IN THE late 1960s, the nascent environmental movement began to worry about humanity’s impact on the planet, and the idea that population growth needed to be limited became a mainstream talking point.
Paul Ehrlich was at the centre of that movement from the beginning. In 1968, together with his wife Anne, he wrote an influential book, The Population Bomb, which crystallised fears about the planet’s burgeoning population. It predicted widespread famine, societal upheaval and a deterioration in environmental conditions in the 1970s if steps were not taken – and fast – to both stop population growing and reduce it.
Ehrlich was wrong. The “green revolution” that vastly increased agricultural production starting in the 1960s meant his dire predictions largely didn’t come to pass. His work has since been accused of alarmism, and of helping to spread fears of rising birth rates in lower-income countries that provided justification for compulsory population control measures. In fact, as he now acknowledges, consumption in higher-income countries is an indispensable factor in the equation.
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In light of our worsening climate crisis, in the past two years debate over population size has started re-entering the mainstream. Now 88, Ehrlich is still active at Stanford in the field of population studies. żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ caught up with him to ask: does he recant any of his earlier views?
Richard Webb: Since you wrote The Population Bomb, the narrative has moved away from overpopulation being a problem. Should it have done?
Paul Ehrlich: The main problem we have with all our environmental dilemmas is too much consumption. Humans are just using too much of what there is and using more all the time. To say that the aggregate consumption is just a problem of overconsumption is like saying that the area of a rectangle is it’s too wide; it has nothing to do with length. The number of people and how much each one consumes multiply together to give you your aggregate consumption.
So you stand by your dire predictions in the book?
It is not the book I would write today. I would put more emphasis on consumption, particularly because we know we can change consumption very fast. The US did it after 7 December 1941 [Pearl Harbor and the start of US involvement in the second world war] very dramatically – I remember having meat rationed and gasoline rationed. Britain did the same thing, of course, a little earlier. You can’t change the size of the population humanely with that kind of rapidity. And you don’t even want to change it by reducing births too rapidly, because that would have horrendous economic consequences. We should have started reducing births a long time ago and done it gradually.
So why didn’t we?
I think there are a whole series of factors. One is that we didn’t focus enough on giving full rights and opportunities to women. We know that brings down fertility rates, and there isn’t a country in the world where women have anything like equal rights and opportunities and pay for the same work as the men. Some places are better than others. The US is going backward on women’s rights and going backward rapidly at the moment.
What other reasons are there that population just keeps growing?
We’re fighting against economic growth mania, which has become built into our culture. You know the pondweed analogy? If you have a pond and you put in a pondweed that’s going to double in size every day, and it’s going to take 30 days for the pond to be entirely covered by the weed, how much of the pond is covered by the 29th day? You think a lot, but it’s just half of it, because it’s going to double the next day. We’re reaching the point of where you’re getting near to the pond being half-full and everybody saying, well, we’ve got another 10 million years to cover the rest of it. That ain’t the way it works. Growth is the disease; it’s not the cure. As someone once said, anyone who thinks you can have infinite growth on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist.
What sort of population should we be aiming for?
We basically asked this question, Anne and I and [Stanford biologist] Gretchen Daily. And we decided that what you’d want is a world where people could make choices about their lifestyles, where there were few enough people so that you could actually have wilderness, but enough people so you could have big cities and operas and nice restaurants and so on. And we figured about 1 or 2 billion people, because that would be about the number between the 19th and 20th centuries, around 1900 when there were big cities and there was still wilderness. And we have better technologies today, so we could do a better job of it.
What happens if we don’t take drastic measures?
I have almost zero interest in the population trajectory after 2100. I don’t have a single colleague who doesn’t suspect that a population crash will come within the next couple of decades. Hopefully, more time, but there’s so little time to do anything. We are so far beyond Earth’s carrying capacity. Recent work on methane suggests that it may already be impossible to keep warming below 2 degrees. That means that there will likely be large areas where people will not be able to work outside or grow crops – including those areas under rising seas. We’re watching the disappearance of biodiversity, including pollinators, at a rate far beyond any us who work on it have guessed. We are toxifying the planet at a rate that people can hardly focus on.
Isn’t that a little alarmist?
I and my colleagues are all alarmed. After all we’ve been warning for decades about the population-related rising threat of pandemics, only to watch as not enough is done by the US government while millions get sick and hundreds of thousands die. Most alarming is the idea that humanity can somehow grow to 10 billion or 20 billion people, as in some projections. It is just nonsensical. It reminds me of an ad that Herman Daly, a smart economist, sent me years ago from a meeting in Italy. They had a beautiful picture, and it said: “Italian Electric: growing with the planet.” The planet ain’t growing, and that’s a very fundamental constraint. For a start, the decay of biodiversity attacks agriculture, and climate disruption is already changing the agricultural system in negative ways and is bound to change it much further. With more people, you’re going to need bigger and bigger agricultural systems. If you think humanity can keep increasing agricultural production easily with the climate changing rapidly, you don’t understand what is required to grow plants dependably.
So how do we solve the problems of overpopulation and overconsumption?
The problem is the people who are super-consumers. There are too many middle-class and rich people who consume too much. And on the other side of the coin is, at least from my ethical standpoint, the whole bunch of people, a couple of billion at least, that need to consume more. You should be taking the best possible care of the people you’ve already got, and we don’t do that.
How can we take better care of these people?
Development is a fine contraceptive. In agricultural economies, where you have mostly subsistence agriculture, children were a net benefit because they were farm labour. Still in parts of Africa, it’s the kids that have got to walk to find this ever-scarcer firewood, the ever-scarcer water and so on. Whereas in Britain and the United States, you have to send the kids to university, and it costs you $100,000 or $200,000. So you don’t want to have a lot of kids to send to university, so the birth rates drop. Meanwhile give everyone access to modern contraceptives and backup abortion. Nobody I know thinks abortion is a great method of birth-control, but nobody I know either thinks that men should control women’s bodies. We should want to make abortion, as I think Bill Clinton said, very accessible and very rare.
And how should people in higher-income countries be changing their lives?
We should be looking dramatically and rapidly at how to change consumption patterns, because we can do that rapidly. We could get off the fossil fuel standard. What would make me less pessimistic about the future would be some powerful politician getting up and saying, we had a terrible year last year, our GDP went up 1 per cent and we should be trying to shrink it. We have a chance if we really had a way of convincing Brits and Americans that you can actually live without a new cellphone every six months and that you don’t have to drive around in SUVs, that you can share vehicles, that you can start tearing down strip malls and tearing up highways and returning areas to natural vegetation while there’s still a little time. And perhaps, above all, the rich should be thinking of solving the problems of poor people not with growth, but with redistribution.
Are there any grounds for optimism?
What we have in the US, one of the things that Donald Trump has done is really stirred up a lot of bright, young kids, and they’re the ones who are going to have to solve it. And we know how to harness energy without using fossil fuels. We know how to limit our reproduction safely and carefully. We know how to reduce the chances of pandemics and deal with them when they occur. And Trump gave us a brilliant demonstration of how incompetent leadership can exacerbate large-scale problems, underlining the need for comprehensive planning at the socio-political level and action at all levels. We know how to take good care of the kids we’ve got at the moment, at least in Britain and the United States. We don’t do it, but we know how to do it. And societies, we know from history, can change very, very fast, in either direction. Things can change fast if you have the right incentive. And we certainly have the bright, young people, at least here, to do it, if they want to do it.
