The Patriot Post® · Human Fossil Warns of Extinction

It’s been nice knowing ya.

Perhaps you haven’t heard, but the Sixth Extinction is upon us. At least that’s what Stanford University’s Paul Ehrlich was telling CBS News’s Scott Pelley and the untold dozens of his “60 Minutes” viewers on Sunday.

“No, humanity is not sustainable to maintain our lifestyle — yours and mine,” claimed Ehrlich. “Basically, for the entire planet, you’d need five more Earths. It’s not clear where they’re gonna come from.” He continues: “I know there’s no political will to do any of the things that I’m concerned with, which is exactly why I and the vast majority of my colleagues think we’ve had it; that the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to.”

So, yeah, it’s been nice knowing ya.

Ehrlich, if you’re too young to remember, is the Stanford biologist entomologist bug scientist who in 1968 authored The Population Bomb, a book that has been debunked time and again from start to finish and yet has still managed to become one of the handful of bibles of the eco-pagan Left. On its cover is the following false choice: “Population control or race to oblivion?” And toward the bottom is this sloppily written bit of guilt-tripping alarmism: “While you are reading these words four people will have died from starvation. Most of them children.”

Yes, 90-year-old Paul Ehrlich is still around, still serving up doomsday scenarios to gullible leftists. But we repeat ourselves. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” Ehrlich wrote back in his heyday. “In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

How nice it must be to be a leftist, and to never have to say you’re sorry.

Columnist David Harsanyi notes that there’s plenty more eco-theological claptrap where Ehrlich came from: “It was likely, he went on, that the oceans would be without life by 1979 and the United States would see its population plummet to 23 million by 1999 due to pesticides. ‘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 famously told Mademoiselle in 1970.”

To the credit of CBS’s Pelley, he made mention of Ehrlich’s poor track record of predicting our demise. “The alarm Ehrlich sounded in 1968 warned that overpopulation would trigger widespread famine,” Pelley noted. “He was wrong about that. The Green Revolution fed the world.”

Indeed he was, and indeed it did. But instead of reflecting on the life’s work of, for example, the great Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Peace Prize winner whose agricultural ingenuity saved untold millions of lives in some of the world’s most destitute regions, “60 Minutes” instead chose to give a platform to the discredited doomsayer Ehrlich.

While Ehrlich has spent his life alternatively scolding and scaring the human race, Borlaug spent his life showing just how much human creativity could do toward solving the world’s most seemingly intractable problems. Here’s what The Wall Street Journal had to say about him in a 2009 obituary:

Borlaug solved [the global starvation] challenge by developing genetically unique strains of “semidwarf” wheat, and later rice, that raised food yields as much as sixfold. The result was that a country like India was able to feed its own people as its population grew from 500 million in the mid-1960s, when Borlaug’s “Green Revolution” began to take effect, to the current 1.16 billion. Today, famines — whether in Zimbabwe, Darfur or North Korea — are politically induced events, not true natural disasters.

What Borlaug’s remarkable life teaches us is that human ingenuity is real and unpredictable. Ehrlich has no idea what things will be like here on Earth in 10 years, or 20, or 50. And he has no idea what sorts of adaptive responses will be uncorked by his plucky and creative fellow humans.

Much to Ehrlich’s chagrin, that Sixth Extinction isn’t quite upon us. At least not according to science journalist Michael Shellenberger, who’s been following Ehrlich for years. “The assertion that ‘five more Earths’ are needed to sustain humanity,” writes Shellenberger, “comes from something called the Ecological Footprint calculation. I debunked it 10 years ago with a group of other analysts and scientists, including the Chief Scientist for The Nature Conservancy, in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, PLOS Biology.”

One wonders: Is there a credible scientist out there who hasn’t debunked Ehrlich?

“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions,” said our favorite living philosopher, Thomas Sowell, “than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

Ehrlich is 90, and the clock on holding him accountable is ticking.

POSTSCRIPT: We can’t learn much from Paul Ehrlich’s incessant Malthusianism, but we can learn a great deal from Norman Borlaug and his ilk. What Borlaug’s remarkable life teaches us is that human resilience is real and unpredictable. Ehrlich has no idea what things will be like here on Earth in 10 years, or 20, or 50. And he has no idea what sorts of adaptive responses will inevitably be uncorked by his plucky and creative fellow humans.