[National Review] Paul Ehrlich died Monday, nearly 60 years after he published his book The Population Bomb, ushering in a wave of mass hysteria over the imagined consequences of overpopulation that persists to this day.Ehrlich warned in the 1968 book that overpopulation would lead to "mass starvation" on a "dying planet."
"The battle to feed all of humanity is over," he warned in the book’s opening sentence, declaring that humanity had lost. He predicted "hundreds of millions of people" would starve to death in the 1970s.
Of course, his predictions fell flat thanks to the green revolution in Asian agriculture that made farming more efficient.
Ehrlich’s alarmist warnings spread like wildfire thanks in part to legacy media outlets and a major boost from NBC’s Tonight Show. Johnny Carson had Ehrlich on the show more than 20 times, including one segment ahead of Earth Day where he invited Ehrlich to speak for over an hour on population, birth control, and sterilization to his audience of millions. In 1977, nearly a decade after the book’s publishing, Carson called Ehrlich "one of my favorite guests on this show over the years."
As the New York Times wrote in Ehrlich’s obituary this week, the book sold three million copies and "transformed Dr. Ehrlich, who was 37 at the time, into one of the global environmental movement’s most recognized leaders."
Smithsonian Magazine reports that Ehrlich initially had difficulty gaining media attention — but that struggle didn’t last long.
In a New York Times "Books of the Times" column from February 1969, the paper describes the book as follows:
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