He didn’t repudiate his warnings when they failed to pan out, yet didn’t lose his popularity or prestige.
Not many biologists sell millions of books, make frequent appearances on late-night talk shows and achieve guru status. Paul Ehrlich, the population-control advocate who died last week at 93, checked all three boxes.
Ehrlich’s 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” first brought him notoriety. It asserted that widespread famines and mass starvation would doom huge swaths of mankind because the world’s population was growing too rapidly. “The battle to feed humanity is over,” Ehrlich wrote. “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
Ehrlich had visited India and concluded that poor people were overbreeding. He believed that the developing world simply had “too many people” and calculated that the earth’s population needed to be cut in half. “The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions,” and the “pain may be intense,” he cautioned, sounding like a cartoon villain. But it would be “coercion in a good cause.” Ehrlich urged wealthy nations to cut off food assistance to the Third World. He endorsed an Indian official’s proposal for “sterilizing all Indian males with three or more children.” It was for their own good, he insisted.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
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