# Pentti Linkola

Kaarlo Pentti Linkola (7 December 1932 - 5 April 2020) was a prominent Finnish deep ecologist, ornithologist, polemicist, naturalist, writer, and fisherman. He wrote widely about his ideas and in Finland was a prominent thinker. Linkola was a year-round fisherman from 1959 to 1995. He fished on Keitele, Päijänne and Gulf of Finland, and since 1978 he fished on Vanajavesi. Linkola blamed humans for the continuous degradation of the environment. He promoted rapid population decline to combat the problems commonly attributed to overpopulation.

## Quotes

* What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides of the boat.
** The Doctrine Of Survival And Doctor Ethics (1992)
* How can anyone think so insanely that the human life has the same value and mankind, the same morality, independent of numbers? It is lucid to me that everytime a new child is born, the value of every human in world decreases slightly. It is obvious to me that the morality of the population explosion is wholly unlike than when man was a sparse, noble species in its beginning.
** The Doctrine Of Survival And Doctor Ethics (1992)
* Virtually, Finnish woods are stripped so bare, so sold out and first and foremost, so long way off from genuine diverse natural forest, that the resources of language will not permit excessive words. Finnish forest economy has been compared to the ravaging of rain forests. Nevertheless, the noteworthy difference is that there is a half or two thirds left from rain forests, but from Finnish forests there is left - excluding arctic Lapland - 0,6 per cent.
** The Forest Covering Must Be Restored In Finland (1995)
* It is an assumption brought forth countless of times in various contexts that the world would be better, drifting slower towards the ruin, if women had the "power"; if political leadership, decision making, government and economic life was in the hands of women. I think reality, the observation material, supports the assumption.
** Women As The Protectors Of Life II (1996)
* When a novel department store called Gigantti was opened in the capitol area a year or two ago, which promised gadgets of many colors for the stinking cheap price of 9:90, 99:90, 999:90; the parking field's rafts of metal plated beetles reached the horizon, and the human lines wriggling midst them in tens of thousands surpassed all the records of the good old Soviet Union. As I looked at those newspaper pictures, a tormented scream erupted from my lips: no democracy, for heaven's sake, no democracy! No common voting right, never! No, no, no!
** Thoughts And Memories About The Old Educated Class - A View Into The Century's Ideological History (2000)
* Although my view is a world-wide one and my area of observation is Europe, the nation closest to my heart is, understandably, my homeland. And it is a fortunate coincidence, fortunate in terms of the explanation of the world, that it is this country which is the clearest example of the playground of destructive development in the whole world.
** Introduction, to Can Life Prevail? (2004) ISBN 978-1-907166-00-6
* Finnish forests: Let us remind the satellite pictures of the 1970’s winter in which the old forest appeared black and young forest and cut downs white. Already then the Finnish borders were like drawn on the map: White Finland between black Karelian and black Sweden. Finnish Forest Research Institute hicced up some time and then decided that the pictures are fake. . .
** Can Life Prevail? (2004) Pentti Linkola Voisiko elämä voittaa - ja millä ehdoilla Tammi 2004 page 65 (Muistettakoon vaikka 1970-luvun talviset satelliittikuvat , joissa vrttunut metsä näkyi mustana ja ukot ja taimikot valkeina. Jo silloin Suomen rajat erottuivat ikään kuin ne olisivat karttaan piirretty.: valkea Suomi mustan karjalan ja mustan Ruotsin välissä. Metsäntutkimuslaitos nikotteli aikansa, kunnes se teki päätöksen, että kuvat ovat väärennettyjä. . . )
* The 20th century peatlands ditching in Finland was the worst human environmental destruction action in Europe.
** Can Life Prevail? Pentti Linkola Voisiko elämä voittaa - ja millä ehdoilla tammi 2004 page 23 (Suomen soitten ojitusta on sanottu Euroopan suurimmaksi luonnon tuhotoimeksi 1900-luvulla.)
* The chief cause for the impending collapse of the world - the cause sufficient in and by itself - is the enormous growth of the human population: the human flood. The worst enemy of life is too much life: the excess of human life.
** Can Life Prevail? :A Revolutionary Approach to the Environmental Crisis. UK: Arktos Media, 2nd Revised ed. (2011). ISBN 1907166637 (English translation of Voisiko elämä voittaa) page 122
* Man has learned nothing: there are people who are still sanctimonious in their opposition to violence regardless of the state of the world, and who will presumably continue in the same way until the end. Frolicking in peace and love must be sweet – no doubt about that. Yet it is a nonsensical and disastrous attitude. With a smothering shroud of six billion people and all their demands covering the surface of the earth, pacifism is dead.
** Can Life Prevail?: A Revolutionary Approach to the Environmental Crisis. page 169
* The crippling human cover spread over the living layer of the Earth must forcibly be made lighter: breathing holes must be punctured in this blanket and the ecological footprint of man brushed away. Forms of boastful consumption must violently be crushed, the natality of the species violently controlled, and the number of those already born violently reduced — by any means possible.
** Can Life Prevail?: A Revolutionary Approach to the Environmental Crisis. page 170
* On a global scale, the main problem is not the inflation of human life, but its ever-increasing, mindless over-valuation. Emphasis on the inalienable right to life of foetuses, premature infants and the brain-dead has become a kind of collective mental illness.
** Can Life Prevail?: A Revolutionary Approach to the Environmental Crisis. page 132
* The most wretched of all current trends is of course the mass extinction of organisms, which has been escalating for decades and is still increasing in magnitude.
** Can Life Prevail?: A Revolutionary Approach to the Environmental Crisis. page 183
* The difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter is a matter of perspective: it all depends on the observer and the verdict of history.
** Can Life Prevail?: A Revolutionary Approach to the Environmental Crisis. page 160
* Those who died in the attack were not simply humans: they were Americans; and not ordinary Americans, either, but the priests and priestesses of the supreme God of this age: the Dollar. The passengers of the domestic flights are not a valid sample of humanity either, but a wealthy, busy, environmentally damaging and world-devouring portion of mankind.
** Can Life Prevail?: A Revolutionary Approach to the Environmental Crisis. page 158
* The US is the most wretchedly villainous state of all times. Anyone aware of global issues can easily imagine how vast the hatred for the United States - a corrupted, swollen, paralysing and suffocating political entity - must be across the Third World - and among the thinking minority of the West too.
** Can Life Prevail?: A Revolutionary Approach to the Environmental Crisis. page 159
* The coming years will prove increasingly cynical and cruel. People will definitely not slip into oblivion while hugging each other. The final stages in the life of humanity will be marked by the monstrous war of all against all: the amount of suffering will be maximal.
** Can Life Prevail?: A Revolutionary Approach to the Environmental Crisis. page 152

## See also

* Overpopulation

## External links

* Pentti Linkola fansite
* Church of Euthanasia reports a Wall Street Journal-Europe interview in which Linkola expresses the view that World War III would be: "a happy occasion for the planet.... If there were a button I could press, I would sacrifice myself without hesitating, if it meant millions of people would die."