Biologist and environmentalist Paul Ralph Ehrlich, born May 29th 1932 died last week, March 13th 2026, aged 93. Ehrlich rose to global fame for his 1968 book The Population Bomb, which argued that there are simply too many people for the Earth’s “systems” to sustain, and that ecological collapse was inevitable. This worldwide best-seller shocked much of the West into a new 'environmental consciousness' and turned the grim but charismatic (if you like that sort of thing) scientist into a global celebrity. It paved the way for the Club of Rome’s 1972 report 'The Limits to Growth', which used computer simulations similarly to predict our imminent demise. Such hypotheses became the mainstay of the United Nations' environmental agencies, and set their approach to economic and technological development, including their anti-population-growth policies. Ehrlich's preoccupation with doom made him the spiritual godfather of the (post) modern green movement, and his scientific and arithmetic claims became its intellectual substance. But because of the predominance of the green movement in global and national politics, Ehrlich is less famous for the most enduring fact about his life’s work: it was completely wrong.
In recent pieces on the Daily Sceptic, including one coincidentally written on the day of his death, I have referred to Ehrlich’s work to show how its errors have cascaded over the years, ultimately even to the detriment of the green movement’s objectives. Nuclear power, argued Ehrlich in the 1970s, is “the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a
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Superb piece, many thanks
Rather unfair to Malthus. Unlike Ehrlich, Malthus refined his views as evidence and arguments to the contrary became available. He softened his views on protectionism and moved closer to Ricardo on free-trade. Given his direction of travel, had Malthus lived as long as Ehrlich, he may have fully reversed his earlier views.
In contrast, despite the overwhelming contradictory evidence which Ben outlines, Ehrlich never significantly modified his position. Whereas Malthus was able to adapt to new empirical facts, Ehrlich was trapped by his “environmental apocalypse” ideology.
I freely confess that, when I was young and idealistic and foolish, I believed all the tripe: from “Global Warming” to “Paul Ehrlich’s Malthusian Doom”; from “We Must Stop Having Children to Save the Planet” to “Peak Oil”; from “We Need to Help All the Starving in Africa/ India/ Fill-in-the-Blank” to “We Must Plant More Trees”; from “The Ozone Hole” to “We Must Give All Our Money to Poor Foreign People”; from “Nuclear Weapons” to “Australians Are Walking Upside Down on the Bottom of the Globe”; from “Darwinian Evolution” to “The Virgin Birth” to “Resurrection from the Dead”, which means we should all be worshipping Lazarus.
Unlike many people who yearn to be young again, I wouldn’t want to be young again for worlds! “Live and Learn” is the lifelong task of every human in this physical world, just as “Repent, Go & Sin no more, Denounce the Devil, and Thank God every day for His Blessings” is the task of every human soul. And get yourself properly baptised by full immersion of your own Free Will… none of that pathetic sprinkling!
It’s certainly peverse to turn a measure of our immense success as species living in a certain environment into an argument for making our lifes objectively worse. It works! We must stop it because it might stop to work in future!
Hä¹?
¹ Colloquial German for Wie bitte — pardon.
This guy is to doom-mongering what Brazil are to World Cups. Julian Simon though managed to always beat Brazil. With facts, evidence and reason
This article gets the historical trend right but, as any sceptic knows, basing the future trend on that alone and turning our eyes away from the realities of the present does not reflect the truth of a matter. How many times have I heard that crime statistics show huge historic declines yet most people feel things are worse.
The scale and speed of human expansion is now overwhelming the abilities of states, science and technology to deal with its impact or provide believable answers.
Step outside the increasingly few bubbles of entitled comment and contentment and it is observable and obvious.
Current demographics will inevitably lead to a large population drop. But save for a few nations we are nowhere near that point, especially in the worst affected, over-populated regions.
The rising frequency of economic, military, social and cultural conflict is not a coincidence. The refrain from the blinkered optimists – on both right, left and in-between – that it is all solvable and we have never had it so good now sounds and is hollow, and the majority now know it because they live beneath that lie.
A fundamental question remains. Why is there a certain view that the… Read more »
The only way for more and more humans to be living on this planet is that chances of survival of individual humans until they’re old enough to sire and raise children keep getting better. The world can never be overpopulated because excess humans are going to die, usually as children, as children are much more fragile than adults.
What makes you think you can steer a complex self-regulating system better than what it would be capable of on its own? And what do you mean by “better”, anyway?
Perhaps we need a posh phrase for the logical fallacy of “bad model”? Google Translate offers ‘malum exemplar’ for Latin or “kakó modeló” in Greek.
In any event there have been too many recent examples where politicians have used a poor model to justify their authoritarian meddling in peoples’ lives. Garbage in, mega garbage out, as it were.
Great article Ben. This is a luxury belief system that sadly too many people I know bathe in, all of them well off.
Darwin explicitly debunked Malthus:
It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms; for in this case there can be no artificial increase of food, and no prudential restraint from marriage. Although some species may be now increasing, more or less rapidly, in numbers, all cannot do so, for the world would not hold them.
There is no exception to the rule that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair. Even slow-breeding man has doubled in twenty-five years, and at this rate, in a few thousand years, there would literally not be standing room for his progeny. Linnæus has calculated that if an annual plant produced only two seeds—and there is no plant so unproductive as this—and their seedlings next year produced two, and so on, then in twenty years there would be a million plants. The elephant is reckoned to be the slowest breeder of all known animals, and I have taken some pains to estimate its probable minimum rate of natural increase: it will be under the mark to assume that it… Read more »
Darwin? Another half wit. One philosophy pissing on the other. No relationship to ‘science’.
How much agricultural land has been switched from food to bio-fuel production to satisfy green mandates
Too much. And the whole process, agriculture, turning into fuel releases more of the dreaded C02 per litre of furl than the natural good stuff out of oil wells.