Population Bomb Research Articles

Paul R.EhrlichLife: A Journey through Science and PoliticsYale University Press, 2023, 395 p., $30.00

Paul R.EhrlichLife: A Journey through Science and PoliticsYale University Press, 2023, 395 p., $30.00

Building the Population Bomb by Emily Klancher Merchant

This book seems to be about population, but it is really about justice. Merchant’s argument is that population growth is not a barrier to economic and environmental progress. Rather, population growth has been used as a scapegoat for a variety of global ills, thus distracting attention from the distributional injustices rising from the rich world fouling the air and water and using the majority of the earth’s resources despite having a minority of the world’s people. Moreover, she argues that the demography profession not only supported this scapegoating but rose to global prominence on its back. Whether pursuing the “moderate” approach—encouraging voluntary reductions in family size to slow growth—or the more extreme approach—vigorously promoting fertility control to reduce global population—scientists who tout fertility reduction as the crucial method to fight climate change or end poverty do substantial harm by blaming the poor and pushing phantom remedies for real ills.Many earnest and well-meaning scholars and policymakers who measure, and seek ways to manage, fertility will be pained by these arguments. Merchant backs up her view with a detailed history of scientific demography and population policies that plainly shows the profession’s role in emphasizing the dangers of population growth, and in encouraging governments to promote fertility reduction as a pathway to economic development. In the extreme—for example, the “population bomb”—natural scientists and popular writers have warned that failure to control population growth would bring catastrophe.Yet demographers are not entirely mistaken. No country has ever launched itself on the path to eliminating poverty and reaching middle-income status without having fertility fall considerably. Studies of the “demographic dividend” have shown clear benefits from an age structure with more young workers and fewer dependent children, a product of falling fertility. Changes in demographic factors—fertility, age structure, ethnic balances, urban/rural distribution—have proven relevant to patterns of women’s rights, ethnic conflict, and democracy.Merchant’s history is most valuable in making clear the horrific costs of treating population growth as a totemic factor that can change the world. In fact, population issues only have meaning, and can produce coherent policy, when embedded in the details of a local social, political, and economic context. Niger, where women typically have seven children (and fathers profess to desire ten) might benefit from shifting to a smaller average family size, but only in the right context. That is, if women have smaller families to improve their opportunities for meaningful and rewarding work, and to educate their children properly, lower fertility can be part of a comprehensive program to aid development. However, if women lack options for education and employment, their children face only low-paid work, and families depend on kin networks for support, any move toward smaller families will result in further poverty and unhappiness.From eugenics to coercive fertility reduction and erroneous and exaggerated warnings about the harm from population growth, demographers have much to answer for. Merchant beautifully shows how, despite good intentions (where does that road lead?), demographers spent decades promoting policies that visited great harm on people, did little to alleviate poverty or environmental damage, and diverted attention from the abuse of material wealth in rich countries. This valuable, sometimes shocking history should be required reading for all demographers and those interested in population policies.Yet, at the same time, we should note that even if the faults of capitalism are mainly responsible for environmental threats and global inequality, the successes of capitalism allowed the increase in global population to 8 billion not to be a critical problem. Similarly, demographers’ faults in earlier generations should not blot out their great accomplishments in developing measures, models, and data that have contributed enormously to our understanding of population dynamics—a vital part of the integrated policies that will address poverty, health, and the environment in the future.

Has the world survived the population bomb? A 10-year update.

Between 1960 and 2011, world population grew from 3 to 7 billion, an unprecedented rate of population growth that will never be seen again. In spite of the addition of 4 billion people in just 51years, the world experienced some of the biggest improvements in living standards in human history, with declines in poverty and improvements in food production per capita in all major regions. This paper looks at the period since 2011, during which the world added another billion people. Progress has continued in many areas, with food production continuing to grow faster than population and with continued declines in the proportion of the population in poverty in all regions. Not all trends are positive, however. Progress in food production has slowed, with recent declines in food production per capita in Africa. Prices of food and other commodities have recently hit historic highs. Climate change is a challenge to progress in combatting hunger and poverty, especially in Africa. While climate change will make it harder to meet the needs of Africa's continued population growth in this century, the paper shows that the countries with the highest population growth account for a very small share of global CO2 emissions. The record of the last six decades suggests that progress can be made to reduce poverty and hunger, even while world population continues to grow, but continued progress will require solutions to climate change that mainly target high-income and middle-income countries.

