Humanity adapted to a rising population and will adapt to a shrinking one
The prologue to The Population Bomb (1968), a piece of neo-Malthusian apocalyptica written by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich and his (uncredited) wife, Anne, featured a prediction that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.”
Extrapolation is useful as a predictive tool but useless on its own. Trapped in the dead end of finite-resource environmentalism, the Ehrlichs underestimated human ingenuity and human adaptability. Their message, which attracted a vast audience, turned out to be nonsense. It was not the first prophecy of doom to do so, ...
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