Paul R. Ehrlich - Overpopulation Debate

Overpopulation Debate

A lecture that Dr. Ehrlich gave on the topic of overpopulation at the Commonwealth Club was broadcast on the radio in April 1967. The success of the lecture led to further publicity, and the suggestion from David Brower the executive director of the environmentalist Sierra Club, and Ian Ballantine of Ballantine Books to write a book on the topic. Anne and Paul both collaborated on the book, The Population Bomb but the publisher insisted that a single author be credited.

Although Ehrlich was not the first to raise the alarm about population issues – concern had been widespread in the 1950s and 1960s – his charismatic and media-savvy approach brought the issue to a new level of media prominence.

The Population Bomb began with this 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 ... Ehrlich argued that the human population was too high already, and that while the level of disaster could be mitigated, humanity could not prevent severe famines, the spread of disease, social unrest, and other negative consequences of overpopulation. However, he argued that societies must take strong action to curb population growth in order to mitigate future disasters both ecological and social.

In the book Ehrlich presented a number of "scenarios" detailing possible future events, some of which have been held up as examples of errors in the years since. Of these scenarios, Ehrlich has said that although, "we clearly stated that they were not predictions and that 'we can be sure that none of them will come true as stated,’ (p. 72) – their failure to occur is often cited as a failure of prediction. In honesty, the scenarios were way off, especially in their timing (we underestimated the resilience of the world system). But they did deal with future issues that people in 1968 should have been thinking about." Ehrlich further states that he stands behind the central thesis of the book, and that its message is as apt today as it was in 1968.

Ehrlich's views on the situation have evolved over time, and he has presented a number of different proposed solutions. However, he always has been a strong advocate of government intervention into population control. In Population Bomb he wrote, "We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail. We must use our political power to push other countries into programs which combine agricultural development and population control." Voluntary measures he has supported include the easiest possible availability of birth control and abortions. He was not opposed to mandatory population control if necessary, including the suspension of food aid to countries which were considered "hopeless" to feed their populations. Critics have alleged that he was in favor of forced abortion and sterilization. However, this is not true. The Ehrlichs did describe these coercive methods in their 1977 textbook, Ecoscience: Population, Resouces, Environment but they did not endorse them, saying, "A far better choice, in our view, is to expand the use of milder methods of influencing family size preferences, while redoubling efforts to ensure that the means of birth control, including abortion and sterilization, are accessible to every human being on Earth within the shortest possible time. If effective action is taken promptly against population growth, perhaps the need for the more extreme involuntary or repressive measures can be averted in most countries." Today Paul Ehrlich has become more focused on the United States, claiming that it must get its population (and consumption) under control as an example to the rest of the world. He has disavowed some of the what he said in The Population Bomb. He still thinks that governments should incentivize people to have two or fewer children, for example through high taxes on people who have more. Ehrlich believes there is an "optimal" human population, given current technological realities. He believes that policy should be geared toward driving the global population toward that number (1.5-2 billion according to his 1994 estimate).

During a 2004 interview, Ehrlich answered questions about the predictions he made in The Population Bomb. He acknowledged that some of what he had written had not "come to pass", but reaffirmed his basic claim that "population growth was a major problem. Fifty-eight academies of science said that same thing in 1994, as did the world scientists' warning to humanity in the same year. My view has become depressingly mainline!", he said. Ehrlich also noted that 600 million people were very hungry, billions were under-nourished, and stated that his predictions about disease and climate change were essentially correct.

Retrospectively, Ehrlich believes that The Population Bomb was "way too optimistic".

However, critics have disputed Ehrlich's central thesis about overpopulation and its effects on the environment and human society, his solutions, as well as some of his specific predictions made since the late 1960s.

One frequent criticism focuses on Ehrlich's allegedly alarmist tone and sensational statements and "predictions" that have turned out to be false. Ronald Bailey of Reason Magazine has called him an "irrepressible doomster ... who, as far as I can tell, has never been right in any of his forecasts of imminent catastrophe." On the first Earth Day in 1970, he warned that "n 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." In a 1971 speech, he predicted that: "By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people ... If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." When this scenario did not come to pass, he responded that "When you predict the future, you get things wrong. How wrong is another question. I would have lost if I had had taken the bet. However, if you look closely at England, what can I tell you? They're having all kinds of problems, just like everybody else." Ehrlich wrote in The Population Bomb that, "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980."

A common reply to this criticism is that it was precisely the alarmist rhetoric that prevented the catastrophes he warned of. Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau has said, "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." In the 1960s and 70s when Ehrlich made his most alarming warnings, there was a widespread belief among experts that population growth presented an extremely serious threat to the future of human civilization, although differences existed regarding the severity of the situation, and how to approach it.

Some have criticized Ehrlich's proposed solutions to the problems he describes. For example, Barry Commoner criticized his 1970 statement that "When you reach a point where you realize further efforts will be futile, you may as well look after yourself and your friends and enjoy what little time you have left. That point for me is 1972." Dan Gardner, among others, has criticized him for endorsing the strategies to avoid the worst effects of famine that William and Paul Paddock proposed in their book Famine 1975! They had proposed a system of "triage" that would cut off food aid to "hopeless" countries such as India and Egypt. In Population Bomb Ehrlich suggests that "there is no rational choice except to adopt some form of the Paddocks' strategy as far as food distribution is concerned." Had this strategy been implemented, in countries such as India and Egypt, which were reliant on food aid at that time, they would almost certainly have been plunged into famines. As it turned out, both Egypt and India have greatly increased their food production and now feed much larger populations without reliance on food aid.

