Paul Ehrlich died last week. I doubt he would have minded, considering he thought there should have been a lot fewer people on earth. Really, if he wanted to put his money where his rhetoric was, he should have checked out a bit earlier.
Ehrlich, who passed away at the age of 93 on Friday, was a Stanford University biologist best known for his 1968 book “The Population Bomb.” The thesis was effectively in the title — overpopulation would kill us all.
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now,” he wrote in the book, predicting that four billion humans would die.
Well, this didn’t work out as planned. In his obituary, The New York Times did put an “austere religious scholar” twist on his legacy, noting in the subtitle that “he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.”
I guess they figured that was defensible because there are over eight billion people on the planet now and they’ll all die eventually, if not writhing from hunger due to that pesky population bomb that never happened.
There are plenty of reasons to loathe both Ehrlich himself and the legacy he leaves behind, but this clip from 1970 making the rounds should neatly demonstrate why we oughtn’t lament the loss.
Ehrlich was being asked what the government should do to control the population. He said he was “against government interference in our lives” to start with, which turned out to be just as much of a lie as the rest of his life’s work.
“The very first thing the government should do is try and take the pressure off to reproduce,” Ehrlich said. “There’s a lot of pressure in our society now to reproduce.”
“If you’re single, people try and push you into getting married,” he added. “The idea is that nobody should escape. So there’s pressure to get married.”
“Young couples, if they don’t have children, people say, gee, they must be sterile,” he continued. “They never say, gee, maybe they like good wine and going to the theater and so on. They prefer that to scraping diapers. So there’s pressure to have children.”
At least in that respect, Ehrlich has succeeded, although not through government intervention: We’ve convinced an entire generation that they should care about fleeting pleasures more than the greatest joys in life, although we’ve made them feel guilty about that, too. (Wine has a carbon footprint, after all!)
However, Ehrlich wanted more — he wanted White House intervention.
“The president ought to say, from now, here on out, no intelligent, patriotic American family ought to have more than two children, preferably one, if you’re starting a family now,” Ehrlich said. “Not any law, but just say this is what responsible people do.”
And then he said there should be a law — of the most ridiculous sort.
“He ought to make the FCC see to it that large families are always treated in a negative light on television, wherever they appear,” Ehrlich continued. “There ought to be a tremendous amount of television time devoted to spot commercials, the sort we’ve had against smoking. But ones in the middle, say, in the middle of ‘The Beverly Hillbillies,’ you get a scene which shows Los Angeles in the smog and it just says, ‘This city has a fatal disease. It’s called overpopulation.’ So long.”
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