Posted on 03/15/2026 12:35:58 PM PDT by Borges
Paul R. Ehrlich, an eminent ecologist and population scientist whose best-selling book, “The Population Bomb,” was celebrated as a prescient warning of a coming age of food shortages and famine but later criticized by conservatives and academic rivals for what they called its sky-is-falling rhetoric, died on Friday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 93.
His death, at a nursing facility in the retirement community where he lived, was caused by complications of cancer, his daughter, Lisa Marie Daniel, said.
As a young professor of biology at Stanford University in the mid-1960s, Dr. Ehrlich was known for his absorbing lectures on evolution, in which he described what plants and animals faced on a planet stressed by industrial pollution and rapid population growth. He distilled those lectures into an article published in December 1967 in New Scientist magazine.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
It was NOT criticized for being alarmist. It was criticized for being wrong.
Any truth to the rumor that the inscription on his headstone is “Never make a bet with Julian Simon”?
The inventor of fear porn.
He is part of the depopulation bomb now... Just wondering, did he have any offsprings? If he does, he was a hypocrite, if he didn’t no great loss.
Let me guess, the NYT article was short on mention of Prof. Julian Simon and his wagers with Ehrlich?
He has now done his part.
Finally! He did the right thing. About time!
I still remember Johnny Carson just eating up the guy’s bullshit when he had him on the show.
Most countries have some form of Social Security except places like Egypt, Afghanistan, and most of Africa.
If the government is going to take care of you in your old age, you're not going to need to have children.
He should have done so sooner!
It was based on the idea that an acre of land could only feed X number of people... And that the number of people would grow but what land could produce would stay the same = so the world would starve to death at some future point.
That's because the only places in the world being overpopulated and experiencing real resource scarcity are Third World nations, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. Pointing out that these people are outbreeding the pace of development would be "racist", and so it's no longer a viable political issue.
The Left can't really complain that the Western world is overpopulating (because minus Third World immigration we'd be near zero population growth), so instead they complain that we consume too much.
I’ll bet the climate is hot where he resides now.
He believed it enough to only have one child.
The best snake oil salesmen believe in their product.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.