New York Times: Ehrlich Was Wrong
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The New York Times ran an op-ed today stating the obvious — Paul Ehrlich was dead wrong. According to the Times,
A generation ago, Paul Ehrlich warned in “The Population Bomb” that with demands on resources soaring, overpopulation would kill our planet. As demands on water and air soared, many thought he was right. Now it turns out that population growth rates are plummeting for good and tragic reasons. The implications are profound.
The “good” reason for the decline is declining fertility rates as people throughout the world delay the age at which they have children. The “tragic” reasons, of course, are the AIDS pandemic which will cut short the lives of all too many in Africa and Asia.
But what the Times doesn’t note is that the situation would have been far worse had the world listened to Ehrlich and followed through on his suggestions of using military might and a denial of aid to cure the overpopulation cancer that Ehrlich claimed was afflicting the planet.
Today the percentage of people suffering from hunger in the world is lower than at any time in the last century. Ehrlich’s final solution to the overpopulation “problem” would have condemned many people in the developing world to an agonizing death as he used them as a means to an end of his ideal world population.
Thank goodness that things have changed so much that even the New York Times feels comfortable in stating what has been obvious for at least 20 years — Ehrlich got things completely backwards.
Source:
Humanity’s Slowing Growth. The New York Times, March 17, 2003.
The New York Times: Ehrlich Was Wrong by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Tags: Paul Ehrlich
January 24th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
It is not so much that “Ehrlich was wrong”, but that the unexpected “green revolution” has delayed what is likely to be an ineviatable consequence of unabated growth. Even with the decline in birth rates the U.N.’s conservative estimate has the world population doubling by mid-century, putting greater strains on agriculture to keep up. Optimistically they look for it to decline beyond that and level off at some point, which does not seem terribly realistic in a world where those who choose to remain ignorant are demanding higher birth rates, i.e. Phillip Longman and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.