In 1968 Paul Ehrlich, a professor of population studies and the president of the center for conservation biology at Stanford University, published a book entitled The Population Bomb. In the 1950s and the 1960s Americans were already experiencing widespread fear about the concept of population explosion. With the publication of Ehrlich’s book, that fear spread to an even greater number of people and was severely worsened by the alarmist and apocalyptic tones present within Ehrlich’s writing. Although the book has received an uncountable number of critiques and criticisms throughout the decades since its publication (especially since many of the predictions in the book did not come true in the years named in it), the thinking presented in it was highly influential in the environmental movement and still plays a huge role in the way in which population is discussed within environmentalism.
Ehrlich opens the book by unpacking and breaking down what he calls the “the problem” (referring to the growing numbers of the human species, the consequential ongoing degradation to environment, and the problematic lack of a balance between the number of people and the available resources) into three parts: Too Many People, Too Little Food, and A Dying Planet. By breaking the larger argument about population being a problem into these smaller sections, and defending each of them individually rather than all together, Ehrlich easily presents a believable tail of the horrors that the human race is about to face. Additionally in each of these sections, Ehrlich uses rhetoric that sets up the reader to believe that Ehrlich’s proposition is, without a doubt, the correct one. An example of this can be found as early as the first paragraph of the book where Ehrlich says “it now seems inevitable that it will continue to its logical conclusion: mass starvation” (Ehrlich, 1968). The use of rhetoric like this, where the word “inevitable” is included, implies that the information given is the one and only truth and closely mimics the techniques used by China in presenting the logic behind the one child policy. It revokes the invitation to question the information given, presenting it as the absolute truth that has been proven by science that is too complex to fully explain to the average person.
One of Ehrlich’s strongest tactics is the way in which he presents numbers and mathematics. Specifically, he paints a picture of a horrifying future for the human race and for our planet by talking about the concept of “doubling time” which he defines as the time it takes for the human population to double in size. According to Ehrlich, the first time the population of the planet doubled it took 1 million years to do so. After that the population doubled every 1,000 years or so. Then the population doubled in 200 years, reaching 1 billion total people in 1850. Around 1930 the population reached 2 billion, meaning it had doubled in just 80 years. In 1968, when The Population Bomb was written, the global population had not yet completed the next doubling (though it was already over 3 billion) but the estimated doubling time was 37 years (Ehrlich, 1968). After explaining this Ehrlich goes on to elaborate on a scenario where the population continues to double in size every 37 years, vividly creating the image for his readers of the human population literally exploding in size and demanding more space than the planet has to offer. He says that if this continued to happen for 900 years then the human population would be sixty million billion people and that that work out to be “about 100 persons for each square yard of earth’s surface, land and sea.” (Ehrlich, 1968). He then explains why, even if one were to rule out the inhabitable state of other planets and the logistical problems of moving that many people off of the earth, the human population would still be doubling too rapidly to be sustained via the colonization of other planets.
When talking about population and the concept of there being too many people on the earth, one inevitably is led to the question of who are the too many people. Ehrlich, although he does not outwardly says so, continually points the finger at the underprivileged and the people of the global south, demonstrating an incredibly Malthusian-like ideology. In the first paragraph of the section entitled “Too Little Food” Ehrlich says “the world, specifically the underdeveloped world, is rapidly running out of food” (Ehrlich, 1968). By making statements such as this one, Ehrlich ignores the inequity of food and resource distribution in the world and simply focuses on the consequences of it, being the lack of resources, including food, in developing and underdeveloped countries. Ehrlich also states, when talking about the complications of interstellar transport of surplus people as a solution to the population problem, and the issue of population explosion on a space ship due to the multiple generations it would take to reach most stars, that “we would have to export our responsible people, leaving the irresponsible at home on earth to breed” (Ehrlich, 1968). He says that the only people who could go would be those willing to practice strict birth control in order to prevent the population of the space craft from growing and eventually exploding. Statements like this overlook the concept of accessibility to resources like birth control and other contraceptives and cast the elite, who can afford to have access to these products, as responsible, and people who do not share that access, due to a lack of privilege, as irresponsible and the collateral damage we would have to sacrifice in order to save the human race. It’s moments like this in Ehrlich’s writing that the reader can see the underlying tones of eugenics, racism and classism with which this book was written.
Over all, Ehrlich’s argument is an incredibly pessimistic one about the future of both humanity and our planet. He says that even if we were to enact a plan to stop the rapid growth of the human race it would already be too late to prevent a mass starvation and an increase in the death rate (Ehrlich, 1968). He focuses on the next nine years after the publication of the book as crucial for finding a solution due to the rapidity at which the world is running out of food. He makes the claim that “In fact, the battle to feed humanity is already lost; in the sense that we will not be able to prevent large-scale famines in the next decade or so” (Ehrlich, 1968). In the section entitled “A Dying Planet” Ehrlich kills the hope that agricultural advancement would pose a solution to the population crisis, elaborating on the resulting environmental degradation and other consequences that steam from farming to feed such a large population. Specifically, he focuses on the use of pesticides, and their necessity in farming for such a large population, and the harm they cause to the environment, specific ecosystems, and human health. He quotes Professor LaMonte Cole on this, saying “It has been estimated that the agricultural value of Iowa farmland, which is about as good land as we have, is declining by 1% per year” (Ehrlich, 1968).
