Paul Ehrlich died last week at the age of ninety-three, without a doubt the world’s most famous entomologist. Of course, Ehrlich didn’t become a household name because of the butterflies that were his academic specialty, but because of his misanthropy. Whenever civilization despaired, there was Paul Ehrlich to tell us it was all our own fault, and that it would be better if most of us simply didn’t exist. His 1968 pop-science best-seller The Population Bomb defined the environmental-apocalyptic genre and anchored popular beliefs in overpopulation that persist to this very day. His Zero Population Growth organization (since renamed the more friendly Population Connection) founded the same year carried the book’s message to Congress and America’s college campuses. His frequent media appearances throughout the 1970s and early 1980s allowed him to spread his gospel discouraging marriage, recommending self-sterilization, advocating anti-natal government propaganda and taxation, and perfectly open to coercive population policies. Ehrlich died as the world’s most famous Malthusian, second only to Malthus himself.
Although Paul Ehrlich was a scientist and Stanford professor, his fame came not from careful analysis, research, and teaching but from skillful agitprop through fear-mongering and outlandish predictions. Because the world production of human beings was (supposedly) about to outrun the world production of food, “in the 1970s hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death,” Ehrlich stated in The Population Bomb. On the first Earth Day in 1970 he claimed four billion people would “die off” due to starvation in the 1980s. American life expectancy was going to fall to 42 years by 1980 due to chemical poisoning. Needless to say, none of these catastrophes came to pass. Despite the Bangladesh famine of 1974, the 1970s had the lowest global starvation rate in world history up to that point. It fell even lower in the 1980s. American life expectancy rose nearly three years over the course of the 1970s and today is above 78.