The Horrific Legacy of Paul Ehrlich | The American Spectator

One wonders what Paul Ehrlich thought about his death.

He died at the ripe old age of 93 — an achievement he probably considered well-nigh impossible, given that he predicted that, by 1980, the average life expectancy would be less than half of that. At the time of his death, he was surrounded by some 8.3 billion people on this beautiful planet, despite his prediction that the global population would number just 1.5 billion by 1985. 

It may have been some solace that cancer — a disease he thought would take the majority of the globe by 1980 — was what eventually killed him.

Had Ehrlich spent his life quietly studying butterflies in California, he might have deserved a generous obit. He would be one of those affable professors whom Stanford grads had the good fortune to remember with fondness — apparently his lectures on ecology were rather riveting — and to mourn briefly. But he didn’t. 

Instead, he dabbled in apocalyptic predictions of a scientific flavor, about which he was horribly wrong.

Ehrlich, of course, was the author of the tiny paperback book that took the world by storm in the 1970s. The Population Bomb claimed, quite simply, that the “battle to feed all of humanity is over.” The globe was vastly overpopulated, and the result would be widespread death in the coming decades. People would starve — so many people that, “by 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.” 

The timing of the book was perfect. We were coming to the end of the post-war baby boom and humanity had recently been forced to reckon with the potential for its imminent end via atomic war. Ehrlich’s message struck a nerve — one that NBC’s Johnny Carlson recognized when he decided to have the scientist on The Tonight Show more than 20 times. 

And yet, more than half a century later, most of us can safely say Ehrlich’s predictions were mistaken (although the New York Times insisted in his obituary this week that they were merely “premature”). Global hunger rates are much lower than they were in the 1970s (today, just one out of every eleven people goes hungry) and the population of the earth is more than double what it was when he published his book. If anything, we’re more concerned about underpopulation, rather than overpopulation. (READ MORE by Aubrey Harris: We Could Be Doing Something About Our Birth Rate Problem. But We Aren’t.)

Unfortunately, The Population Bomb wasn’t just an obscure scientific paper with no impact. It sold millions of copies, and its arguments were seized by groups like the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Population Council, the World Bank, the United Nations Population Fund, and other programs, which threw enormous amounts of funding into making sure babies weren’t born. 

In China alone, hundreds of millions of children were aborted when the government coerced their mothers into doing so. In India, proof of sterilization was required to obtain water, electricity, ration cards, medical care, and other basic amenities — a policy that was so successful that, in 1975, “more than eight million men and women were sterilized.” In the Philippines, birth control pills were dropped from helicopters over remote villages.

Was Ehrlich really responsible for all this?

Maybe not directly, but these kinds of policies didn’t come out of nowhere. They were born in a global intellectual climate shaped by men like Ehrlich who proclaimed that drastic measures were necessary for human flourishing.

“Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired population size,” Ehrlich wrote in The Population Bomb, before dismissing a program of government sterilization as being premature due to lack of research. In 1977, he proposed adding sterilants “to drinking water or staple foods,” and wrote in favor of semi-sterilization, which would “reduce fertility by adjustable amounts, anywhere from 5 to 75 percent, rather than to sterilize the whole population completely.” 

If scientific methods wouldn’t work, Ehrlich thought, maybe onerous taxes on cribs and diapers might do the trick. 

You’d think that, after we reached the 2000s without any widespread death and destruction, Ehrlich might have seen the error of his ways. After all, the man had predicted that “England would not exist in the year 2000.” Instead, he doubled down.

In 2015, he told the New York Times that, while he didn’t think everything in The Population Bomb was perfect, his “language would be even more apocalyptic today,” and in 2018, he assured the Guardian that the collapse of civilization “is a near certainty in the next few decades, and the risk is increasing continually as long as perpetual growth of the human enterprise remains the goal of economic and political systems … As I’ve said many times, ‘perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell’.” 

And so, Ehrlich doesn’t get a generous obituary willing to overlook his few faults. His legacy wasn’t that he was horribly wrong about his apocalyptic predictions, but that those predictions gave intellectual legitimacy and a “scientific” basis for killing hundreds of millions of innocent babies and the forced sterilization of so many helpless women — facts that never persuaded him to back down on those predictions or his radical political prescriptions.

One hopes, for the sake of his soul, that coming face to face with death enlightened him to his errors and that Divine Mercy will consider what ignorance he had of his own influence. 

The rest of us ought to wholeheartedly reject his legacy and seek to right its wrongs.

READ MORE by Aubrey Harris:

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