In 2006, Lara Knudsen wrote that Ehrlich's views were accepted by many population control advocates in the United States and Europe during the 1960s and 1970s. She chose a brief passage from the final chapter of Population Bomb to show that Ehrlich had discussed an extreme solution to extreme cases of overpopulation: "compulsory birth regulation ... (through) the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired family size."

Another school, generally coming from the political left argues that Ehrlich focuses too much on overpopulation as a problem in itself, instead of distribution of resources. Marxists worried that Ehrlich's work could be used to justify genocide and imperial control, as well as oppression of minorities and disadvantaged groups or even a return to eugenics. Barry Commoner argued that Ehrlich was too focused on overpopulation as the source of environmental problems, and that his proposed solutions were politically unacceptable because of the coercion that they implied, and because the cost would fall disproportionately on the poor. He argued that technological, and above all social development would lead to a natural decrease in both population growth and environmental damage. Ehrlich denies any form of racism, and has argued that if his policy ideas are implemented properly they will not be repressive.

Some have criticized Ehrlich for not sufficiently acknowledging the mistakes he has made in the past, and maintaining a consistent argument in spite of new countervailing evidence. Gardner believes that Ehrlich has been insufficiently forthright in acknowledging errors he made, while being intellectually dishonest or evasive in taking credit for things he claims he got "right". For example, he rarely acknowledges the mistakes he made in predicting material shortages, massive death tolls from starvation (up to one billion in Age of Affluence) or regarding the collapse of specific countries. Meanwhile, he is happy to claim credit for "predicting" the rise of AIDS or global warming. However, in the case of disease, Ehrlich had predicted the rise of a disease based on overcrowding, or the weakened immune systems of starving people, so it is "a stretch to see this as forecasting the emergence of AIDS in the 1980s." Similarly, global warming was one of the scenarios that Ehrlich outlined, so claiming credit for it, while disavowing responsibility for failed scenarios is a double standard. Gardner believes that Ehrlich is displaying classical signs of cognitive dissonance, and that his failure to grapple with obvious errors in his own judgement render his current thinking suspect.

Still others have argued that overpopulation is not a problem in itself, and that humanity will adapt to changing conditions. One example was Julian Lincoln Simon, a Cornucopian economist and libertarian theorist who authored the book The Ultimate Resource, in which he argued that a larger population is a benefit, not a cost. Of the repeated predictions of disaster, Simon complained "As soon as one predicted disaster doesn't occur, the doomsayers skip to another ... why don't see that, in the aggregate, things are getting better? ... Why do they always think we're at a turning point — or at the end of the road?" Julian argued that in the long run, human creativity would constantly improve living standards, and that the Earth's resources were, in effect, infinite. Ehrlich questioned the peer review standards at Science which was considered one of the leading scientific journals at the time. He questioned Simon's intelligence and re-asserted the idea that population growth was outstripping the earth's supplies of food, fresh water and minerals. This exchange eventually led to the Simon-Ehrlich wager, a bet about the trend of prices for certain metals that he made in 1980 with, and lost to, Julian Simon. Simon had Ehrlich choose five of several commodity metals. Ehrlich chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Simon bet that their prices would decrease between 1980 and 1990; Ehrlich bet they would increase. Ehrlich ultimately lost the bet. Over the years the two maintained a public debate, but never met face to face. Ehrlich considered Simon a "fringe" character, and refused to meet.

Criticizing Ehrlich on similar grounds as Simon was Ronald Bailey, a leader in the wise use movement, who wrote a book in 1993 entitled Eco-Scam where he blasted the views of Ehrlich, Lester Brown, Carl Sagan and other environmental theorists.

Ehrlich has also been criticized by Bjørn Lomborg in his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist. Lomborg highlights a repeated theme of Ehrlich's from the early 1970s—a coming age of material scarcity, most prominently displayed in his 1974 book The End of Affluence in which he predicted widespread shortages of vital materials by the mid-1980s along with acute food shortages. Lomborg presents Ehrlich's case as a cautionary story against listening to "eloquent rhetoric" at the expense of rigorous scientific data.

With Stephen Schneider and two other authors, writing in the January 2002 issue of Scientific American, he critiqued Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist.

Ehrlich, and others, argue that he got the timing wrong, but that humanity has simply deferred the moment of disaster through the use of more intensive agricultural techniques, introduced during the Green Revolution, which will eventually lead to environmental and social disaster. They argue that increasing populations and affluence are putting more and more pressure on the global environment in many different fields, from loss of biodiversity, overfishing, global warming, urbanization, chemical pollution, and competition for raw materials. Ehrlich maintains that in light of growing global affluence, reducing total population as well as reducing consumption are critical to protecting the environment and maintaining living standards. He maintains that current rates of growth are still too high for a sustainable future. In 2011, as the world's population passed the seven billion mark he argued that the next two billion people on Earth would cause more damage than the previous two billion because we are now increasingly having to resort to using more marginal and environmentally damaging resources.