Floyd was as widely read as he was artistically gifted, and it often seemed no reading matter or new angle in science or philosophy escaped his notice. (Once he tried to explain something of Stephen Hawking’s to me, but I was pretty much a lost cause.) Because he was so rarely interviewed, few of his ideas have been recorded on paper (other than in his art), but he was as free a thinker as he was an artist.
Perhaps dominant among his perspectives was the notion that humanity was traveling down the wrong paths. In a 1977 interview, he is reported as saying:
When I got old enough to realize the dilemma of man and the hellish situation he was in and is in now, I couldn’t understand why anyone had any ambition, knowing what we face.
Mankind is at a crisis and there’s only one supreme crisis. That is population. We’ve come to that point because of our technology. Look at what we’ve done to the earth. The end result [of mankind] will be the same as that of lemmings or locusts or bumblebees. It’s all the same. Man is an animal just like anything else. We’re going to end up with a population reduced to a third of what it is now. Reality will make fantasy pale by comparison.
Ah, a man after my own heart! I wish I had gotten to know him better.
A small selection from Floyd’s library.
Floyd R. Peterson 
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