As mentioned earlier, there have been many, many critiques of Paul Ehrlich and his work as presented in The Population Bomb, often focusing on issues with it such as repetitive restatement of Malthusian ideas, the inaccuracy of the predictions, and focusing on the wrong problem when it comes to global hunger (being population rather than the distribution of wealth and resources). Among these critiques is a particularly notable women named Betsy Hartmann, currently a professor at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, who presents a radically different argument than that presented by Ehrlich, which is laden with hints of Malthusianism.
Rather than being a problem, Hartmann argues that population growth is a good thing and is the driving force behind many developments and technological advancements. When it comes to population she makes the claim that the problem is not so much rapid growth, but rather issues related to resource and wealth distribution, population distribution between rural and urban areas, and imbalances in age structures (Hartmann, 1995). Hartmann refers to Ehrlich and other likeminded thinkers as “Malthusian alarmists” and goes on to speak about why their work, particularly Ehrlich’s, have continually gotten so much attention while other scholars who bring intellectual variation to the argument remain mostly ignored. Making sense of this bizarre popularity, she says “It not only makes good shock headlines in the press, but also draws on the deep undercurrents of parochialism, racism, elitism, and sexism, complementing the Social Darwinist ‘survival of the fittest’ view” (Hartmann, 1995).
Hartmann also combats Ehrlich’s views about the rising populations of countries in the global south, bringing into perspective issues of resource accessibility and the accessibility to reproductive choice. She makes the claim that many of the modern day proponents for population control are simply reinterpreting Malthusian ideas and selectively applying them to people of the global south and some underprivileged and marginalized communities within the western world. On this she says “Upper and middle-class people have the right to voluntary choice as to whether and when to bear children, but the rights of poor people are subordinate to the overriding imperative of population control” (Hartmann, 1995).
Hartmann elaborates on the point that world population growth does not actually outpace food production. Rather than being an issue of the mouths to feed multiplying faster than the food that is being produced is, the problem has more to do with the inequity of the distribution of said food. She makes the claim that in most countries today there is either enough food being produced to fill the mouths of the growing population or they have the economic stability and availability of resources to have the necessary amount of food imported, though millions still go hungry every year. On this, Hartmann states “They go hungry because individual families do not have land on which to grow food, or the money with which to buy it. The main problem is not that there are too many people and too few resources, but rather that too few people monopolize too many resources. The problem is not one of absolute scarcity, but one of distribution” (Hartmann, 1995).
Another, more contemporary, critique of Ehrlich’s work, Justin Fox, who is more representative of everyday critiques of Ehrlich’s work from your average person rather than your traditional academic scholar’s critique, focuses on the inaccuracy of ideas such as carrying capacity that are crucial in the support of Ehrlich’s argument. Ehrlich severely underestimated the world’s carrying capacity and it has done a much better job at feeding and clothing the growing human population than he expected. A huge part of this had to do with the occurrence of the green revolution, which greatly increased food production and helped it keep up with the growing number of mouths to feed. On this Fox says “Sure, global population doubled. But thanks to the Green Revolution, per-acre grain yields went up much faster than that” (Fox, 2015).
Additionally, Fox focuses on Ehrlich’s inability to include sociopolitical factors in his predictions about fertility rates. He argues that the spreading of affluence across the globe, as currently underdeveloped countries become more developed, will help bring down the global fertility rate. One can already see by looking at fertility rate distributions across the globe that there is a strong trend of developed countries having lower fertility rates. As mentioned above this correlates to increased access to reproductive choice due to the affluence of those countries. What Ehrlich did not take into consideration was that the development of countries in the global south is not stagnant. As these countries gain more affluence, the people living in them will have greater access to resources like contraceptives, giving them reproductive choice, and thus significantly lowering the global fertility rate (fox, 2015).
In conclusion, one can say that Paul Ehrlich’s work, or at least as it is represented by his book, The Population Bomb, was at the least extremely problematic. One can also point to the failed predictions in the book as proof of its overall inaccuracy. Many people, both academics and not, criticize Ehrlich for an astronomical number of reasons and although the majority of those are logical arguments and incredibly valid, I do believe we need to cut Ehrlich at least a little bit of slack. Now I’m not saying that the obvious prejudices and sever exaggerations present within Ehrlich’s work are at all justifiable or excusable, but we do need to consider his intentions. Ehrlich’s goal in writing the book was, according to him, to create a call to action for people to answer. There is no better way to do that than to present the problem as immediate and life threatening. Although we must recognize the problems with the ways in which we went about doing so, and those present within his theories, we do need to give Ehrlich credit for helping to bring into the spotlight an issue that will be a permanent topic of interest and controversy in the foreseeable future.
