The Population Bomb

The Times has a discussion of Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb, setting it up as so many do today–as being fundamentally wrong and tainting environmentalism as a whole with that wrongness. That’s pretty unfair. On some level of course, Ehrlich wasn’t correct in that he underestimated the technological ability to grow more crops and how higher consumption rates would lead to declining birth rates. But on the fundamental level–that the world is vastly overproducing in proportion to what the planet can handle–was not incorrect. It may be that consumption is the real threat the world faces as opposed to overpopulation. There is an upper limit of the world’s carrying capacity of humans, but the significantly greater threat in the short term is that overconsumption will lead to catastrophic climate change, as we are already seeing. It’s this latter issue why attacks on Ehrlich are problematic–because it assumes that apocalyptic environmental thinking is inherently wrong. Meanwhile, those who are seen as opposing Ehrlich’s line of thinking are portrayed as not only correct, but generally better people. But Stewart Brand, who made an entire career on optimistic environmental thinking, is horribly wrong about extinction in ways that are at least as damaging to the world as anything Ehrlich has written. Meanwhile, Green Revolution scientist Norman Bourlag was perfectly fine with the mass extinction of all the world’s animals if it meant selling more DDT.

There’s no question that focusing on population as the world’s greatest environmental problem has given cover to racists and rich world consumers blaming poor people instead of examining their own culpability. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need jeremiads about the state of the planet. With the realities of climate change just beginning to hit us, we need all the jeremiads we can get.

And as for the idea that apocalyptic environmentalism turns people away from doing anything, I hear this talked about as received wisdom all the time, but have never seen a single piece of empirical evidence supporting the claim.