WHICH American made the most impact on society in the Sixties: JFK, Neil Armstrong, Martin Luther King Jr, perhaps Bob Dylan? I suggest another figure, not so widely known, but who set the scene for the current dystopia of Net Zero and the global technocrats’ Great Reset. It was Paul Ehrlich, who died last week at 93, who brought the radical depopulation agenda into the corridors of power.
An entomologist and Stanford scholar since 1959, Ehrlich came to regard human beings like ants that had outgrown their colony and were now on a path of self-destruction. In 1968, the same year as the founding of the Club of Rome, Ehrlich and his wife Anne presented the neo-Malthusian thesis of overpopulation and impending doom. The book’s title, The Population Bomb, was the publisher’s decision, Ehrlich having suggested the less exciting Population, Resources and Environment. But the contents merited such an explosive cover.
The notorious Population Bomb predicted that billions of people would perish in the 1980s from war, disease and famine, while American life expectancy would fall to 42 years due to pollution. The book was not peer-reviewed science, as Ehrlich asserted, but a polemic against humankind with crazily pessimistic forecasts. But like the climate change alarmists of recent decades, being proved wrong does not seem to detract from being taken seriously by the establishment and its ‘useful idiots’. And as for peer review, Professor Gloria Moss and I wrote on TCW about how that system was created by Robert Maxwell to control information: it maintains orthodoxy and suppresses dissenting opinion and revelations.
Ehrlich criticised policies that perpetuated overpopulation. Malaria kills hundreds of thousands in underdeveloped regions every year, but Ehrlich lamented the reduction in death toll achieved by US exports of DDT. With lawyer Richard Bowers and Yale professor Charles Remington, Ehrlich founded the campaigning body Zero Population Growth.
At an international ecological meeting in 1970, Ehrlich implored the US government to legislate for depopulation. Marriage and child-bearing to be actively discouraged; sterilisation to be freely available (voluntary, but pushed by propaganda and physicians); punitive taxation; federal requirement for Hollywood to depict large families negatively; and to consider jail for over-breeding parents.
In 1977 Ehrlich and his wife wrote Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment with Stanford physicist John Holdren (later President Barack Obama’s scientific adviser). The authors’ recommendations included taking children from single mothers, involuntary sterilisation through chemical additives to food and water, and a two-child limit. Nice chap, Paul.
Reflecting on the impact of his book, Ehrlich derided his right-wing critics. He never backed down on his prophecy, acknowledging only that his predictions were incorrectly timed. In a Guardian interview with Damian Carrington in 2018, on the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Population Bomb, he insisted that the optimal population of the globe is no more than 2billion. It is currently estimated at 8.3billion, so that’s a lot for abortion, euthanasia, careerism, drugs and vaccines and suicidal demoralisation to achieve. Perhaps Ehrlich would have approved, from his death bed, tensions rising for World War Three.
The professor emeritus of population studies told Carrington that ‘collapse of civilisation is a near-certainty within decades’. I am reminded of Zhou Enlai’s misquoted remark that it’s ‘too early to say’ whether the French Revolution was a success. Yet some of Ehrlich’s warnings were justified: pervasive contamination by synthetic chemicals, wildlife threatened with extinction, overfishing of the oceans, and increasing consumption by an increasing population. The Guardian is not fully on board with Ehrlich on the latter point, supporting the liberal migration that has destabilised Western demography and dramatically increased population density in relatively small countries such as Great Britain.
Ehrlich was also correct on the widening gap between rich and poor. You don’t need to be a socialist to regard this expropriation as a social injustice (I guess that most TCW readers are not beneficiaries of this movement of assets). The wealthy, Ehrlich argued, would never voluntarily relinquish their ill-gotten gains (to which I’d add that greed is masked by virtue-signalling about equality).
Conspiracy theorists, we are called, for alerting fellow citizens to the misanthropic designs of the globalists, with their puritanical Net Zero and destruction of society’s traditions, cohesiveness and freedom. Ehrlich, who dropped a pseudoscientific bomb on humanity, is celebrated by the elite as a prime mover for the impoverishment, enslavement and depopulation of Homo sapiens.
