms such as "fit" and "unfit," as applied to human beings, with considerable precision. Although we realize that there is little likelihood that human beings will ever be able consciously to improve the species by carrying out a process of planned selection, there appears to be a finite possibility that, given adequate research and broad planning, deterioration of the species might eventually be halted.

Precise control of population can never be made completely compatible with the concept of a free society; on the other hand, neither can the automobile, the machine gun, or the atomic bomb. Whenever several persons live together in a small area, rules of behavior are necessary. Just as we have rules designed to keep us from killing one another with our automobiles, so there must be rules that keep us from killing one another with our fluctuating breeding habits and with our lack of attention to the soundness of our individual genetic stock. On the other hand, although rules of behavior which operate in such areas are clearly necessary if our civilization is to survive, it remains to be seen whether or not such rules can be reconciled satisfactorily with the ideal of maximum individual freedom.


Pages 102-3 full-length extended passage from The Challenge of Man's Future by Harrison Brown
In the past there has been considerable selection in favor of intelligence characteristics involving abilities to learn, to solve problems, and to transmit experience to offspring. In recent decades this pattern of selection has been completely reversed. Whereas in former times high intelligence increased the probability that many of an individual's characteristics would be reproduced and would spread throughout the population, today a high intelligence actually decreases this probability. The present situation has arisen as a result of the uneven adoption of birth-control techniques by differing social and economic groups in the Western World.

As modern contraceptive techniques have come into existence, they have first been used extensively by the wealthier and better- educated members of society. The techniques have been adopted only very gradually by the poorer and less-educated groups, with the result that these groups have been breeding much more rapidly than have the wealthier and better-educated ones. Although all of us have known intelligent people who are neither rich nor well educated, and we have known rather stupid people who are both rich and well educated, it is likely that on the average the more well-to-do and better-educated persons in our society have higher intelligence than the others. Although there are admittedly numerous individual fluctuations, it does appear that the feeble-minded, the morons, the dull and backward, and the lower-than-average persons in our society are outbreeding the superior ones at the present time. Indeed, it has been estimated that the average Intelligence Quotient of Western population as a whole is probably decreasing significantly with each succeeding generation.

Fortunately there are indications that this trend may well be of a temporary nature. It is likely to be but a symptom of the transition period in which we are now living, where fertility control has been only partially accepted. Recent trends in the Western World, and particularly the recent developments in Sweden, indicate that within a few decades we may actually achieve a birth pattern according to which parents least able to provide for children will have small families; and as the ability to provide—both economically and intellectually—increases, family size will increase proportionately.

Practically all of the recent changes in selection forces which we can imagine are of a negative nature. We can easily conceive of changes that may lead eventually to a lessened effectiveness of the human machine, but it is difficult to visualize forces that are leading to human betterment from the point of view of survival values. Nevertheless, a few slow changes which might or might not, in the long run, play important roles can be imagined. Traffic accidents tend to remove the reckless, the inattentive, and persons unable to judge time and distance at high speeds. Among children as well as adults, accidents of all types tend to remove from society persons who cannot obey instructions or heed warnings. General pressures of living tend to select in favor of persons who can adjust themselves to city and to factory life. Among the laboring groups, selection effects favor those who can work with groups and who can follow instructions meticulously.


Pages 220-1 full-length extended passage from The Challenge of Man's Future by Harrison Brown
There are, of course, physical limitations of some sort which will determine the maximum number of human beings who can live on the earth's surface. But at the present time we are far from the ultimate limit of the number of persons who could be provided for. If we were willing to be crowded together closely enough, to eat foods which would bear little resemblance to the foods we eat today, and to be deprived of simple but satisfying luxuries such as fireplaces, gardens, and lawns, a world population of 50 billion persons would not be out of the question. And if we really put our minds to the problem we could construct floating islands where people might live and where algae farms could function, and perhaps 100 billion persons could be provided for. If we set strict limits to physical activities so that caloric requirements could be kept at very low levels, perhaps we could provide for 200 billion persons.

At this point the reader is probably saying to himself that he would have little desire to live in such a world, and he can rest assured that the author is thinking exactly the same thing. But a substantial fraction of humanity today is behaving as if it would like to create such a world. It is behaving as if it were engaged in a contest to test nature's willingness to support humanity and, if it had its way, it would not rest content until the earth is covered completely and to a considerable depth with a writhing mass of human beings, much as a dead cow is covered with a pulsating mass of maggots.


Pages 259-60 full-length extended passage from The Challenge of Man's Future by Harrison Brown
These arguments have recently been expressed forcefully by Sir Charles Galton Darwin in his stimulating and highly provocative book entitled The Next Million Years.