Abundance Against Scarcity

Abundance Against Scarcity

Editorial Introduction

References Bookchin, M., 1987. Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology: a challenge for the ecology movement. [pdf] Green Perspectives: Newsletter of the Green Program Project, 4–5, Summer. Available at: http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murraybookchin-social-ecology-versus-deep-ecology-a-challenge-for-the-ecologymovement [Accessed 14 July 2021]. Coole, D., 2018. Should we control world population? Cambridge: Polity. Ehrlich, P. and Ehrlich, A., 1968. The Population Bomb. New York: Ballantine Books. Giddens, A., 1984. The constitution of society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Godwin, W., 1793. An enquiry concerning political justice, and its influence on general virtue and happiness, vol. 2. London: G.G.J. and J. Robinson. Kirk, D. 1996. Demographic transition theory. Population Studies, 50:3, pp. 361– 387. DOI: https://www.doi.org10.1080/0032472031000149536. Klein, Naomi. 2014. This Changes Everything. London: Penguin. Malthus, T.R., 1998 [1798]. An essay on the principle of population. [pdf] Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project. Available at: http://www.esp.org/books/malthus/population/malthus.pdf [Accessed 26 November 2018]. Marx, K., 1954 [1890] Capital: volume one. London: Lawrence and Wishart Marx, K., 1972 [1845]. The German ideology. In: On historical materialism. Moscow: Progress Publishers pp.14–76. Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J. and Behrens, W.W., 1972. The limits to growth. Washington DC: Universe Books. Monbiot, G., 2019. The big polluters’ masterstroke was to blame the climate crisis on you and me. The Guardian [online] 9 October. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/09/polluters-climate-crisis-fossil-fuel [Accessed 3 July 2021]. Roche, J., 2020. Marx, population and freedom. The Journal of Population and Sustainability, 5(1), pp.31–46. Saito, K. 2017. Karl Marx’s ecosocialism: capital, nature, and the unfinished critique of political economy. New York: Monthly Review Press. Samways, D., 1996. Ecological wisdom and the noble savage: assessing the foundations of eco-fundamentalism. PhD. University of Essex. Wadley, D., 2020. The city of grace: an urban manifesto. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.

Figuring the Population Bomb: Gender and Demography in the Mid-Twentieth Century . By Carole R. McCannSeattle: University of Washington Press, 2017. xi + 304 pp. Illustrations. Paper $30.00.

<i> Figuring the Population Bomb: Gender and Demography in the Mid-Twentieth Century </i>. By Carole R. McCannSeattle: University of Washington Press, 2017. xi + 304 pp. Illustrations. Paper $30.00.

Disassembled Food Webs and Messy Projections: Modern Ungulate Communities in the Face of Unabating Human Population Growth

The human population grows inexorably. When Charles Darwin explored the southern cone of South America in 1830, fewer than 1.2 billion people inhabited Earth. When Ehrlich’s Population Bomb appeared in 1968 there were ~3.5 billion. We approach eight billion today, and biospheric impacts do not abate. We’ve affected most life forms through climate modification, harvest, erasure and fragmentation of habitat, disease, and the casting of alien species. Given the lack of abatement in human population growth, herein we focus on the modalities of ecological disruption – direct and indirect – that mitigate the changing role of ungulates in landscapes. Much of what was once generally predictable in terms of pattern and process is no longer. Offshore climatic events have strong onshore consequence, as exemplified by toxic algal blooms in the Patagonian Pacific. These have diminished the harvest of fish and likely resulted in fisherman using dogs to hunt huemul (Hippocamelus bisulcus), the most endangered large terrestrial mammal of the Western Hemisphere. Similarly, human economies foment change in the Himalayan realm and Gobi Desert by increasing numbers of cashmere-producing goats, and where dogs that once followed tourists or guarded livestock they now hunt a half dozen threatened, endangered, and rare ungulates including kiang (Equus kiang) and chiru (Pantholops hodgsonii), saiga (Saiga tatarica) and takin (Budorcas taxicolor), spread disease, and displace snow leopards (Panthera uncia). In North America’s Great Basin Desert, one hundred years of intense livestock grazing created a phase shift by which changed plant communities enabled mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) colonization. An altered predator-prey system ensued with the arrival of pumas (Panthera concolor). Patterns of resilience postulated by Hollings (1973) become more difficult to witness in the absence of humans as our domination of earth destabilizes systems beyond return points. These include ungulates both in and out of protected areas. Consequently, only messy projections of future community reorganization seem reasonable whether related to food webs or assembly rules that once governed ungulate communities of the very recent past.

