The Book That Incited a Worldwide Fear of Overpopulation | Innovation| Smithsonian Magazine

As 1968 began, Paul Ehrlich was an entomologist at Stanford University, known to his peers for his groundbreaking studies of the co-evolution of flowering plants and butterflies but almost unknown to the average person. That was about to change. In May, Ehrlich released a quickly written, cheaply bound paperback, The Population Bomb. Initially it was ignored. But over time Ehrlich’s tract would sell millions of copies and turn its author into a celebrity. It would become one of the most influential books of the 20th century—and one of the most heatedly attacked.

The first sentence set the tone: “the battle to feed all of humanity is over.” and humanity had lost. in the 1970s, the book promised, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve.” no matter what people do, “nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the global death rate.”

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Published at a time of tremendous conflict and social upheaval, Ehrlich’s book argued that many of the day’s most alarming events had a single underlying cause: too many people, crammed into too small spaces, taking too much of the land. unless humanity reduces their numbers, soon, all of us would face “mass starvation” on “a dying planet.”

ehrlich, now 85, told me recently that the book’s main contribution was to make population control “acceptable” as “a topic of debate.” but the book did much more than that. It gave a major shock to the nascent environmental movement and fueled a crusade against population growth that led to human rights abuses around the world.

Born in 1932, Ehrlich grew up in a leafy New Jersey town. his childhood love of nature morphed into a fascination with collecting insects, especially butterflies. Somewhat reclusive, as precocious as he is assertive, Ehrlich was publishing articles in local entomological journals as a teenager. even then he was appalled by environmental degradation. ddt insecticide was killing his beloved butterflies and rapid suburban development was destroying his habitat.

When Ehrlich entered the University of Pennsylvania, he befriended some seniors who were shocked by his refusal to wear the freshman cap, then a demeaning tradition. Because he didn’t want to join a fraternity—another college custom—Ehrlich rented a house with his friends. they handed out books of interest, including the path to survival by william vogt. published in 1948, it was an early warning of the dangers of overpopulation. We are subject to the same biological laws as any species, Vogt said. if a species exhausts its resources, it crashes. Homo sapiens is a species rapidly approaching that terrible fate. Along with his own observations, Vogt’s book shaped Ehrlich’s ideas on ecology and population studies.

ehrlich earned his doctorate from the university of kansas in 1957 and wrote his dissertation on “the morphology, phylogeny, and higher classification of butterflies.” he was soon hired by the biology department at stanford university, and in his classes he expounded on his ideas on population and the environment. The students, attracted by his charisma, mentioned Ehrlich to his parents. he was invited to speak before alumni groups, which put him in front of larger audiences, and later on local radio shows. David Brower, CEO of the Sierra Club, asked him to write a book in a hurry, hoping—“naively,” says Ehrlich—of influencing the 1968 presidential election. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, who would co-write many of his 40-plus books produced the first draft of the demographic bomb in about three weeks, based on his class notes. only his name was on the cover, ehrlich told me, because his publisher said “single-author books get a lot more attention than two-author books…and at the time I was stupid enough to agree.” “.

Although Brower thought the book was “a first rate battle treatise”, no major newspaper reviewed it for four months. The New York Times gave it a one-paragraph notice nearly a year after its release. however, ehrlich promoted it relentlessly, enacting her message at dozens or even hundreds of events.

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In February 1970, Ehrlich’s work finally paid off: he was a guest on NBC’s “Tonight Show.” Johnny Carson, the comedian and host, was wary of serious guests like college professors because he feared they would be pompous, boring, and opaque. Ehrlich proved to be personable, witty and forceful. thousands of letters arrived after his appearance, astonishing the network. the demographic bomb shot up the best-seller lists. Carson invited Ehrlich in April, just before the first Earth Day. for more than an hour he spoke on population and ecology, on birth control and sterilization, before an audience of tens of millions. after that, ehrlich returned to the show many times.

ehrlich said he and anne “wanted to call the book population, resources, and environment, because it’s not just population.” But his publisher and browser thought this was too heavy and asked Hugh Moore, a businessman and activist who had written a pamphlet called “The Population Bomb,” if they could borrow his title. Ehrlich reluctantly agreed. “We hate the title,” he says now. “I was hung up on being the bomber of the population.” even so, he acknowledges that the title “worked” because it attracted attention.

The book received furious criticism, much of it centered on Ehrlich’s apparent decision, emphasized by the title, to focus on human numbers as the cause of environmental problems, rather than total consumption. the sheer number of people, critics said, matters far less than what people do. population per se is not at the root of the world’s problems. The reason, ehrlich’s detractors said, is that people are not fungible: the impact of one person living one kind of life is completely different from another person living another kind of life.

