To make sure The Population Bomb would reach the widest possible audience, Ehrlich paid his twelve-year-old daughter ten dollars to read the draft manuscript and flag any difficult passages.
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Ehrlich’s fear of overpopulation and famine reflected broader elite concerns in the mid-1960s. With the world population growing from 2.5 billion people in 1950 to 3.35 billion in 1965, many commentators questioned whether the planet could sustain the growing number of people. The New Republic announced in 1965 that “world population has passed food supply. The famine has started.” The magazine predicted that even “dramatic counter-measures” could not reverse the situation. A “world calamity” would strike within the decade. World hunger, the magazine editors wrote, would be the “single most important fact in the final third of the 20th Century.” US Ambassador to India Chester Bowles concurred, telling a Senate subcommittee in June 1965 that the approaching world famine threatened “the most colossal catastrophe in history.” Starting in January 1968, around the time that Ehrlich was writing The Population Bomb, a group calling itself the “Campaign to Check the Population Explosion” started running full-page advertisements in the Washington Post and the New York Times. The imagery was apocalyptic. One advertisement showed a large stopwatch and announced that someone “dies from starvation” every 8.6 seconds. “World population has already outgrown world food supply,” the advertisement declared. Another advertisement showed the picture of a baby under the headline “Threat to Peace,” warning that “skyrocketing population growth may doom the world we live in.” A third pictured Earth as a bomb about to explode — with population control the only way to defuse the threat.
The stark clash of perspectives that the bet represented suited the divisive environmental politics of the early 1990s. Regulations to protect endangered species, policies to slow global warming, and efforts to protect national forests and rangelands now sharply split Democrats and Republicans. Whereas in the 1970s, major environmental legislation had passed with bipartisan support, by the early 1990s, where a politician stood on environmental policies served as a litmus test of ideology and political affiliation.
“How often does a prophet have to be wrong before we no longer believe that he or she is a true prophet?” Simon goaded. He argued that Ehrlich had been wrong about the “demographic facts of the 1970s,” whereas Simon’s own predictions had been right. Ehrlich had said in 1969, for instance, “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Ehrlich had been expressing his view that, without worldwide population control, overpopulation would cause nuclear war, plague, ecological catastrophe, or disastrous resource scarcities. Complaining that Ehrlich made wild statements without ever facing the “consequences of being wrong,” Simon said, “I’ll put my money where my mouth is” and asked Ehrlich to do the same. Rather than betting on the future existence of England, Simon challenged Ehrlich to bet on raw material prices and test their theories about future abundance. Ehrlich’s warnings about limits to economic growth, famines, and declining food harvests suggested rising prices that reflected growing scarcity due to population growth. But Simon argued that prices generally were falling for natural resources because they were becoming less scarce due to increasing productivity and human ingenuity.
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Ehrlich, Holdren, and Harte knew about inflation and exchange rates, but soaring nominal prices could not help but encourage their belief that resources were rapidly getting scarcer. Many shared their conviction. The story of Bunker and Herbert Hunt, scions of a leading Texas oil family, might have provided a cautionary tale for the scientists. The Hunts gambled billions of dollars on the rising price of silver. When prices did not increase sufficiently, the Hunt brothers tried to corner the silver market; at one point, they and their partners controlled 77 percent of the silver in private hands. Their effort failed spectacularly in March 1980, however, when government regulators tightened credit and restricted silver purchases. As silver prices collapsed, the Hunt brothers in desperation were forced to borrow more than a billion dollars to extricate themselves from their silver play. Despite such stories from the business pages, Ehrlich and his colleagues believed that the price trends all were in their favor. They felt confident that they would prevail in the bet.
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During the late 1970s, tin prices rose sharply. Many observers anticipated shortages. Malaysian producers sought to corner the tin market to force prices even higher in 1981 and 1982. New high-quality tin deposits discovered in the Brazilian Amazon, however, undermined this market-cornering effort. By the end of the 1980s, Brazil, a previously marginal producer, produced roughly one quarter of the world’s tin supply. At the higher prices of the late 1970s, demand for tin also started to fall. Manufacturers substituted aluminum and plastic for tin in packaging. Trying in vain to stabilize prices, the International Tin Agreement held a quarter of the world’s annual tin production off the market. The International Tin Council soon ran out of money, however, and the agreement collapsed. Tin prices went into “free fall,” dropping more than 50 percent from $ 5.50 per pound in October 1985 to $ 2.50 per pound in March 1986. Overall, between 1980 and 1990, the gyrations of the tin market supported the arguments of Simon and the economists. New sources of supply, product substitution, and, above all, the breaking of the tin cartel had a far greater impact than population growth on tin prices, ultimately driving them down almost 75 percent.
Fears of a Malthusian calamity that would intensify global conflicts prompted radical prescriptions. In their 1967 book, Famine 1975! the brothers William and Paul Paddock argued that the United States should apply the concept of military triage to its international food aid. Countries should be separated according to whether they “can’t be saved” (Haiti, Egypt, India), were “walking wounded” (Libya, The Gambia), or “should receive food” (Pakistan, Tunisia). The Paddocks’ ideas of triage and limits to food aid resonated in Washington, DC. President Johnson had refused to send American wheat to India in 1966 until that country adopted a vigorous family planning program. According to presidential adviser Joseph Califano, Johnson told him, “I’m not going to piss away foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems.” How much Johnson and other American policy-makers believed that India faced a Malthusian crisis— and how much they needed to use the idea of a famine to sell Congress on continuing the Food for Peace export program— is a matter of historical argument. The massive scale of the eventual American relief effort is indisputable: over a two-year period, roughly one-quarter of annual US wheat production was sent to India.
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Wading into American politics inevitably meant that Zero Population Growth would have to tackle controversial issues such as birth control, abortion, and women’s rights. Ehrlich’s push for measures to reduce population growth thus drew on the 1960s sexual revolution and efforts to separate the pleasure of sex from reproduction. As a biologist, Ehrlich did not view sexual intercourse as anything sacred. He attacked “sexual repression” and celebrated sex as “mankind’s major and most enduring recreation.” Ehrlich waged an aggressive campaign against Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical “Humanae Vitae,” which affirmed the Catholic Church’s traditional proscription of most forms of birth control. Zero Population Growth continued this fight in the early 1970s, advocating forcefully for abortion rights and access to contraception. In California, Zero Population Growth sought to help pass a proabortion ballot initiative. Ehrlich, who served as the organization’s first president, urged the legalization of abortion and removal of restrictions on contraception in the interest of population control. Ehrlich mocked the association of a fetus with a human being as “confusing a set of blueprints with a building.” After New York passed a liberal abortion law in 1970, Charles Wurster, a founder of the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, wrote exultantly to Ehrlich, “I wouldn’t have dreamed this could have happened so fast! This bill is now LAW in the State of New York.”
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One summer, a mentally ill woman who had grown obsessed with Ehrlich broke into their house and began living there with her dog, while the family was away at the Colorado field station. When the police came to investigate, they found the Ehrlich’s house in disarray, with piles of papers and books in apparent chaos. The place had been ransacked, they thought. It turned out, however, in what would become a family joke, that this was just the way Paul and Anne lived.
From Sabin’s The Bet:
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