Some provocative thoughts from Paul R. Ehrlich

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Paul R. Ehrlich is a renowned ecologist, an Emeritus Professor of Population Studies at Stanford, and an outspoken, self-proclaimed “loudmouth” and polymath with strong opinions about topics ranging from education to nuclear weapons. He is probably best known for his controversial 1968 book “The Population Bomb,” which included a number of inaccurate and alarmist predictions. He has published research on butterflies, birds, evolution, extinction, conservation, and more over a six decade career.

At age 90 last year, he went on a speaking tour to promote his most recent book, a memoir of his life. Although Ehrlich can be intentionally provocative and even careless in his speech, he made a number of interesting points that I want to share here to see if they resonate or lead to a productive discussion. I wasn’t able to talk directly with Professor Ehrlich, so this is based on a number of interviews that he gave last year.¹

What should a school of sustainability focus on?

Ehrlich is grateful to Stanford for giving him decades of academic autonomy and surrounding him with excellent colleagues to enable him to pursue his work. But he is unhappy with the structure of the new Doerr School of Sustainability. In an interview with Chris Field, director of Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, he refers to it as the “Fake School of Sustainability” for the “most obvious reason … The entire school has nothing of demography… If you’re not discussing population and you’re not discussing consumption, then you’re not discussing sustainability!”

He suspects that a need for funding led the Doerr School to focus on engineering and “extractive geology”, when what is really needed is social science and the arts. “Engineers just want to plane the world flat and build electric cars to drive over it.” Ehrlich believes that humanities and the arts must help us figure out how to get people to understand and respond to the threats posed by climate change. “Telling people the science doesn’t change their behavior…. We need art… We need narrative.” While there are some social scientists in the school, he is frustrated by their department’s mission, which reads in part “The Environmental Social Sciences department will discover the causes of sustainability challenges”. His view is that the causes are clear — over-population and over-consumption — and the real question is how to reduce those.

Do we all need to be poor? Is it reasonable to expect that?

Ehrlich is known for an equation he developed with John Holdren, I=P×A×T that conveys that our impact on the planet is a product of population, affluence, and technology (e.g., whether you are riding a bike or driving a Hummer). He developed this equation in part because population concerns at the time were often directed at poor people and people of color. He wanted to reframe the conversation.

Field relayed a question about this from one of his students: “Does Ehrlich believe that we all need to be poor?” Ehrlich cited a large study that found that if everyone on the planet used as many resources as the average Mexican, the planet could sustain about 3 billion people. (Today it is over 8 billion.) He referenced findings that consumption is not correlated with happiness beyond a certain point.

When challenged in a separate interview by Nate Hagens about why Ehrlich and many other ecologists don’t adopt such a lifestyle, he responded: “I wish I knew the answer. We’re all creatures of our culture…. I certainly live a style that uses probably ten times more energy than I would have to to live a reasonable life.” He noted that he had only one child, then went on to express skepticism about individual action. “If you think of all the things that need to be done to give somebody reasonable health care, reasonable shelter, reasonable diet, and so on, it’s a social thing, it’s almost impossible to do individually.”²

What about controlling population instead of consumption?

“There is not the slightest question that 8 billion is too many,” asserts Ehrlich, suggesting that we should be “thinking about ways to humanely reduce that number” to around two billion. He believes that empowering women can go a long way to achieving population reduction, though misogyny in many parts of the world makes that difficult.

Another complicating factor is a continued push from countries to avoid population decline and to pursue growth. The result is that we are “living in ecological debt.” He would like to see economists pay more attention to ecology. “The idea that human beings … are utterly dependent on the ecological systems of the planet for their very existence … is just not clear enough to people.” He questions whether we can successfully push for “de-growth” when our countries have GDP as their guiding metric.

Are we having enough frank discussions about all of this? How do we make them productive?

Ehrlich believes we should be having more honest conversations about the danger that humanity is in. “There is certainly a feeling among my colleagues that we’ve got to get out there and tell the truth,” he said, referring to an article he and others wrote titled “Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future.” He attributes our reluctance to engage openly on difficult topics to our evolution as “small-group animals”, for whom social ties take precedence over other things. “Fitting in has become much more important to us than doing what is right,” he says. “Our urge is to be with the group and to not offend others.”

As an example of a problem we are not talking about enough, Ehrlich mentions the number of people living in areas that are starting to experience wet bulb temperatures so high that human bodies cannot cool down. This is a critical issue for survivability. How can we get societies to cooperate on large issues like this? “We really do need to get together, as a species, as a civilization, and solve a lot of problems… You can’t solve the climate dilemma in one country. You can’t solve the feeding humanity dilemma in one country.”

Should we be optimistic?

On the one hand, Ehrlich has seen people quickly change their consumption. He looks to World War II, where Americans rationed fuel and beef and other items when we were incentivized to do so. He thinks it’s possible that at some point the impact of climate change will be immediate enough that people will respond in similar fashion. But ultimately he is not optimistic that will happen. “There are lots of things we could do, none of which I think we will do.”

On that happy note, what are your thoughts on some of these questions? How should we rein in our environmental debt, for the sake of our children and their children?

Current Climate Data

Global impacts (January 2024), US impacts (January 2024), CO2 metric, Climate dashboard

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Notes and References

1. Ehrlich had a pretty amusing auto-response to my email asking for an interview: “Due to the flood of emails largely over political issues, but also because of heavy “normal” work commitments and my failing eyesight, Anne and I, retired in our early 90s, can no longer respond to every email. If you are not a close friend or colleague a response may be delayed — forever.” ↩︎
2. As one example of this, Hagens observes that the US has 4.5% of the world’s population but 50% of the world’s medical prescriptions, and wonders: “Are we sicker? Are we babies? Are we over-prescribing?” ↩︎