1: Are People the Problem?

We know that the world is burning. The question is how to put out the fire.

—Twilly Cannon, former captain of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior¹

 

 

 

Other things being equal, a larger population will eat more food, wear more clothes, occupy more shelter, and generate more excrement than a smaller one. That’s an indisputable biological fact.

If there is not enough food, fabric, or shelter to go around and the latrines are overflowing, you might conclude that economic, social, or political institutions are faulty, that the system isn’t meeting people’s basic needs.

Or if you believe that the system is fundamentally sound and that any other system would be worse, you might conclude that the problem is too many people.

Activists have debated those opposing views since the modern environmental movement was born in the 1960s.

The new movement was born as part of the same global radicalization, and involved many of the same people, as the nuclear disarmament and test ban campaigns and the movement against the US war in Vietnam. There had long been wilderness conservationist societies in North America and countryside preservation groups in Europe, but the new movement was very different. It focused on how humanity was affected by environmental destruction rather than on preserving pristine wilderness; it was activist and political rather than charitable.

Above all, where the older groups largely reflected the views of the wealthy and comfortable, the new environmental activists believed that “environmental catastrophe could be avoided only by fundamental changes in the values and institutions of industrial societies.”²

But what should those changes be? The answer depended on what was causing the environmental destruction, and there was much debate on that.

The longest-lasting and most contentious debate in the environmental movement has focused on whether population growth is a fundamental cause of environmental destruction and whether the movement should support measures to reduce population.

The main issues in that dispute were defined when modern environmentalism was being born. The leading participants in the debate were among the most prominent figures in the new movement: Paul and Anne Ehrlich, authors of The Population Bomb (1968),³ and Barry Commoner, author of The Closing Circle (1971). Their disagreements defined a controversy that continues today.

The Population Bomb

Paul Ehrlich came to environmentalism from the conservationist movement. He was a professor, and his wife Anne Ehrlich was a research associate, in the biology department at Stanford University. They initially worked on classifying butterflies, but by the late 1950s they were increasingly focused on human population issues. In 1967, at the urging of the executive director of the venerable Sierra Club, they expanded an article they had written for New Scientist magazine into a book. Subsidized by the Sierra Club and published as a mass-market paperback in 1968, The Population Bomb became one of the best-selling environmental books of all time.

The arguments in The Population Bomb drew heavily on two best-selling books from the late 1940s—Our Plundered Planet by Fairfield Osborne and Road to Survival by William Vogt—and on the 1967 best seller Famine—1975! in which William and Paul Paddock predicted a “time of famines” within a few years and urged the US government to cut off all aid to “can’t-be-saved” nations, a category that included India, China, Egypt, and Haiti.⁴

The Ehrlichs’ book was a popular presentation of views that were already widely accepted in the preservationist establishment, which tended to be white, rich, and politically conservative. Sierra Club executive director Dave Brower expressed the common view two years before The Population Bomb was published: “We feel you don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.”⁵

Although the publisher’s blurb stressed that Paul Ehrlich was “a qualified scientist,” The Population Bomb was not a scientific book: it was a political tract aimed at a broad audience. A historian writes: “At a time when an American audience was never more eager to learn about the impending environmental crisis, Ehrlich presented arguably the loudest and most persuasive treatise on the ecological problems of human overpopulation.”⁶

The Ehrlichs made three fundamental points.

First, mass starvation was inevitable in the near future. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate . . . .” (Bomb, 1).

Second, “the progressive deterioration of our environment may cause more death and misery than any conceivable food-population gap” (Bomb, 46).

And third, the food and environmental crises had a common cause: “The causal chain of deterioration is easily followed to its source. Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticide, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide—all can be traced easily to too many people” (Bomb, 66–67).

Why have people insisted on reproducing past the point of no return? The Ehrlichs argued that overpopulation is in our genes.

Reproduction is the key to winning the evolutionary game. Any structure, physiological process, or pattern of behavior that leads to greater reproductive success will tend to be perpetuated. The entire process by which man developed involves thousands of millennia of our ancestors being more successful breeders than their relatives . . . (Bomb, 28)

Billions of years of evolution has given us all a powerful will to live. Intervening in the birth rate goes against our evolutionary values. During all those centuries of our evolutionary past, the individuals who had the most children passed on their genetic endowment in greater quantities than those who reproduced less. Their genes dominate our heredity today. (Bomb, 34)

So long as death eliminated people almost as quickly as birth produced them, population rose very slowly, but “the development of medical science was the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Rich countries exported “instant death control”—wiping out major diseases and causing “plunges in the death rate” in poor countries. The death rate fell, but the birth rate was still driven by our evolved biological urges, so population exploded (Bomb, 32–33).

