Top Obama Adviser Urged a ‘World of Zero Net Physical Growth’ in 1995 World Bank Publication

A top White House adviser to President Barack Obama argued that mankind eventually must face up to the need for a “world of zero net physical growth” and “population limitation” in an essay he co-authored that was included in a 1995 book on environmentally “sustainable” economic activity published by the World Bank.

John P. Holdren, who is now director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, co-authored the essay with Paul Ehrlich and Gretchen Daily of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford. Ehrlich has been a well-known population control advocate since he authored the 1968 bestseller, “The Population Bomb,” in which he advocated zero population growth. At the time the 1995 essay was published, Holdren was a professor at the University of California.

The essay—“The Meaning of Sustainability: Biogeophysical Aspects”—was published in the first chapter of “Defining and Measuring Sustainability: The Biogeophysical Foundations,” a book published in 1995 by the World Bank. The book is available as a PDF on the World Bank’s Web site.

“We know for certain, for example, that: No form of material growth (including population growth) other than asymptotic growth, is sustainable,” wrote Holdren and his co-authors. “Many of the practices inadequately supporting today’s population of 5.5 billion people are unsustainable; and [a]t the sustainability limit, there will be a tradeoff between population and energy-matter throughput per person, hence, ultimately, between economic activity per person and well-being per person.

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