Ehrlich’s work left much misery in its wake.
“I was a college student when I read Mr. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb,” wrote Wall Street Journal reader Kenneth Emde of “population scientist” Paul Ehrlich’s most famous work in a 2023 letter. “I took it to heart and now have no grandchildren, but 50 years later, the population has increased to eight billion without dire consequences. I was gullible and stupid.”
It’s cold comfort, but Emde was hardly alone in deferring to Ehrlich’s supposed expertise. The longtime professor of biology at Stanford University and advocate of an apocalyptic theory of human overpopulation, who passed away on Friday at the age of 93, was said by the New York Times to have been merely “premature” in his predictions. Maybe someday, Ehrlich’s catastrophism will seem prescient. Today, however, it would be more accurate to say that Ehrlich was just wrong.
Central to Ehrlich’s thesis in The Population Bomb was his contention that the Earth had a finite “carrying capacity,” and its limits were already being tested by the mid-20th century. Humanity would soon have to ration its resources and consign those for whom it could no longer care to triage.
Ehrlich’s modern Malthusianism fired the imaginations of the international environmental left, but he seemed compelled to forever up the ante on his dire predictions. He subsequently anticipated that, by 1980, the average American lifespan would decline to just 42. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” Ehrlich wrote in 1969. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years,” he declared the following year. By 1971, Ehrlich was willing to “take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Roughly 100 to 200 million people, he assumed, would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989 in what he deemed “the Great Die-Off.”
Sure, he got some of the “details and timing” of the events he predicted wrong, his allies will concede. But, to them, the eschatological gist of his work still rang true. “Population growth, along with over-consumption per capita, is driving civilization over the edge,” Ehrlich told The Guardian as recently as 2018, “billions of people are now hungry or micronutrient malnourished, and climate disruption is killing people.” With the confidence of a Marxian economist, Ehrlich never questioned his faith in where humanity’s addiction to prosperity was taking it. “As I’ve said many times, ‘perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell,’” he said.
Ehrlich’s work left much misery in its wake. As even Ehrlich’s supporters will admit, his theories “lent support to racist attitudes to population control.” Population bombers encouraged the promotion of abortion in places like Sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Overpopulation as a theory justified some of the worst eugenicist abuses of the human species since World War II — abuses in which the United States was very much a participant. “The large number of sterilizations began in earnest in 1966, when Medicaid came into existence and funded the operation for low-income people,” the author Angela Franks wrote. Indeed, by 1977, “up to one-quarter” of Native American women had undergone sterilization, she wrote. A program of “voluntary” sterilization of Puerto Rican women in the 1960s unfolded similarly. By 1965, about one-third of Puerto Rican women surveyed admitted to undergoing a sterilization procedure amid the efforts of the U.S. government and the International Planned Parenthood Federation to promote the practice.
Ehrlich’s primary contention — that the human race is, more or less, doomed — continues to inform the work of today’s Malthusians. The various United Nations appendages that routinely warn us of our species’ imminent collapse a decade or so on from whenever the last report was published lean on Ehrlich’s theories. The professor’s legacy inspired a 2018 initiative by a collection of bioethicists to rehabilitate The Population Bomb in the pages of the Washington Post. As recently as 2023, CBS’s 60 Minutes lent its platform to Ehrlich to promote groundless apocalypticism. “The next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to,” he told a credulous Scott Pelley.
Ehrlich never questioned his conclusions and refused to repent for the suffering they produced.
“For a species that named itself homo sapiens, the wise man, we’re being incredibly stupid,” Ehrlich told CNN at the end of the last decade. That seems to have been Ehrlich’s primary conceit — one that fatally undermined his work. Ehrlich and those who bought into the theory of overpopulation regularly underestimated mankind’s ability to engineer itself out of a challenge. Those who subscribed to that flawed outlook did what they could in their own ways to meet what they were told was the measure of a responsible citizen of the world: In CNN reporter Clint Watts’s summary, “consuming less, polluting less,” and “having fewer children.”
Kenneth Emde took Ehrlich’s advocacy to heart, and he regrets it. Emde was asked to make what he thought was a noble sacrifice to future generations, but he only deprived himself of one of life’s foremost joys. Millions more similarly immiserated themselves for what they were told was the greater good. They deserved, if not an apology, at least the truth. But Paul Ehrlich couldn’t bring himself to provide them with either.