Unlike other populationists of the time (William Vogt, for instance), the Ehrlichs didn’t say that medical treatment should be withheld from poor countries, although they did say that “death control in the absence of birth control is self-defeating, to say the least” (Bomb, 92).

The Ehrlichs’ book described a world in crisis—too many people, too little food, and the environment being destroyed. So their main conclusion wasn’t surprising:

A general answer to the question, “What needs to be done?” is simple. We must rapidly bring the world population under control, reducing the growth rate to zero or making it go negative. Conscious regulation of human numbers must be achieved. Simultaneously we must, at least temporarily, greatly increase our food production. This agricultural program should be carefully monitored to minimize deleterious effects on the environment and should include an effective program of ecosystem restoration. As these projects are carried out, an international policy research program must be initiated to set optimum population-environment goals for the world and to devise methods for reaching these goals. (Bomb, 131)

But while growing more food would buy time, there would be no solution without drastic measures.

A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people . . . We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense. But the disease is so far advanced that only with radical surgery does the patient have a chance of survival. (Bomb, 166–67)

Unlike many populationists, the Ehrlichs didn’t target only population growth in poor countries. Pointing out that per capita resource use in the United States was vastly higher than in other countries, they concluded: “Obviously our first step must be to immediately establish and advertise drastic policies to bring our own population size under control” (Bomb, 135).

Still, the policies they proposed for the United States were considerably less drastic than those they advocated for others. For the United States, they suggested tax changes to penalize large families, better sex education, access to birth control and abortion, and a federal Department of Population and Environment. For poor countries, they endorsed compulsory sterilization of men with more than three children and ending food shipments to countries deemed to be “so far behind in the population-food game that there is no hope that our food aid will see them through to self sufficiency” (Bomb, 160).

They went further in an article written shortly after The Population Bomb appeared, urging the US government to use its political and economic might to force the world into compliance. The United States, they wrote, should “withhold all aid from a country with an expanding population unless that nation convinces us that it is doing everything possible to limit its population.” Critics who object that “extreme political and economic pressure” is repressive should “reflect on the alternatives.”⁷

Despite their call for drastic population controls, the Ehrlichs were very pessimistic about the possibility of actually making things better.

Most Americans clearly don’t give a damn . . . Our population consists of two groups; a comparatively small one dedicated to the preservation of beauty and wildlife, and a vastly larger one dedicated to the destruction of both (or at least apathetic towards it). (Bomb, 66)

By now you are probably fed up with this discussion. Americans will do none of these things, you say. Well, I’m inclined to agree. (Bomb, 156)

Many of you are doubtless saying now, “It’s too unrealistic— it can’t be done.” I think you’re probably right—as I said earlier, the chances of success are small. (Bomb, 174)

The Population Bomb catapulted Paul Ehrlich from local prominence in California to national fame. He appeared more than twenty times on the popular Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and on many other programs. He spoke at conferences and wrote for popular magazines, and he and Anne coauthored a major textbook that went through multiple editions beginning in 1970. Shortly after The Population Bomb was published, he and others formed Zero Population Growth (ZPG), which soon had tens of thousands of members and chapters on hundreds of university campuses.

The Ehrlichs never said that population control was the only measure needed. In The Population Bomb they also advocated increased food production, and in most of their books and articles they argued for improved technology and for reduced consumption in wealthy countries. But they always described population reduction as the top priority. A 1979 article in the journal Bioscience, by Paul Ehrlich and frequent collaborator John Holdren, summed up their view:

It is abundantly clear that in terms of cost, lead time, and implementation on the scale required, technology without population control will be too little and too late . . .

