That was the gist of so many tweets on Abundance and Progress Twitter this week, marking the death of the famed environmentalist and Population Bomb author. “Paul Ehrlich was one of the most pernicious public figures of the last 50 years,” said Institute for Progress’ co-founder Alec Stapp. “Paul Ehrlich made a lot of money and got a lot of awards (including a MacArthur ‘genius’ award),” noted science writer Matt Ridley, “out of making doomsday predictions that were wrong, and did real harm.” My impressionistic tally counted hundreds of tweets of this nature this week.
Even on the occasion of his death, Ehrlich-bashing is so universal, I think, because of how spectacularly wrong his high-stakes predictions proved, and because of the cruelty with which he spoke about babies, mothers, families, and the poor.
I come not to add nuance, but to pile on. Ehrlich’s empirics and metaphysics were badly mistaken. He advocated monstrous policies, such as tax penalties for large families, coercive sterilization campaigns, and withholding foreign aid to lower-income nations which fail to control population growth. And throughout it all, he maintained a callous attitude towards the weakest among us. “Sure I’ve made some mistakes, but no basic ones,” he said in 2023, decades after inspiring China’s one-child policy, which is estimated to have resulted in 20 million “missing girls,” largely due to coerced sex-selective abortion and infanticide.
For those who think that Ehrlich’s errors are only obvious in hindsight, I would simply observe that Ehrlich himself never changed his tune as real-world events falsified his hypotheses. The same week as his death, a paper that he co-authored was published that argued the Earth can only sustain 2.5 billion people.
Ehrlich’s intellectual project was not merely proven wrong in retrospect. It was wrong throughout his life, and was always more the product of ideology than science, invulnerable to falsification. He was a proud champion of Malthusianism, which by the time of his own research had been thoroughly discredited by the likes of the Marquis de Condorcet, Karl Marx, and Ester Boserup. “I was pleased to find an article in a history journal that credited us ‘neo-Malthusians’ with stimulating ‘thinking of the planet as a whole and anticipating its future,’” he wrote in his memoir, even though the 20th century famines he predicted would kill hundreds of millions never came to pass.
All of which is to say that while his impact on society was significant, Ehrlich was merely one in a long lineage of eco-doomers, a tradition that carries on to this day. As my colleague Vijaya Ramachandran and I wrote for the Atlantic a few years ago, Ehrlich’s ideas can be easily found in the writings and positions of influential modern environmentalists. Naomi Oreskes, progenitor of the litigation campaign against oil and gas companies, and William Rees, one of the creators of the carbon footprint, to this day invoke population control and biophysical limits to growth.
As Williams College’s Darel E. Paul eulogized this week for Compact:
Thirty years after The Population Bomb, environmentalist Bill McKibben published Maybe One: A Personal and Environmental Argument for Single Child Families. Reprising Ehrlich’s argument, Earth Policy Institute founder Lester R. Brown published Full Planet, Empty Plates in 2012. Broadcaster and natural historian David Attenborough has been a reliable Malthusian scold down to the present day, referring to human beings as a “plague” and giving his valuable long-time patronage to the organization Population Matters (formerly known as Optimum Population Trust).
It is with centuries of failed prophesies in mind that we should evaluate this generation of neo-Malthusians’ warnings about the latest looming eco-apocalypse.
What most, though not all, of Ehrlich’s intellectual descendants have abandoned is the abject cruelty of his conduct. The opening pages of The Population Bomb have become infamous for the way they describe a crowd of poor Indians (witnessed on an Ehrlich family vacation) as a horde of people “screaming,” “defecating,” and “urinating.” Ehrlich never publicly reckoned with, let alone atoned for, the tens of millions of forcibly terminated pregnancies and murdered babies he left in his wake. And throughout all his doomsaying about the poor and the planet, he was a charming, charismatic, seemingly carefree celebrity intellectual. He was the consummate pop scientist of his day, flaunting his anti-humanism while glad-handing with Johnny Carson, Ted Turner, and other paragons of the wealthy Western elite.
It’s important to note the ways in which environmentalism has moved beyond this blatant anti-humanist callousness. As Ramachandran and I noted in our Atlantic piece about the modern Malthusians, the major population control organizations have eschewed, at least officially, the use of coercive contraception and sterilization practices, instead emphasizing family planning resources and women’s education. The Sierra Club, to its credit, recently went further, closing the long-standing population program that had actually published Ehrlich’s book. “Contraception and family planning are not climate mitigation measures,” the Club wrote in 2022.
But modern environmentalism does still reward cruel anti-humanism. Consider the still-celebrated climate scientist Michael Mann, who earlier this year released an “enemies list” that ostensibly included all Republicans in America, and has referred to his critics as “cockroaches.” (Mann was one of Ehrlich’s few vocal defenders this week, because of course he was.)
And even if Ehrlich’s vile dehumanizing language and policy agenda have gone out of fashion, it’s still important to recognize the inherent cruelty in enforced Malthusian scarcity that persists in too much of environmental advocacy today. The Sierra Club notwithstanding, groups like Population Connect and the Overpopulation Project are still out there pitching population control as an environmental solution. Most major environmental groups oppose development finance for modern agriculture technologies and fossil fuel, hydroelectric, and nuclear energy infrastructure in poor countries. As Ramachandran put it a few years ago, these restrictions are little more than “green colonialism.”
There is also a certain cruelty in telling children that they may not make it to adulthood because of the ecological crisis. As Jake Anbinder wrote this week, “the small but growing number of young people who cite climate change as the reason they do not want children reflects a view that, in its way, is gloomier than anything Ehrlich wrote.”
And of course all this doomsaying is predicated on the same kind of pseudoscientific biophysical boundaries that Ehrlich insisted would doom hundreds of millions of humans to starvation and death. Limits to Growth, the Earth’s supposed human population carrying capacity, the two-degree temperature target, the Planetary Boundaries, and the Ecological Footprint are not fixed biophysical constraints on human population and development, but rather arbitrary limits, dressed up in the language of science, intended to enforce a Malthusian scarcity agenda.
Remember that next time you see one of these alleged boundaries out in the wild, even if it’s discussed in less cruel language than Ehrlich took to his grave.