The Population Bomb That Bombed

John Holdren, who was a supporter of Paul Ehrlich, the author of The Population Bomb, which, when I read it at a too-early age, had me convinced for at least ten minutes that we were all going to die, like, now, is Barack Obama's science adviser. I've only encountered Holdren at the Aspen Ideas Festival (he was on a panel I moderated on nuclear proliferation, and he was quite dark -- probably appropriately -- in his outlook) and he seems like a very smart man, but Ross reminds us that Ehrlich's supporters believed some very outlandish things:

There's a pretty good reason that the book is remembered primarily for its mix of hysteria and moral idiocy: When you kick off your argument by predicting that "the battle to feed all of humanity is over," and that "in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now," and then proceed to argue for mass sterilization programs, the quarantine and abandonment of countries too overpopulated to save from total collapse, and various other "triage" methods (honestly, The Population Bomb has to be read to be believed), you pretty much forfeit the right to be praised for your prescience forty years down the line.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2008/12/the-population-bomb-that-bombed/9258/