It cannot be emphasized enough that if the population control measures are not initiated immediately and effectively, all the technology man can bring to bear will not fend off the misery to come. Therefore, confronted as we are with limited resources of time and money, we must consider carefully what fraction of our effort should be applied to the cure of the disease itself instead of to the temporary relief of the symptoms. We should ask, for example, how many vasectomies could be performed by a program funded with the 1.8 billion dollars required to build a single nuclear agroindus-trial complex, and what the relative impact on the problem would be in both the short and long terms.⁸

The Closing Circle

Barry Commoner was a biology professor, a socialist, a humanist, and one of the central leaders of the anti–nuclear testing movement in the United States in the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1966 he founded the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, which aimed to “adapt our science to the urgent need for understanding the natural biology of the environment and so help to preserve the community of life from extinction at the hand of man.”⁹

Commoner strongly disagreed with The Population Bomb and said so publicly at a Harvard University teach-in during the first-ever Earth Week in 1970:

In my opinion, population trends in the U.S. cannot be blamed for the deteriorated condition of the environment . . . Of course, if there were no people in the country there would be no pollution problem, but the fact of the matter is that there simply has not been a sufficient rise in the U.S. population to account for the enormous increase in pollution levels . . . It is a serious mistake to becloud the pollution issue with the population, for the facts will not support it.¹⁰

The next day he told a meeting at Brown University, “Pollution begins not in the family bedroom, but in the corporate boardroom.”¹¹

And in December 1970, during a panel discussion with Paul Ehrlich at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science: “Saying that none of our pollution problems can be solved without getting at population first is a copout of the worst kind.”¹²

Commoner was impressed and inspired by the massive turnout for demonstrations, meetings, and rallies during Earth Week 1970, but he was also disturbed by what he saw as a desire for simplistic explanations and quick fixes. His response was The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology, which he described as “an effort to discover which human acts have broken the circle of life, and why” (Circle, 13). Published in October 1971, The Closing Circle was by far the most ambitious attempt to date to describe and explain the environmental crisis in the United States.

The Closing Circle included a strong critique of populationism, and its major conclusion directly contradicted the Ehrlichs’ views:

Human beings have broken out of the circle of life, driven not by biological need, but by the social organization which they have devised to “conquer” nature: means of gaining wealth that are governed by requirements conflicting with those which govern nature. (Circle, 299–300)

After discussing ecology, the ecosphere, and specific examples of major ecological destruction in the United States, Commoner narrowed in on his main concern: why, after millennia in which human beings did little permanent harm to the environment, did major pollution problems either appear for the first time or become very much worse in the years following World War II? Since 1946, Commoner

Profit versus sound energy

“In the last thirty years many thousands of production decisions have been made in the United States. They have determined that automobiles shall be large and sufficiently powerful to travel at a rate of 100 mph; that electricity shall be produced by nuclear power plants; that we shall wear synthetic materials instead of cotton and wool, and wash them in detergent rather than soap; that baseball shall be played on plastic rather than grass; that the beneficent energy of sunlight shall go largely unused.

“In every case, the decision was made according to the ‘bottom line’—the expectation of an acceptable profit. More precisely, as we have seen from the behavior of US oil companies, such decisions are based on the marginal difference between existing rates of profit and hoped-for, larger ones.

“It would have been a fantastically improbable statistical accident if most or even a small fraction of these thousands of decisions, made on the basis of a hoped-for marginal increase in profit, happened neatly to fit into the pattern of a rational, thermodynamically sound energy system.

“Such an energy system is a social need, and it is hopeless to expect to build it on the basis of production decisions that yield commodities rather than the solutions to essential tasks; that produce goods which are maximally profitable rather than maximally useful; that accept as their final test private profit rather than social value.

“Thus, the energy crisis and the web of interrelated problems confront us with the need to explore the possibility of creating a production system that is consciously intended to serve social needs and that judges the value of its products by their use, and an economic system that is committed to these purposes. At least in principle, such a system is socialism.”

—Barry Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 1976

said, population had increased 42 percent, and the US standard of living had not risen much, but pollutants had increased by 200 to 2,000 percent and more. Clearly “more people consuming more” couldn’t explain more than a fraction of the problem.

Commoner’s key argument was that the pollution explosion was driven not by increased population but by changed industrial and agricultural production—by radical changes in the way things were made and grown, in the raw materials used, and in the products themselves. Those changes were adopted by industry during and after World War II because the new technologies were more profitable than the old ones.

