A recent article in the New York Times revisits the generalized pandemonium in the 1970s over fears of a global population explosion, due in large part to Paul R. Ehrlich’s 1968 doomsday bestseller: The Population Bomb. The article inadvertently ties Ehrlich’s apocalyptic thesis—and the widespread willingness to believe it—to the current climate change hysteria that has swept a large part of the planet.
Ehrlich sold the world the idea that mankind stood on the brink of Armageddon because there was simply no way to feed the exponentially increasing world population. The opening line set the tone for the whole book: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.”
Being a well-credentialed scientist—as a biologist lecturing at Stanford University—Ehrlich’s trumpet call of the end times struck many as the plausible theory of an “expert.”
In the book, Ehrlich laid out the devastating future of the planet. He predicted that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s (and that 65 million of them would be Americans), that already-overpopulated India was doomed, and that odds were fair that “England will not exist in the year 2000.”
Ehrlich concludes that “sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,” meaning “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”
It is fascinating to compare Ehrlich’s hyperbolic forecasts with those of the recent climate workshop sponsored by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Science.
