For the doubters and the naysayers...
There are five possible counter-claims which you might make against this report:
1. I'm lying, Holdren wrote no such thing, and this whole page is one big hoax.
2. He may have said those things, but I'm taking them out of context.
3. He was just the co-author -- he probably didn't write these particular passages, nor did he agree with them.
4. What he said really isn't that egregious: in fact, it seems pretty reasonable.
5. He wrote all this a long time ago -- he's probably changed his views by now.
I'll address each in turn:
1. I'm lying, Holdren wrote no such thing, and this whole page is one big hoax.
Scroll to the bottom of this page, and look at the photos of the book -- especially the last two photos, showing the book opened to pages quoted in this report. Then look at the full-page scans directly above those photos, showing each page mentioned here in full, unaltered. What more proof do you need? If you're still not convinced, go to any large library and check out the book yourself, and you'll see: everything I claim here is true.
If you don't have the patience to go to a library, you can always view the actual contents of the book online for free for a brief trial period.
2. He may have said those things, but I'm taking them out of context.
Some have argued that the FrontPage article "takes quotes out of context," which is the very reason why I went and investigated the original book itself. Turns out that not only are the quotes not out of context, but the additional paragraphs on either side of each passage only serve to make Holdren's ideas appear even more sinister. You want context? Be careful what you ask for, because the context makes things worse.
But yes, to satisfy the curious and the doubters, the "extended passages" and full-page scans given below provide more than sufficient context for the quotes.
In truth, I weary of the "context game" in which every controversial statement is always claimed to be "out of context," and no matter how much context is then given, it's never enough, until one must present every single word someone has ever written -- at which point the reader becomes overwhelmed and loses interest. Which is the whole point of the context game to begin with.
3. He was just the co-author -- he probably didn't write these particular passages, nor did he agree with them.
First of all: If you are a co-author of a book, you are signing your name to it, and you must take responsibility for everything that is in that book. This is true for John Holdren and every other author.
But there's plenty more evidence than that. Most significantly, Holdren has held similar views for years and frequently wrote about them under his own name. It's not like these quotes are unexpected and came out of the blue -- they fit into a pattern of other Holdren writings and viewpoints.
Lastly, below I present full-page scans of the "Acknowledgments" pages in Ecoscience, and in those Acknowledgments pages are dozens of thank-yous to people at U.C. Berkeley -- where Holdren was a professor at the time. In fact, there are more acknowledgments involving Berkeley than anywhere else, and since Holdren was the only one of the three authors with a connection to Berkeley, they must be his thank-yous -- indicating that he wrote a substantial portion of the book. Even his wife is thanked.
I have no way of knowing if Holdren himself typed the exact words quoted on this page, but he certainly at a minimum edited them and gave them his stamp of approval.
4. What he said really isn't that egregious: in fact, it seems pretty reasonable.
Well, if you believe that, then I guess this page holds no interest for you, and you are thereby free to ignore it. But I have a suspicion that the vast majority of Americans find the views expressed by Holdren to be alarming and abhorrent.
5. He wrote all this a long time ago -- he's probably changed his views by now.
You might argue that this book was written in a different era, during which time a certain clique of radical scientists (including Holdren) were in a frenzy over what they thought was a crisis so severe it threatened the whole planet: overpopulation. But, you could say, all that is in the past, an embarrassing episode which Holdren might wish everyone would now forget. I mean, people change their opinions all the time. Senator Robert Byrd was once in the KKK, after all, but by now he has renounced those views. Perhaps in a similar vein John Holdren no longer believes any of the things he wrote in Ecoscience, so we can't hold them against him any more.
Unfortunately, as far as I've been able to discover, Holdren has never disavowed the views he held in the 1970s and spelled out in Ecoscience and other books. In fact, he kept writing on similar topics up until quite recently.
The closest Holdren has come to retracting any of these statements was in a single sentence he spoke during his confirmation hearings. Under questioning from Senator David Vitter, Holdren did backpedal a bit concerning a different statement he made in the '70s about government-controlled population levels. Does this single sentence count as an across-the-board disavowal of every single specific recommendation he made in Ecoscience as well as in many other books and articles? My opinion is Not even close, but I'll let you decide for yourself. You can view the video of the confirmation hearings here (introductory page here), but be warned that it is an extremely long streaming video that doesn't work in all browsers, and the answer in question doesn't come until the 120th minute.
