Human consumption: Flying in the face of logic

Forty years after dropping his Population Bomb into the environment debate, Paul Ehrlich is still railing at man’s destructiveness

In 1968, six years after Rachel Carson published Silent Spring – the book regarded as marking the beginning of modern environmental consciousness – a young American entomology professor at Stanford University, California, published The Population Bomb. The tenor of Paul Ehrlich’s book echoed the revolutionary sensibility and pervasive anxiety of the time. In it, Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, presented a neo-Malthusian scenario of imminent population explosion and ensuing disaster. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” the Ehrlichs warned. “In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programmes embarked upon now. At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…”

Not surprisingly, the second part of his message – that society must find ways to limit population growth – drew howls of protest. The left saw it as immoral, and feared that the right would use the idea of overpopulation to promote only the right kind of social or ethnic bloodlines. The right worried that population control might limit the rights of individuals. And virtually every one objected to the discussion of human reproduction as a condition of food and habitat as if discussing, say, a population of fruit flies.


Forty years on, the message from Ehrlich, now 76 and the Bing professor of population studies in the department of biological sciences at Stanford, has barely mellowed. He and his wife have just published a new book, The Dominant Animal, the central theme of which is how one species, Homo sapiens, has become so powerful that it can significantly undermine the Earth’s ability to support much of life.

It is undeniably timely as we lurch from one grim realisation to another: a climate crisis, then an energy crisis, now a food crisis. And underlying them all is the issue of population. When Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, there were 3.5 billion people on Earth; there are now 6.7 billion. “The connections are so obvious it’s appalling that they’re not made,” he says. “Each person we add now disproportionately impacts on the environment and life-support systems of the planet.”

There is a growing sense in the environmental movement that population will again emerge as a central component of the debate on global warming. But it’s a discussion that’s open to distortion on one side by fringe groups who use the issue as cover for positions on race and immigration, and on another by superstitious thinking that technology will arrive to support and improve living standards for ever greater numbers of people, or that some kind of natural phenomenon – such as a disease, perhaps with a moral or spiritual component – will take the problem out of our hands entirely.

Guardian