There’s always that one guy, standing on a street corner, raving about the ‘end times’. For the last fifty years, Paul Ehrlich has been ‘that guy’.

Like all false prophets shaking their fist at the sky, his gimmick is a type of fear that only has to last long enough for a coin to leave a passerby’s hand – or in this case, a book to fly into someone’s online shopping cart.

Far from admitting defeat when humanity stubbornly failed to collapse, Ehrlich is back ranting that the next few decades of history ‘will be the end of the kind of civilisation we’re used to’. His proclamations were eagerly repeated by media organisations addicted to calamitous clickbait.

‘For the entire planet you’d need five more Earths, [it’s] not clear where they’re going to come from’ because humanity is ‘feasting on resources’.

The modern era’s hack Nostradamus first published his apocalyptic ravings in 1968. The Population Bomb has been severely criticised because it was fundamentally wrong. Based on its mistaken presumption, the author proceeded to float inhuman solutions that make most rational people’s stomachs turn.

Ehrlich’s worldview sees humanity as a plague or ‘bomb’ eating toward apocalypse.

‘The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.’

For this, and other false predictions, he has been honoured by leading scientific institutions.

60 Minutes extinction story has brought the usual right-wing out in force. If I’m always wrong so is science, since my work is always peer-reviewed, including the POPULATION BOMB and I’ve gotten virtually every scientific honor. Sure I’ve made some mistakes, but no basic ones

— Paul R. Ehrlich (@PaulREhrlich) January 3, 2023

Back in the real world, farming advances continue to provide excess food for the human population, with starvation almost entirely the cause of corrupt authoritarian (and largely socialist) regimes that prioritise power over food security. When the young men of a culture are continuously stolen for war or killed in their infancy, agriculture fails. No amount of environmentalism can solve that problem.

Ehrlich’s vision of an ever-expanding ravenous civilisation necessitates a terrifying solution – population control. This is where environmentalists start appointing themselves to god-like roles, discussing who can have children, when, and how many.

Which goes a long way to explaining why we’ve come to call this movement eco-fascism.

In particular, Ehrlich called for America to ‘take a leading role’ in population control as part of a moral duty, including adding ‘temporary sterilants’ to the water supply and food sources, leaving citizens infertile. After deciding this perhaps wasn’t the best idea, the book went on to consider treating children as a luxury tax item or adding incentives for sterilisation. The latter was put in place in nations like India during their period of so-called emergency.

India’s forced sterilisation program under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975 was encouraged by the World Bank and bolstered by foreign aid gifted by organisations including the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller. According to Vox:

‘In 1975, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered the declaration of a national emergency. She seized dictatorial powers, imprisoned her political rivals, and embarked, with the help of her son Sanjay, on a mass, compulsory sterilisation program that registers as one of the most disturbing and vast human rights violations in the country’s modern history.

‘Ensminger and Ford were intervening in a foreign democracy under the banner of philanthropy, and gave that foreign democracy tools that Gandhi used for vast wrongdoing when she decided to suspend democracy and leap into autocratic terror. And at the time, that result was the cause of celebration, not dismay; World Bank President Robert McNamara praised Gandhi, declaring, “At long last, India is moving to effectively address its population problem.”’

What began as an incentive to those who were finished having children quickly became a system of punishment enacted against the poor in what many feared was an attempt to ‘solve poverty’ by erasing the children of poor families before they were born.

Learning nothing, and perhaps most frightening of all was Ehrlich’s suggestion that America could set up a ‘Department of Population and Environment’ to ‘take whatever steps are necessary to establish a reasonable population size in the United States and to put an end to the steady deterioration of our environment’.

Right now, environmental bureaucracies across the world have established possibly the most powerful alliance seen in centuries, with their tactic of emotional guilt and political ‘popularity’ leading to policies that actively starve previously successful nations in pursuit of a Net Zero fantasy.

Ehrlich’s work is a tired revision of the equally failed Malthusian catastrophe.

Thomas Malthus envisioned the world and its resources in a problematically simplistic fashion in which humans, like rats raiding a corn field, would eat their way to war and death until the world returned to a ‘sustainable healthy normal’. Environmentalists, particularly in the age of Greta Thunberg, take this fiction to be fact and have set about finding ways to reduce both the population and its demand on resources before the tipping point is reached.

