In Defense of Paul Ehrlich
November 5th, 2008 | Posted in Population Basics
by Carl Haub, Senior Demographer
What! Someone is defending Paul Ehrlich? Paul Ehrlich, the famous author of the 1968 Population Bomb, has often taken it on the chin for his infamous “predictions.” His statement in the Population Bomb “The battle to feed all of humanity is over” has probably landed him in the most hot water. While that battle has not been lost, neither has it been won even to this day.
Ehrlich’s Cassandra-like statements have caused him considerable grief – but consider them as products of the time in which they were made. The population of the world’s developing countries (Africa, Asia, Latin America/Caribbean, and Oceania) was growing at a startling 2.5 percent per year. Our old friend “doubling time” tells us that that rate would cause their population, 2.6 billion at the time, to double every 28 years - 2.6 billion in 1968, 5.2 billion in 1996, 7.0 billion today, 10.4 billion in 2024, and so on. In 1968, women averaged six children per woman; family planning was virtually unknown; and death rates were likely to continue downward thanks to immunization programs and spreading public health measures so the growth might even increase.
It had taken world population until about 1800 to reach its first billion and 130 to reach the second. Four billion would come just six years after Ehrlich had written his book and the fifth billion just 13 years further on. The unprecedented growth was a result of a very rapid 20th century decline in death rates in developing countries, something that had taken the developed countries many centuries to achieve. That growth came as a real surprise.
If you are going to sound a warning, a clarion call, sound it LOUDLY. Ehrlich (whose name means “honest” in German) pulled no punches. If he had said something like “There is a possibility that increased hunger and starvation might manifest itself should the population growth rate in developing countries not ameliorate,” no one would have listened. Nor would he be much criticized or remembered today. If you’re going to say “Fire!” don’t whisper.
To be sure, Ehrlich was hardly the first to sound the alarm. News magazines, such as U.S. News and World Report, far more influential then than now, had run stories on the population problem. In 1963, the magazine reported that President Kennedy had agreed to offer birth control information to “other nations.” It makes no sense that Ehrlich is now criticized as being alarmist because his dire warnings did not, in the main, come true. But it was because of such warnings from Ehrlich and others that countries took action to avoid potential disaster.The edition of the Bomb I picked up in a used book sale at Georgetown University in 1974 was in its 32nd printing. Someone must have been getting the message. Nice going, Paul.
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July 4th, 2009 at 11:00 am
Well, Paul Ehrlich’s “honest” in the same way that the Jehovah Witnesses are honest: they truly believe that Armageddon’s just around the corner. And when that Armageddon doesn’t unfold, they just push it forward.
Also, are the drop in birth rates (which are below replacement levels in many countries) really due to Ehrlich’s “clarion call?” I suspect rather than they’re due to the fact that many women now want to have careers out of the home and that even those don’t work prefer to concentrate more attention among a small number of children than divide it among a larger brood.
I’ll use myself as an example. I have one child for the reasons I mentioned above: I work outside the home, and I’d rather spend my attention on one child, at least while she’s in her preschool years, than divide it. If I have a second child, I will probably do so through adoption (one interesting thing: Paul Ehrlich encouraged people to adopt rather than have biological children but never adopted himself; sounds a bit like Jimmy Swaggart preaching marital fidelity).
Sorry, but I can’t take Ehrlich much more seriously than the old-time preachers who thundered about an end of the world which never occurred.
July 7th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Dear Emily,
I completely agree with the reasons you give for the very steep birth rate declines in industrialized countries and appreciate your comments. The movement of women from their traditional roles into the career labor force, economic considerations, and many other factors associated with contemporary society led to low fertility, not Paul Ehrlich. But I was referring to the “bomb,” if you will, in developing countries where rapid declines in mortality caused population growth rates to rise to unprecedented heights — and that in the most impoverished countries. On that point I’ll stick to my guns. It was, after all, the developing countries themselves that, one by one, tackled the challenge of unsustainable growth once they fully realized the situation.
Regards,
Carl Haub
July 8th, 2009 at 9:48 am
I still think that the failure of many of Ehrlich’s “prophecies” to occur reflects poorly on him. So I still don’t think he deserves to be taken any more seriously than a religious fanatic preaching the upcoming Armageddon.
Also, I know many of Ehrlich’s critics are members of the so-called “right-to-life” crowd who oppose abortion and in some cases even contraception. Let me be clear I’m in no way part of that crowd: I’m pro-choice and personally favour one- or two-child families. I even agree that if everybody decided to have twelve children there might be a population problem.
Paul Ehrlich’s sometimes been described as the hero the right wing loves to hate. But is he really that different from them? For instance, he once wrote that children with AIDS shouldn’t attend school because they might spread the disease. I think those who consider themselves progressive should seriously reconsider how “heroic” he is.
July 8th, 2009 at 10:00 am
In support of Paul Ehrlich…….
Imagine for a moment that we are looking at an ocean wave, watching it move toward the shore where it crashes finally at our feet. The wave is moving toward us; however, at the same time, there are many molecules in the wave that are moving in the opposite direction, against the tide. If we observe that the propagation of the human species worldwide is like the wave and the reproduction numbers of individuals in certain locales are like the molecules, it may be inaccurate for the latter to be looked at as if it tells us something meaningful about the former.
