Defuse the Population Bomb Narrative before It’s Too Late

By Chelsea Follett

Thursday, January 05, 2023

 

CBS’s 60 Minutes recently interviewed Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich about his long-held conviction that so-called overpopulation will deplete resources, destroy wildlife, and end civilization as we know it. The nonagenarian appeared hale and hearty, prophesying Armageddon with the same enthusiasm as in his youth.

 

His health is representative of a trend: People are living longer, and death rates have plunged since Ehrlich began predicting an overpopulation-induced apocalypse in his best-selling 1968 jeremiad, The Population Bomb. The change in death rates is just one piece of evidence cited by my colleague Marian L. Tupy in his rebuttal debunking Ehrlich’s fears.

 

Ehrlich’s lengthy record of failed apocalyptic predictions is perhaps evidence enough. From his worry that England might cease to exist by the year 2000, to his confident claim that hundreds of millions of people would die of starvation in the 1970s, Ehrlich’s doomsday forecasts have consistently failed to materialize.

 

Why does it matter that he is still making the same unfounded claims of impending environmental and societal collapse that he has for the last half-century? It may seem like a harmless enough belief. People believe in all sorts of things, from astrology to Bigfoot, even if such delusions are not usually presented uncritically on major news broadcasts such as 60 Minutes.

 

Regrettably, Ehrlich’s brand of misbelief can result in horrific human-rights abuses, such as China’s one‐child policy (1979–2015) and India’s forced sterilizations during its “Emergency” (1975–77), a period when that country’s civil liberties were suspended. The one‐child policy saw over 300 million women fitted with intrauterine devices modified to be irremovable without surgery, over 100 million permanent sterilizations, and over 300 million abortions. Many of these procedures were coerced. India’s Emergency similarly saw 11 million sterilizations, many of them forced. The extent of the human-rights nightmare that can result from overpopulation hysteria is difficult to fathom.

 

Ehrlich himself has repeatedly endorsed coercive measures to curb population growth. The Population Bomb suggests involuntarily sterilizing the population en masse. “Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired population size,” he mused, before deeming such a program premature due to the “criminal inadequacy of biomedical research in this area.” The book also suggests that the government impose hefty taxes on children’s products such as cribs and diapers. “There would, of course, have to be considerable experimenting on the level of financial pressure necessary to achieve the population goals,” he notes.

 

In 1977, Ehrlich co-authored another book which suggests “a program of sterilizing women after their second or third child,” and mentions China’s program with approval. That book also again discusses adding sterilants “to drinking water or staple foods,” and having the government ration antidotes. The book also supports involuntary mass semi-sterilization to “reduce fertility by adjustable amounts, anywhere from 5 to 75 percent, rather than to sterilize the whole population completely.” Technocrats, the book theorizes, could then dial the dose up or down depending on whatever the aforementioned central planners of population size felt was appropriate.

 

Most of these ideas, thankfully, end in complaints that they are infeasible. The taxation idea is followed by no such lament.

 

Surely since the 1970s, Ehrlich has had time to reflect and realize that a program of global coercive population control would not merely be impractical, but unethical? Seemingly not. Talking to writer Mara Hvistendahl in 2012, Ehrlich continued to defend hypothetical mass involuntary sterilization as “a great idea.”

 

It is dismaying that 60 Minutes chose to spotlight a man who has repeatedly supported ideas that sound more like part of a dystopian sci-fi movie or a conspiracy theory than a policy proposal. Coercive population control on the scale that Ehrlich envisions — and would actively advocate if not for technological limitations — would exceed the tragedy of India’s Emergency and even China’s disastrous childbearing restrictions.

 

China began allowing couples to have a second child in 2016, and a third child in 2021 — but to this day does not allow fourth children, and infamously enforces that limit in a brutal manner on minority groups (such as the Uyghurs and ethnic Kazakhs) whose cultures encourage large families.

 

Could coercive population control one day come to the United States? Some of Ehrlich’s ideological fellow travelers have called for taxes on families with “extra” children or even proposed that the U.S. adopt Chinese-style family-size limits. Overpopulation concerns have been gaining ground recently among policymakers, particularly on the Left, from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez questioning the morality of childbearing to Senator Bernie Sanders promising to “curb population growth.”

 

The omnibus bill passed in December included $575 million to fund family planning in areas where, allegedly, “population growth threatens biodiversity or endangered species.” While that is at worst wasteful rather than coercive, if Ehrlich’s overpopulation fears grow in popularity, history indicates that they could motivate far more concerning policies. It is imperative to push back against baseless apocalypticism and defuse the Population Bomb narrative.