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).

 

Too Many People, or Too Few?

This blog post is about the human population of the world. Are there too many people, or are there too few? 

(A slightly inaccurate graph of the world's population growth, but the point is well made.)

The county of my birth is very small; it could be argued that there are too few people there. I was born in Worth County, Missouri, which is the youngest of the 114 counties in the state. It is also the Mo. county with the smallest land area and the smallest population.**

According to the U.S. census records, the peak population of Worth Co. was in 1900 when the number of residents reached nearly 10,000. But in the 2020 census, the population had dropped to under 2,000.

It can be argued, with good reason, that there are now too few people in Worth Co. for it to be viable still, and the same is true for many rural counties across the nation.

The population of some nations is decreasing, and some people in those countries are worrying about there being too few people—especially too few of the “right” kind.

I have long been concerned about the rapid increase of the world’s population. When I was born in 1938, there were about 2.2 billion people living on this earth, but by 1998 (just 60 years later) that number reached six billion—and this year it topped eight billion!

If my home county had grown by the same percentage as the world’s population between 1900 and 2020, it would have a population of around 49,000, not fewer than 2,000.

But already by the early 2000s, there was serious talk about the declining population in Japan and the need to encourage more Japanese women to marry and for couples to have more children.

And it is true, many of the wealthy countries of the world are losing population, and even some in China, until this year the world’s most populous country, are increasingly concerned about the current population decline there.

The cover story of the June 3^rd-9^th issue of The Economist was “The Baby-Bust Economy,” and they highlighted the problem of the declining population growth in most of the world’s wealthiest countries: “The largest 15 countries by GDP all have a fertility rate below the replacement rate.”

Thus, they project that before the end of this century “the number of people on the planet could shrink for the first time since the Black Death.”

The unchecked growth of the world’s population has long been a concern of some scholars, and others. It was 225 years ago when Thomas Malthus published the first edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society (1798).

Malthus (1766~1834) was an English economist and demographer and is best known for his theory that population growth will always tend to outrun the food supply and that betterment of humankind is impossible without stern limits on reproduction.

Malthus was the first to write publicly about carrying capacity and overshoot, which are central themes of William Catton’s book that I introduced in my March 23 blog post, and that perceptive author refers to Malthus several times.

Malthus didn’t know of the coming industrial revolution in the 19^th century or the “green revolution” that began in mid-20^th century. But as Catton clearly explains, the extension of the carrying capacity of the earth was primarily based on the exploitation of depletable and non-renewable fossil fuels.

It was quite disappointing that the concluding paragraph of The Economist’s recent cover story states, “Unexpected productivity advances meant that demographic time-bombs, such as the mass starvation predicted by Thomas Malthus in the 18th century, failed to detonate.”

True, such time-bombs haven’t detonated yet. But why do they think that those time bombs are not still ticking in this world with its continual global warming, ongoing over-consumption of non-renewable resources, and increasing inequality and strife between the “haves” and “have nots”?

Because of the current, but insufficiently understood, ecological crisis, there will most likely be a drastic, and catastrophic, decline in the world’s population long before the end of this century.

Fortunately, rather than being a problem, the current decline in population pushes the coming catastrophic decline further into the future.

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** You might also find it interesting that the land area that became Worth County in 1861 was the most northwestern corner of the United States after Missouri became a state in 1821. 

“Listen to the Scientists”: Considering the Limits to Growth

This post is directly related to the one I made on January 25. It is about the possibility of an “ecological Armageddon” (words not used but implied in the 1/25 post), which might occur even before the end of this century. 

Becoming Aware

I have been much concerned about this issue for 50 years, and more. By 1970 or ’71, I had read Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb (1968), or had read enough of and about that book, to be greatly concerned about what was often called “the population explosion.”

Then in 1972, the Club of Rome published another highly significant book. It was titled The Limits to Growth, authored by Donella H. Meadows et al. The New York Times (here) summarized the central thesis of that book succinctly:

Either civilization or growth must end, and soon. Continued population and industrial growth will exhaust the world’s minerals and bathe the biosphere in fatal levels of pollution. As the authors summarize, “if the present growth trends continue unchanged, the limits of growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next hundred years.”

It was, however, many years later before I began to be aware of the serious problem of global warming—and I recently learned that the term “global warming” didn’t even appear in a scientific article until 1975.

In fact, as late as that year, some were still talking of climate change making the world too cold—which is why the term global warming is now much to be preferred to climate change.

In recent years, though, I have been very aware of the danger of global warming, and my 1/5/20 blog post was titled “Climate Crisis: The Challenge of the Decade.”

However, I have only recently become aware of the fact that global warming itself is not the primary ecological problem confronting humankind. Rather, global warming is the result of a network of problems all related to unrestrained growth, which is also called overshoot.

EarthOvershoot.org explains, “Overshoot is when a species consumes resources and generates wastes faster than the ecosystem in which it inhabits can replace those resources or absorb those wastes.”

Further, “Climate change is just one symptom (and a pretty big one) of a much larger ‘disease’ called overshoot. Overshoot is the all encompassing threat to sustainability posed by too many people consuming too many resources and emitting to much waste.”

The concept of overshoot clearly acknowledges the limits to growth—of the world’s population, of the consumption of nonrenewable resources, and of the global standard of living (and the stock market).

