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?
_____
* 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).