The crucial link between pollution and profits appears to be modern technology, which is both the main source of recent increases in productivity—and therefore of profits—and of recent assaults on the environment. Driven by an inherent tendency to maximize profits, modern private enterprise has seized upon those massive technological innovations that promise to gratify this need, usually unaware that these same innovations are often also instruments of environmental destruction. (Circle, 267–68)

That passage illustrates the most important feature of Commoner’s analysis: rather than treating population, technology, and affluence as independent forces, he viewed them as driven by and interacting with wider social processes. A noteworthy example was his discussion of the dynamic factors that underlie what demographers call the “demographic transition”—the process by which population growth in many countries had first accelerated and then leveled off in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

It is sometimes supposed that this self-accelerating interaction between the increase in wealth and technological competence and population growth is bound to set off an explosive “population bomb” unless deliberate steps are taken to control birth rates. In fact, there is strong evidence that the process itself sets up a counterforce that slows population growth considerably. (Circle, 118)

The new wealth generated by the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth century caused the death rate to fall and population to rise. But as living standards increased further, the birth rate fell and population growth slowed. Child labor was abolished so children were no longer economic assets. Improved pensions and social services meant that parents didn’t need to depend on their children’s support in their old age.

The natural result was a reduced birth rate, which occurred even without the benefit of modern methods of contraception. Thus, although population growth is an inherent feature of the progressive development of productive activities, it tends to be limited by the same force that stimulates it—the accumulation of social wealth and resources. (Circle, 119)

But there was nothing inevitable about this process. Population growth in many third world countries remained high because the death rate had fallen but the birth rate hadn’t followed suit: the demographic transition had been “grossly affected by certain new developments” (Circle, 119).

The wealth produced in the colonies was sent to Europe, which made possible the increased living standards that led to lower birth rates but prevented the colonies from going through the same process— Commoner called this “a kind of demographic parasitism.”

Then, after World War II, industry used modern technology to “replace natural products with synthetic ones,” a trend that “exacerbated ecological stresses in the advanced countries and has hindered the efforts of developing nations to meet the needs of their growing populations” (Circle, 246).

In short, poverty was the cause of rapid population growth in the twentieth century, not an effect—and poverty itself was the result of centuries of colonialist plunder.

Pressuring poor countries into reducing their birth rates without the improved living standards that enable lower death rates and infant mortality, Commoner wrote, is a “gigantic and questionable experiment.”

If one’s moral convictions and political views regard [that] course as dictatorial and corrosive of human values, then one can adopt the view that population growth in the developing nations of the world ought to be brought into balance by the same means that have already succeeded elsewhere—improvement of living conditions, urgent efforts to reduce mortality, social security measures, and the resultant effects on desired family size, together with personal, voluntary contraceptive practice. It is this view with which I wish to associate myself. (Circle, 242)

The measures Commoner advocated amounted to total restructuring or replacement of the production systems and institutions that had caused the crisis—“something like one half of the postwar productive enterprises would need to be replaced by ecologically sounder ones”— combined with an intensive program to restore damaged ecosystems. He had no illusions that this could be done quickly or cheaply: “Perhaps the simplest way to summarize all this is that most of the nation’s resources for capital investment would need to be engaged in the task of ecological reconstruction for at least a generation” (Circle, 285).

Head to head

Within weeks of the publication of The Closing Circle, Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren were privately circulating a long critique that described Commoner’s book as “inexplicably inconsistent and dangerously misleading.” An edited version of their critique and an equally long response from Commoner were published in May 1972 in the influential Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.¹³

Large parts of both articles were taken up with “somewhat tedious arguments” (as Ehrlich and Holdren accurately wrote) about mathematics and definitions, along with cheap shots about who had or had not published their research in peer-reviewed journals. In several cases Ehrlich and Holdren identified supposed errors and Commoner replied by pointing out that he had actually said the opposite of what they accused him of saying.

Nevertheless, the exchange reveals two profound differences between the two sides.

1. Are people always harmful? Because Commoner’s book focused on the rapid acceleration of pollution in the United States after World War II, Ehrlich and Holdren accused him of ignoring the fact that “serious ecological harm has accompanied man’s activities ever since the agricultural revolution some 10,000 years ago.” They devoted a substantial part of their article to descriptions of earlier environmental disasters.

That was a peculiar criticism: no one actually believed that Commoner was unaware of that history. What Ehrlich and Holdren were really saying was that Commoner didn’t agree that people are always harmful to the environment. Paul and Anne Ehrlich expressed that view explicitly in a textbook that was also published in 1972: “Each human individual, in the course of obtaining the requisites of existence, has a net negative impact on his environment.”¹⁴

If people are always harmful to the environment, then the only way to save the earth is to reduce the number of people to a point where the damage is less than the maximum the environment can handle. When it comes to population, bigger is always worse.

