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Paul Erlich on Population
In 1968, the Stanford entymologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, a bestselling book that alerted the world on the doomsday crisis of the 20th century population explosion. He argued that the world was coming to a point where it could no longer support its own human population and that mass famines would ensue. In the course of the seventies and eighties, when many of his predictions didn't come true and the "green revolution" dramatically changed the food-supply equation, Ehrlich's ideas fell rather more out of favor. Over the course of my higher education in the last half-decade, hardly anybody talks about population as the problem. It is considered unhumanistic. Political and more transcendent economic forces are now seen as the cause, rather than the result, of structural famine.
On October 17, 2006, the population of the United States officially reached 300 million. It reached 200 million, incidentally, in 1967, the year before Ehrlich's book was published. Whether or not there is need to recover his crusade, this milestone offers a good opportunity to at least look back on it an wonder.
In homage to Ehrlich, the Center is pleased to offer an exclusive, fuzzy and incomplete, but nonetheless classic, recording of a lecture from his heydays.
There is also some interesting and strange music at the end. Definitely worth waiting for.
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