![]() When Ehrlich entered the University of Pennsylvania he befriended some upperclassmen who were impressed by his refusal to wear the freshman beanie, then a demeaning tradition. The insecticide DDT was killing his beloved butterflies, and rapid suburban development was destroying their habitat. Even then he was dismayed by environmental degradation. Something of a loner, as precocious as he was assertive, Ehrlich was publishing articles in local entomological journals in his teens. ![]() His childhood love of nature morphed into a fascination for collecting insects, especially butterflies. It gave a huge jolt to the nascent environmental movement and fueled an anti-population-growth crusade that led to human rights abuses around the world.īorn in 1932, Ehrlich was raised in a leafy New Jersey town. Unless humanity cut down its numbers-soon-all of us would face “mass starvation” on “a dying planet.”Įhrlich, now 85, told me recently that the book’s main contribution was to make population control “acceptable” as “a topic to debate.” But the book did far more than that. Published at a time of tremendous conflict and social upheaval, Ehrlich’s book argued that many of the day’s most alarming events had a single, underlying cause: Too many people, packed into too-tight spaces, taking too much from the earth. In the 1970s, the book promised, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” No matter what people do, “nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” ![]() The first sentence set the tone: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” And humanity had lost. It would become one of the most influential books of the 20th century-and one of the most heatedly attacked. But over time Ehrlich’s tract would sell millions of copies and turn its author into a celebrity. In May, Ehrlich released a quickly written, cheaply bound paperback, The Population Bomb. As 1968 began, Paul Ehrlich was an entomologist at Stanford University, known to his peers for his groundbreaking studies of the co-evolution of flowering plants and butterflies but almost unknown to the average person.
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