By Tony Hagen • editor@newjersey.sierraclub.org
Sierrans come in all shapes and sizes. One such was Paul R. Ehrlich, who passed away recently at the age of 93.
Somehow Ehrlich managed to get his spurs lodged in the side of certain conservatives during his lifetime, such that they practically celebrated his death.
Headlines saying, essentially, “He got it wrong!” virtually littered the conservative press. Why such jubilation?
Ehrlich was the author of The Population Bomb, a treatise on the imminent downfall of man owing to his rampant consumption and the supposed limitations of our global food supply.
Ehrlich wrote the book in 1968, at which time the world population was 3.5 billion. It’s now well over 8 billion, so we got over any hiccups in sustainability that Ehrlich thought would trip us up.
What got people so uptight was that Ehrlich’s arguments were a compelling indictment against the capitalist system of produce and consume. It flew in the face of the corporate mantra, which is build markets everywhere.
I was curious about this posthumous reaction to Ehrlich, so I went out and bought a copy of his book. It cost me $15 on Amazon and was billed as a used book and the last one in stock, presumably to get me to buy it, although it was clear upon receipt that it was run off an on-demand printer at very low quality and nobody had ever creased its pages.
Rivers on Fire
Ehrlich was actually encouraged to write the book by Sierra Club, because in the sixties everybody was looking at everything from roadside trash to rivers on fire with chemical pollution and wondering whether the sky was really falling. We didn’t have the Environmental Protection Agency or the Clean Air Act back then.
People like Ehrlich got Richard M. Nixon to pay attention and do something, and it pulled industry up short like a mad dog reaching the end of its chain. No wonder there was so much lingering resentment.
Ehrlich’s book is not an easy read. I just think that technically it’s not a marvel of literary accomplishment (although who am I to talk?). It piles environmental horror upon environmental horror until you are somewhat traumatized and ready for a Lake Tahoe spa–if you can afford it. (I went to Starbucks for a latte.)
But in his day people read it and then carried the football another fifty yards. Charlton Heston starred in a movie about people eating chips made of recycled people. China passed its one-child-per-family policy, which spurred its own horror stories, and India tried forced sterilization.
Yes, Ehrlich was partly held to blame for these things. He condoned and recommended such policies in his book.
But the world was a mess in those days, and Ehrlich seemed to want to be as blunt as dropping billions of pounds of bombs on Cambodia.
Looking back, we want to ask whether he overreacted to the sustainability issue. We didn’t have genetically modified crops in those days. Improvements in mechanization, pest control, and fertilizer input changed the game for agriculture, and a large part of the Amazon rainforest had yet to be converted to beef production. Industry found ways through science to feed all those five billion extra mouths, and those advances, should you choose to call them that, had not been foreseen in Ehrlich’s day.
Some people think science can continue to solve all of our problems. Others see an image of Phileas Fogg tearing the boat to pieces and throwing it bit by bit into the boiler to get more steam, as he rushes to get back to England to win a bet and save his fortune.
We’ve paid a heavy price to feed those five billion extra people. How many more can we feed?
Ehrlich sang like a canary in the mine. He did help to reset the doomsday clock by advocating for environmental cleanup. People overlook his unflagging efforts in that regard. We do owe him better than the headlines he got.
By the way, I’m done with The Population Bomb. If anybody else wants to read it, just send me a note and the postage.
It’s our modern Helen of Troy, the book that launched a thousand, well, different things.