Biologist Paul Ehrlich, who died on Monday, was certainly not the first to raise fears of overpopulation. Nearly two centuries earlier, Thomas Malthus had warned about “unchecked” population growth in his 1798 “Essay on the Principle of Population.”
And in the two decades after World War II, at least six books revived these fears — including “Our Plundered Planet” in 1948, “The Population Explosion” in 1958 and “Too Many Americans” in 1964. Each author amplified fears of runaway growth due to record increases in the birth rate (helped by a postwar “baby-boom”), a declining death rate due to medical advances, and Cold War fears about famine and instability.
But no book penetrated the American consciousness quite like Ehrlich’s 1968 megahit, “The Population Bomb.” Dispensing with scientific circumspection, Ehrlich amplified hair-raising fears, declaring in the opening sentence that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over” — going on to warn that overpopulation would lead to “mass starvation” on the order of “hundreds of millions of people” dying for lack of food in the coming decades.
American fascination
Like many books with catastrophic claims today, “The Population Bomb” may have been dismissed at the time as far-fetched and implausible. But Johnny Carson took a particular interest in Ehrlich’s message — inviting him on “The Tonight Show” in February 1970, then again in April after a positive audience response.
Ehrlich was invited back every subsequent year until 1989, for a total of 20 appearances that reached tens of millions of people. For instance, during the 1980 episode, the biologist lamented how the prior decade had increased the world population by another billion, bringing it to 4.4 billion.
“The population is still growing like a skyrocket,” he told Carson. “It’s mostly gloom and doom” — but noted “there have been so few cheery signs there,” mentioning how the U.S. birth rate had slowed a bit.
Ehrlich, who had a single child with his wife, Anne, lauded several countries in Eastern Europe that had reached “zero population growth” — the name he gave his own organization, which would explode to 600 chapters and 60,000 members over these same years.
Multiplying fears of overpopulation
In the decades following the bestselling “Population Bomb,” fears of overpopulation more than tripled. According to Gallup, only 21% of Americans were worried in 1959 about “the great increase in population which is predicted for the world during the next few decades.”
But that spiked in the decades to come, to the point that, in 1992, when Americans were asked the same question, 68% said they were worried about overpopulation.
It was in the middle of this growing fear, in 1973, that Lex de Azevedo recalled overhearing a grocery store clerk wondering whether their family even wanted their children. “How could you even ask such a question?” he later recollected.
“These children are a gift from God. They are part of his plan!”
That moment sparked his epic Latter-day Saint musical “Saturday’s Warrior,” remade in 2016 — with one song capturing the cultural frenzy of the 1970s, where having fewer children was touted as the solution to many social ills:
“Ev’ry day the world is getting smaller by far! Bursting at the seams, what can we do?
“Zero population is the answer, my friend! Without it the rest of us are doomed! ... Who can survive? Not one of us will be alive!”
“Ev’ry day the food supply is shrinking away!” the song intoned. “With starvation at our door, what can we do?”
Teens agonized about a future “When ev’ry inch is gone! ... When Mother Earth is gone? ... When ev’ry crumb is gone?”
Aggressive government steps
Such fears played out in more than fictional theater. In the decades after overpopulation fears swept the globe, governments took action:
- Between 1969 and 1987, Singapore’s “Stop at Two” policy financially penalized large families while giving incentives to sterilize after two births and providing priority housing and education to smaller families.
- From 1975 to 1977, India incentivized and sometimes coerced as many as 12 million people to be sterilized, tied to quotas set by local officials.
- Between 1979 and 2015, China’s “One-Child Policy” led to 336 million abortions, 200 million sterilizations and mandatory IUD insertions after birth, according to official government figures.
- From 1996 to 2000, an estimated 300,000 women and 25,000 men from mostly rural and indigenous areas in Peru were pressured — and often coerced — to be sterilized.
By the end of the 20th century, more than 100 countries had family planning programs that included sterilization as an available method, though only a fraction of nations used coercion.
Population doubles, starvation decreases
Ehrlich’s most dire predictions have not come to pass. Compared with the 3.5 billion people in 1968, today there are an estimated 8.1 billion people — representing one of the fastest-growing population increases in human history.
Yet during this same period, deaths from large famines dropped dramatically between 1970 and 2022, thanks to improved crop strategies, expanded global food trade and faster international responses to famines that, themselves, have been less intense.
Food production has thus kept up with the expanding population — with the amount of undernourished people also falling significantly, from an estimated 30-35% of the global population undernourished in 1970 to 10% in the last decade.
However, famine threats in the last five years have spiked in parts of Africa (Sudan, South Sudan and Somalia), Yemen and Afghanistan — connected to military conflicts preventing food from reaching ordinary people.
Too many children or too few?
After the global population hit its peak growth rate of 2% in the mid-1960s, the birth rate has been slowing for decades, currently at half of what it was (0.9% annually).
That still means as many as 70 million new human beings on the planet each year, enough to keep Ehrlich uncomfortable until the end of his life. As late as 2023, at the age of 90, he still lamented “too many people, too much consumption and growth mania” in a “60 Minutes” interview.
“Humanity is not sustainable,” he said, insisting that to maintain modern lifestyles across the planet, “you’d need five more Earths.”
“Humanity is very busily sitting on a limb that we’re sawing off.”
Deseret News contributor Stephen Cranney, whose wife Rachel recently brought their ninth child into the world, pushes back — noting that according to most population projections, “Depopulation, not overpopulation, is what is on the long-term menu.”
“Lowering fertility to avoid the apocalyptic scenario Ehrlich outlines is quite easy,” he says. “Many countries have done it around the world, from Mexico to Iran to Thailand.”
By comparison, “increasing fertility by more than marginal amounts to avoid another kind of apocalyptic scenario is nearly impossible using policy levers.”
Aside from a few projections that remain “optimistic about family sizes magically rebounding or fertility decline stalling,” Cranney notes that most researchers anticipate a continued decline in birthrates.
‘I knew they weren’t right’
Latter-day Saint Kathy Thatcher is a grandmother living in northern Utah. She had her first of 13 children in 1973, in the middle of these growing cultural fears about too many children being born.
She remembers talking with a neighbor at the time who was highly educated, asking him what he thought was the biggest problem facing the world. “Without a doubt, overpopulation,” Thatcher’s neighbor responded.
Did this larger rhetoric impact her own feelings as a mother? “That never concerned us,” she told the Deseret News. “We knew it was a lie. It’s the prophets who influenced us,” she said, referring to words of Presidents Spencer W. Kimball and Ezra Taft Benson that reassured her.
“How sad it would be if we listened to the world and didn’t have our kids,” Thatcher added, grateful she didn’t get distracted by the gloomy forecasts of the future.
“I knew they weren’t right — because there was power in what the prophets were saying. I was so grateful that someone had the courage to teach truth.”
Correction: A previous version quoted Stephen Cranney as saying no projections were “optimistic about family sizes magically rebounding or fertility decline stalling,” when the researcher was making a point about the few who do remain hopeful. The paragraph has been updated.