Depopulate or perish

Launching himself as a green campaigner, actor Jeremy Irons has revealed plans to make a documentary about sustainability and waste disposal, likening himself to controversial filmmaker Michael Moore, though “not as silly”.

The increasing global population would put an intolerable strain on the world’s resources, he says, and the gulf between developing countries and Westerners living a “pie-in-the-sky” existence must be addressed.

“One always returns to the fact that there are just too many of us, the population continues to rise and it’s unsustainable,” he says.

“I think we have to find ways where we’re not having to scrap our effluent junk and are a really sustainable planet.”

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Natural systems of self-regulation may stop population growth, he says.

“I suspect there’ll be a very big outbreak of something because the world always takes care of itself.” The 61-year-old actor went on to speculate that either disease or war, “probably disease”, could be nature’s way of halving the population.

He is seeking funding for a film on sustainability, which he hopes will be in the manner of An Inconvenient Truth, the Oscar-winning Al Gore documentary on climate change.

“We’ll be pulling in a lot of expert opinion, and we are in talks for funding,” Irons says. “We hope it will be a movie.”

The actor, who says he is apolitical although he is a former Labour donor and his wife Sinead Cusack is “deeply socialist”, has already made a plea for action in a short video for an organisation campaigning to end world hunger.

In a film on the website 1billionhungry.org, he declares: “People around the world suffer hunger:

1 billion. Now that’s bad, worse than bad, that’s crazy!

“We’ve got to get mad. I want you to get mad. I want you to get up right now, stick your head out of the window and yell, ‘I’m mad as hell.’ ”

Irons, who owns seven houses, including a pink castle in County Cork in Ireland, believes a new economic vision is needed in the wake of the global financial crisis.

“We are facing an economic revolution,” he says. “I don’t think things can ever be the same again. The next generation will have to think laterally and find ways to cope with this.”

He dismisses the idea that a recovery in consumption and high-street sales would help Britain out of recession.

“You walk down the high street and it’s just clothes, clothes, clothes. How many clothes do people need? It’s just stuff. We’re on a hiding to nothing with that.

“We’ve always known the City was a bubble. We can’t continue to divide the world between people who live a pie-in-the-sky life and people who are starving.”

The Australian