The dark legacy of Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb

In December 2022, Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes reported that nations of the world were uniting “to save nature from mass extinction.” Scientists agreed that time was running out, said Pelley, who spoke to zoologist Paul Ehrlich.

“Humanity is not sustainable,” said Ehrlich, who died last week at age 93. “To maintain our lifestyle (yours and mine, basically) for the entire planet, you’d need five more Earths.”

That Ehrlich told Pelley humanity was doomed was no surprise. For more than half a century, Ehrlich had been predicting mass extinction, the theme of his 1968 book The Population Bomb, which declared humans an existential threat requiring urgent intervention.

“The cancer of population growth must be cut out,” wrote Ehrlich, adding that “nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”

I recall being assigned Ehrlich’s book as an undergrad in the late 1990s. By that time, Ehrlich had become a kind of star as far