What Happened to the Population Bomb?

Only you older readers have clear memories of 1968, but I remember it well. That was nearly 60 years ago, and it was a pivotal year in my career. I also remember it because of a book that was published that year, a work that had widespread societal as well as personal impact. 

Paul Ehrlich was the author of The Population Bomb (1968), the book just mentioned. He was born in Philadelphia in 1932, and after graduating from Pennsylvania University in 1953, he received the Ph.D. degree in Entomology (the scientific study of insects) in 1957 from the University of Kansas. From 1959 to 1968, he was a professor at Stanford University.

When Ehrlich’s soon-to-be bombshell book was first released in May 1968, it was initially ignored—no major newspaper reviewed it for four months. Its rise to prominence came through a different route entirely. In February 1970, Johnny Carson invited Ehrlich onto the Tonight Show, and the book soon became a bestseller.

The book received the Bestsellers Paperback of the Year Award in 1970, selling over two million copies. It raised general awareness of population and environmental issues as well as influencing public policy in the 1960s and 1970s.

It should be noted that Paul, with the assistance of his wife Anne, wrote the first draft in about three weeks, based on his lecture notes. The publisher, though, insisted on listing only Paul's name—a decision Ehrlich later called a mistake he was “stupid enough to go along with.” Anne was genuinely the co-author from the beginning.

Paul died on March 13 at the age of 93, and Anne, his wife for 71 years, is still living and now 92 years old.

Why would a biology professor be qualified to write a book about human overpopulation? The answer is found in his emphasis on “coevolution,” about which he wrote a landmark paper in 1964. That work, co-written with botanist Peter Raven, was titled “Butterflies and Plants: A Study in Coevolution and published in the journal Evolution.

Ehrlich’s entomology background trained him to think in terms of populations, limits, adaptation, and ecological relationships rather than just individual organisms. That perspective made it easier for him to frame human population growth as part of a larger biological system with finite resources.

In his ecological studies, Ehrlich repeatedly saw that when a population (of any species) undergoes exponential growth, it then experiences a subsequent crash as it has grown beyond what its environment can support. Since his research led him to believe that to be true, then humanity, he thought, was due to experience a cataclysmic downsizing of the population.

As it turned out, Ehrlich's dire prophecy proved self-defeating. The alarm he sounded was taken seriously enough to trigger responses that averted the catastrophe he foresaw for the 1970s.

Ehrlich himself was a keynote speaker at the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, helping to shape the day's sense of urgency. In addition, the Green Revolution, international family planning initiatives, and agricultural investment in vulnerable regions also contributed substantially to staving off the outcome he feared.*

Although there were an impressive 8-9 million people at the No Kings protests on March 28, that is far less than half the number estimated to have participated in the first Earth Day activities. However, the latter covered a very broad range of activities while the No Kings figure refers to concentrated, single-day marches and rallies, which makes comparison tricky.

What was averted in the 1970s has been coming true in the 2020s. Since what he predicted in 1968 didn’t come true in the 1970s, Ehrlich changed his position during that decade and later. In the present decade, however, what is happening in the Global South resonates powerfully with his original warning.

The population explosion Ehrlich feared in 1968 largely did not materialize in the wealthy nations he was most focused on, but population growth now is concentrated in the poorest and most climate-vulnerable regions, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa and other vulnerable regions of the Global South.**

The main issue now is climate-related disasters displacing millions—what many now call “climate refugees.” Drought, desertification, erratic rainfall, and crop failures is displacing large numbers of people primarily in the Sahel region (Mali, Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso) and the Horn of Africa (Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea).

Next month, Earth Day will be termed Earth Week, with major activities beginning on April 18 and continuing through April 25. Those activities will likely be much smaller but potentially more important than the No Kings activities on March 28. What will you do for humanity and for Mother Earth that week?

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 * The Green Revolution refers to a series of agricultural research and development initiatives, spanning roughly the 1940s through the 1970s, that dramatically increased food production in developing countries, particularly in Asia and Latin America. It was led principally by American agronomist Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

** The Progress Network posted “The Underpopulation Bomb” in their March 26 newsletter. It is largely critical of Ehrlich’s “prophecy of catastrophe” in The Population Bomb and, contrastingly, writes of the current concern with underpopulation and pronatalism. That article, and the Progress Network itself, is overly focused on the wealthy West and negligent of the population and ecological issues of the Global south.

Note: Research assistance provided by Claude (Anthropic).