The Population Bomb
Encyclopedia
The Population Bomb was a best-selling book written by Paul R. Ehrlich
and his wife, Anne Ehrlich
(who was uncredited), in 1968. It warned of the mass starvation of humans in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation
, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. Fears of a "population explosion" were widespread in the 1950s and 60s, but the book and its charismatic author brought the idea to an even wider audience. The book has been criticized in recent decades for its alarmist tone and inaccurate predictions. The Ehrlichs stand by the basic ideas in the book, stating in 2009 that "perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future" and believe that it achieved their goals because "it alerted people to the importance of environmental issues and brought human numbers into the debate on the human future."
, and Ian Ballantine
of Ballantine Books
following various public appearances Ehrlich had made regarding population issues and their relation to the environment. Although the Ehrlichs collaborated on the book, the publisher insisted that a single author be credited, and also asked to change their preferred title: Population, Resources, and Environment. The title Population Bomb was taken (with permission) from General William H. Draper, founder of the Population Crisis Committee
and a pamphlet issued in 1954 by the Hugh Moore Fund. The Ehrlichs regret the choice of title, which they admit was a perfect choice from a marketing perspective, but think that "it led Paul to be miscategorized as solely focused on human numbers, despite our interest in all the factors affecting the human trajectory."
Early editions of The Population Bomb began with the statement:
Much of the book is spent describing the state of the environment and the food security
situation, which is described as increasingly dire. Ehrlich argues that as the existing population was not being fed adequately, and as it was growing rapidly it was unreasonable to expect sufficient improvements in food production to feed everyone. He further argued that the growing population placed escalating strains on all aspects of the natural world.
In answer to the question, "what needs to be done?" he wrote, "We must rapidly bring the world population under control, reducing the growth rate to zero or making it negative. Conscious regulation of human numbers must be achieved. Simultaneously we must, at least temporarily, greatly increase our food production." Ehrlich described a number of "ideas on how these goals might be reached." He believed that the United States should take a leading role in population control, both because it was already consuming much more than the rest of the world, and therefore had a moral duty to reduce its impact, and because the US would have to lead international efforts due to its prominence in the world. In order to avoid charges of hypocrisy or racism it would have to take the lead in population reduction efforts. Ehrlich floats the idea of adding "temporary sterilants
" to the water supply or staple foods. However, he rejects the idea as unpractical due to "criminal inadequacy of biomedical research in this area." He suggests a tax scheme in which additional children would add to a family's tax burden at increasing rates for more children, as well as luxury tax
es on childcare goods. He suggests incentives for men who agree to permanent sterilization before they have two children, as well as a variety of other monetary incentives. He proposes a powerful Department of Population and Environment which "should be set up with the power to take whatever steps are necessary to establish a reasonable population size in the United States and to put an end to the steady deterioration of our environment." The department should support research into population control, such as better contraceptives, mass sterilizing agents, and prenatal sex discernment
(because families often continue to have children until a male is born. Ehrlich suggested that if they could choose a male child this would reduce the birthrate). Legislation should be enacted guaranteeing the right to an abortion
, and sex education
should be expanded.
After explaining the domestic policies the US should pursue, he discusses foreign policy. He advocates a system of "triage," such as that suggested by William and Paul Paddock in Famine 1975!. Under this system countries would be divided into categories based on their abilities to feed themselves going forward. Countries with sufficient programmes in place to limit population growth, and the ability to become self sufficient in the future would continue to receive food aid. Countries, for example India, which "were far behind in the population-food game that there is no hope that our food aid will see them through to self-sufficiency" would have their food aid eliminated. Ehrlich argued that this was the only realistic strategy in the long-term. Ehrlich applauds the Paddocks' "courage and foresight" in proposing such a solution. Ehrlich further discusses the need to set up public education programs and agricultural development schemes in developing countries. He argues that the scheme would likely have to be implemented outside the framework of the United Nations
due to the necessity of being selective regarding the targeted regions and countries, and suggests that within countries certain regions should be prioritized to the extent that cooperative separatist movements should be encouraged if they are an improvement over the existing authority. He mentions his support for government mandated sterilization of Indian males with three or more children.
