Thirty years ago, Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich fired the opening salvo in what would soon become a war on people. In the pages of The Population Bomb, he sketched out a frightening scenario of humanity doubling and doubling again, until it was standing room only on a world wracked by massive famines. Fearful of this future, the US and other developed countries undertook a decades-long campaign to abort, sterilize and contracept the poor of the world.
As regular readers of the Population Research Institute Review know, virtually every claim Ehrlich’s book contains — from the inevitability of massive famine to the endless doubling of human populations — has been proven false. The population of the world will never double again, while each year or two we hit new high water marks in food production. We face a future of surfeit, not of famine.
So it is not surprising that, when The Population Bomb is brought up these days, Ehrlich is quick to change the subject. The chief threat to the world, he now says, comes not from the people of the Third World, but from the “excess consumption” of the people of the First World. (“Scientists Denounce Excess Consumption,” 4 October 1998, San Jose Mercury News). “Improving the behavior of the wealthy would ultimately be much more effective than simply telling the poor how to change theirs,” he now opines.
Ehrlich believes that rich countries should institute “strong consumption reduction policies” to reign in the over-consumptive lifestyle of the average American. Now I hold no brief for the overblown materialism practiced by some in this country, but it is not hard to hear in Ehrlich’s words the echo of hobnailed boots. By heavy taxes and government-enforced rationing, he would limit America’s access to certain resources, such as water, gasoline and other fuels, and to certain goods that are in his opinion profligate.
“People need to pay for what they destroy — whether disposable diapers or fuel-inefficient sports utility vehicles,” quipped one of Ehrlich’s colleagues, sounding as if he believes that consumer goods are given away free. What he means, of course, is that some goods should not be sold at all — or at such exorbitant prices that ordinary people simply cannot afford to pay for them. Doubling gas prices, a favorite environmentalist proposal, would harm the working classes far more than the wealthy.
Please note the self-serving selection of goods to be banned or penalized. Stanford University professors, being a largely barren lot, have little need for disposable diapers, while SUVs are entirely beneath their dignity. Books, it is safe to say, will never appear on their list of items to be banned. But how many trees have died so that their books might be published and their libraries thrive?
Still, the poor of the world should be relieved that Ehrlich has now turned his attention away from reducing their number to “improving the behavior” of the wealthy. So perhaps he will now condemn the targets and quotas, threats and bribes, coercion and experimentation that have come to characterize population control programs. It was, after all, his hysterical tomb that helped to get them started.
