Paul R. Ehrlich

About the Paul R. Ehrlich

Paul Ralph Ehrlichis an American biologist known for his predictions and warnings about the consequences of population growth, including famine and resource depletion. Ehrlich is the Bing Professor Emeritus of Population Studies of the Department of Biology of Stanford University.

Ehrlich became well known for the controversial 1968 book The Population Bomb, which he co-authored with his wife Anne H. Ehrlich, in which they famously stated that “[i]n the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” Among the solutions suggested in that book was population control, including “various forms of coercion” such as eliminating “tax benefits for having additional children”.

Scholars, journalists and public intellectuals have mixed views on Ehrlich’s assertions on the dangers of expanding human populations. While Paul A. Murtaugh, associate professor of statistics at Oregon State University, says that Ehrlich was largely correct, Ehrlich has been criticized for his approach and views, both for their pessimistic outlook and, later on, for the repeated failure of his predictions to come true. For example, in response to Ehrlich’s assertion that all major marine wildlife would die by 1980, Ronald Bailey termed Ehrlich an “irrepressible doomster”. Ehrlich has acknowledged that “some” of what he predicted has not occurred, but nevertheless maintains that his predictions about disease and climate change were essentially correct and that human overpopulation is a major problem. Whereas American journalist Jonathan V. Last has called The Population Bomb “one of the most spectacularly foolish books ever published”, journalist Fred Pearce argues that overconsumption is the real problem.