Environmentalist Misanthropes

Okay, so one would think by now that Ehrlich's book, The Population Bomb, which came out in the 70s, would be dead and gone by now.

The fact is that, you know, Ehrlich was predicting an imminent collapse of everything if we didn't reduce the population.

At that point, There was 3.8 billion people in the world.

Today, there's over 8 billion, and we have not seen the disaster that he predicted.

And actually, what we're seeing is birth rates below the rate of replacement in almost every developed country around the world.

Some, like in South Korea, it's disastrously low.

China is realizing that their one-child policy, which, by the way, seems to have been influenced in part at least by Ehrlich's book, is is facing the very great likelihood of severe economic contraction as you have an aging population and an ethos that says that you shouldn't have more than one child, which guarantees a shrinking population.

How do you support the elderly under these circumstances? And so on.

So We see the disastrous effects of declining population, of reproduction below replacement rate.

We have not seen the predictions of disaster come into effect, and yet somehow you've got this group of scientists who are saying that we need to have the Earth's population in order to save it.

Yeah,

there are a lot of things that come to mind, and you brought up a couple of them, and that is we're already on our way to doing what they want.

So they should be applauding and encouraging people to even just keep going as you're going.

In other words, everything you've noted – if I understand the way the numbers work with demography, will get us to where they say we should be, where we should be without any new efforts or initiatives.

So that's where I'm at.

Yeah, and I mean, I'm always fascinated as a theologian looking at the theological vision that underpins these things.

They're basically soteriologies.

They're views of salvation, right? The high priest scientists are going to deliver their prophetic word and prognostication and solution.

But it is interesting that in this case in particular, this is just a kind of rehashed spirituality, the images of God are the problem again.

And in some sense, they're right.

The image of God have done and wreaked havoc on each other and the world.

But their solution is basically just start having less and less image bearers around.

Again, it's outside of their competence to have a vision where you can transform and transfigure.

But it is interesting that in Christian theology, where you have how fundamental the salvation of the world is to the image of God, so much so that it groans until the children of God are liberated back into being full image bearers.

And so it is interesting to see how those visions contrast.