Utopia (TV Series)

Episode #1.5 (2013)

Stephen Rea: Letts

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Quotes 

• Letts : We've now passed seven billion on this planet. When I was born, it was a little over two. Food prices rising, oil's ending. When our resources end in twenty years, given everything that we know of our species, do you really think we're going to just share?

  Becky : So your answer to that is some kind of genocide?

  Letts : No, it is not, it is not genocide. Our answer to this is Janus.

• Letts : Janus effects 90 to 95% of the population, leaving only one in twenty fertile. We predict population will plateau at 500 million in just under a hundred years. By then, normal breeding rates should resume, but on a planet that will feel empty.

  Ian : You're fucking insane!

  Letts : To do nothing is insane. You accuse us of being genocidal? Not acting is genocide. Where do you think your food comes from, Ian? A third of the world's farmland is now useless due to soil degradation. Yet we keep producing more mouths to feed. And what's your answer to that? Energy-saving light bulbs?

  Ian : But we're doing things, we're changing things.

  Letts : You know the person who had the greatest positive impact on the environment on this planet? Genghis Khan, because he massacred forty million people. There was no one to farm the land. Forests grew back. Carbon was dragged out of the atmosphere. And had this monster not existed, there'd be another billion of us today, jostling for space on this dying planet. Yet Janus massacres no one. It's without violence.

  Wilson Wilson : This is why you did this to me, this is why you killed my father.

  Letts : And there are a thousand other crimes on my conscience. But you know what I see, Wilson? A planet turned into a desert. A thousand million souls starving, dying. And we can stop this, with Janus.