Where previous generations improved agricultural techniques and streamlined cities, today’s radicalised and anti-human environmentalists are in charge. They are pushing through policy that steals resources from civilisation – such as power and food – deliberately giving the impression that we are living in a time of catastrophic shortage which is then used to justify their freshly acquired power.

The reality is that this ‘age of hunger’ is manufactured by Malthusians in a self-fulfilling prophecy. We are being starved so that a bunch of environmentalists can salvage decades of embarrassment.

Attempting to control the population ‘for the greater good’ is an obvious evil and an abandonment of long-held moral standards related to the rights of human beings to procreate without reference to the government.

It is also unnecessary. The Malthusian trap, if it ever existed, was solved long ago by rich Western nations, whose populations universally stalled and entered a decline when mass migration statistics are removed from the calculation. Capitalism within the world’s Western democracies led to children becoming expensive investments taking up not only money, but love and time. This meant that people had fewer children, mostly within replacement figures. There was no need for environmentalists to interfere.

Educated, well-off women have no overwhelming desire to subject their bodies to fifteen births or spend the entirety of their adult lives raising small children. They want careers and freedom, similar to their male counterparts. The education of women was enough. It created a natural limiting factor bred out of choice rather than threat.

Communism and socialist governments tend to make people poorer which drives uncontrollable population growth. Instead of making the West poor, environmentalists concerned about the population bomb should have been spreading capitalism and democracy to the third world. Conversely, any society interested in expansion and regional domination pushes for women to have as many children as possible so that they can be used as soldiers and workers – replaceable parts in their political machine. It’s no wonder that even the Marxists rejected Malthusian theory. Where else will the dictatorship get cheap labour if not from the wombs of its enslaved women?

While Marx and Engels were wrong about almost everything, they correctly labelled Malthusianism as ‘blaming the poor’ for their own exploitation. We can see the parallel today as the most wealthy and privileged individuals in society stand around at COP conferences talking about how they can limit the population of the peasants while they continue selling their baby photos to an adoring press. While they may not say it aloud, it is clear that they believe themselves to be more worthy of the Earth’s resources than us.

Malthusian environmentalism is the seed that led to eugenics – wildly popular with the elite and educated classes of last century – just as it is today with those green revolutionaries who imagine themselves capable of determining who should and should not be born.

Ehrlich predicted that tens of millions would starve to death in America during the 1970s. Those deaths happened in China, not because of over-population, but because the arrogance of communist dictator Mao led him to believe he could socialise agriculture for ‘the greater good’ – just as the United Nations and its Sustainability Goals urge governments to interfere in the previously exceptional farming industry.

The environmentalists are right, we might have a global famine, but it will be entirely of their making. Just as the United Nations convinced Sri Lanka to destroy its agricultural industry in six short months, Canada and the Netherlands will soon follow – putting catastrophic dents in the world’s food bowls. Australia, under Labor, appears determined to plough farming families into the ground, rip away their land, and tax the survivors out of existence. If we end up scrounging around for bugs and lab-grown protein, make sure you point the finger directly at Prime Minister Albanese and his green, anti-human Cabinet.

On Earth Day, 1970, Ehrlich laughably claimed that all important animal life in the sea would be extinct by now. ‘Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.’ And that by the year 2000 (twenty years ago) ‘the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people’.

The biggest problem with Ehrlich is that his ideology appealed to a group of people in the 1970s. They got it in their heads (somewhere between the Pot smoke and alcohol) that they had a moral obligation to manipulate the wombs of the world to ‘save the planet’ and create some kind of Edenesque Age.

Those people are the bureaucrats, billionaires, and political elite in charge of the world.

Humanity has a wonderful capacity to adapt while the brute force of our population keeps us alive through the Earth’s repeated attempts to wipe us out. This is not something to be ‘fixed’.

If you want proof that Malthusianism’s connection with eugenics continues to the modern era, look no further than the United Nations and World Economic Forum, who spend their time fantasizing about the ‘new humans’ who can be modified and improved by technological advances in the transhumanist movement.

The last word, I leave with Ehrlich.

‘I do not think my language was too apocalyptic in The Population Bomb, my language would be even more apocalyptic today. The idea that every woman should have as many babies as she wants is to me exactly the same kind of idea as everybody ought to be permitted to throw as much of their garbage into their neighbour’s backyard as they want.’