Are We Truly Running Out of Everything?

The 1960s and 1970s marked the triumph of environmentalist and interventionist ideas. Paul Ehrlich, a professor of biology at Stanford University, epitomizes that era for, as Sabin says, he “embraced environmentalism as a secular religion.” In his 1968 book The Population Bomb, Ehrlich warned, à la Malthus, that the population explosion was hitting resource constraints. He predicted that within a decade, food and water scarcity would result in a billion or more people starving to death. Governments should work toward an optimal world population of 1.5 billion. He opposed immigration, since the United States was already above its 150 million population limit. He talked about the imminent “disintegration of an unstable world” and said, “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”