In a 1967 article in New Scientist, Ehrlich began his public ministry preaching a religion whose central dogma was that humans are bad.
Inside Scoop: Left-wing wolf in sheep’s clothing, Taiwan identity crisis, life at war in Israel, and countless other horrors. This may explain why this butterfly scientist decided in his 30s to become a professional misanthrope.
Also, it paid pretty well.“The battle to feed humanity is over,” Ehrlich wrote. “Sometime between 1970 and 1985, the world will undergo vast famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Our only salvation was population control.Ehrlich instantly became a star and filthy rich. The book sold more than 2 million copies. He was called to testify before congressional committees regularly. Johnny Carson had him on themore than 20 times. He was the boomers’ favorite scientist. As late as 2023, 16 years into an unprecedented baby bust, CBS’s He won every award imaginable. As essayist Scott Alexander documented: “he won the MacArthur ‘Genius’ Prize in 1990, the Crafoord Prize that same year, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012.” Throw in the “Blue Planet” prize and a hundred others.hit shelves at the cusp of the Sexual Revolution. The anti-natal message seamlessly blended with women’s liberation, birth control, and abortion. He also had the right enemies, as far as academia and the media were concerned: Ehrlich saw Judaism and Christianity as a root of all evil. “One of the saddest things about Western culture is that it’s based on a Judeo-Christian idea of man dominating nature,”The bug scientist supported mass sterilization of humans. The fruits of his labor included China’s one-child policy and India’s forcible sterilization of millions. Ehrlich’s road to Damascus was a street in India. “One stinking hot night in Delhi,” Ehrlich wrote, he turned against his species. “Streets seemed alive with people,” he bemoaned in. “People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.”He wasn’t much of a prophet, though. All of Ehrlich’s predictions proved wrong. An increased world population didn’t lead to mass starvation. England didn’t cease to exist in the 1980s. The world’s oceans were not rendered lifeless. Yet, Ehrlich never explained his error, never apologized, and never moderated.. My language would be even more apocalyptic today,” he said in 2015. “The idea that every woman should have as many babies as she wants is, to me, exactly the same kind of idea as everybody oughtta be permitted to throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.” One co-religionist sharing this dogma of misanthropy is Warren Hern, a doctor who has made his living aborting babies late in pregnancy, including viable babies. Hern wrote a book arguing that humans are, in effect, a cancer on the Earth. At the climax of this argument, he quotesreference to “the cancer of population growth.” Ehrlich praised Hern’s book, offering a blurb on the back cover: “A fascinating analysis by the physician scientist who pioneered the idea that humanity is performing like a metastatic skin cancer on our planet. Read it and act!” Not everyone bought what Ehrlich was selling, though. Economist Julian Simon demanded that Ehrlich put his money where his mouth was. If the world were truly running out of resources, those resources would become more expensive. So the two in 1980 placed a bet on the price direction of five metals, of Ehrlich’s choosing. When it came due in 1990, Simon easily won.Ehrlich saw humans as simple stomachs: consumers of finite resources. Simon saw humans as also minds and hands: creators and builders. One of the humans Ehrlich implicitly wished had never been born was Norman Borlaug, whose discoveries in agriculture allowed him to spur the “Green Revolution,” which made food much more plentiful. This revolution was already underway when Ehrlich started his celebrity world tour of doom. Ehrlich couldn’t see it through the images of hellfire that always danced before his eyes. To escape from his misanthropy, one need not embrace the Judeo-Christian view of the individual that Ehrlich violently rejected — that every human being is of infinite worth. One could, like Simon, use almost an economic accounting: During Ehrlich’s public life, including his public ministry, extreme poverty was reduced drastically.Who caused these improvements? It wasn’t space aliens. It wasn’t Lizard People. Ehrlich would never grant that it was Providence. The cause of our improving lot must have beenThat’s not to say each and every human makes the world a better place. Ehrlich proved that over the past six decades.
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