The Patriot Post® · The False Prophet of Overpopulation Is Dead
Famed (or infamous) Stanford University professor and author Paul Ehrlich has died at the ripe old age of 93. Ehrlich rose to world fame in the late 1960s following the publication of his alarmist book The Population Bomb, which quickly became a bestseller.
Published in 1968, Ehrlich’s tome predicted mass starvation worldwide due to human overpopulation and a static food supply. The book begins with the following statement:
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.
From this premise, Ehrlich made numerous apocalyptic prophesies that all turned out to be tremendously wrong. For example, he predicted that by 1999, the total U.S. population would be roughly 22 million, due to a famine-induced “Great Die-Off.” At the time of his book’s publication, the American population was over 203 million. Far from declining, America’s population has continued to steadily grow, now numbering over 342 million.
In another demonstrably false prediction, Ehrlich declared in 1970, “In ten years, all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” The ocean is still teeming with fish and sea life, and more people than ever are living on America’s coastlines. So much for that unbearable stench of dead fish.
Ehrlich’s dubious overpopulation ideology proved to be especially popular with leftist politicians, as it fueled the elitist hubris that more government control was necessary if humanity had any hope of surviving.
Ehrlich didn’t stop with the publication of his book; he advanced his alarmist ideology by founding the “Zero Population Growth” organization, which inspired the modern population-control movement.
Via this movement, he promoted controversial population control ideas like forced sterilization, contraception, and abortion. His alarmism influenced cultural and government policies worldwide, including China’s infamous One-Child Policy. Despite largely ending that policy, China has not been able to reverse the looming underpopulation precipice it faces.
China was far from the only nation negatively impacted, as Charles Mann observed in a 2018 Smithsonian magazine article:
Some population-control programs pressured women to use only certain officially mandated contraceptives. In Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Korea and Taiwan, health workers’ salaries were, in a system that invited abuse, dictated by the number of IUDs they inserted into women. In the Philippines, birth-control pills were literally pitched out of helicopters hovering over remote villages. Millions of people were sterilized, often coercively, sometimes illegally, frequently in unsafe conditions, in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia and Bangladesh.
Some ideas are simply wrong, but others are both wrong and evil. Paul Ehrlich’s overpopulation claim falls into that second category.
It’s difficult to quantify the negative impact of Ehrlich’s erroneous overpopulation alarmism. How many people have been duped into avoiding having children in the service of the inherently anti-human zero population growth movement? How many babies were aborted because of his lies?
Fundamentally, the overpopulation alarmism is not just anti-human, it’s also expressly anti-Christian. It advocates the exact opposite of the earliest command God gave to humanity, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28).
Ehrlich promoted evil, the severe limiting of human life, rather than expanding it as God commanded. At the time of his book, the U.S. and the West writ large were in the midst of the sexual revolution, and his advocacy for artificially limiting human procreation via practices like abortion and sterilization has cost millions of lives.
Finally, despite his long life, during which his dire predictions were repeatedly proven false, Ehrlich never gave up his fanaticism about overpopulation. As the years went by, he also jumped aboard the cult of climate change alarmism, seeing in it a similar anti-human message: that humanity is the problem.
Let Ehrlich serve as a reminder that lies and falsehoods are exceedingly dangerous, capable of wreaking havoc far beyond what many may appreciate or anticipate.