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Paul Ralph Ehrlich (born May 29, 1932 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a Stanford University professor and a renowned entomologist specializing in Lepidoptera (butterflies). He is also well known as a researcher and author on the subject of human overpopulation.
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Education
Ehrlich earned a B.A. in zoology in 1953 at the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in 1955 at the University of Kansas, and a Ph.D. in 1957, also at the University of Kansas. During his studies he took part in surveys of insects on the Bering Sea and in the Canadian Arctic, and then on a National Institutes of Health fellowship, investigated the genetics and behavior of parasitic mites. In 1959 he joined the faculty at Stanford, being promoted to full professor of biology in 1966.
Marriage and family
On December 18, 1954, Paul Ehrlich married the former Anne Fitzhugh Howland, a research assistant. They remain married and have one child, Lisa Marie.
Academic activities
Ehrlich is president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University.
He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
Ehrlich's research group at Stanford currently works extensively on the study of natural populations of checkerspot butterflies (Euphydryas). Along with Dr. Gretchen Daly, he has conducted work in "countryside biogeography", or the study of making human-disturbed areas hospitable to biodiversity. Ehrlich continues to conduct policy research on population and resource issues, focusing especially on endangered species, cultural evolution, environmental ethics, and the preservation of genetic resources.
The Population Bomb
Ehrlich has written numerous books on the subjects of ecology, entomology, overpopulation, and related subjects. His best known book is The Population Bomb, published in 1968. A complete list of his writings can be found below in the "Writings" section.
The Population Bomb was written at the suggestion of David Brower, at the time the executive director of the Sierra Club, following an article Ehrlich wrote for the New Scientist magazine in December, 1967. In that article, Ehrlich predicted that the world would experience famines sometime between 1970 and 1985 due to population growth outstripping resources. Ehrlich wrote that "the battle to feed all of humanity is overw/. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Ehrlich also stated, "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980," and "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks that India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971." These predictions wouldn't come to pass at those dates. In the book's 1971 ion, the latter prediction had been removed. An oft-cited cause of these famine aversions is the "Green Revolution", as it was called by the U.S. Agency for International Development in 1968 1 Another oft-cited cause was the sharp drop in the fertility rate which occurred in the developed world during the 1960s and 1970s.
Ehrlich has stated that despite his other work, the predictions of his first book are regularly cited as proof of extensive flaws in the environmental movement. At the same time, Ehrlich also notes that many things critics claim were "predictions" were actually scenarios. 2 In the first ion of The Population Bomb, Ehrlich wrote: "The possibilities are infinite; the single course of events that will be realized is unguessable. We can, however, look at a few possibilities as an aid to our thinking, using a device known as a 'scenario'. Scenarios are hypothetical sequences of events used as an aid in thinking about the future, especially in identifying possible decision pointsw/.Remember, these are just possibilities, not predictions." (p. 72)
Other activities
Ehrlich was one of the founders of the group Zero Population Growth in 1968, along with Richard Bowers and Charles Remington. Supporters point to the impact of The Population Bomb and the ZPG organization in helping to raise awareness about overpopulation and in helping to change U.S. laws to make birth control and other reproductive health care more easily available. The U.S. fertility rate dropped from 3.42 children per woman in the early 1960s to 1.8 by 1975, and ZPG crs Ehrlich's influence along with the efforts of National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood of America, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the U.S. Supreme Court for helping to bring this about.
He and his wife Anne were on the board of advisors of the Federation for American Immigration Reform until 2003.
With Stephen Schneider and two other authors, writing in the January 2002 issue of Scientific American, he critiqued Bjørn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist.
Criticisms
Critics have compared Ehrlich to Thomas Malthus for his multiple predictions of famine and economic catastrophe. The leading critic of Ehrlich was Julian Simon, a libertarian theorist and the author of the book The Ultimate Resource, a book which argues a larger population is a benefit, not a cost. To test their two contrasting views on resources, in 1980, Ehrlich and Simon entered into a wager over how the price of metals would move during the 1980s. Ehrlich predicted that the price would increase as metals became more scarce in the Earth's crust, while Simon insisted the price of metals had fallen throughout human history and would continue to do so. Ehrlich lost the bet. Indeed such was the decline in the price of the five metals Ehrlich selected, Simon would have won even without taking into account inflation.
In Ehrlich's books, many predictions are made, for example, The Population Bomb begins "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," while in "The End of Affluence", Ehrlich stated, "One general prediction can be made with confidence: the cost of feeding yourself and your family will continue to increase. There may be minor fluctuations in food prices, but the overall trend will be up". According to Ehrlich, the United States would see its life expectancy drop to 42 years by 1980 because of pesticide usage, and the nation's population would drop to 22.6 million by 1999 1. Criticizing Ehrlich on similar grounds as Simon was Ronald Bailey, a leader in the wise use movement, who wrote a book in 1993 entitled Eco-Scam where he blasted the views of Ehrlich, Lester Brown, Carl Sagan and other environmental theorists. While of the repeated theorizing Simon complained "As soon as one predicted disaster doesn't occur, the doomsayers skip to anotherw/. why don't the they see that, in the aggregate, things are getting better? Why do they always think we're at a turning point -- or at the end of the road?"