Figuring the Population Bomb: Gender and Demography in the Mid-twentieth Century

Figuring the Population Bomb: Gender and Demography in the Mid-twentieth Century

EPR19-070: Incidence Pattern of Malignant Lymphoma by Cell-Lineage/Cell-Maturity Status in Nagasaki, Japan, 1985–2012: Preliminary Results

Background: Malignant lymphoma (ML) is a heterogeneous neoplasm with a wide range of etiological factors, pathological patterns, incidence rates, and outcomes. Most epidemiological studies have reported the incidence pattern of ML by simply dividing into 2 groups, Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) or non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). However, differences in the incidence pattern by cell-lineage or by cell-maturity have been rarely evaluated. The aim of this study was to characterize the incidence pattern of ML by cell-lineage and cell-maturity in Japanese population. Methods: This is a descriptive study based on regional cancer registry data. We obtained a dataset of anonymized 12,645 cases with ICD-O histology codes of ML diagnosed 1960–2012 from the Nagasaki Prefectural Cancer Registry. From those, we excluded 1,477 records because of codes other than ML, diagnosed before 1985, and possible relapse records of identical cases. Records based on ICD-O-1 or ICD-O-2 were substituted by the corresponding ICD-O-3 code. We also treated patients having multiple types of MLs at same diagnosis date as a single case of “composite/discordant lymphoma,” and patients having multiple types of MLs at different diagnosis date as a single case based on the first lymphoma. We finally confirmed 11,118 patients of ML that occurred in 1985–2012. The overall age-adjusted incidence rate (per 100,000 population) during 1985–2012 was already reported to be 20.5 for men and 12.9 for women. Then we divided them into the following cell-lineage/maturity groups: precursor B (B1), mature B (B2), other B (B3), precursor T (T1), mature T/NK (T2), undetermined cell-lineage NHL (U), HL (H), and other lymphomas (O). Results: The median age at diagnosis of all patients was 69.7 years (interquartile range, 59.4–78.0 years) and male sex were 5,980 (53.8%). The frequency of B-cell lineage, T/NK-cell lineage, and Hodgkin lymphoma were 5,196 (46.7%), 3,257 (29.3%), and 209 (1.9%), respectively, with a significant sex difference (P&lt;.0001). For B-cell maturity, B2 was predominant (84.8%), followed by B3 (14.4%) with a significant sex difference (P&lt;.0001). In T-cell, T2 was predominant (99.4%). Conclusion: This preliminary analysis suggests a significant sex difference in the cell-lineage and cell-maturity of ML. Additional analysis to elucidate whether there are any differences in the incidence pattern by cell-lineage and by cell-maturity of ML between general population and Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors are underway.

“How Little Progress”? A Political Economy of Postcolonial Nutrition

“How Little Progress”? A Political Economy of Postcolonial Nutrition

Malthus meets Green Lantern: comic book representation of Malthusian concerns

ABSTRACTWith growing concerns of overpopulation in the developing world in the 1960s, Thomas Malthus’ work was rediscovered as an answer to social problems. Neo-Malthusian thought was centred on the pessimistic view of the coming ‘population bomb’ that would create worldwide ills that even developed nations such as the United States and United Kingdom could not ignore. This pessimistic mood found its way into comic books of the era (1960s–1980s). This coincided with a new interest in problems with society at large, epitomised by Bronze Age comic books such as Green Lantern/Green Arrow. Throughout this era, comic book stories occasionally featured villains and/or social settings based on overpopulation. For the first time, our superheroes had to deal with over-urbanised cityscapes, environmental degradation from humans, and crime as a result of population pressure. The ways that comic book creators dealt with this social problem reveals a great deal about the general mood of this issue.

