Given how spectacularly wrong they’ve been proven over the past two generations, you would think the anti-population crowd would be pretty chastened. And to be fair, it is getting quieter and more modest in its aims.

Back in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, and even into the 1990s, it was chic to freak out about overpopulation. Most famously, bug scientist Paul Ehrlich became a celebrity in the late ’60s for predicting that overpopulation would cause massive human starvation.