In the rest of the book Ehrlich discusses things which readers can do to help. This is focused primarily on changing public opinion to create pressure on politicians to enact the policies he suggests, which he believed were not politically possible in 1968. At the end of the book he discusses the possibility that his forecasts may be wrong, a fact which he felt he must acknowledge as a scientist. However, he believes that humanity will only be better off if it follows his prescriptions, so that even if he is incorrect it is the right course of action.
The book sold over two million copies, raised the general awareness of population and environmental issues, and influenced 1960s and 1970s public policy.
and William Vogt
’s Road to Survival. Although, they are now much less well known than Population Bomb, they inspired many works such as the original Population Bomb pamphlet by Hugh Everett Moore in 1954 that inspired the name of Ehrlich's book, as well as some of the original societies concerned with population and environmental matters. D.B. Luten has said that although the book is often seen as a seminal work in the field, the Population Bomb is actually best understood as "climaxing and in a sense terminating the debate of the 1950s and 1960s.” Ehrlich has said that he traced his own Malthusian beliefs to a lecture he heard Vogt give when he was attending university in the early 1950s. For Ehrlich, these writers provided “a global framework for things he had observed as a young naturalist."
argument that population growth will outpace agricultural growth unless controlled. Ehrlich observed that since about 1930 the population of the world had doubled within a single generation, from 2 billion to nearly 4 billion, and was on track to do so again. He assumed that available resources on the other hand, and in particular food, were nearly at their limits. Some critics compare Ehrlich unfavorably to Malthus, saying that although Thomas Malthus
did not make a firm prediction of imminent catastrophe, Ehrlich warned of a potential massive disaster within the next decade or two. In addition, critics state that unlike Malthus, Ehrlich did not see any means of avoiding the disaster entirely (although some mitigation was possible), and proposed solutions that were much more radical than those discussed by Malthus, such as starving whole countries that refused to implement population control
measures.
Ehrlich was certainly not unique in his neo-Malthusian predictions, and there was a wide spread belief in the 1960s and 70s that increasingly catastrophic famines were on their way.
In The Population Bomb's opening lines the authors state that nothing can prevent famines in which hundreds of millions of people will die during the 1970s (amended to 1970s and 80s in later editions), and that there would be "a substantial increase in the world death rate." Although many lives could be saved through dramatic action, it was already too late to prevent a substantial increase in the global death rate. However, in reality the global death rate has continued to decline substantially since then, from 13/1000 in 1965–74 to 10/1000 from 1985–1990. Meanwhile the population of the world has more than doubled, while calories consumed/person have increased 24%. The UN does not keep official death-by-hunger statistics so it is hard to measure whether the "hundreds of millions of deaths" number is correct. Ehrlich himself suggested in 2009 that between 200-300 million had died of hunger since 1968. However, that is measured over 40 years rather than the ten to twenty foreseen in the book, so it can be seen as significantly fewer than predicted.
Famine has not been eliminated, but its root cause has been political instability, not global food shortage. The India
n economist and Nobel Prize
winner, Amartya Sen
, has argued that nations with democracy and a free press have virtually never suffered from extended famines. Nevertheless, in 2010 the UN reported that 925 million of the world's population of nearly seven billion people were in a constant state of hunger. The UN report notes that the percentage of the world's population who qualify as "undernourished" has fallen by more than half, from 33 percent to about 16 percent, since Ehrlich published The Population Bomb.
Ehrlich writes: "I don't see how India
could possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980." This view was widely held at the time, as another statement of his, later in the book: "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks that India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971." In the book's 1971 edition, the latter prediction was removed, as the food situation in India suddenly improved.
