Paul Ehrlich’s dire predictions never came to pass, but they did plenty of damage. Fortunately, even his intellectual allies have abandoned his core premise of humans as planetary parasites.

Paul Ehrlich, famed biologist, died last week at age 93. Ehrlich rose to fame in the 1960s as the author of a book that resonated powerfully with the public, The Population Bomb, and became a recurring guest on late-night talk shows and a frequent subject of discussion in all the major newspapers. The even more famous Johnny Carson, interviewing him in 1980 — more than a decade after the book’s publication, a sign of its lasting impact — said he generated “more mail than any guest we ever had on the show.”

All in all, he appeared 25 times on one of history’s most famous talk shows.

The Population Bomb arrived at the right time: economic growth was fast across the world, and so was population growth. Given finite resources, population growth (at 3.5 billion people in 1968) would outstrip food production and deplete the stock of key resources (think metals, fossil fuels, farmable land). Eventually, Ehrlich argued, starvation would occur, mass famines would follow, and social collapse would take place. Whatever technological progress could be achieved would only delay the inevitable — and only do so trivially.

To stave off the chain reaction, Ehrlich suggested, economic growth would need to slow down. Overpopulation should be curtailed by discouraging large families, possibly with coercive population control measures. However, Ehrlich did not stop there. He proposed that the Federal Communications Commission should discourage media that portrayed large families positively. He argued for immigration restrictions because allowing the poor of the world to come to America would accelerate their consumption and hasten the collapse. He argued that international aid should be tied to conditions requiring other nations to slow down population growth. All his policy proposals ended up being calls for greater coercion and greater control.

Ultimately, he was proven wrong. We now have more than twice as many humans on this planet as when Ehrlich wrote his doomsday prophecy. We live longer, healthier, wealthier, safer lives on a planet that has, on many dimensions (but not all), grown cleaner. None of the extreme predictions came to pass. Technological innovations were not trivial — they were exceptional. The Green Revolution, improvements in transportation, improvements in energy efficiency have all staved off the predicted catastrophe.

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