Unquestionably, we all need to be deeply aware of this perilous predicament.

Becoming Alarmed

“Listen to the scientists” has been widely used over the past couple of years in the attempt to get people to fight the covid-19 epidemic by getting vaccinations and wearing masks. That is good advice.

But I am afraid that, as William Rees forcefully emphasizes, politicians as well as the general public don’t listen to scientists well when it comes to considering overshoot / the limits to growth.

Rees (b. 1943), who has a Ph.D. in population ecology, was a professor at University of British Columbia from 1969 to 2012. During that time, he coined the phrase/concept ecological footprint (in 1992).

Since his retirement, he has continued to be an active advocate of protecting human life on this planet. Several recent talks are available on YouTube, and in one of them, he wisely emphasizes the great need for politicians and the general public to listen to the scientists.

In February 2020, Rees gave a talk entitled “Will Modern Civilization Be the Death of Us” (see here). I encourage you to watch that video as well as other more recent talks you can easily find under his name on YouTube.

Given the alarming facts that Rees graphically presents, I wonder when, oh when, are we the general public and political leaders going to listen to the scientists about the limits to growth?

And when, oh when, will we (humankind) begin to take more decisive and meaningful steps to limit growth?

7 Billion and Counting

According to the United Nations Population Fund, on October 31, tomorrow, the population of the world will become seven billion persons. That is remarkable!

When I was born in 1938, the global human population was under 2.3 billion. So in my lifetime the population of the world has tripled, and then some!

Population Action International has an app on their website that calculates the world population on any given day in the past. You can put in your birth date and quickly get the estimate of “your number,” the population of the world on your birthday. The link for “What’s Your Number?” is here. (I am 2,267,750,937.)

It is estimated that the world's population didn’t reach the one billion mark until 1804, just a little over 200 years ago. By 1927, 123 years later, the population of the world became two billion. Then in just 33 years, in 1960, the number of people on earth climbed to three billion.

Since February 1967, world population has doubled to reach the seven billion mark. (Actually, the U.S. Census Bureau says that seven billion won’t be reached until February, 2012.) What will it be like, though, if the population doubles again in the same length of time? That is unlikely to happen; estimates now indicate that even the nine billion mark will probably not be reached until 2045 or later. Still, that is a number fraught with problems.

How many people can the earth sustain? It can be argued that the earth is not adequately sustaining its seven billion people now. But the problem is largely a matter of distribution, not resources. There is enough food for everyone, but some (particularly many Americans) eat far too much, and hundreds of millions, mostly in south Asia and Africa, have far too little to eat.

With the growth of the population, there is a strain on other resources, too. And, again, the U.S. with only 5% of the world population uses an extraordinarily large share of the world’s natural resources. 

As the population continues to rise above seven billion, there will doubtlessly be more and more struggle for limited resources: fresh water, food, oil, and the like. As resources become scarcer, prices rise and more people face financial problems. More troubling, in a world of shortages violence also becomes more prevalent as nations, or smaller groups, seek to provide for their own.

Population pressures and need for additional food and natural resources have been part of the cause of wars, large and small, through the centuries, and the likelihood of warfare increases as the population continues to increase. In addition, the gap between the wealthy countries and the poor countries, or between the wealthy and the poor within countries, leads to various acts of revolutionary violence.

So the fact that the world population is now 7,000,000,000 and counting is not good news. But that is the situation we are in. And it is a matter about which we all need to be concerned, supporting ideas and programs for dealing with the problem in constructive ways.

The World in 2100

June and I are delighted to announce the birth of Natalie June Seat on February 16. Natalie is the daughter of Ken and Mina Takazaki Seat and our seventh, and probably last, grandchild. We are very happy to welcome this new member into the Seat family and into the world.

There is a strong possibility that little Natalie will live to see the year 2100—and that is also possible for her big sister, Naomi, who was born in 2004. After all, Natalie had three great-grandparents to live past 90, and her only living great-grandparent will likely live that long. And what with medical advances and all, we should be able to expect children born in 2010 to live longer than people born in the 1910s. Or should we?

I have no doubt that the earth will still be here in 2100, but what about the human race? Will there be a U.S. presidential election that year? Will the Summer Olympics be held? Will there be as much resemblance between 2100 and 2000 as there was between 2000 and 1900?

While there is not, at present, a strong threat of a nuclear war, such as was the underlying fear of so many people a half-century ago, there are other ominous signs that make me uneasy about human society in 2100. I guess my three main concerns are the possibility of massive changes on earth due to global warming, the likelihood of enormous problems due to the depletion of water resources in much of the world, and the constant increase in the population of the world.

When I was born in 1938, the world population was under 2.3 billion. This year there will likely be exactly three times that number of persons on earth. Even though the growth rate has slowed greatly, the population of the world may reach nine billion several years before 2050, and who knows what it will be by 2100.

Population growth is one of several reasons why the world’s supply of clean, fresh water is steadily decreasing. Water demand already exceeds supply in many parts of the world. In my lifetime, let alone in Natalie’s, we may see major warfare over water. And who can say what dire effects of global warming may be seen in the coming thirty, sixty, or ninety years.

All I know is that there are great problems that all people of goodwill need to be concerned about and working diligently to solve. I want to keep doing what I can to work for a just and sustainable society, for the sake of Natalie and my other grandchildren and as well as for the sake of all the children of the world.