Your death was Paul Ehrlich’s dream

Rick McGinnis:

You have to wonder if Paul Ehrlich ever thought he’d live to 93. The biologist and writer – his initial specialty was butterflies, though his ambitions proved much broader – had his death announced this March to what can only be described as a mix of tributes and mockery. We should, according to the firm predictions in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, have had our ranks drastically thinned by global famine by now.

Ehrlich, like so many people predicting dire scenarios looming in our imminent futures, doubtlessly imagined that he would beat the odds while billions starved, or that he was somehow exceptional. Considering how many times his deadlines for disaster passed without coming true, he must have considered himself supremely lucky; he certainly never considered that he might have been wrong.

Ehrlich was unequivocal about the doom we faced: he predicted in The Population Bomb, published in 1968, that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s; at the first Earth Day in 1970 he upped the ante to four billion by the 1980s. He said that American lifespans would drop to just 42 years because of chemical poisoning.

“Yet,” as Matt Ridley wrote in The Free Press, “he not only lived more than 50 years longer than 42; he lived to be one of more than 8 billion people in a world where global life expectancy has increased at the average rate of seven hours per day since he forecast it would collapse. Meanwhile, famine has all but gone extinct, with death rates from mass starvation down to a tiny fraction of what they were in the 1960s. Here are the astounding numbers: in the 1960s, 29.7 million people out of a population of 3 billion died in famines that killed more than 100,000 people each. In the 2010s, 1.1 million out of a population of more than 8 billion died in such episodes: a decline of 99 per cent in the death rate.”

As Ridley and several other Ehrlich eulogists wrote, even before The Population Bomb was published scientists like Norman Borlaug had begun a “green revolution” that saw crop yields increase – information that Ehrlich chose to downplay or ignore not just while he wrote his book but for decades afterward.

In 2000, when Jonathan Margolis published A Brief History of Tomorrow, he wrote that “the sexier, more media-friendly Ehrich pessimism has remained impermeable to any more optimistic view, and is routinely repeated by the great and the good, in spite of the fact that such famines as there have been in areas of counties like Ethiopia since Ehrlich’s prediction are all the more tragic for being easily avoidable.”

If you weren’t alive at that time it’s hard to overstate just how predominant Ehrlich and his predictions were. As Elliot Haspel noted in an article in UnHerd, Ehrlich appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson more than 20 times and his book sold more than two million copies. He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 1990 – at which point half the world’s population should have starved to death. In 2012 he was given honorary membership in London’s Royal Society despite predicting in 1970 that “if I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

Haspel writes that “while The Population Bomb has been subject to many academic critiques over the years, the lay public has rarely heard them. Instead, many ordinary people have been raised on similar nonsense, promoted by pop scientists like Bill Nye, whose show Bill Nye Saves the World featured an episode titled ‘Earth’s People Problem.’ Hollywood, too, has often served as a conduit for Ehrlich-ite fantasies: witness the whales heading up the Hudson River in Avengers: Endgame, representative of Nature healing itself, after half the planet’s population is removed by a supervillain. Insofar as most people think at all about population dynamics, their instinct is that too many people is the problem, not too few.”

Despite Ehrlich’s predictions, global population has not just stabilized but is projected to begin declining as birth rates are falling to well below replacement rates. Ehrlich might have taken credit for much of this “progress;” his ideas were influential enough to see Indira Gandhi’s government mandate forced sterilization, and China introduced a catastrophic “one child policy” (in practice more like a “one son policy”) whose effects the country can’t disguise today even behind its notoriously cooked population statistics.

In a 2018 profile of Ehrlich and his book in Smithsonian magazine, Charles C. Mann wrote that “population-control programs pressured women to use only certain officially mandated contraceptives. In Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Korea and Taiwan, health workers’ salaries were, in a system that invited abuse, dictated by the number of IUDs they inserted into women. In the Philippines, birth-control pills were literally pitched out of helicopters hovering over remote villages. Millions of people were sterilized, often coercively, sometimes illegally, frequently in unsafe conditions, in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia and Bangladesh.”

But Ehrlich didn’t think we were going far enough; he proposed a tax on families for each child, rising steeply after the third birth, and “responsibility prizes” for couples who went five years without having a child, or when the husband had a vasectomy. He wanted the FCC to oversee efforts to depict large families negatively on television and mused that it was unfortunate that it wasn’t technically or politically possible to put sterilizing chemicals in the U.S. water supply. Constitutional freedoms were, he reasoned, unfortunate obstacles in the way of forestalling the disaster he was sure would happen sooner or later; countries without them were able to act more responsibly.

But Ehrlich’s ideas have thrived and will continue to resonate; as the headline of Matt Ridley’s article in The Free Press put it, “Paul Ehrlich Was Wrong – but He Still Changed the World.” The non-profit advocacy group he co-founded as Zero Population Growth has rebranded itself as Population Connection and describes itself as a “national grassroots population organization that educates young people, and advocates progressive action to stabilize world population at a level that can be sustained by Earth’s resources.”

Ehrlich’s career-spanning errors weren’t even unique – his whole thesis was little more than a reheated version of the centuries-old theories of Anglican curate and economist Thomas Malthus, endlessly debunked yet still evergreen. His vision of a starving world had a strange appeal that meshed with so much of the dystopian sci-fi popular for the last half-century. “There’s something about Malthusian dread that is simply too seductive to shake,” wrote Jonah Goldberg in his Los Angeles Times column on Ehrlich’s passing.

He recalls an article in the Economist on the 50th anniversary of the film Soylent Green – where starving populations resort unwittingly to cannibalism via government-manufactured processed meal made of humans – that called the movie an “eerie prophecy.” “It is impossible to watch the film today without weighing up how accurate its predictions turned out to be,” the magazine reflected. 

“Really?” Goldberg asked. “It’s ‘impossible to watch’ a movie about mass state-sponsored euthanasia that turns human beings into high-protein crackers to fend off starvation – set in 2022! – without marveling at the accuracy of its predictions?” Like many others, Goldberg noted how the sub-headline of the New York Times obituary for Ehrlich stated that “he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.”

Despite being consistently and unapologetically wrong, endless policy has been enacted as if Ehrlich’s predictions actually proved true. State-assisted suicide, offered as medical treatment, is precisely the kind of utilitarian program that treats citizens as mere numbers on a spreadsheet devised to cull excess bodies.

I have lost track of the times when friends and family and not just strangers or talking heads have confidently, even blandly, remarked while discussing some disparate crisis that something should probably be done since “there are just too many people.” My response is to ask what sort of concrete action they could take. “Who should go first? Your children? Your grandchildren? How about you?”

Nobody ever has an answer. Like Ehrlich I imagine they think they deserve every year they’ve enjoyed past those doomsday deadlines while someone, somewhere else, is expendable – or at least until something like the Canadian government reminds you that it’s an option.

Read original article