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Paul R. Ehrlich lecturing at Berkeley California on April 8, 2008. I was looking forward to this lecture because Paul Ehrlich has been a hero of mine for many years. He is one of the founding fathers of the ecology movement, and the creator of the Zero Population Growth movement. He originally came to prominence when he published an article in the New Scientist in December 1967 about the coming world hunger, and then a book The Population Bomb which I read soon after publication.

My blogs of the last couple of months have been greatly influenced by his concerns, and so I was hoping that he would have pursued his original ideas further, and would have presented to us some new earth-shaking revelations such as the 1967 article. I was gravely disappointed! There was nothing new, nothing challenging and nothing in the way of new directions which would impact the coming world disaster in any positive meaningful way. Because, my personal ideas on these population, and survival-of-humanity subjects are rather grim I was hoping he would have something new to offer. A new possibility of bringing the coming disaster under control. Nothing! He many times blamed the whole problem on the politicians, and ridiculed them over and over. And yet, there was nothing new in his message to present to them for their consideration. His job as a prominent, and well paid scientist is to explore new ideas, and present them to the public, but there was nothing new. He has a highly visible pulpit, but he is using it in such a way that distracts his audience away from even searching for workable new answers. The sophisticated looking Berkeley audience loved his callous jokes sprinkled with needless obscenities. It was like watching The Daily Show, or the Colbert Report, on the Comedy Channel. But, this wasn’t a comedy venue. Let me say again, I didn’t laugh much, and I was disappointed!

In the discussion afterwards, which lasted for well over an hour, I said before a rather distinguished circle of faculty people that gathered—since there are twice as many people now as there were when Ehrlich started his Zero Population Growth movement that his efforts were a total failure. Perhaps it was worse than a failure because it created the false sense that something significant was being done—when it wasn’t. Things are being done of course, but since they are not bringing the problem under control, or even starting to bring it under control or even suggesting that they might be trying to write legislation that might bring it under control, that they are in fact counterproductive. Those people out in the field promoting contraception, women’s rights, and responsibilities are the real heroes. Ehrlich only spoke these words and there was no leadership in his position. In fact he said he would rather be chasing butterflies.

One complaint I mentioned was that the population that was most compliant to his message were college educated people, and therefore this most intelligent part of our population is the very one that isn’t reproducing, and the lest informed, and therefore least compliant portion of the population is reproducing. As a biologist he should realize that it is this kind of positive feedback loop that has major consequences after a few generations. So, in an effort to ease the situation he has, in fact, set up the social-biological-feedback conditions which make it worse. It is a tragedy of the commons sort of problem, where the most cooperative, are compliant to some externally imposed rules and because of their compliance are the ones who get exterminated, in the end. He pilloried Americans for being such wasteful consumers, but my experience is that many of them are making a real effort to cut back, and the foreign born emigrants who come to this country immediately purchase the biggest car they can afford and start filling it with kids. I write this not to be ornery, but to demonstrate the effects of Ehrlich’s message.