Consider the opening scene of the demographic bomb. He describes a taxi ride that Ehrlich and her family experienced in Delhi. in the “old fashioned taxi”, with the seats “full of fleas”, the ehrlichs entered “a crowded slum”.

the streets seemed full of people. people eating, people washing, people sleeping. people visiting, arguing and yelling. people put their hands out the taxi window, pleading. people who defecate and urinate. people clinging to buses. people herding animals. people, people, people, people. . . . [s]ince that night, I have known the feeling of overcrowding.

the ehrlichs took the taxi in 1966. how many people lived in delhi then? just over 2.8 million, according to the United Nations. By comparison, the population of Paris in 1966 was about 8 million. no matter how carefully one searches the archives, it is not easy to find expressions of alarm about how the Elysian fields were “alive with the people”. instead, paris in 1966 was an emblem of elegance and sophistication.

delhi was overcrowded and would continue to grow. in 1975, the city had 4.4 million inhabitants, an increase of 50 percent in a decade. why? “no births,” says sunita narain, director of the center for science and environment, a think tank in delhi. Instead, she says, the overwhelming majority of people new to Delhi were immigrants drawn from other parts of India by the promise of employment. the government was deliberately trying to move people from small farms to industry. many of the new factories were located around delhi. Because there were more immigrants than jobs, parts of Delhi had become crowded and unpleasant, exactly as Ehrlich wrote. but the overcrowding that gave it “the feeling of overcrowding” had little to do with a general increase in population—with an absolute increase in births—and everything to do with government planning and institutions. “If you want to understand the growth of Delhi,” argues Narain, “you should study economics and sociology, not ecology and demographic biology.”

what fueled criticism of the population bomb were its striking graphic descriptions of the possible consequences of overpopulation: famine, pollution, social and ecological collapse. Ehrlich says that he saw them as “scenarios,” illustrations of possible outcomes, and expresses his frustration that instead they are “continually cited as predictions,” as unavoidable situations. if he had the ability to go back in time, she told her, he wouldn’t include them in the book.

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It’s true that in the book, Ehrlich exhorted readers to remember that his scenarios “are only possibilities, not predictions.” but it’s also true that she slipped into the language of prediction from time to time in the book, and more often in other settings. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” he promised in a 1969 magazine article. “Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,” Ehrlich said. to cbs news a year later. “and by ‘the end’ I mean a total collapse of the planet’s ability to support humanity.”

such statements contributed to a wave of alarm among the population that spread throughout the world. The International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Population Council, the World Bank, the United Nations Population Fund, the Hugh Moore-backed Association for Voluntary Sterilization, and other organizations promoted and funded programs to reduce fertility in poor places. “The results were horrible,” says Betsy Hartmann, author of Reproductive Rights and Wrong, a classic 1987 exposition of the anti-population crusade. some population control programs pressured women to use only certain officially mandated contraceptives. in egypt, tunisia, pakistan, south korea and taiwan, healthcare workers’ salaries were, in a system that invited abuse, dictated by the number of iuds inserted into women. In the Philippines, birth control pills were literally dropped from helicopters flying over remote villages. Millions of people were sterilized, often coercively, sometimes illegally, frequently in unsafe conditions, in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia, and Bangladesh.

in the 1970s and 1980s, india, led by prime minister indira gandhi and her son sanjay, adopted policies that in many states required sterilization of men and women to obtain water, electricity, ration cards, health care and wage increases. teachers could expel students from school if their parents were not sterilized. More than eight million men and women were sterilized in 1975 alone. (“At last,” commented World Bank chief Robert McNamara, “India is moving to effectively address its population problem”). For its part, China adopted a “one child” policy that led to a large number, possibly 100 million, of forced abortions, often in poor conditions that contribute to infection, sterility, and even death. millions of forced sterilizations occurred.

Ehrlich does not see himself as responsible for such abuses. He strongly supported population-control measures like sterilization, and argued that the United States should pressure other governments to launch vasectomy campaigns, but he did not advocate for the programs’ brutality and discrimination.

Just as firmly, he disputes criticism that none of his scenarios came true. The famines occurred in the 1970s, as Ehrlich had warned. india, bangladesh, cambodia, west and east africa—all were horribly racked by famine in that decade. however, there was no “great increase in the death rate” worldwide. According to a widely accepted count by British economist Stephen Devereux, famine claimed between four and five million lives during that decade, with most deaths due to warfare, rather than environmental depletion from overpopulation.

In fact, famine has not increased but has become rarer. when the demographic bomb appeared, according to the u.n. food and agriculture organization, something like one in four people in the world was hungry. today the proportion of hungry is one in ten. meanwhile, the world’s population has more than doubled. people survive because they learned to do things differently. they developed and adopted new agricultural techniques: improved seeds, high-intensity fertilizers, drip irrigation.

for ehrlich, the current reduction in hunger is only a temporary respite, a lucky break for an entire generation, but it does not indicate a better future. population will fall, she says now, either when people decide to drastically reduce birth rates or when there is a mass die-off because ecosystems can no longer support us. “I’m afraid the much more likely [result] is an increase in the mortality rate.”

his point of view, once common, is now more atypical. In 20 years of reporting on agriculture, I have met many researchers who share Ehrlich’s concern with feeding the world without inflicting massive environmental damage. but I don’t recall anyone thinking that failure is guaranteed or even likely. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” Ehrlich warned. the researchers I have met believe the battle continues. and nothing, they say, proves that humanity cannot win.

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