The end of the world is always 10 years away

Alarmists have been doling out humanity's demise decade by decade, but it has resulted in some very positive developments.

Unchecked population growth will result in widespread famine, multiple wars over dwindling resources, and will yield only social, economic, and environmental collapse.

These were the key dead-certain predictions contained in the 1968 book The Population Bomb by Sanford University professor Paul R. Ehrlich. His wife, Anne Ehrlich, was co-author but she was not credited until some years later. Ehrlich was then a biologist specializing
Alarmists have been doling out humanity's demise decade by decade, but it has resulted in some very positive developments.

Unchecked population growth will result in widespread famine, multiple wars over dwindling resources, and will yield only social, economic, and environmental collapse.

These were the key dead-certain predictions contained in the 1968 book The Population Bomb by Sanford University professor Paul R. Ehrlich. His wife, Anne Ehrlich, was co-author but she was not credited until some years later. Ehrlich was then a biologist specializing in butterflies (he became a professor of population studies after publication of Bomb).

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Ehrlich was an alarmist. That’s putting it nicely. The only prediction about which he was even half right is the present-day size of the world’s population. As for other predictions, The Bomb is a dud.

Foremost, Ehrlich did not foresee developing agricultural improvements. He didn’t even know they were underway. The The Green Revolution had been percolating since the 1950s and before, and was showing results. But for Ehrlich, many people simply meant less food.

While Ehrlich was wearing a The End is Near sandwich board, Norman Borlaug (d. 2009), a Lutheran sleeves-rolled-up agronomist from Minnesota, was working in Mexico, Pakistan, India and elsewhere. Mexico became a net wheat exporter in 1963. The Philippines became a rice exporter in 1968, for the first time in the 20th century. By 1970 India and Pakistan more than doubled their wheat production. India became a net exporter; Pakistan became Asia’s third largest grain producer, also an exporter, and Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work.

While this was happening, Ehrlich was calling for “social policies” to curb population. He suggested mandatory sterilization of Indian males with two children, and he asserted that U.S. food aid to the Third World should be withheld from recipient nations that would not agree to compulsory population control.