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Different people believe in different things. Some believe that we go to paradise after we die. Others that we disappear into cosmic dust. But environmentalist prophet Paul Ehrlich believed mankind would be reduced to cannibalism unless we stopped having children. Right away.
And Ehrlich never gave up hope of seeing cannibalism in his lifetime.
In ‘The Population Bomb’, the 1968 bestseller that became one of the foundational texts of the environmentalist movement and helped inspire the population reduction industry, Ehrlich opened with the statement that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
After going through a dozen printings, later editions postponed the mass deaths and Armageddons to a safely more ambiguous, at least for the era, time “the 1970s and 1980s”.
It got less cheerful from there.
“Will we be willing to slaughter our dogs and cats?” the book backed by the Sierra Club and published by a Stanford University professor inquired. Then it mentioned the “addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple foods” or have the government “impose penalties designed to discourage reproduction” with “luxury taxes placed on… cribs, diapers” and “considering the savings in school buildings” it would be a “money making proposition.”
The media and the cultural elites hailed ‘The Population Bomb’ as an urgent warning for mankind. It inspired assorted disastrous policies, including population control, and some bad science fiction like ‘Soylent Green’ which imagined that cannibalism would be official policy.
The Chalton Heston movie was based on an even worse novel, ‘Make Room, Make Room’, which featured an introduction by Ehrlich (since deleted out of some latent sense of shame) claiming that it “presents a gripping scenario of where current trends may be leading.”
“If the post-1950 rates of urban growth continue to 1984, half of the human race will be living in cities. By 2023 everyone would live in an urban area,” Ehrlich warned in his introduction.
Like a reverse Cassandra, the more wrong Ehrlich’s predictions were, the more he insisted on making them, and the more they were taken seriously by the rapidly discredited expert class.
“Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,” Ehrlich told CBS News in 1970. And “it’s very difficult for me to picture things holding together for more than another decade or so.”
In ‘How To Be A Survivor’, Ehrlich and his co-author insisted that “since we have only about one year’s reserve supply of food in the United States, famine could come to this nation and could come relatively soon.” Hopefully crossing his fingers, he added that “the blight in the corn belt in 1970… may be a foretaste of things to come.” Sadly for Ehrlich it wasn’t. Millions of Americans did not die in a corn famine and they did not take to eating each other, but went on reproducing.
“No one has yet presented a sound argument for having more than 150 million Americans,” the book contended, and suggested that “the government would eventually place criminal sanctions on overbreeding”, argued “there is no sacred right to have children” since the “the government tells you precisely how many husbands or wives you can have and claims you in jail if you exceed that number. Having a third child may some day produce that same unhappy result.”
In an interview with CBS News, Ehrlich had compared children to garbage. The idea that every woman should have as many babies as she wants is, to me, exactly the same kind of idea as everybody oughta be permitted to throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want..”
This was followed by proposals to ban ads for cars and soap, forcible social justice reeducation and an assertion that communism would have to be imposed on Americans in a ‘subtle’ way.
“The new men must come through gentle conversion and natural replacement. Certainly the antisocial activities of the old men and technology will have to be quickly stopped, but this should be done with a maximum of subtlety. There is no point in waving a red flag in front of the bulls. If the new men in the United States demand a replacement of ‘capitalism’ with ‘socialism’, (or ‘Marxism’ or ‘communism’), the old will recoil in horror. They have not the vaguest notion what either capitalism or socialism is all about. They have however been indoctrinated to react negatively to the words ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’”. That was always the end game.
Ehrlich’s apocalypse follies, like the postmodern climate change discourse, was the ghoulish stick to convince Americans and the rest of the free world to submit to government control.
None of his predictions came true, but that never stopped him from throwing them around.
“By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people,” Ehrlich told the British in a 1971 speech. “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
Had Ehrlich predicted mass migration instead of famine, he might not have been that far off.
Despite the lack of mass deaths in the previous decades, Ehrlich and his wife bounced back with a sequel, ‘The Population Explosion’, that began with a first chapter titled “Why Isn’t Everyone As Scared As We Are” and linked ‘global warming’ to ‘overpopulation’, demanding that “the human birthrate must be lowered to slightly below the human death rate as soon as possible” because inaction had “already condemned hundreds of millions more people to premature deaths from hunger and disease”. Still Ehrlich’s famines never seemed to arrive.
By 2014, with the UK still persistently here and mankind still not dead, Ehrlich had stopped teasing cannibalism and fully turned to it. “I don’t think there’s going to be the centuries to come with our kind of civilizations,” he told the Huffington Post. “I think the issues are more likely to be “is it perfectly OK to eat the bodies of your dead because we’re all so hungry.”
When the interviewer expressed shock, Ehrlich doubled down on the dead, claiming, “It’s moving in that direction with ridiculous speed.”
By 2016, Ehrlich was complaining that Trump was “pig-ignorant” of “destruction—increasing overpopulation and overconsumption”. In 2018, he declared that a “shattering collapse of civilization” was “a near certainty in the next few decades”.
In 2023, 60 Minutes brought him back and falsely claimed that Ehrlich “may have lived long enough to see some of his dire prophecies come true.”
“Humanity is not sustainable,” he told his favorite news network. Humanity has turned out to be more sustainable than either CBS News or Ehrlich.
Paul Ehrlich is dead and nobody is eating him because, despite his predictions, mass famine and cannibalism have yet to reach Palo Alto, California.
According to the New York Times orbit, “his predictions proved premature” meaning that the paper of record is still convinced that the mass famines and cannibalism are on the way. They’ve been merely held up a bit. Just because we’re not eating each other now is no reason to give up hope of a worse tomorrow. Sure the mass famines didn’t arrive in the 1970s or 80s, but environmentalists managed to convince a new generation that they’re coming any day now.
One day perhaps someone in California will finally get around to eating Ehrlich.
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
