The Book That Incited a Worldwide Fear of Overpopulation ‘The Population Bomb’ made dire predictions—and triggered a wave of repression around the world

Smithsonian Magazine ^ | January 2018 | Charles C. Mann

[daniel1212]

As 1968 began, Paul Ehrlich was an entomologist at Stanford University, known to his peers for his groundbreaking studies of the co-evolution of flowering plants and butterflies but almost unknown to the average person. That was about to change. In May, Ehrlich released a quickly written, cheaply bound paperback, The Population Bomb. Initially it was ignored. But over time Ehrlich’s tract would sell millions of copies and turn its author into a celebrity. It would become one of the most influential books of the 20th century—and one of the most heatedly attacked.

The first sentence set the tone: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” And humanity had lost. In the 1970s, the book promised, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” No matter what people do, “nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”

Published at a time of tremendous conflict and social upheaval, Ehrlich’s book argued that many of the day’s most alarming events had a single, underlying cause: Too many people, packed into too-tight spaces, taking too much from the earth. Unless humanity cut down its numbers—soon—all of us would face “mass starvation” on “a dying planet.”

Ehrlich, now 85, told me recently that the book’s main contribution was to make population control “acceptable” as “a topic to debate.” But the book did far more than that. It gave a huge jolt to the nascent environmental movement and fueled an anti-population-growth crusade that led to human rights abuses around the world....

He was invited onto NBC’s “Tonight Show.”..For more than an hour he spoke about population and ecology, about birth control and sterilization, to an audience of tens of millions.

[Fiji Hill]

In 1969, I saw Ehrlich when he came to the slopes of Fiji Hill to give an address at Occidental College. He urged every young man in the audience to get a vasectomy. I thought his presentation was creepy.

[KarlInOhio]

The only way I was able to survive the Great Starvation of the 1980s was by eating remaindered copies of the Population Bomb.

[heartwood]

Agreed

[fini]

"The only way I was able to survive the Great Starvation of the 1980s was by eating remaindered copies of the Population Bomb."

You too? I never had more than a few frozen meals in the frig and a few cans of misc meat available. If it wasn't for abundant stocks of beer and cigarettes, I don't think I would have survived.

[Lurker]

Julian Simon won the bet.

L

[yesthatjallen]

The Ehrlichs took the cab ride in 1966. How many people lived in Delhi then? A bit more than 2.8 million, according to the United Nations. By comparison, the 1966 population of Paris was about 8 million. No matter how carefully one searches through archives, it is not easy to find expressions of alarm about how the Champs-Élysées was “alive with people.” Instead, Paris in 1966 was an emblem of elegance and sophistication.

Delhi was overcrowded, and would continue to grow. By 1975, the city had 4.4 million people—a 50 percent gain in a decade. Why? “Not births,” says Sunita Narain, head of the Centre for Science and Environment, a think tank in Delhi. Instead, she says, the overwhelming majority of the new people in Delhi then were migrants drawn from other parts of India by the promise of employment.

The man who led the demographic collapse of western nations based his theory on a completely false premise.

[A strike]

Nope, disagree,

The dystopian problems you mention are almost solely the result of too much government. Mankind has thusfar been able to feed itself barring natural catastrophies or evil human intervention.

[nathanbedford]

The dystopian problems you mention are almost solely the result of too much government.

My argument is that too much government is not just the cause but a result of the "dystopia" created by too many people competing for too little space such as housing in New York City, too few resources, such as water in Los Angeles or Nevada.

Mankind has thusfar been able to feed itself barring natural catastrophies or evil human intervention.

Again, my argument is not Hobbesian but about liberty:

"My concern about exploding population is not offered out of Hobbesian theories of want but out of real fears concerning liberty. Even assuming we are theoretically capable of feeding billions more people, are we actually able to do so as a free people operating in a free market in a free society?"

[A strike]

“Mankind has thusfar been able to feed itself barring natural catastrophies or evil human intervention.”

I should have said (sometimes evil) human intervention; because there is and has always been plenty of natural stupidity.

[KC_for_Freedom]

Absolutely, I fell for it hook line and sinker. We only had a single child as a result. After a few years I realized that he knew nothing and as a result I started thinking for myself. Now we support Trump and our son won’t talk to us.

[a fool in paradise]

The ushered in the agenda they wanted - kill off the west

[impimp]

Overpopulation is a lie. Growing populations make the USA strong.

