Lily Cole On Overpopulation
Actress, film director and model Lily Cole has long been a strong advocate for the environment, as well as being outspoken on the issue of human overpopulation.
In a 2022 interview with Hello! magazine, she was asked what she thought about the idea of people having less children for the sake of the environment.
“There is a really compelling argument that we need to manage population growth in order to have less of an impact on the earth, less of a need for food, a need for material resources.”
“I don’t think this is the kind of conversation we should shy away from having because it will make a big difference whether we have ten billion people or 12 billion people on the planet in a century’s time.”
Cole went further, adding that population growth was only part of the problem and that consumption of resources also needs to be significantly reduced.
“That being said, it’s really important that you don’t talk about population growth without also talking about consumption growth because they’re not neatly separated. Some of the wealthiest countries in the world have a footprint, a carbon footprint, a thousand times higher than some. The statistics vary but it’s between 400 and 1,500 times difference, so a huge difference between the footprint of somebody in one of the poorest countries in the world and one of the wealthiest areas in the world.”
“And so, it’s not simply about how many children we’re having, it’s also about the lifestyle that we are expecting those children and ourselves to have.”
“I’m really encouraging of being mindful of being open to the population growth conversation, as long as it is caveated with the consumption growth conversation.”
Lily Cole is a British model, author, film director, actress and entrepreneur. In 2009 she was listed by Vogue Paris as one of the top 30 models of the 2000s.