In his book Betrayal of Science and Reason, Ehrlich discussed these earlier predictions of his and re-affirmed his stances on population and resource issues.
Ehrlich also has critics on the political left. These include Betsy Hartmann, author of the 1987 book Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control & Contraceptive Choice. Hartmann accuses Ehrlich and other environmentalists who focus on population control of misanthropy, and believes that such focus is antithetical to activism on issues of social class and feminism.
Other criticisms are published with the summary of The Population Bomb.
Ehrlich Answers Critics
In an question-fielding Grist Magazine interview (published on-line), Paul Ehrlich acknowledged some specific predictions he had made, in the years around the time his Population Bomb was published, that had not come to pass. However, as to a number of his fundamental ideas and assertions he maintained that facts and science proved them valid. (The Grist interview can be accessed via an external link provided near the bottom of this Wikipedia article.)
Among other things Ehrlich had to say was the following:
"When I wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, there were 3.5 billion people. Since then we've added another 2.8 billion — many more than the total population (2 billion) when I was born in 1932. If that's not a population explosion, what is? My basic claims (and those of the many scientific colleagues who reviewed my work) were that population growth was a major problem. Fifty-eight academies of science said that same thing in 1994, as did the world scientists' warning to humanity in the same year."
Awards
Ehrlich has been recognized for his work with the following awards:
- The John Muir Award of the Sierra Club
- The Gold Medal Award of the World Wildlife Fund International
- A MacArthur Prize Fellowship
- The Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
- A World Ecology Award from the International Center for Tropical Ecology, University of Missouri in 1993
- The Volvo Environmental Prize in 1993
- The United Nations Sasakawa Environment Prize in 1994
- The Heinz Award for the Environment in 1995
- The Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement in 1998
- The Dr. A. H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences in 1998
- The Blue Planet Prize in 1999
- The Eminent Ecologist Award of the Ecological Society of America in 2001
- The Distinguished Scientist Award of the American Institute of Biological Sciences in 2001
Writings
- How to Know the Butterflies (1960)
- Process of Evolution (1963)
- The Population Bomb (1968)
- Population, Resources, Environments: Issues in Human Ecology (1970)
- How to Be a Survivor (1971)
- Man and the Ecosphere: Readings from Scientific American (1971)
- Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions (1973)
- Introductory Biology (1973)
- The End of Affluence (1975)
- Biology and Society (1976)
- Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment (1978)
- The Race Bomb (1978)
- Extinction (1981)
- The Golden Door: International Migration, Mexico, and the United States (1981)
- The Cold and the Dark: The World After Nuclear War (1984, co-authored with Carl Sagan, Donald Kennedy, and Walter Orr Roberts)
- Earth (1987, co-authored with his wife)
- Science of Ecology (1987, co-authored with Jonathan Roughgarden)
- The Cassandra Conference: Resources and the Human Predicament (1988)
- The Population Explosion (1990, co-authored with his wife)
- Healing the Planet: Strategies for Resolving the Environmental Crisis (1991, co-authored with his wife)
- Birds in Jeopardy: The Imperiled and Extinct Birds of the United States and Canada, Including Hawaii and Puerto Rico (1992, co-authored with David S. Dobkin and Darryl Wheye)
- The Stork and the Plow : The Equity Answer to the Human Dilemma (1995)
- Betrayal of Science and Reason: How Anti-Environment Rhetoric Threatens Our Future (1998, co-authored with his wife)
- Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect (2002)
- One With Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future (2004, co-authored with his wife)
- On the Wings of Checkerspots: A Model System for Population Biology (2004, co-authored with Ilkka Hanski)
References
1. ^ "Eco-Catastrophe!". Ramparts. Sept 1969. pages 24–28.
External links
General
- Paul R. Ehrlich's faculty web page at Stanford University
- Namebase.org citations for Paul R. Ehrlich
Organizations
Sympathetic articles
- History of the Zero Population Growth organization
- Info on The Population Explosion, the 1990 sequel to The Population Bomb
- Biographical page at the International Center for Tropical Ecology, University of Missouri, St. Louis
- Simon knew what he was doing!
- Several online Paul Ehrlich interviews
- "Plowboy Interview" of Paul Ehrlich, 1974 from The Mother Earth News magazine
Critical articles
- A critique of Paul Ehrlich
- A critical biographical sketch
- We're Doomed Again: Paul Ehrlich has never been right. Why does anyone still listen to him?
- Doomsayer Paul Ehrlich Strikes Out Again
- Ehrlich quotes