New York Times, 3/15/2026
Keith Schneider reports:
As a young professor of biology at Stanford University in the mid-1960s, Dr. Ehrlich was known for his absorbing lectures on evolution, in which he described what plants and animals faced on a planet stressed by industrial pollution and rapid population growth. He distilled those lectures into an article published in December 1967 in New Scientist magazine.
Six months later, encouraged by David Brower, the executive director of the environmental group the Sierra Club, to write a book on the subject, Dr. Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb.” In 233 pages, he asserted that the planet’s condition began to deteriorate rapidly in the 1950s, when the rate of population growth exceeded the increase in food production — or, as he put it, when “the stork passed the plow.” He called on couples to limit their families to one or two children.
Witty, knowledgeable and not at all reticent, Dr. Ehrlich gained a huge audience on television, especially on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” which he appeared on roughly 20 times. His forecast of food riots in the United States and of imminent global famines caused by escalating population growth found a worldwide readership.
One of the best-selling nonfiction books about the environment to date, “The Population Bomb” sold three million copies [yet not a single one remains in any South Central public library] and transformed Dr. Ehrlich, who was 37 at the time, into one of the global environmental movement’s most recognized leaders. His influence motivated international governments to convene conferences on controlling population, and his message was heard in private homes across the industrialized world as couples conceived fewer children.
Dr. Ehrlich expanded on his thesis in “The End of Affluence” (1974), which he wrote with his wife, Anne H. Ehrlich, who wrote or edited 15 books with him.
The book forecast a “nutritional disaster” in the 1970s, predicting that “before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity.”
United Nations, 10/25/2025
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