False Prophets of Doom

RIP Paul Ehrlich and his decided lack of optimism

Paul Ehrlich died on March 13, at 93. He is only occasionally remembered now, but as the obituaries reminded us, his was one of the most influential voices of the late 1960s and through the 1970s, warning that the world was past a tipping point of environmental stress that would eventually make it impossible to feed the new billions of people. His 1968 book, The Population Bomb, which sold more than three million copies, became a foundational text for a generation of ecologists and environmentalists.

And it was utterly wrong.

The first edition began with a blunt jeremiad: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” The virtue of Ehrlich’s book was its complete clarity, which equaled a complete lack of nuance or subtlety. It was a sledgehammer, intentionally, and its impact was magnified by the author’s ubiquitous media presence: In the 1970s and 1980s, Johnny Carson’s hugely popular Tonight Show welcomed Ehrlich as a guest more than 20 times. (Here’s a clip.) He launched a “Zero Population Growth” initiative and led a zealous anti-immigration movement in the U.S.

There were about 3.5 billion people on Earth in 1970. There are about 8.5 billion today. Yet, none of Ehrlich’s prognostications of doom have come true. Yes, there have been famines and mass starvation in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia, but none were the result of a shortfall of food produced globally, or even regionally. Rather, those food crises were caused by political turmoil, especially the Ethiopian famine of the mid-1980s. Year by year, food output on this planet actually increased faster than population, and that remains true today.

One of the primary reasons was the startling increase in corn yields, which is part of what I discuss in my forthcoming book, to be published in 2027. In 1970, American corn yields were about 70 bushels per acre, with the U.S. far and away the world’s largest producer. Today, yields are more than 170 bushels per acre, thanks to technological advances in fertilizer as well as hybrid and gene-edited and transgenic (GMO) seeds. In addition, Brazil and China have become major corn producers, now growing more than the U.S. grew when Ehrlich was doomsaying.

You can — and many do — criticize the corn economy. These days, much of the U.S. crop is turned into ethanol for gasoline, and most of global corn production goes to animal feed. The monoculture and its abundant use of synthetic fertilizers has created its own particular vulnerabilities: The current virtual closure of the Strait of Hormuz has interrupted 20 percent of the global fertilizer supply because so much of it is made from the natural gas of the region.

But corn is also a big reason that there was no caloric deficit as the world population kept growing (and growing and growing). Today, of course, humanity faces a population decline, the first time that trend has reversed since, perhaps, the Black Death of the 14^th century.

Strangely, Ehrlich never acknowledged his mistaken prognostications. In fact, he said that, if anything, he’d been too optimistic, because by the 21^st century it was clear (to him) that wealthy nations were embarked on an orgy of resource consumption that would set the stage for an even more epic collapse in the years ahead. He acknowledged that he had not predicted the “Green Revolution” that saw wheat, corn, and rice yields spike in the developing world, but he pointed to the chronic persistence of malnutrition as evidence of the essential rightness of his thesis and doubled down on his forecast of a disastrous, unsustainable future.

That is still the sentiment of a broad cohort around the world. Ehrlich became famous because he articulated a general unease with the course of consumer capitalism. The 1970s were a time of energy crises and fears of reaching “peak oil” when there was nothing much left to drill. It was a time when the post-1945 consensus around the virtues of free-market capitalism versus communism were being questioned, if not rejected. And there was a strong sense that industrialization on a global scale — and not just in the West — was swallowing the planet.

Fifty years later, those concerns are more acute than ever. And yet more people have more caloric abundance and more cheap energy — the current oil and gas supply shock caused by the fighting in the Middle East notwithstanding. The world, in fact, throws away 30 percent of the calories it produces every single day! We do not extract nearly as much oil and gas as we could, because demand is stable and alternative forms of energy are increasingly meeting our energy needs. The world is not, in other words, experiencing a resource crunch.

There’s an old saying: If you are going to predict the end of the world, don’t give a date. Ehrlich made that mistake in his book, then benefited from the fact that warnings of future doom can never be proven wrong by present facts. When there is fear of what lies ahead, we can always find ample evidence to feed those fears. Ehrlich was a master feeder.

No one, though, can be certain about the future. The issues of environmental harm and climate change are not inventions of our darkest worries; they are real challenges with potentially dire consequences. But as Ehrlich’s flawed arc shows, there needs to be more emphasis on “potentially” rather than assuming certainty. What he and others chronically underestimate is the X factor of human innovation to solve problems that humans have created. You can’t rely on that happening, but a persistent past pattern like that must be factored into any look ahead.

Of course, the art of Ehrlich’s resource jeremiad is to reject that possibility. He was able to remain a true believer in the face of the facts because he didn’t allow himself to imagine that humans could solve their problems. Rather, he saw our nature as spurring us to plow ahead, consequences be damned. That is a grim view, one that elides a rich history of plowing ahead to generally make life better, not worse.

The dance continues. There will forever be prophets of doom. But just because they get more attention than prophets of hope doesn’t make them right.