Abundant research indicates that most countries in Western Europe, among many other countries globally, have recently shown a decline in their rates of human population growth. These geographically localized data need not blind us to the fact that the absolute global human population numbers are skyrocketing. The world’s human population is like the wave; the individual or localized reproduction numbers are like the molecules.
Perhaps a “scope of observation” problem is presented to everyone who wants to adequately understand the dynamics of human population numbers.
Choosing a scope of observation is a forced choice, like choosing to look at either the forest or the trees, at either the propagation numbers of the human species (the wave data) or localized reproduction numbers (the molecular data). Data regarding the propagation of absolute global human population numbers is the former while individual or localized reproduction data are the latter.
From this vantage point, the global challenge before humanity could be a species propagation problem. Take note that global propagation numbers do not vary with the reproduction data. That is to say, global human propagation data and the evidence of reproduction numbers of individuals in many places, appear to be pointing in different directions. The propagation data are represented by the wave; the reproduction data are represented by the molecules moving against the tide.
In the year 1900 world’s human population was approximately 1.2 to 1.6 billion people. With the explosive growth of the global human population over the 20th century in mind (despite two world wars, ubiquitous local conflicts, famine, pestilence, disease, poverty, and other events resulting in great loss of life), what might the world look like in so short a period of time as 41 years from now? How many people will be on the planet at that time? The UN Population has recently made its annual re-determination that the world’s human population will reach 9.2 billion people around 2050, and then somehow level off. No explanation is given for how this leveling-off process is to occur.
We can see that the fully anticipated growth of absolute global human population numbers is about 8 billion people for the 150 year period between 1900 and 2050.
Whatever the number of human beings on Earth at the end of the 21st century, the size of the human population on Earth could have potentially adverse impacts on the number of the world’s surviving species, on the rate of dissipation of Earth’s resources, and on the basic characteristics of global ecosystems.
For too long a time human population growth has been comfortably viewed by politicians, economists and demographers as somehow outside the course of nature. The potential causes of global human population growth have seemed to them so complex, obscure, or numerous that a strategy to address the problems posed by the unbridled growth of the human species has been assumed to be unknowable. Their preternatural, insufficiently scientific grasp of human population dynamics has lead to widely varied forecasts of global population growth. Some forecasting data indicate the end to human population growth soon. Other data suggest the rapid and continuous increase of human numbers through Century XXI and beyond.
Recent scientific evidence appears to indicate that the governing dynamics of absolute global human population numbers are indeed knowable, as a natural phenomenon. According to unchallenged scientific research, the population dynamics of human organisms is essentially common to, not different from, the population dynamics of other organisms.
To suggest, as many politicians, economists and demographers have been doing, that understanding the dynamics of human population numbers does not matter, that the human population problem is not about numbers, or that human population dynamics have so dizzying an array of variables as not to be suitable for scientific investigation, seems not quite right.
If I may continue by introducing an extension of my perspective.
According to the research of Russell Hopfenberg,Ph.D., and David Pimementel, Ph.D., global population growth of the human species is a rapidly cycling positive feedback loop in which food availability drives population growth and this recent, astounding growth in absolute global human numbers gives rise to the misperception or mistaken impression that food production needs to be increased even more.
Data indicate that the world’s human population grows by approximately two percent per year. All segments of it grow by about 2%. Every year there are more people with brown eyes and more people with blue ones; more people who are tall and more short people. It also means that there are more people growing up well fed and more people growing up hungry. The hungry segment of the global population goes up just like the well-fed segment of the population. We may or may not be reducing hunger by increasing food production; however, we are most certainly producing more and more hungry people.
Hopfenberg’s and Pimentel’s evidence suggests that the magnificently successful efforts of humankind to increase food production in order to feed a growing population has resulted and continue to result in even greater human population numbers.
The perceived need to increase food production to feed a growing population is a widely shared and consensually validated misperception, a denial both of the physical reality and the space-time dimension. If people are starving at a given moment of time, increasing food production cannot help them. Are these starving people supposed to be waiting for sowing, growing and reaping to be completed? Are they supposed to wait for surpluses to reach them? Without food they would die. In such circumstances, increasing food production for people who are starving is like tossing parachutes to people who have already fallen out of the airplane. The produced food arrives too late; however, this does not mean human starvation is inevitable.
Consider that human population dynamics are not biologically different from the population dynamics of other species. Human organisms, other species and even microorganisms have essentially similar population dynamics. We do not find hoards of starving roaches, birds, squirrels, alligators, or chimpanzees in the absence of food as we do in many “civilized” human communities today because these non-human species are not annually increasing their food production capabilities.
Please take note that among tribal peoples in remote original habitats, we do not find people starving. Like non-human species, “primitive” human beings live within the carrying capacity of their environment. History is replete with examples of early humans and more remote ancestors not increasing their food production annually, but rather living successfully off the land for thousands upon thousands of years as hunters and gatherers of food.
Prior to the agricultural revolution and the production of more food than was needed for immediate survival, human numbers supposedly could not grow beyond their environment’s physical capacity to sustain them because global human population growth or decline is primarily determined by food availability. Looked at from a global population perspective, more food equals more human organisms; less food equals less human organisms; and, in one and all cases, no food equals no humans.
Thank you.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
September 1st, 2010 at 10:44 am
So are you still going to call Paul Ehrlich a hero after knowing his views on children with AIDS? I’m sure that if some of the liberals who supported him knew this, they’d be a bit embarrassed.