Commoner argued that humans could change their ways, could realize that “ecological considerations must guide economic and political ones,” and could build a new society on that basis. Ehrlich and Holdren didn’t agree.

2. Is the crisis biological or social? In their critique, Ehrlich and Holdren said not one word about Commoner’s clear statement that his goal was to consider “the links between the environmental crisis and the social systems of which it is a part,” or about his extensive discussion of the profit-driven system of production that he saw as ultimately responsible for environmental destruction, or about his conclusion that “an economic system which is fundamentally based on private transactions rather than social ones is no longer appropriate.”

As pro-capitalist liberals, Ehrlich and Holdren undoubtedly disagreed with Commoner on all of those points, so their failure to comment is significant. By completely ignoring the social and economic framework of Commoner’s work, they showed that they viewed such issues as unimportant or irrelevant.

This was fundamental. For Ehrlich and Holdren, the causes of the environmental crisis were biological and technical, and so were the solutions. For Commoner, the environmental crisis was rooted in an economic and social system that was profoundly anti-ecological.

Everywhere in the world there is evidence of a deep-seated failure in the effort to use the competence, the wealth, the power at human disposal for the maximum good of human beings. The environmental crisis is a major example of this failure. For we are in an environmental crisis because the means by which we use the ecosphere to produce wealth are destructive of the ecosphere itself. The present system of production is self-destructive; the present course of human civilization is suicidal. (Circle, 294–95)

For Ehrlich and Holdren, the problem was growth as such: too much production was overwhelming the ecosphere. The solution was to reduce population so that less production would be needed.

For Commoner, the system of production itself was the problem. So long as it remained in place, ecological crises were inevitable.

Paul and Anne Ehrlich made two explicit predictions in 1968, on the first page of The Population Bomb.

1. Birth rates would not fall unless governments instituted population control, which they defined as “conscious regulation of the numbers of human beings.”

2. Food production could not possibly expand fast enough to feed everyone , so massive famines were inevitable in the immediate future. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over . . . At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the death rate.”

They were wrong on both counts.

1. Birth rates fell without population control. In most developed countries, birth rates were already falling when The Population Bomb was published. The US rate dropped to replacement level (2.1 births per woman) in 1972, continued down to 1.7 by mid-decade, and stayed there through the 1980s. Birth rates in many countries were in decline by the 1980s.

2. Food production increased dramatically. Between 1960 and 2000, while the world’s population doubled, food production increased by about two and a half times. ¹⁵ In the same period, the global death rate (annual deaths per thousand people), which the Ehrlichs said was bound for a “substantial increase,” fell from 15.5 to 8.6.¹⁶

You might think that the Ehrlichs would have analyzed and corrected their mistakes, but you’d be wrong. During the 1970s they published two more editions of The Population Bomb, each time pushing the dates for the predicted food catastrophe further into the future but never revising their underlying assumptions. As late as 1990, in The Population Explosion, they wrote as though they had been fully vindicated:

In 1968, The Population Bomb warned of impending disaster if the population explosion was not brought under control. Then the fuse was burning; now the population bomb has detonated . . . hunger is rife and the prospects of famine and plague ever more imminent . . .

A largely prospective disaster has turned into the real thing.¹⁷

In a footnote, the Ehrlichs claimed that their 1968 book didn’t make predictions—it only offered possible scenarios. But only one chapter of The Population Bomb contained scenarios—the rest of it said that population growth would definitely outrun food production and that nothing could be done to avoid a huge increase in the death rate.

For more than four decades they have displayed a remarkable ability to shift ground, maintaining, denying, or minimizing their past errors and adopting new justifications for populationism. That strategy has worked: even today it is rare to read an article or book on population that doesn’t mention or quote them. Paul Ehrlich has received at least twelve major medals and awards for his work, and he and Anne have published eight more books and innumerable articles on population-related topics.

In stark contrast, Commoner’s radical social-ecological critique of capitalism was cast aside and has been virtually forgotten. The environmental movement that he hoped would challenge capitalism instead became more conservative. By the end of the seventies, protests were out of favor and lobbying was in. Instead of changing the system, the major nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) became part of it, and the population explanation became accepted wisdom among liberal greens.