To the Prophet of Overpopulation, Humans Were No Different from Insects

On March 13, the entomologist and population scientist Paul Ehrlich died at the age of ninety-three. Born into a Jewish family, Ehrlich drew immense public attention in 1968 with The Population Bomb, which he authored with his wife Anne. The book predicts that “hundreds of millions of people” would starve to death in the following decade, and that “nothing can prevent” such an outcome. While no such thing occurred, Ehrlich stuck to his prophesies of doom—and continued to discourage procreation—throughout his life, even as evidence against his theories accumulated. The demographer Nicholas Eberstadt writes: