Paul Ehrlich, the celebrity bug scientist-turned-environmentalist who wrote a tract against babymaking called The Population Bomb, was disastrously wrong and never really admitted it. He spent his life defending The Population Bomb and saying he wished he had been more strident in it.
He predicted mass starvation as a consequence of a growing population, but the opposite happened: When the population grew, hunger dissipated. Now we face a crisis of low birth rates, and we are on the verge of a shrinking population.
Ehrlich just died, which means he can no longer advocate forced sterilization and try to convince everyone that babies are bad. But the sad thing is, he doesn’t really need to — because much of the population is already so convinced.
Just check the pages of the New York Times. You could start with the laughable subheadline on their obituary, which refused to grant that Ehrlich was wrong.
But picking on the New York Times editors is not terribly apt on this score. The Times, for the past eight years or so, has been better than any other legacy left-leaning outlet in covering the collapse of the birth rate.
For instance, here’s a 2021 article that casts the collapse in the birth rate as a bit of a problem. A 2018 New York Times article was ambivalent about low and falling birth rates. And way back in 2012, the Times ran a David Brooks column that worried about “The Fertility Implosion.”
If you want to see Ehrlich’s effects on the American psyche, check out the reader responses to these articles.
The first letter to the editor about the 2012 Brooks column reads, “Falling global fertility rates are hardly a cause for handwringing pessimism,” but should instead be celebrated. Another reads, “Fewer people on this planet could very well mean less pollution and destruction of natural habitats, and greater biodiversity. That would be good for all living things, including self-serving humans.”
Check out the 1,200 comments on that 2018 Times piece: “I admire the young people who are choosing not to have children.” “Earth to the NY Times — falling birthrates are not, I repeat, not a problem … with eight billion people jammed into one overpopulated, overheated planet, the last thing we need is more people.” “Not only are there too many humans worldwide, but there are too many in the developed countries like the U.S. If the developed nations do not decrease their population, the biosphere will be destroyed.”
Responses to that 2021 article were similar: “Maybe fewer humans will help the planet and some of humanity survive.” “At an early age, I saw that the explosion of humans on this planet was ruining the world for future generations and all other living species.” “Mother Nature has an answer to her pressing concerns and we are not needed.”
And the New York Times published four letters in response to its latest piece on low and falling birth rates, and all four were against babies.
This isn’t unique to the New York Times readership, though. The Washington Post’s former letters editor wrote that many of her writers really thought people were bad.
Sure enough, when I wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about how to make your life easier by having many children, the 6,000 comments were almost all negative.
“In this world of over-consumption having so many kids seems selfish. More than that morally reprehensible … relies on a patriarchal view of the family.”
“The planet is already overpopulated. The author’s disdain for science and the nature of exponential increase is obvious.”
The sad fact is that millions of people believe the planet is overpopulated. That view is grounded in a belief that humans are basically bad.
As you consider the terrible effect Ehrlich had on the planet, read one more letter to the editor. This one ran in the Wall Street Journal and was written by Kenneth Emde of Woodbury, Minnesota.
“I was a college student when I read Mr. Ehrlich’s ‘The Population Bomb.’ I took it to heart and now have no grandchildren, but 50 years later the population has increased to eight billion without dire consequences. I was gullible and stupid.”