Paul Ehrlich: When Bad Ideas Grow Feet and Start Walking
On March 13, biologist and environmentalist Paul Ehrlich died. According to the obituary in Nature, Ehrlich was “pioneering” and “controversial.” In reality, his book, The Population Bomb, is perhaps the best example in recent memory that “ideas have consequences” and that bad ideas have victims.
His catastrophic predictions about overpopulation, as the obituary admitted, “encouraged mass sterilization programmes in India and the one-child policy in China, and influenced how children everywhere were viewed and valued.” His catastrophic predictions were also, as Chuck Colson noted in 2001, spectacularly wrong.
Even 25 years later, Colson’s analysis of The Population Bomb and why Ehrlich missed so badly remains spot on:
In 1968, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich famously declared that “the battle to feed humanity is over.” He predicted that during the 1970s, “the world will experience starvation of tragic proportion [and] . . . hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” It didn’t quite turn out that way.
In fact, almost none of the dire predictions associated with what Ehrlich called “The Population Bomb” came to pass. That’s because the doomsayers didn’t understand what it really means to be human. Ehrlich’s was only the most dramatic expression of a worldview that saw reducing birth rates as the key to not only humanity’s, but the entire planet’s fate. In this view, people were akin to parasites. They consumed resources and gave little, if anything, back. Population had to be contained both for our sakes and for the sake of the earth.
As a 1970s Smithsonian exhibit put it, “Population: The Problem Is Us.” The fear was so acute that groups like Planned Parenthood recommended making abortion not only legal, but compulsory. They proposed tax penalties to discourage marriage and proposed governmental encouragement of homosexuality. Well, it turns out that all we really had to fear was our irrational fear about population growth.
It goes without saying that Ehrlich was wrong about mass starvation. The only deaths from starvation since The Population Bomb was published have been the result of war and man-made famines. What’s more, not only is there food in abundance, but natural resources haven’t run out either. In 1980, economist Julian Simon made a wager with Ehrlich that any five metals Ehrlich picked would be cheaper in 1990 than in 1980. Simon won the bet hands down.
Today, many natural resources, including oil, cost less, if you adjust for inflation, than they did in 1980. The population doom-and-gloomers were wrong about almost everything. Yet, their predictions and policy recommendations shaped an entire world’s attitude toward population. Their mistakes were more than math errors. Their worldview didn’t permit them to see what makes man unique. Their naturalism — the belief that the natural world is all there is—caused them to see man as just another animal—an animal that consumed food and other resources at a much higher rate than other animals.
Remarkably, this static understanding of man made no allowance for human ingenuity. It never stopped to consider that our God-given intelligence would enable us to find a way to feed our growing population. Or that our intelligence would help us find resources where previous generations hadn’t thought to look. Instead, it made us the equivalent of sheep, rabbits, and other animals.
And that’s why they were so spectacularly wrong—and why we shouldn’t listen to them now. This goes to show you that any account about the nature and destiny of man must start with the biblical account of who man is. Man, alone among the creatures of the earth, is created in the image of God. Any worldview that doesn’t acknowledge this fact, and grasp its implications, will inevitably fall into error, as we saw with the population doomsayers. Because the problem isn’t people. The problem is not appreciating the true significance of our humanity.
Ehrlich’s worldview blinded him from reality. Not only did he get humanity tragically wrong, but he also misunderstood the physical world. Had his ideas merely remained in a book, to be analyzed and critiqued by other academics, the damage done would have been minimal. But his ideas, as ideas tend to do, grew feet and walked into the real world of image bearers, and they wreaked havoc. Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have victims.
Photo Credit: ©GettyImages/Ruben Earth
John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host of BreakPoint, a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.
The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.
BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.
