A glut of people

THE DOMINANT ANIMAL: HUMAN EVOLUTION AND THE ENVIRONMENT

BY PAUL R. EHRLICH and ANNE H. EHRLICH

Paul and Anne Ehrlich explore the genetic and cultural evolution of the Earth’s dominant animal, looking at what’s gone wrong.

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb, created a furore with its prophesies of war, famine and disaster, based on the exploding human population. In the ensuing years, the rich got richer, the good times continued to roll — at least in the developed nations — and many scoffed at his unfulfilled dystopian predictions. Four decades have passed and Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, have written another book, The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment. The world’s population has increased by three billion and there is genocide in Darfur, a war in Iraq, cities around the world are cloaked in smog, and food and water are diminishing at a frightening rate.


…I found the first half of the book difficult reading. It is academic in style (it has 368 pages, plus detailed notes and a lengthy bibliography), and sentences like this aren’t going to keep a reader glued to the page: “But how those building blocks became concentrated and assembled into metabolizing, self-replicating entities with capsules separating them from the environment is still unknown.”

Fortunately, the second half of the book makes it all worthwhile. Here the Ehrlichs explore the problems that humans’ dominance and overpopulation have created. They note that peak oil has arrived and energy resources are in short supply, the biosphere is slowly being poisoned by toxic chemicals, food shortages are leading to riots and the atmosphere is under attack, most threateningly from global warming. As biologists, they are particularly concerned about what they call the sixth major extinction — that is, humans wiping out other species. They worry that the Earth’s natural capital — the resources and services, provided by nature, on which we are completely dependent — is being rapidly eroded.

Vancouver Sun