Ehrlich Still Hysterical After All These Years

Paul Ehrlich has been wrong about nearly everything, and yet, remains a prophetic voice for some. Tim Chivers takes him down a needed couple of notches in The Telegraph.  From, “Paul Ehrlich Still Prophesying Doom, and Still Wrong:”

So, let’s take a look at some of his predictions, made in 1968:

1) “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,” he said. He predicted four billion deaths, including 65 million Americans.

What actually happened: Since Ehrlich wrote, the population has more than doubled to seven billion – but the amount of food per head has gone up by more than 25 per cent. Of course there are famines, but the death rate has gone down. I don’t think a significant number of Americans have starved.

2) “The train of events leading to the dissolution of India as a viable nation is already in motion.” India was doomed, and should be left to die in a “triage” system that would concentrate resources on those places that can be saved.

What actually happened: The Green Revolution, a series of technological and agrarian advances led by a man called Norman Borlaug, transformed our ability to produce food. These techniques were introduced to India by one Prof Monkombu Swaminathan. “They [Ehrlich, and Paul and William Paddock, authors of Famine: 1975!] said Indians, and others, were like sheep going to the slaughterhouse. They’ll all die,” Swaminathan told Gardner in an interview. But thanks to Borlaug, Swaminathan, and human ingenuity, India is now one of the few countries with a booming economy, and is a net exporter, rather than recipient, of food aid. But if Ehrlich’s and the Paddocks’ advice had been followed, there could have been tens of millions of deaths, says Swaminathan.

He goes on at greater length than I can reproduce here. Chivers concludes:

As recently as 2009 Ehrlich was saying The Population Bomb was “too optimistic”. But he’s wrong. He’s not lying, he entirely believes what he is saying, but he is wrong.

But there are those who still allow Ehrlich to make them hysterical and accept odious or disastrous policies as the price of saving the planet.  It is up to the rest of us to maintain our heads, promote human thriving by resisting radical environmental and population polices, and ignore Ehrlich and the other cranks yelling about doom and gloom in Hyde Park.