Paul R. Ehrlich

So the The baby boom happened, and so the baby boom allowed economists to just assume the population question would take care of itself.

And then later on, we'd get this, actually the revival of the old eugenic society of the 1930s as the population control people in the 1970s, Paul Ehrlich and so on.

continuous lineage from those early eugenics movements, which people don't like talking about for understandable reasons.

But basically what happened was, on the one hand, you had this baby boom.

And of course, and the New York Post even pointed this out, a couple of years after the study was published...

We get Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, which was very popular but ultimately was a bomb because none of it turned out to be true.

That's where Paul Ehrlich argued that in his seminal paper that the world was overpopulated.

and that the whole world was going to collapse, lack of resources, etc., etc., etc.

And even if you were to statistically play around with the data, it looks like the world didn't end.

would be the one that would be the guide throughout this entire ecology-based version of the land.

And the interesting thing that I was just thinking about when you were saying that is that this was the time during Paul Ehrlich's wonderful, excuse me, not so wonderful trustees about like, you know, like we were going to have a food epidemic that was going to happen with a population bomb and everything.

So it was kind of interesting that they went through this way they went first the ecology way and then they transitioned over uh to something that was about agriculture which is probably something that's a little bit more uplifting at the time period and also acted as a wonderful antidote uh to um his paul's predictions of things and carl hodges he was he was the primary um advisor for all of the land and actually he and he he didn't in I think he either invented or he popularized the term of symbiosis, which is also the name of the movie that's inside of the attraction.

And they still have the dedication plaque outside of the land, which has a lot of his words on there as well.

Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that civilization will end within 15 to 30 years unless immediate action is taken against the problems facing mankind.

Paul Ehrlich said, who I don't have his credentials here, but he appeared in a lot of these, so I think he had something to do with maybe the organizing of Earth Day.

Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in Mademoiselle magazine in April 1970, the population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make.

The death rate will increase until at least 100 to 200 million people per year will be starving to death in the next 10 years, so by 1980.

Life magazine reported in January 1970, scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support the following predictions.

The end of growth has been predicted plenty of times, and the people who predicted it were famously wrong.

Malthus over two centuries ago, Paul Ehrlich and the population bomb, the limits to growth team back in the 1970s, which wasn't wrong so much as misunderstood.

It wasn't the underlying logic that was incorrect.

Each time, something in our economy showed up that actually opened up a whole new pool of real surplus and productivity, which allowed the financial claims to extend their biophysical tether a while longer.

Malthus could not have known about the carbon pulse, the enormous one-time inheritance of buried ancient productivity that we were about to start burning.

which grew far more food and far more people than his arithmetic could have envisioned two centuries ago.

Ehrlich's generation didn't anticipate globalization, the way that we would outsource our resource use to cheaper areas in the world, or the way that debt would allow us en masse to reach into the future and pull tomorrow's consumption forward to today.

And I think almost nobody saw how long the whole thing could be stretched once central banks stepped up to replace what commercial banks did as the guarantors of last resort for all the new money and claims that started around 2009.

I mean, the concept was ultimately we would have starvation and famine.

And in 1968, we had Paul Ehrlich come out with the population bomb, again, arguing that population was going to grow to the point of starvation, mass starvation.

And he said that would happen in 1970s.

Well, what that led to was things like China's one child policy.

Um, but the people that latched onto the ideologues that latched onto this thing were not at all.

This was, if you recall the sixties, the height of, uh, Paul Ehrlich, warning of Malthusianism and the Club of Rome talking about the limits to growth and the humans are going – are a cancerous plague upon the earth and we're going to quickly overstrip, overpopulate, overrun our resources and we're all going to die.

And so – And scientists latched onto this mouse thing, or scientists didn't, ideologues did, and said, see, this proves that we need to address the population problem.

There was even some clown in the Senate who brought up this mouse thing on the floor of the Senate and said, see, we need to do something about it.