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Anti-humanist crank, false prophet, eugenicist, and authoritarian Paul Ehrlich died last week at 93. Considering the celebrity biologist’s view of humans as parasites, it seems unlikely he’d want us to mourn.
Ehrlich is survived by the destructive, apocalyptic environmentalism he helped popularize. His progeny include, but certainly isn’t limited to, the likes of former Vice President Al Gore, who called The Population Bomb a “seminal” work and Ehrlich a “visionary” and “pioneer,” Bill Nye, Greta Thunberg, Michael Mann, and millions of other scaremongering Malthusians and little Ehrlichs prodding us to eat plant-based burgers, warning us against having children, gluing themselves to great works of art, demanding we abandon cheap energy, and trying to compel us to surrender the basic conveniences and necessities of modernity.
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” is the opening line of 1968’s The Population Bomb. The book only gets worse from there. The oceans, he prophesied, would be without life by 1979 and the U.S. population would crater to 23 million by the year 1999 due to pesticides and hunger. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years,” he said in 1970. “While you are reading these words,” the cover of the mass paperback version of the book warned, “three children are dying of starvation — and 24 more babies are being born.”
The New York Times notes that Ehrlich was godfather for the modern “environmental movement,” though it admits he “faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.” Insisting that Ehrlich’s prophecies were “premature,” that he merely got the timing wrong, speaks to the Left’s inability to grasp the power of capitalistic adaptability, modernity, and technology.
And, anyway, his predictions weren’t “wrong,” they were the antithesis of reality.
In 1970, around 37% of the global population suffered from hunger. As of 2024, around 8% did. The world uses nearly 70% less land to produce the same number of crops it did 55 years ago. This revolution in efficiency was driven by the Green Revolution, a movement that began in the early 1960s and was ignored by Ehrlich. In 1970, around 60% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. Today, around 8% does.
Ehrlich was unrepentant when it was obvious he was wrong. Looking back at his earlier work in 2009, the Malthusian regretted that “perhaps the most serious flaw” in The Population Bomb was that it was “much too optimistic.” In 2014, the year Uber Eats was launched, Ehrlich warned we’d “soon be asking: Is it perfectly OK to eat the bodies of your dead because we’re all so hungry?”
There were those who had Ehrlich’s number early on. One of them was the late, great Julian Simon, who argued that human innovation would outpace scarcity and made a wager with Ehrlich in 1980. Simon let the biologist pick any five natural resources he believed would experience shortages due to human consumption over the next decade. Ehrlich lost the bet on all counts, as the composite price index for those commodities, copper, nickel, tin, and so on, fell by more than 40%, despite there being 800 million new people on Earth during the span of the bet.
If the bet was still active, Simon would still win.
It should not be overlooked that Ehrlich was also a raving authoritarian. A fan of the Chinese communist one-child policy, the biologist often floated the idea of mass sterilization campaigns, enforced through pills or public drinking water. Ehrlich thought the state tying aid to infertility was “coercion in a good cause.” The Federal Communications Commission, he argued, “should see to it that large families are always treated in a negative light on television.” And if people didn’t listen, the government should “throw you in jail if you have too many” children.
In his 1977 book, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, another compendium of unhinged predictions, which he co-authored with his wife, Anne Ehrlich, and future Obama administration “science czar” John Holdren, proposed “population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion.” The trio argued that such requirements could be “sustained under the existing Constitution.”
Today, we tend to forget that the popularization of abortion as a leftist rite was also tied to false fears over overpopulation. “Frankly,” noted Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2009, speaking of the early 1970s, “I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”
Which types of people did we not want to have “too many of” is unclear.
The notion of “overpopulation” is still ingrained in our culture, regularly cited by academics and journalists, who quite often live in the densest, yet somehow also the wealthiest, places on earth, as one of the world’s most pressing problems.
Ehrlich would never be held accountable for his “premature” forecasts. The media never stopped showering him with attention and respect. In the 1970s, Ehrlich was a guest on The Tonight Show, which drew 10 million viewers every night, over two dozen times, not to mention a slew of other popular programs. But even in 2023, after six decades of being unwaveringly wrong about everything, 60 Minutes featured Ehrlich as an unblemished expert on the environment, warning that the planet was headed for a sixth extinction.
“At the age of 90,” Scott Pelley told the audience, “biologist Paul Ehrlich may have lived long enough to see some of his dire prophecies come true.”
THE QUIET RADICALIZATION OF THE AMERICAN LIBRARY
The 60 Minutes anchor does not inform us which of these predictions came to fruition. Ehrlich was 0-for-30 in extinction predictions in his 60 years as a public intellectual. Indeed, Ehrlich’s biggest mistake was living long enough to be proven wrong dozens of times. Born in 1932, when an average man could expect to live to 61, Dr. Doom died at 93.
His legacy, regrettably, will live on for years.
