Suddenly, ‘The Population Bomb’ Is a Population Bust By Stephen Moore for CNS News
Paul Ehrlich wrote one of the most famous and bestselling books of the 20th century. It was called “The Population Bomb.” It was 300 pages of doom and gloom. The planet was being destroyed because human beings were reproducing like Norwegian field mice. It was a Darwinian nightmare leading the species inexorably back to a Neanderthal subsistence level existence.
We learned this from the book’s memorable, often-quoted, and apocalyptic opening:
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970’s and 1980’s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” He predicted that highly populated countries such as India could not be saved from the extinction.
Overpopulation was to the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s what climate change is today.
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Ehrlich became an overnight media darling, appearing six times on “The Johnny Carson Show,” spreading his message of ecological gloom to millions of people. This was considered the irrefutable science of the day, and it gave birth to the modern “green movement.” Only a few academics, such as my mentor Julian Simon, exposed the predictions as hogwash. Simon and others were dismissed as what would be described today as “science deniers.”
So, imagine my surprise when I read this front-page headline from the Sunday, May 23, New York Times: “World Is Facing First Long Slide in Its Population: Fertility Rates Plunge.”
The story describes that even in some of the once most overcrowded nations, “countries are confronting population stagnation and a fertility bust.” People are having so few children now that “maternity wards are…shutting down” across the planet. The doomsayers’ sheepish response is not an apology or admission of academic fraud. Rather, they say, “Thank God we warned the world about overpopulation.”
