Bomb

Pessimists are never disappointed, as my buddy Grant likes to say. If you spend your days believing the worst in people, they will eventually prove you right. Being prepared, therefore, equips you to skip right through the heartbreak and disappointment.

But what happens when we take pre-emptive steps to ward off the bad thing that is coming? That is sure to disappoint? Do pessimists see the future better than the rest of us?

In his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich predicted the end of days for our species. Ehrlich figured there were simply too many of us for the planet to continue to feed. By the mid-70s, he foresaw mass starvation on a global level—hundreds of millions dead each year. Within 15 years, the planet would no longer be able to sustain human life. According to Ehrlich, we were already doomed.

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” wrote Ehrlich in the first line of The Population Bomb.

Despite his fatalistic view, or perhaps because of them, he didn’t shrink from offering harsh prescriptions to save some remnant of our species. He proposed, for example, adding temporary sterilants to municipal drinking water in the US—so as not to be seen as racist, and to set a good example.

Permitting women to have babies without limits, according to Ehrlich, was like allowing everyone to “throw as much of their garbage into their neighbour’s backyard as they want.”

Ehrlich wasn’t the first to make alarmist claims about the end of days, nor was he the most shrill. But Ehrlich was a Stanford University biology professor. A scientist. He knew how the natural world worked.

Population Bomb sold millions of copies around the world. His ideas and forecasts were taught in school as fact. It was our job as young people in the early ’70s, to save the species—presumably by cutting back on our procreating habits.

These ideas became an orthodoxy that could not be challenged by skepticism or doubt. It was science. It was beyond our ability to challenge these notions. Our job was to act. We had to do something. The time for discussion was over.

So The Population Bomb became a manual for policy makers for the following two decades. In India, the poster child for much of how humans had gone so wrong, the government declared a state of emergency in 1975. Over the next two years more than 10 million men and women were forcibly sterilized. The practice continues today, more with coercion and financial inducement rather than martial law, in smaller numbers— typically targetting a lower, disadvantaged class.

China responded with a policy of one child per family. A largely agrarian society, boys were viewed as more valuable than girls. Since 1971, China has seen a total of 336 million abortions, completed 196 million sterilizations, and inserted 403 million intrauterine devices.

More difficult to count are the ones who were born, but have no official status. China’s 2010 census estimated that there were 13 million people without official documentation—a population almost the size of Ontario’s.

But Ehrlich was wrong. Indeed we added billions more people to the planet, but our species learned how to feed itself. Agricultural output more than doubled. The world’s population is undeniably healthier and more prosperous than it was in 1968. Global starvation did not wipe out the human species.

Instead, fertility rates around the world are falling. Women are having fewer babies on every continent except Africa. Already in many western nations, we aren’t producing enough children to sustain our population.

We will continue to add people to the planet—but it now seems likely we will reach a peak population around the middle of this century. Then I expect pessimists will worry about problems associated with declining population.

Ehrlich, now 83, is unrepentant. He says now he wasn’t making predictions. And he wasn’t alone in his pessimism.

“My basic claims (and those of the many scientific colleagues who reviewed my work) were that population growth was a major problem,” Ehrlich was quoted in a 2004 magazine article. “Fifty-eight academies of science said that same thing in 1994, as did the world scientists’ warning to humanity in the same year.”

In any event, his warnings, and those of many other scientists, propelled societies to act—often in horrifying and devastating ways. Yet even today, many smart people are reluctant to say Ehrlich was wrong, and that policymakers were wrong to follow his prescriptions. The New York Times this week assembled six academics, writers and policymakers to consider the legacy of The Population Bomb.

Pessimists all, they agreed, in a rather lopsided debate, that while Ehrlich may have got some detail and the timeline wrong, the species is indeed doomed—and we did it to ourselves.

Given long enough, I suppose, pessimists will always be proven right. But we must guard against pessimists dictating policy or setting in motion the horrifying consequences that result from these policies upon the rest of us. Surely this is the sorry lesson we must learn from The Population Bomb.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca