OPINION:
At the beginning of this week there were predictions of a weather-borne apocalypse, replete with torrential rains, ferocious winds and tornadoes. Schools closed early or didn’t bother to open. Workplaces shuttered. Meetings were cancelled. It was the end of days.
Only it wasn’t. It turned out to be just a decent rainstorm with occasionally energetic winds and no tornadoes.
I was thinking about the failure of these weather predictions when the news first came that Paul Ehrlich was dead at the tender age of 93. Ehrlich, for those of you who might not remember, was the author of “The Population Bomb,” a book in which he predicted mass planetary starvation by the 1980s and a world in which all of our systems had broken completely under the stress of more people.
Like the meteorologists this week, Ehrlich was wrong in pretty much every particular. If anything, we suffer from a problem of plenty. The almost 9 billion humans on this planet consume more calories today, on average, than at any time in recorded history. Average life expectancy has more than doubled since 1900. Deaths from malnutrition and starvation are at historic lows.
In 1968 (when “The Population Bomb” was published), 500 out of every 100,000 people on this planet starved to death or died of malnutrition. Last year, fewer than three out of every 100,000 people died of starvation or malnutrition.
It’s now likely that more people die from overeating or eating the wrong kinds of food than die from starvation or malnourishment.
Unlike the meteorologists, however, Ehrlich’s predictions had terrible effect, as they encouraged governments all over the planet (including ours) to kill people — in utero or otherwise — and prevent would-be mothers from becoming mothers.
If you had to assess the scope and awfulness of crimes against humanity, Professor Ehrlich gave any regime in the last 100 years — the Soviets (40 million dead), the Nazis (15 million dead), the Chinese Communist Party (40 million dead) — a solid run for their money.
It was so bad that even after all his neo-Malthusian propaganda was proven to be nonsense, Ehrlich was given a “Genius Grant” by the MacArthur Foundation. They should be ashamed of themselves.
Ehrlich’s failures were probably predictable. His was an entomologist by training, with probably only a very limited concept of either God or the genius of mankind, so it was natural for him to assume that humans and bugs were more alike than different.
But the reality is, as it has always been, that given the time and freedom to innovate, human beings can rise to most any challenge and can solve problems in amazing ways.
It’s no accident that at the same time Mr. Ehrlich was spinning yarns about a population catastrophe, Norman Borlaug was literally planting the seeds of the Green Revolution, a revolution that would change agriculture and enable billions of people to live longer, healthier and better lives.
Borlaug won a Nobel Prize, as well as the admiration and appreciation of the billions of people whose lives he either made possible or improved.
Humans love to predict the future; it seems to be in our DNA. This week, the NCAA tournament is going to make soothsayers of us all. That’s all well and good, except for those dark moments when we listen to the sirens’ call of doom and death.
The reality is that humans, left to their devices, adapt, improvise and overcome whatever challenges the world throws at them, almost always without government “help.”
Let’s keep that in the mind the next time a carnival barker of doom – like Paul Ehrlich – heads our way.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.
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