Fears of overpopulation and its effect on the Earth’s ability to sustain human life peaked in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when the scientific “consensus” was that overpopulation would result in large-scale famines. Paul Ehrlich, in his book The Population Bomb — which predicted that “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death” in the ‘70s — articulated many of these concerns. Ehrlich’s predictions proved false. In the more than four decades since The Population Bomb was published, the number of people inhabiting the Earth has more than doubled, but the death and poverty rates have dropped, and life expectancy has increased. Not only are we feeding more people than ever before, we’re doing it with less land. What Ehrlich and other scientists missed was man’s propensity to innovate and adapt to changing circumstances.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Jun 2013 04:37:27 +0000
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