{"id":12774,"date":"2018-07-10T02:51:30","date_gmt":"2018-07-10T02:51:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=12774"},"modified":"2018-07-11T03:05:09","modified_gmt":"2018-07-11T03:05:09","slug":"a-long-fuse-the-population-bomb-is-still-ticking-50-years-after-its-publication","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/a-long-fuse-the-population-bomb-is-still-ticking-50-years-after-its-publication\/","title":{"rendered":"A long fuse: ‘The Population Bomb’ is still ticking 50 years after its publication"},"content":{"rendered":"

Derek Hoff<\/a>, University of Utah<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe battle to feed all of humanity is over,\u201d Stanford biologist and ecologist Paul Erhlich declared on the first page of his 1968 best-seller, \u201cThe Population Bomb<\/a>.\u201d Because the \u201cstork had passed the plow,\u201d he predicted, \u201chundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.\u201d <\/p>\n

Ehrlich\u2019s book identified dramatically accelerating world population growth as the central underlying cause of myriad problems, from a food crisis in India to the Vietnam War to smog and urban riots in the United States. It sold more than 2 million copies and went through 20 reprints by 1971. Ehrlich appeared more than 20 times on NBC\u2019s \u201cThe Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson\u201d<\/a>, and became the first president of Zero Population Growth, a Washington D.C.\u2013based advocacy organization, while remaining a professor at Stanford.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Population Bomb\u201d created more space to hold radical views on population matters, but its impact was fleeting, and maybe even harmful to the population movement. By the early 1970s, many critics were savaging Ehrlich and the larger goal of achieving zero population growth. And the politics of \u201cmorning in America\u201d in the 1980s successfully marginalized Erhlich as a doomsdayer.<\/p>\n

However, as a historian who has studied<\/a> debates about population growth throughout U.S. history, I believe that Ehrlich\u2019s warnings deserve a new and less hysterical hearing. While Ehrlich has acknowledged significant errors, he was correct that lowering birth rates was \u2013 and remains \u2013 a crucial plank in addressing global environmental crises. <\/p>\n

\n \"\"<\/a>
\n Paul Ehrlich in 2010.<\/span>
\n Paul R. Ehrlich<\/a>, CC BY<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A Malthusian warning<\/h2>\n

Ehrlich drew on nearly 200 years of thinking inspired by British pastor and political economist Robert Thomas Malthus. In his 1798 study, \u201cAn Essay on the Principle of Population<\/a>,\u201d Malthus famously predicted that \u201cgeometric\u201d population growth would overwhelm \u201carithmetic\u201d gains in agricultural production, leading to wars, famines and societal collapse. <\/p>\n

Fears of the potentially dangerous social and ecological effects of population growth intensified after World War II. Global population surged as public health improved greatly in developing nations, increasing life expectancy. At the same time, the new science of ecology demonstrated the fragility of Earth\u2019s interconnected systems. And the Cold War promoted worries that population-induced poverty would breed communism<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Mainstream advocates of arresting population growth emphasized better access to family planning and education, but Ehrlich had no use for such baby steps. \u201cWell-spaced children will starve, vaporize in thermonuclear war, or die of plague just as well as unplanned children,\u201d he wrote. <\/p>\n

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