Paul Ehrlich, the biologist whose 1968 bestseller “The Population Bomb” warned of imminent mass starvation and environmental catastrophe from overpopulation and whose predictions proved spectacularly wrong, died March 13 at age 93. His death has prompted retrospection among Catholic scholars, who condemned his legacy as a “false prophet” whose ideas fueled deadly population control policies and demographic decline worldwide.
Several of those scholars, whose work deals directly with the fallout of Ehrlich’s ideas, did not mince words when talking with EWTN News about the immense responsibility Ehrlich bore for his “wrong predictions,” which they say led to the deaths and nonexistence of millions of people around the world.
“He was a false prophet of the worst kind,” said Steve Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute and a specialist on China. “He is responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths worldwide, and his wrong predictions prevented millions of souls from coming into existence. There is nothing more diabolical than that.”
Ehrlich’s book famously opened with the following statement: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
Later editions of the book, which Ehrlich co-authored with his wife, Anne, sometimes broadened the dates slightly to “the 1970s and 1980s,” but his core prediction, that large-scale famines killing hundreds of millions were inevitable in the immediate future, never came to pass.
Ehrlich “never acknowledged how extraordinarily, absolutely wrong he was about every one of his predictions,” Mosher said. “America and many parts of the world are now below replacement birth rate in part because of his false proclamations of doom.”
In the book, Ehrlich suggested voluntary, mass contraceptive use, tax penalties on large families, “luxury taxes” on goods such as cribs and diapers, and “responsibility prizes” and other incentives for childlessness or delayed marriage.
If these methods failed to change people’s “value systems,” however, he suggested governments force change “by compulsion,” such as adding temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple foods (with government-rationed antidotes to control birth rates).
He also called for a powerful federal bureau to enforce population limits and the conditioning of foreign aid on recipient countries’ population-control efforts, which, according to Mosher, to this day remains part of U.S. law.
Ehrlich framed these as necessary to avert catastrophe, emphasizing “conscious regulation of human numbers” and that “the cancer [of population growth] itself must be cut out.”
Ehrlich’s death “marks the end of the life of one of the great enemies of mankind,” said Catherine Pakaluk, a Harvard-trained economist at The Catholic University of America and author of the 2024 book “Hannah’s Daughters: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth,” in which college-educated women explain why they chose to have large families.
“He was unbalanced, and no part of his work was correct,” she said. “The great scandal is that he was welcomed not only by progressives all over the world but even by Christians and Catholics as some kind of prophet.”
Mosher agreed: “Many people have regretted that they were deceived by Ehrlich and his false claims. They tell me they were deceived into contracepting or aborting the children they would have had out of existence.”
He taught “really nasty, humanity-hating stuff. I will pray for the repose of his soul,” Mosher said.
Though Ehrlich later distanced himself from the more coercive policies he urgently suggested in his first book, Mosher told EWTN News that Ehrlich often refused to debate others with ideas that opposed his “because he didn’t like being contradicted and could not admit that he was wrong.”
Instead, Ehrlich doubled down, Mosher said: “With each passing decade, he would write a new book, explaining his predictions were merely premature, not wrong. He taught that people were jeopardizing earth’s ability to support life and were a plague on the planet. By killing ourselves, we’d be doing mother earth a favor.”
Indeed, in 2018, Ehrlich said civilization’s collapse was “a near certainty in the next few decades.”
An obituary in the New York Times last week called Ehrlich’s predictions of ecosystem collapse and mass starvation “premature” rather than wrong.
China’s 1-child policy an outcome of Ehrlich’s ideas
In 1979, Mosher, who studied anthropology, oceanography, and East Asian studies at Stanford University, where Ehrlich taught, was the first American social scientist to visit mainland China. Invited there by the Chinese government, he personally witnessed women forced to have abortions under the “one-child policy.”
Mosher was a pro-choice atheist at the time, he said, but seeing the brutality of the forced abortions, sterilizations, and infanticide led him to change his views and eventually become a pro-life Catholic.
Mosher called Ehrlich the “godfather of China’s one-child policy” because the communist regime adopted principles directly from Ehrlich’s book, among other sources.
“His proposals, which suggested governments should impose harsh regimens of population controls and resource conservation, using whatever means necessary, led to the forced killing of 400 million unborn and newborn children,” Mosher said.
He pointed out that Ehrlich’s ideas were so wrong, China is now having a “population implosion. The government is desperate to raise the birth rate, proposing incentives to young couples to have children.”
Ehrlich’s thinking ‘rejects the providence of God’
Ehrlich’s thinking “rejects the providence of God,” Pakaluk said, “specifically in the domains which are God’s: Scripture says God is the author of life and death.”
Regarding population growth (or decline) and climate change, Pakaluk said people of faith should ask: “How does this thing, which seems difficult or impossible, how does it propose a challenge we as a society have to meet in order to see the plan of God?”
“With the hopeful expectation of people of faith, we say with Our Lady … how? How is it going to work out that people aren’t going to be a threat to mankind? That’s always been the question of Our Lady. She doesn’t doubt, she just has a question,” Pakaluk said.
“The ‘how’ question is the job of people of goodwill, specifically, men and women of science,” she said.
The Green Revolution
Ehrlich’s predictions of worldwide starvation did not come to pass in part because of the Green Revolution, which massively transformed agriculture through advances in technology. It was a vast, global, technological initiative to fight hunger by introducing high-yield, disease-resistant seeds (especially wheat and rice).
Key elements included synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and intensive irrigation, shifting agriculture toward industrial methods. This dramatically increased food production globally and prevented the predicted scale of famine, though hunger and malnutrition have persisted in parts of the world for political or economic reasons.
Ehrlich’s ‘huge cultural impact’
Although Ehrlich was one of many scientists claiming the world could not handle its growing population, Ehrlich’s charisma helped popularize his ideas. He appeared on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson“ at least 20 times.
“Ehrlich had a huge cultural impact,” Mosher said. “He was a pied piper who misled generations of American young people, forced by their professors to read his screed. They thought it was the socially responsible thing to do to have one child.”
Ehrlich wrote more than 50 books and founded Zero Population Growth, now called Population Connection, which blames overpopulation for climate change. He received dozens of awards for his work.
Ehrlich was born in Philadelphia in 1932 and earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania and received his doctoral degree in entomology from the University of Kansas, specializing in butterflies.