Earth beyond repair: Race and apocalypse in collective imagination

Scholars have argued that geologic proposals for the Anthropocene are entangled with collective imaginaries and geopolitical anxieties. In this article, we analyze three prominent tropes of American apocalyptic films (the “Great Deluge,” the “Nuclear Catacalysm,” and “the Population Bomb”) and map them onto existing geological proposals for the Anthropocene. In staging this encounter, we illustrate how impending ecological disasters in American popular imagination temporally displace the apocalypse into the present or the future. These imaginings of apocalypse evade specific culpability when they imagine a universal human frailty, enacting a darkly ironic reversal of historical and ongoing apocalyptic realities. Drawing on insights from ecocriticism, political geography, postcolonial, decolonial and critical race studies, we argue that the global crisis heralded by the Anthropocene reveals deep-seated fears of racialized others taking over the planet and the decline of white civilization, and we suggest alternative openings for other futures.

Ecophilosophy and African traditional ecological knowledge

Ecophilosophy is concerned with the critical study of ecological issues. It critiques the human- earth relationship advocating for friendly treatment of the environment. Philosophy’s interests in the environmental crisis dates back to the late 1960s. Among those who were at the forefront are Holmes Rolston III, Thomas Berry, and Richard Routley. The philosophical movement towards the environment was also inspired by Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, Garrett Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons, Lynn White’s 1967 article, The Historical Roots of the Ecological Crisis, Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb, and so forth. It is not that before the 1960s philosophers have not spoken about the environment. The unfortunate thing was that most of the philosophers that had spoken about the environment merely saw the environment or nature from a utilitarian perspective and nature was perceived as an object to be studied, evaluated and conquered without concern for environmental wellbeing. Yet, when the philosophic turn towards the environment began even till today, most of the voices are those of western and Euro-centric philosophers. Indigenous voices and wisdoms from non-western cultures are often ignored. The purpose of this paper is to argue for the place of African traditional ecological knowledge in ecophilosophy and environmental ethics. Through the method of critical analysis, what constitutes African traditional ecological knowledge and its place in global environmental ethics is examined. The paper finds and concludes that global environmental ethics will be incomplete and weakened without the inclusion of African traditional ecological knowledge.

What if… We hit peak population?

Pearce determines whether the population bomb could be about to go off in the most unexpected way. To find out how and why, go to Japan, where a recent survey found that people are giving up on sex. Despite a life expectancy of 85 and rising, the number of Japanese is falling thanks to a fertility rate of just 1.4 children per woman, and a reported epidemic of virginity. The population, it seems, are too busy (and too shy) to procreate.

Four Commentaries on the Pope’s Message on Climate Change and Income Inequality. IV. Pope Francis’ Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’, Global Environmental Risks, and the Future of Humanity.

Four Commentaries on the Pope’s Message on Climate Change and Income Inequality. IV. Pope Francis’ Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’, Global Environmental Risks, and the Future of Humanity.

Population, Resources, and the Faith-Based Economy: the Situation in 2016

Today’s population–resource–environment situation is summarized in comparison with that pertaining in 1968 when The Population Bomb was published. The human predicament is now much more serious, since the human population has more than doubled in size since 1968, key resources are much more depleted, and environmental deterioration is substantially more advanced. It is concluded that a change of society as profound and far-reaching as the agricultural revolution may provide a slim hope of avoiding a collapse of civilization, a change so profound as to cause the disappearance of most of the features of the industrial age and the myths that sustain it.