Sir Charles's argument takes the following form:

1. Any nation which limits its population becomes less numerous than nations which do not limit their populations. The former will then sooner or later be crowded out of existence by the latter.
2. A nation which limits its population forfeits the selection effects of natural biological competition and as a result must gradually degenerate.
3. The tendency of civilization to sterilize its ablest citizens accelerates this process of degeneration.
4. The possibility that statesmen, perceiving these dangers, might agree upon a world-wide policy of limitation appears remote. How can they be expected to agree among themselves in this area when they have failed to solve the far easier problem of military disarmament?
5. Even if agreements among nations could be obtained, there would be great difficulty in establishing limits to the numbers admissible for the various populations.
6. The problem of enforcement of population-limitation agreements would be extremely difficult.
7. The probabilities of fanatical opposition to population limitation would be enormous. Although existing opposition is not, in the main, strongly emotional, it is likely that once population growth is forbidden by law, new creeds will emerge which will regard the practice as sinful.
8. The creedists, by multiplying more rapidly than the others, will make up an increasingly large fraction of the population, thus making enforcement increasingly difficult.
9. Natural selection will operate in favor of parental, as distinct from sexual, instincts. Those persons who want large families will in general have more children than others, and to the extent that this characteristic can be inherited, it would spread throughout the population.

These are indeed powerful arguments and, when considered together, they make the possibility of ultimate population stabilization within a framework of low birth rates and low death rates appear so remote as to border on the impossible. Nevertheless, we must ask ourselves: Can we visualize ways and means whereby these difficulties might be minimized?

In the first place, it is amply clear that population stabilization and a world composed of completely independent sovereign states are incompatible. Populations cannot be stabilized by agreement any more than levels of armament can be stabilized by agreement. And, as in the latter case, a world authority is needed which has the power of making, interpreting, and enforcing, within specified spheres, laws which are directly applicable to the individual. Indeed, population stabilization is one of the two major problems with which a world government must necessarily concern itself.

Given a world authority with jurisdiction over population problems, the task of assessing maximum permissible population levels on a regional basis need not be prohibitively difficult. A rancher in Nevada usually puts no more cattle on a range than he believes can be adequately supported. Similarly, working on the basis that individual regions of the world should be self-sufficient both agriculturally and industrially, indices of potential productivity can be computed for all regions of the world, and maximum permissible population levels can be calculated on this basis.
John Holdren lavished (and continues to lavish) praise on Harrison Brown's The Challenge of Man's Future, and on pages 259-60 in that book Brown (as seen here) lavishes praise on the book The Next Million Years, by Charles Galton Darwin. This all by itself is truly astonishing and should raise serious questions about Holdren, because Charles Galton Darwin was one of the leading eugenicists of the early 20th century and his The Next Million Years is essentially a eugenicists' handbook. You can read the entire book online here if you're curious, including many extremely disturbing passages such as (on page 122),
...These feeble-minded can be regarded objectively by their superiors, and so might be amenable to the same sort of control as is applicable to domestic animals. This restraint of the breeding of the feeble-minded is important, and must never be neglected....
...and on page 124,
...With the knowledge of the various sexual hormones it might also become possible to free the majority of mankind from the urgency of sexual impulse, so that they could live contented celibate lives...
...etc. (This second quote is eerily reminiscent of the "put sterilants in the drinking water" proposal discussed by Holdren in Ecoscience, as pointed out in my earlier essay on the subject.)

It's interesting to note the close parallels between the careers of Charles Galton Darwin, Harrison Brown, and John Holdren. All started their careers as successful and highly regarded physicists; then, after establishing their credentials as scientists early in life, they all retired as physicists and then turned their attentions to the topic of overpopulation and the global environment. They all then wrote popular books outlining their (generally pessimistic) views about the fate of mankind and what we might do to fend off the looming disaster: First Darwin in 1952 wrote The Next Million Years; then Brown in 1954 wrote The Challenge of Man's Future, and then in 1973 Holdren wrote Human Ecology (which I'll examine in my next report) and finally Ecoscience in 1977 (which we looked at previously). All four books are very similar in structure and tone, each seemingly an update of the preceeding one, with more details, more facts -- and more euphemisms.

In light of this, Holdren emerges as part of a long line of physicists who want to grapple with the "big picture" of how population control can save humanity from itself.


Full Context: High-res scans of all pages cited in this report

Click on each of the images below to see the full-size scans of the pages mentioned in this report:

Title page
Page 102
Page 103


Page 104
Page 105
Page 106


Page 220
Page 221
Page 236


Page 237
Page 258
Page 259


Page 260
Page 262
Page 263


Page 264
E&HF Title page
E&HF Page 73


E&HF Page 75
E&HF Page 78
E&HF Page 79




E&HF Page 156
E&HF Page 159
TEWB


CC Page 15






























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