As of 2010, India had almost 1.2 billion people, having nearly tripled its population from around 400 million in 1960. India's Total Fertility Rate in 2008 was calculated to be 2.6. While the absolute numbers of malnourished children in India is high, the rates of malnutrition and poverty in India have declined from approximately 90% at the time of India's independence, to less than 40% today. Ehrlich's prediction about famines were found to be false, although food security is an issue in India. However, most epidemiologists, public health physicians and demographers identify corruption as the chief cause of malnutrition, not "overpopulation". As Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen noted, India frequently had famines during British colonial rule. However, when India became a democracy, there have been no recorded famines.
Journalist Dan Gardner has criticized Ehrlich both for his over-confident predictions and his refusal to acknowledge his errors. "In two lengthy interviews, Ehrlich admitted making not a single major error in the popular works he published in the late 1960s and early 1970s … the only flat-out mistake Ehrlich acknowledges is missing the destruction of the rain forests, which happens to be a point that supports and strengthens his world view—and is therefore, in cognitive dissonance
terms, not a mistake at all. Beyond that, he was by his account, off a little here and there, but only because the information he got from others was wrong. Basically, he was right across the board."
noting that Ehrlich does not try to "convince intellectually by mind dulling statistics," but rather roars "like an Old Testament
Prophet." Gardner says, "as much as the events and culture of the era, Paul Ehrlich's style explain the enormous audience he attracted." Indeed, an appearance on The Tonight Show
with Johnny Carson
helped to propel the success of the book, as well as Ehrlich's celebrity. Desrochers and Hoffbauer go on to conclude that it seems hard to deny that using an alarmist tone and emotional appeal were the main lessons that the present generation of environmentalists learned from Ehrlich's success.
. Barry Commoner
argued that the Ehrlichs were too focused on overpopulation as the source of environmental problems, and that their proposed solutions were politically unacceptable because of the coercion that they implied, and because the cost would fall disproportionately on the poor. He argued that technological, and above all social development would lead to a natural decrease in both population growth and environmental damage.
interview, Ehrlich acknowledged some specific predictions he had made, in the years around the time the Population Bomb was published, that had not come to pass. However, as to a number of his fundamental ideas and assertions he maintained that facts and science proved them correct.
In answer to the question: "Were your predictions in The Population Bomb right?", Ehrlich responded:
In another retrospective article published in 2009, Ehrlich said, in response to criticism that many of his predictions had not come to pass:
Paul R. Ehrlich
Paul Ralph Ehrlich is an American biologist and educator who is the Bing Professor of Population Studies in the department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University and president of Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology. By training he is an entomologist specializing in Lepidoptera , but...
and his wife, Anne Ehrlich
Anne H. Ehrlich
Anne Howland Ehrlich is the co-author of several books on overpopulation and ecology with her husband, Stanford University professor Paul R...
(who was uncredited), in 1968. It warned of the mass starvation of humans in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation
Overpopulation
Overpopulation is a condition where an organism's numbers exceed the carrying capacity of its habitat. The term often refers to the relationship between the human population and its environment, the Earth...
, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. Fears of a "population explosion" were widespread in the 1950s and 60s, but the book and its charismatic author brought the idea to an even wider audience. The book has been criticized in recent decades for its alarmist tone and inaccurate predictions. The Ehrlichs stand by the basic ideas in the book, stating in 2009 that "perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future" and believe that it achieved their goals because "it alerted people to the importance of environmental issues and brought human numbers into the debate on the human future."
General description of the book
The Population Bomb was written at the suggestion of David Brower the executive director of the environmentalist Sierra ClubSierra Club
The Sierra Club is the oldest, largest, and most influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States. It was founded on May 28, 1892, in San Francisco, California, by the conservationist and preservationist John Muir, who became its first president...
