I remember being in late elementary school, watching as the world seemed to shrink under the weight of dire predictions. We were told Africa and India would inevitably collapse, with their populations forced down to 100 million each due to famine, war, and disease. It was presented as ‘settled science’—a phrase that carries a familiar, sharp sting even today. My own school teachers and even the UN, through those UNICEF collections we all did at Halloween, pushed this narrative that overpopulation would make the world unsustainable by 1985. It felt like we were all just waiting for the food riots to start.
Dr. Paul Ehrlich, the man who largely authored this panic with his 1968 bestseller *The Population Bomb*, passed away this past week. I recall my dad keeping a copy on his desk; looking at that dust jacket back then was enough to haunt a kid for a month. Ehrlich wasn’t just some academic making guesses in a vacuum, though. He had the ear of governments and global institutions, convincing them that survival required—well, some rather dark measures.
Actually, it’s hard to wrap your head around how far he wanted to go. He didn’t just want to limit growth; he wanted to shame it. He suggested the FCC force TV shows to depict large families in a negative light. He even contemplated poisoning the water supply to induce infertility, though he couldn’t find a ‘safe’ way to do it. It’s a chilling detail that feels almost unreal when you read it now, sitting in a quiet office with the low hum of the AC—hard to reconcile that with reality, but it’s there in the record.
He was wrong, obviously. Let the record show that Africa and India are doing fine, and in America, our biggest food-related crisis isn’t starvation, but obesity. It’s a complete reversal of his 1960s prophecies. Even when he was proven wrong, he didn’t really stop. There was that famous 1980 bet with economist Julian Simon regarding the price of metals—if resources were becoming scarce, prices should have spiked. They didn’t. In 1990, Simon received a check from Ehrlich for $576.07. No note, just the money.
Perhaps it was all inevitable—or maybe not. Still, while Ehrlich’s theories were being dismantled, we saw real progress elsewhere. Men like Norman Borlaug were actually solving the problems Ehrlich just complained about, boosting agricultural yields and saving millions from the very famine Ehrlich predicted was unavoidable.
Yet, Ehrlich kept at it. Even in 2022, he argued China’s one-child policy hadn’t gone far enough. He became a sort of intellectual grandfather to modern climate movements, never really letting go of the doom. I won’t celebrate his death, but I find myself feeling a strange sense of relief at the end of the movement he built. It was a long, loud era of panic that we finally seem to be moving past. Or, well, maybe we’re just trading it for a new one.