Animal Activism and Environmentalism in an Age of Extinction

Animal Activism and Environmentalism in an Age of Extinction John Kinder (bio) Going to the Dogs: Greyhound Racing, Animal Activism, and American Popular Culture. By Gwyneth Anne Thayer. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2013. The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-in Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation. By Adam Rome. New York, NY: Hill and Wang. 2013. Total Liberation: The Power and Promise of Animal Rights and the Radical Earth Movement. By David Naguib Pellow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2014. On June 19, 2015, a team of biologists, including Paul R. Ehrlich, author of the 1960s bestseller The Population Bomb (1968), published a brief study in [End Page 17] Science Advances on the future of life on the planet. Their forecast was dire: the world is in the midst of a sixth mass extinction, a cataclysmic biotic collapse on par with the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Since 1900, more than 450 vertebrate species have disappeared, an extinction toll that will continue to increase over the next few centuries. “If the currently elevated extinction pace is allowed to continue,” they warn darkly, “humans will soon (in as little as three human lifetimes) be deprived of many biodiversity benefits” (read: the basic ecological conditions necessary to sustain life as we know it). And it is not like we can simply wait for things to improve: “On human time scales, this loss would be effectively permanent because in the aftermath of past mass extinctions, the living world took hundreds of thousands of years to rediversify.”1 As if that were not enough, the report’s authors blame human activity for the looming crisis. In their reckoning, global society has exploited the Earth’s living systems to the breaking point—and everyone, every thing, will pay the price. Ehrlich and company are the latest in a long line of commentators to raise the specter of anthropogenic (human-induced) extinction. As journalist Sarah Kaplan points out, a 1998 poll of four-hundred scientists taken by the American Museum of Natural History found that “70 percent believe the Earth is in the midst of one of its fastest mass extinctions, one that threatens the existence of humans as well as the millions of species we rely on.”2 Since that time, warnings of global catastrophe have only gotten louder. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014), writer Elizabeth Kolbert predicts the current extinction event will “continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have—or have not—inherited the earth.”3 Recently, world leaders have also begun to raise alarms about the implications of environmental destruction. At the 2015 graduation of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, Barack Obama called climate change a “serious threat to global security.”4 And just one day before the release of the Science Advances report, to the outrage of climate-change deniers and Earth exploiters worldwide, Pope Francis issued a more than one-hundred page encyclical condemning human destruction of the world’s ecosystems.5 Meanwhile, twenty-first century popular culture churns out apocalyptic visions of mass extinction and environmental collapse. Looking toward the future, films like John Hillcoat’s The Road (2009), David Michôd’s The Rover (2014), and Frank Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) paint a grim picture of a biosphere on the brink of destruction. And yet, when confronted with the most important topic of our time—possibly of all time—the field of American Studies has largely responded with silence.6 In a recent article in American Quarterly, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson observes, “American studies, the academic discipline arguably most dedicated to progressive political engagement, social justice, and activism, has for the most part ignored climate change and the still-accelerating consumption of fossil fuels despite our awareness of the catastrophic environmental and human consequences.”7 Much the same can be said about American Studies’ engagement [End Page 18] with human-animal studies (HAS), an interdisciplinary field dedicated to understanding the complex relationships between human and nonhuman animals. Over the last two decades, HAS...

Book Reviews

Greg C. Wright of University of California, Merced reviews “How Many Is Too Many? The Progressive Argument for Reducing Immigration into the United States”, by Philip Cafaro. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Considers the question of annually limiting the number of immigrants allowed in the United States and presents a progressive argument for limiting the amount. Discusses good people, hard choices, and an inescapable question; immigration by the numbers; the wages of mass immigration; winners and losers; growth, or what an economy is for; population matters; the environmentalists' retreat from demography; defusing America's population bomb—or cooking the earth; solutions; and objections. Cafaro is Professor of Philosophy and an affiliated faculty member in the School of Global Environmental Sustainability at Colorado State University.”

The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth's Future

Are we headed for a world of scarce resources and environmental catastrophe, or will innovation and markets yield greater prosperity In 1980, the iconoclastic economist Julian Simon challenged celebrity biologist Paul Ehrlich to a bet. Their wager on the future prices of five metals captured the public's imagination as a test of coming prosperity or doom. Ehrlich, author of the landmark book The Population Bomb, predicted that rising populations would cause overconsumption, resource scarcity, and famine-with apocalyptic consequences for humanity. Simon optimistically countered that human welfare would flourish thanks to flexible markets, technological change, and our collective ingenuity. Simon and Ehrlich's debate reflected a deepening national conflict over the future of the planet. The Bet weaves the two men's lives and ideas together with the era's partisan political clashes over the environment and the role of government. In a lively narrative leading from the dawning environmentalism of the 1960s through the pivotal presidential contest between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan and on into the 1990s, Paul Sabin shows how the fight between Ehrlich and Simon-between environmental fears and free-market confidence-helped create the gulf separating environmentalists and their critics today. Drawing insights from both sides, Sabin argues for using social values, rather than economic or biological absolutes, to guide society's crucial choices relating to climate change, the planet's health, and our own.

Becker and the Demographic Transition.

It was a different era when Gary Becker did his groundbreaking work on the economics of fertility, during the years from the late 1950 through the early 1990s. There was great concern then about the “population explosion” due to sustained high fertility in the developing world after mortality declined following World War II. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb” predicting disaster and mass starvation due to rapid population growth: “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. . . .” Robert McNamara, then the President of the World Bank, in 1984 said “Short of thermonuclear war itself, population growth is the gravest issue the world faces over the decades immediately ahead. If we do not act, the problem will be solved by famine, riots, insurrection and war.”