Paul Ehrlich’s Unexploded Ordnance

The obituaries for Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, brought back merry memories for late-era Boomers who came of age in the ’70s. He was just one more voice in the chorus of imminent disaster. Here’s how we figured our miserable future would play out:

It would begin with global cooling. Vast blocks of ice would push down from Canada and probably scrape our town of Fargo right off the map. Maybe we could outrun them. We had a vision of Mom and Dad throwing things in a suitcase as the glaciers crushed the grocery store up the street, then all of us jumping in the car and peeling out, heading south for northern Iowa, where we could catch our breath.

Then again, the U.S. was going to run out of oil, so the car might not start. The Arabs, those meanies, wouldn’t let us have any. But even if they turned the spigot back on, we would run out of liquefied dinosaur corpses in a decade and have to revert to rickshaws or horse-drawn carriages.

But even if we did make it to relative safety in Iowa and the relatives took us in, we would have to wonder about the Book of Revelation coming true as we were promised in The Late Great Planet Earth: the seven seals cracking open, wormwood -- whatever that was -- falling everywhere. And then everyone dies and we go to heaven, which would be great, but maybe not yet? It would be nice to finish high school and maybe have a girlfriend first.

But even if none of that stuff happened, there would be about 476 million people in Iowa because of the Population Bomb. There wouldn’t be enough food for everyone, so you’d have famine, then pestilence, then civil collapse. And Iowans would fight Illinoisans in vast pitched battles over a box of Ritz crackers or some expired Cream of Wheat.

Of all these scenarios, the Population Bomb seemed the most likely because it came from a Very Serious Book, and all the people who were worried about the world were talking about it. Mind you, it is a testament to media-driven eschatology that we were worried about overpopulation in North Dakota, where you can drive for an entire day and not see another human being. But it fit the narrative of planetary peril that saturated the education system and the culture. As junior-high students, we celebrated Earth Day, which always had the same false-cheer feeling as bringing flowers to someone on their deathbed. Even if you went to the Howard Johnson’s restaurant for ice cream, you got an ecology pamphlet -- just for kids! -- that had a story about how pollution could block all the rays of the sun and then everyone would die from hunger. Here’s your fried clams -- enjoy!

It seemed perfectly likely that Africa and Asia would be overrun with people because there were just so many of them already. Then America would teem as well, just like in the movie Soylent Green, a vision of the future where everyone’s so hungry that they have to eat Edward G. Robinson (who was actually snack-sized and pretty gristly). How could you not worry about this? Ehrlich appeared on The Dick Cavett Show with warnings, and Cavett nodded gravely!

The subhead of Ehrlich’s New York Times obituary was amusing: “His best-selling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement. But he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.” Premature. As in, “It’ll surely happen eventually, and we hope so because people are a pestilence and Mother Earth weeps every time a baby is born.” Optimism, of course, is for fools who just don’t know how bad things are -- and who can actually close their eyes at night without thinking about microplastics.

As populations crash all over the world, the specter of numberless hordes clashing over the last pack of peanuts no longer haunts the leftist imagination. It might occur to them that societies could suffer from population decline, particularly in places where the system is set up to extract money from one small group and give it a much larger one. Well, if it comes to that, we can just turn to incompatible cultures and import grand quantities of sullen dudes who are disinclined to adapt. If they vote correctly, what’s the downside? Okay, well, some of them might blow themselves up at a Christmas celebration, but that’s the price you gotta pay. The metaphorical Population Bomb was horrible! The literal population bomb, well, we can work with that.