[A strike]

So are you arguing that too many people is the cause of bad government?
I agree we have bad government but not that it is because of too many people, there are way too many other reasons.

Also you question “are we actually able to do so as a free people operating in a free market in a free society?”
I guess that depends on how much you believe in the free market in a free society.

[The Truth Will Make You Free]

That book about killed me. Read it high school. Lost hope. Got depressed and confused. Went into the occult. Hitch-hiked cross country. Thank God I had a praying aunt and was eventually led to the Lord.

[decal]

You’ll notice he wasn’t the one who signed the check - the coward made his wife do it.

[nathanbedford]

Growing populations make the USA strong

I wrote this last September which, with the onset of the coronavirus and the truly dystopian government imposed restrictions on individual liberty by the Chinese government, now reads as rather prophetic:

"if you're a military analyst you might come to regard a huge population mass of like 1.4 billion to be a burden rather than a strategic advantage. What a huge target! How do you feed it, how do you control it, what happens when he gets out of control?"

Does a growing population affording huge targets in the nuclear age make America stronger?

Does a growing population that until now has unfortunately been turned over by our politicians to the Chinese as a a market for consumption of Chinese goods, really make us stronger?

Does a growing population in an age in which wealth is increasingly made not by human hands but by robots really make us stronger?

Does an increasing population in an age when wealth is generated by robots but distributed to people really make us wealthier and stronger?

There's a growing population in an age of pandemics that politicians will inevitably mean huge subsidy payments for healthcare, unemployment, bankruptcies etc. really make us stronger?

Do growing populations around the world (your reply seems to argue that all population growth everywhere is good) pressing into Europe and across our southern border really make a stronger?

Does the increase in population advanced as a cure to the threat to our Ponzi scheme that we call Social Security really only an enlargement of the very Ponzi scheme which is failing, really make us stronger?

Overpopulation steals our liberty! That is a very real threat.

[nathanbedford]

So are you arguing that too many people is the cause of bad government? I agree we have bad government but not that it is because of too many people, there are way too many other reasons.

Why do you persist in misquoting me to create strawmen? I said:

"My argument is that too much government is not just the cause but a result of the "dystopia" created by too many people …"

[A strike]

sorry
missed the fine distinction

[nathanbedford]

Let me try to make the point another way by quoting a reply from 2015:

The next time an article gets posted about overpopulation and the swarm of reflex posters reappears pooh-poohing the problems of overpopulation, consider this kerfuffle which is really quite trivial.

Our conception of property rights was created at a time when America was a vast wilderness and we only sparsely populated a thin strip along the Atlantic coast. To the west was a vast fastness of wilderness where one could go, clear the land, live out of sight and out of mind of our neighbors and dispose of our property as we individually and alone saw fit. Today we are a country of 315 million people, the population has more than doubled in my lifetime, much of that population increase consists of people who do not share my culture, my language, my very Teutonic conception of orderliness, my sense of civic responsibility.

So people who are as tight-assed as I am seek to have their environment ordered according to their lights. I don't want my neighbor's front yard to have a disused toilet bowl as a planter, I do not want to see his car up on blocks, I do not want him posting commercial signs. In short I want him to have a nice, well groomed, Protestant appearance to his half-acre.

I do not live in the wilderness, I grew up in a leafy suburban upper-middle-class town built largely after World War II. I cannot escape my neighbor therefore I must regulate him but because I need to regulate him I must equally submit myself to regulation. There is the rub.

I am afflicted with normal human nature, I want my neighbor to be regulated according to my tastes but I want to be free of the appearance police myself. When my neighbor is regulated it is to keep property values up but when I am regulated it is fascism on the hoof.

Not only are we imprisoning ourselves in gated gulags in order to avoid the onrush of population which doubles every century, we are desperately trying to protect ourselves from foreign and alien cultures who do not conceive of well manicured lawns as a desirable or even normal way of living. We can no longer flee these people by going into the wilderness, we can only regulate them.

These are the problems that come with population and with immigration. When we try to solve them with regulation we inevitably trade away our freedoms.

[A strike]

I don’t disagree that there are issues and sometimes big problems concerning quickly swelling population, made exponentially worse by immigration. But my point is that it is not necessarily the size of the population that causes the bad government that leads to bad outcomes. In my opinion there are more sinister reasons which is where we are.
Btw, I’m perfectly satisfied with fewer people here.