, and Ian Ballantine
Ian Ballantine
Ian Keith Ballantine was a pioneering American publisher who founded and published the innovative paperback line of Ballantine Books from 1952 to 1974 with his wife, Betty Ballantine....
of Ballantine Books
Ballantine Books
Ballantine Books is a major book publisher located in the United States, founded in 1952 by Ian Ballantine with his wife, Betty Ballantine. It was acquired by Random House in 1973, which in turn was acquired by Bertelsmann AG in 1998 and remains part of that company today. Ballantine's logo is a...
following various public appearances Ehrlich had made regarding population issues and their relation to the environment. Although the Ehrlichs collaborated on the book, the publisher insisted that a single author be credited, and also asked to change their preferred title: Population, Resources, and Environment. The title Population Bomb was taken (with permission) from General William H. Draper, founder of the Population Crisis Committee
Population Action International
Population Action International is an international nongovernmental organization that uses research and advocacy to improve global access to family planning and reproductive health care...
and a pamphlet issued in 1954 by the Hugh Moore Fund. The Ehrlichs regret the choice of title, which they admit was a perfect choice from a marketing perspective, but think that "it led Paul to be miscategorized as solely focused on human numbers, despite our interest in all the factors affecting the human trajectory."
Early editions of The Population Bomb began with the statement:
Much of the book is spent describing the state of the environment and the food security
Food security
Food security refers to the availability of food and one's access to it. A household is considered food-secure when its occupants do not live in hunger or fear of starvation. According to the World Resources Institute, global per capita food production has been increasing substantially for the past...
situation, which is described as increasingly dire. Ehrlich argues that as the existing population was not being fed adequately, and as it was growing rapidly it was unreasonable to expect sufficient improvements in food production to feed everyone. He further argued that the growing population placed escalating strains on all aspects of the natural world.
In answer to the question, "what needs to be done?" he wrote, "We must rapidly bring the world population under control, reducing the growth rate to zero or making it negative. Conscious regulation of human numbers must be achieved. Simultaneously we must, at least temporarily, greatly increase our food production." Ehrlich described a number of "ideas on how these goals might be reached." He believed that the United States should take a leading role in population control, both because it was already consuming much more than the rest of the world, and therefore had a moral duty to reduce its impact, and because the US would have to lead international efforts due to its prominence in the world. In order to avoid charges of hypocrisy or racism it would have to take the lead in population reduction efforts. Ehrlich floats the idea of adding "temporary sterilants
Compulsory sterilization
Compulsory sterilization also known as forced sterilization programs are government policies which attempt to force people to undergo surgical sterilization...
" to the water supply or staple foods. However, he rejects the idea as unpractical due to "criminal inadequacy of biomedical research in this area." He suggests a tax scheme in which additional children would add to a family's tax burden at increasing rates for more children, as well as luxury tax
Luxury tax
A luxury tax is a tax on luxury goods: products not considered essential. A luxury tax may be modeled after a sales tax or VAT, charged as a percentage on all items of particular classes, except that it mainly affects the wealthy because the wealthy are the most likely to buy luxuries such as...
es on childcare goods. He suggests incentives for men who agree to permanent sterilization before they have two children, as well as a variety of other monetary incentives. He proposes a powerful Department of Population and Environment which "should be set up with the power to take whatever steps are necessary to establish a reasonable population size in the United States and to put an end to the steady deterioration of our environment." The department should support research into population control, such as better contraceptives, mass sterilizing agents, and prenatal sex discernment
Prenatal sex discernment
Prenatal sex discernment is the prenatal testing for discerning the sex of a fetus before birth.-Methods:Prenatal sex discernment can be performed by preimplantation genetic diagnosis before conception....
(because families often continue to have children until a male is born. Ehrlich suggested that if they could choose a male child this would reduce the birthrate). Legislation should be enacted guaranteeing the right to an abortion
Abortion
Abortion is defined as the termination of pregnancy by the removal or expulsion from the uterus of a fetus or embryo prior to viability. An abortion can occur spontaneously, in which case it is usually called a miscarriage, or it can be purposely induced...
