Earth Day Founder to Most of Us: Drop Dead Already!

Start yer Earth Day off with this story about the event's founder, former Badger State Sen. Gaylord Nelson. He's still doggedly reading from his Soylent Green script:

The key to creating a sustainable society, Nelson said, is population.

He has suggested in the past that the United States should cut its population to the 132 million it was around the start of World War II, but he knows that won?t happen. Instead, he points to the low fertility rates of Western European countries such as Italy as a way to stabilize population.

Here's an alternative that Reason's own Ronald Bailey has sketched out: Don't worry about population. Worry about getting rich instead and all the problems of "overpopulation" go away. Or as the late great "doomslayer" Julian Simon put it, more people are not the problem--they're "the ultimate resource."