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).

 

Novelists as Prophets: The Examples of Celeste Ng and Octavia Butler

Good, creative novels are beneficial for their readers not just for the enjoyment they induce but also for the ideas they produce. This post is about two dystopian novels, one published earlier this year and the other back in 1993.

Celeste Ng is an American novelist whose parents were born in mainland China and in Hong Kong. Ng (b. 1980) became widely known with the publication of Little Fires Everywhere in 2017 and the eight-episode 2020 streaming television series based on that book.

Although I found Ng’s 2017 novel a good read, I was more impressed with her 2022 novel Our Missing Hearts. The title of Steven King’s Sept. 22 review in The New York Times sums it up well: “Celeste Ng’s Dystopia Is Uncomfortably Close to Reality.” 

Following what is called the Crisis, the federal government seeks to make the U.S. great again. This is attempted partly by the passing of the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act (PACT).

Under PACT, questionable books are not only banned, those found offensive are pulped and turned into toilet paper.

Further, because of what is believed to be a major economic/cultural threat by the Chinese, there is considerable opposition to anyone who looks Asian. The main characters of Ng’s novel are a Chinese American woman married to a White man and Bird, their 12-year-old son.

The children of parents considered by PACT to be culturally or politically subversive are “re-placed” in foster families. Consequently, Bird’s mother goes missing in order to spare him from being re-placed.

The impact of Ng’s novel was lessened somewhat by the midterm elections, which turned out to be a win for democracy and a loss for the MAGA voters and the authoritarianism they were (many perhaps unwittingly) supporting. Prejudice against Chinese/Asians, however, may continue to increase.

Perhaps to a small degree, the election turned out as it did because of what can be called self-negating prophecy. Sometimes things don’t happen as predicted because enough people take action to keep those dire predictions from being fulfilled.

In that way, novelists, and especially those who write creative dystopian novels, can be seen as prophets who declare what will happen if appropriate steps are not taken to prevent those dreadful situations from taking place.

Let’s hope that is also true with regard to a second novelist I am currently reading.

Octavia Butler is an engaging Black writer whom I was not aware of until recently. More than thirty years ago she planned to write a trilogy of dystopian novels. The first of those is Parable of the Sower (1993), and it was followed by Parable of the Talents (1998).**

Unfortunately, Butler died in 2006 at the youngish age of 58 before she finished the third volume. I have just finished reading Butler’s chilling first book and have started to read the sequel.

Beginning in 2024, when society in the United States has grown unstable due to climate change, growing wealth inequality, and corporate greed, Parable of the Sower takes the form of a journal kept by Lauren, a precocious African American teenager—and religious “philosopher.”

In that 1993 novel, climate change, economic recession, and extensive misuse of drugs lead to a total breakdown of society. Beginning in 2024, Lauren experiences horrific loss and suffering, which ends to an extent for her and her companions with the founding of a religious community in 2027.

(Early in the sequel, Butler has Lauren writing about one of the candidates for the 2032 presidential election in the nation still beset by ongoing societal problems. His appeal to the voters is, “Help us to make America great again.”)

Perhaps sometimes “the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls,” but they are more effectively written in books by novelists such as Celeste Ng and Octavia Butler.

May we be smart enough to understand what such novelists are saying and proactive enough to help their dystopian novels to become self-negating prophecies.

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** Here is the link to “Octavia Butler’s Prescient Vision of a Zealot Elected to ‘Make America Great Again’,” a long, July 2017 article in The New Yorker. June (my wife) doesn’t like to read dystopian novels, but she found this article about Butler to be quite interesting.