, and sex education
Sex education
Sex education refers to formal programs of instruction on a wide range of issues relating to human sexuality, including human sexual anatomy, sexual reproduction, sexual intercourse, reproductive health, emotional relations, reproductive rights and responsibilities, abstinence, contraception, and...
should be expanded.
After explaining the domestic policies the US should pursue, he discusses foreign policy. He advocates a system of "triage," such as that suggested by William and Paul Paddock in Famine 1975!. Under this system countries would be divided into categories based on their abilities to feed themselves going forward. Countries with sufficient programmes in place to limit population growth, and the ability to become self sufficient in the future would continue to receive food aid. Countries, for example India, which "were far behind in the population-food game that there is no hope that our food aid will see them through to self-sufficiency" would have their food aid eliminated. Ehrlich argued that this was the only realistic strategy in the long-term. Ehrlich applauds the Paddocks' "courage and foresight" in proposing such a solution. Ehrlich further discusses the need to set up public education programs and agricultural development schemes in developing countries. He argues that the scheme would likely have to be implemented outside the framework of the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
due to the necessity of being selective regarding the targeted regions and countries, and suggests that within countries certain regions should be prioritized to the extent that cooperative separatist movements should be encouraged if they are an improvement over the existing authority. He mentions his support for government mandated sterilization of Indian males with three or more children.
In the rest of the book Ehrlich discusses things which readers can do to help. This is focused primarily on changing public opinion to create pressure on politicians to enact the policies he suggests, which he believed were not politically possible in 1968. At the end of the book he discusses the possibility that his forecasts may be wrong, a fact which he felt he must acknowledge as a scientist. However, he believes that humanity will only be better off if it follows his prescriptions, so that even if he is incorrect it is the right course of action.
The book sold over two million copies, raised the general awareness of population and environmental issues, and influenced 1960s and 1970s public policy.
Context
In 1948 two widely read books were published that would inspire a "neo-Malthusian" debate on population and the environment: Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered PlanetOur Plundered Planet
WIKIPEDIA Our Plundered Planet is a book published in 1948 that was written by Fairfield Osborn about environmental destruction by humankind. The book is a critique of humankind's poor stewardship of Earth. It typifies the earliest apocalyptic environmental literature, in which human beings are...
and William Vogt
William Vogt
William Vogt was an ecologist and ornithologist, with a strong interest in population control. He was the author of best-seller Road to Survival , National Director of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and secretary of the Conservation Foundation.William Vogt was born in Mineola, New York...
’s Road to Survival. Although, they are now much less well known than Population Bomb, they inspired many works such as the original Population Bomb pamphlet by Hugh Everett Moore in 1954 that inspired the name of Ehrlich's book, as well as some of the original societies concerned with population and environmental matters. D.B. Luten has said that although the book is often seen as a seminal work in the field, the Population Bomb is actually best understood as "climaxing and in a sense terminating the debate of the 1950s and 1960s.” Ehrlich has said that he traced his own Malthusian beliefs to a lecture he heard Vogt give when he was attending university in the early 1950s. For Ehrlich, these writers provided “a global framework for things he had observed as a young naturalist."
Restatement of Malthusian theory
The Population Bomb has been characterized by critics as primarily a repetition of the Malthusian catastropheMalthusian catastrophe
A Malthusian catastrophe was originally foreseen to be a forced return to subsistence-level conditions once population growth had outpaced agricultural production...
argument that population growth will outpace agricultural growth unless controlled. Ehrlich observed that since about 1930 the population of the world had doubled within a single generation, from 2 billion to nearly 4 billion, and was on track to do so again. He assumed that available resources on the other hand, and in particular food, were nearly at their limits. Some critics compare Ehrlich unfavorably to Malthus, saying that although Thomas Malthus
Thomas Malthus
The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus FRS was an English scholar, influential in political economy and demography. Malthus popularized the economic theory of rent....
did not make a firm prediction of imminent catastrophe, Ehrlich warned of a potential massive disaster within the next decade or two. In addition, critics state that unlike Malthus, Ehrlich did not see any means of avoiding the disaster entirely (although some mitigation was possible), and proposed solutions that were much more radical than those discussed by Malthus, such as starving whole countries that refused to implement population control
Population control
Human population control is the practice of artificially altering the rate of growth of a human population.Historically, human population control has been implemented by limiting the population's birth rate, usually by government mandate, and has been undertaken as a response to factors including...
measures.
Ehrlich was certainly not unique in his neo-Malthusian predictions, and there was a wide spread belief in the 1960s and 70s that increasingly catastrophic famines were on their way.
Predictions
The Ehrlichs made a number of specific predictions that did not come to pass, for which they have received criticism. They have acknowledged that some predictions were incorrect. However, they maintain that their general argument remains intact, that their predictions were merely illustrative, that their and others' warnings caused preventive action, or that many of their predictions may yet come true (see Ehrlich's response below). Still other commentators have criticized the Ehrlichs' perceived inability to acknowledge mistakes, evasiveness, and refusal to alter their arguments in the face of contrary evidence.In The Population Bomb's opening lines the authors state that nothing can prevent famines in which hundreds of millions of people will die during the 1970s (amended to 1970s and 80s in later editions), and that there would be "a substantial increase in the world death rate." Although many lives could be saved through dramatic action, it was already too late to prevent a substantial increase in the global death rate. However, in reality the global death rate has continued to decline substantially since then, from 13/1000 in 1965–74 to 10/1000 from 1985–1990. Meanwhile the population of the world has more than doubled, while calories consumed/person have increased 24%. The UN does not keep official death-by-hunger statistics so it is hard to measure whether the "hundreds of millions of deaths" number is correct. Ehrlich himself suggested in 2009 that between 200-300 million had died of hunger since 1968. However, that is measured over 40 years rather than the ten to twenty foreseen in the book, so it can be seen as significantly fewer than predicted.
Famine has not been eliminated, but its root cause has been political instability, not global food shortage. The India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
n economist and Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
winner, Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen, CH is an Indian economist who was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory, and for his interest in the problems of society's poorest members...
, has argued that nations with democracy and a free press have virtually never suffered from extended famines. Nevertheless, in 2010 the UN reported that 925 million of the world's population of nearly seven billion people were in a constant state of hunger. The UN report notes that the percentage of the world's population who qualify as "undernourished" has fallen by more than half, from 33 percent to about 16 percent, since Ehrlich published The Population Bomb.
Ehrlich writes: "I don't see how India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
could possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980." This view was widely held at the time, as another statement of his, later in the book: "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks that India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971." In the book's 1971 edition, the latter prediction was removed, as the food situation in India suddenly improved.
As of 2010, India had almost 1.2 billion people, having nearly tripled its population from around 400 million in 1960. India's Total Fertility Rate in 2008 was calculated to be 2.6. While the absolute numbers of malnourished children in India is high, the rates of malnutrition and poverty in India have declined from approximately 90% at the time of India's independence, to less than 40% today. Ehrlich's prediction about famines were found to be false, although food security is an issue in India. However, most epidemiologists, public health physicians and demographers identify corruption as the chief cause of malnutrition, not "overpopulation". As Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen noted, India frequently had famines during British colonial rule. However, when India became a democracy, there have been no recorded famines.
Journalist Dan Gardner has criticized Ehrlich both for his over-confident predictions and his refusal to acknowledge his errors. "In two lengthy interviews, Ehrlich admitted making not a single major error in the popular works he published in the late 1960s and early 1970s … the only flat-out mistake Ehrlich acknowledges is missing the destruction of the rain forests, which happens to be a point that supports and strengthens his world view—and is therefore, in cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. They do this by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Dissonance is also reduced by justifying,...
terms, not a mistake at all. Beyond that, he was by his account, off a little here and there, but only because the information he got from others was wrong. Basically, he was right across the board."
Showmanship
One frequent criticism of The Population Bomb is that it focused on spectacle and exaggeration at the expense of accuracy. Pierre Desrochers and Christine Hoffbauer remark that "at the time of writing The Population Bomb, Paul and Anne Ehrlich should have been more cautious and revised their tone and rhetoric, in light of the undeniable and already apparent errors and shortcomings of Osborn and Vogt’s analyses." Charles Rubin has written that it was precisely because Ehrlich was largely unoriginal and wrote in a clear emotionally gripping style that it became so popular. He quotes a review from Natural HistoryNatural History (magazine)
Natural History is an American natural history magazine. The stated mission of the magazine is to promote public understanding and appreciation of nature and science.- History :...
noting that Ehrlich does not try to "convince intellectually by mind dulling statistics," but rather roars "like an Old Testament
Old Testament
The Old Testament, of which Christians hold different views, is a Christian term for the religious writings of ancient Israel held sacred and inspired by Christians which overlaps with the 24-book canon of the Masoretic Text of Judaism...
Prophet." Gardner says, "as much as the events and culture of the era, Paul Ehrlich's style explain the enormous audience he attracted." Indeed, an appearance on The Tonight Show
The Tonight Show
The Tonight Show is an American late-night talk show that has aired on NBC since 1954. It is the longest currently running regularly scheduled entertainment program in the United States, and the third longest-running show on NBC, after Meet the Press and Today.The Tonight Show has been hosted by...
with Johnny Carson
Johnny Carson
John William "Johnny" Carson was an American television host and comedian, known as host of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson for 30 years . Carson received six Emmy Awards including the Governor Award and a 1985 Peabody Award; he was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 1987...
helped to propel the success of the book, as well as Ehrlich's celebrity. Desrochers and Hoffbauer go on to conclude that it seems hard to deny that using an alarmist tone and emotional appeal were the main lessons that the present generation of environmentalists learned from Ehrlich's success.
Marxist
On the political left the book received criticism that it was focusing on "the wrong problem", and that the real issue was distribution of resources rather than of overpopulation. Marxists worried that Ehrlich's work could be used to justify genocide and imperial control, as well as oppression of minorities and disadvantaged groups or a even a return to eugenicsEugenics
Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...
. Barry Commoner
Barry Commoner
Barry Commoner is an American biologist, college professor, and eco-socialist. He ran for president of the United States in the 1980 US presidential election on the Citizens Party ticket. He was also editor of Science Illustrated magazine.-Biography:Commoner was born in Brooklyn...
argued that the Ehrlichs were too focused on overpopulation as the source of environmental problems, and that their proposed solutions were politically unacceptable because of the coercion that they implied, and because the cost would fall disproportionately on the poor. He argued that technological, and above all social development would lead to a natural decrease in both population growth and environmental damage.
Ehrlich's response
In a 2004 Grist MagazineGrist Magazine
Grist is a free American liberal non-profit online magazine that has been publishing environmental news and commentary with a wry twist since 1999. Grists taglines are "Gloom and doom with a sense of humor" and "A beacon in the smog"...
interview, Ehrlich acknowledged some specific predictions he had made, in the years around the time the Population Bomb was published, that had not come to pass. However, as to a number of his fundamental ideas and assertions he maintained that facts and science proved them correct.
In answer to the question: "Were your predictions in The Population Bomb right?", Ehrlich responded:
In another retrospective article published in 2009, Ehrlich said, in response to criticism that many of his predictions had not come to pass:
External links
- Paul R Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich. The Population Bomb Revisited, Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development, (2009) I(3)
- Dr. Albert Bartlett, 2004 lecture, "Arithmetic, Population and Energy," http://globalpublicmedia.com/transcripts/645
- "The Global Food Crisis," June 2009 article, National Geographic Magazine, http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/06/cheap-food/bourne-text
- The Population Bomb (working title), Documentary Film http://www.thepopulationbomb.com