Sawing off the Limb on Which We are Perched

Reproductive RightsHuman SupremacyPopulation Denialism

Jul. 5

To commemorate the 32nd World Population Day on July 11, 2022, we are honored to be joined by the legendary Paul Ehrlich, who also celebrates his 90th birthday this year. Author of over 40 books, including the best-selling book The Population Bomb, published in 1968, Dr. Ehrlich was made more famous by numerous appearances on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson - the largest late night show in the 1960’s and 70’s.

We got the rare opportunity to chat with him about his decades-long career in sustainable population advocacy, his studies on natural butterfly populations, as well as his interest in cultural evolution with respect to environmental ethics. We delved into:

why the population bomb was not a dud
a 50,000-ft view of humanity’s evolution over the last 300,000 years and the misunderstood and manufactured “normal” that currently defines us

the need to end the unhelpful consumption vs. population debate

optimal population size and wealth redistribution for a decent standard of living for all
the ethics of nation states and borders
rights to nature
the threat of a nuclear war
the impacts of the agricultural revolution on the human jaw
the maddening rate of planetary degradation and biodiversity loss
a variety of urgent solutions that must be undertaken

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Paul Ehrlich 0:00
The other species that we're wiping out are our life support systems. Basically, humanity, particularly rich humanity is busily sowing on the limb it's sitting on.
Alan Ware 0:11
You may recognize that voice. Today's guest needs little introduction. Paul Ehrlich is author or co-author of over 40 books, including the best selling book, The Population Bomb, published in 1968. He was made more famous by numerous appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, the largest late night show audience of the 1960s and 70s. We'll hear much more from Dr. Ehrlich in this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast.
Nandita Bajaj 0:44
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast where we tirelessly make overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right-sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 1:06
And I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance, a nonprofit that collaborates with experts and other organizations to educate about the impacts of human overpopulation and overconsumption on the planet, people, and animals. And we've got some feedback today from Dr. Phoebe Barnard about the podcast with Dr. Kimya Dennis. She writes, ‘It's such a relief to find a strong and refreshing conversation about race, culture, history and personal choices. I found myself talking back almost always an emphatic agreement to you all, having lived much of the past 40 years in post-apartheid societies. As a white American woman, I completely appreciate the great combination of nuance, and bluntness and of correctness and deep history in this conversation.
Moving on to our interview with today's guest, Paul Ehrlich. He received his PhD from the University of Kansas. He has pursued long-term studies of the structure, dynamics, and genetics of natural butterfly populations. He has also been a pioneer at alerting the public to the problems of overpopulation, and in raising issues of population, resources, and the environment as matters of public policy. A special interest of Ehrlich's is cultural evolution, especially with respect to environmental ethics. And he is deeply involved in the Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior, a Stanford University initiative, which he co-founded with his wife, Anne.
Nandita Bajaj 02:32
Dr. Ehrlich, it's such a pleasure to have you here with us. We want to wish you an early, happy 90th birthday, which falls on May 29, which you will have celebrated by the time this episode gets published. We have so much to discuss with you today. So let's dive right into our interview. Welcome.
Paul Ehrlich 02:52
It's my pleasure to be here.
Nandita Bajaj 02:53
You wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, when the global population growth was peaking. Today, there are plenty of critics who believe that the "population bomb" never went off. They might say that we diffused it with the Green Revolution, which increased food production with the opening up of more global markets with greater technological innovation, etc. How do you respond to critics who say the "population bomb" was a dud?
Paul Ehrlich 03:22
Well, it's easy to respond to them because they don't know what they're talking about. In other words, at the time The Population Bomb was written, there were roughly three and a half billion people on the planet. Now most recently, Partha Dasgupta, the best economist in the world, has written a report in which he points out that sustainably, we might support three billion people, maybe three and a half at a Mexican standard of living. Today, we have eight billion people trying to live at, or would like to live at a US or Canadian standard of living. So the idea that the "population bomb" hasn't gone off is like the idea that the world is flat, or that there really are ghosts or so on. The one thing we're not short of in the world, the one kind of people that are common, are imbeciles, and also very large numbers of uneducated people. And that's one of the problems that you and I have to try and solve.
Alan Ware 04:18
And what would you say are the biggest misperceptions and misassumptions people have had throughout your career, specifically on overpopulation?
Paul Ehrlich 04:26
Well, the one that is most persistent and needs to be put down now, in other words, we had a period when population was considered to be a bad topic, and for some good reasons, namely, that there were an awful lot of people who said, "If there are too many people, who do we kill to get rid of them." In other words, that was something that had to be countered. There's always been a bit of racism in the population issues. But the most persistent rumor now is that the whole problem is overconsumption not overpopulation, and this is a view held by people who believe that the area of a rectangle was caused entirely by its length - its width has nothing to do with it. Obviously, anybody who doesn't have to take off their shoes to count up to twenty knows that the amount of consumption is a product of how many people there are plus, on average, how much each one consumes. And so you cannot leave out the population multiplier, it is quite true that a fundamental problem, maybe the most fundamental problem, is the amount that human beings consume of the Earth's resources, and how that's distributed, and so on, all very essential. But of course, totally tied in with how many people there are. If we're going to redistribute resources, we need to know how many people need to get what - the population dimension cannot be ignored in any of these discussions.
Alan Ware 05:55
And what I love about that population times consumption rectangle is you can choose. Do you want more people with much lower consumption or fewer people with a decent standard of living? Right? So there's a trade off?
Paul Ehrlich 06:06
That's right, except that we always have to remember that there's a limit to one of those dimensions. that will actually limit the both of them. That is how much material there is to consume, and how many people can possibly survive together. But within certain boundaries, of course, the issue is exactly what you said. Do you want to have fewer people at a higher standard of living or more people at a lower standard of living? Of course, there's lots of detail in there too. But the basic principle is very clear.
Alan Ware 06:35
And one element I've heard you talked about that's very important, too, is the longer we want to maintain that huge rectangle of total consumption, the more we're depleting the resources and degrading the environment. So we won't be able to maintain what we have.
Paul Ehrlich 06:50
That's right. When people talk about sustainability, they really ought to think about sustainability for how long. And at the moment, we are unsustainable. It is theoretically possible to get to a point where you could be sustainable for a very long time. And when people say, "Oh, you population nuts don't value people at all," they got it exactly wrong. In other words, I would love to see a maximum number of people enjoy being Homo sapiens. But the way you do that is not trying to have them all at once. It's stretched them out through a very long time so that everybody can have a decent standard of living. One of the things that appalls me most these days, as may have come to your attention. There are a bunch of imbeciles in the United States who are mean and are having a war against women, and now want to change a woman's right to choose how many children she has. And the interesting thing about this is they don't give the slightest thought, or actually oppose any steps to make those children have happy, productive lives. In other words, they lose total interest in reproduction once a child is born, and have no interest in children at all. Although, I think children are fantastic. I mean, they're funny, they're smart. Watching one grow up, as I've had the opportunity of doing, is one of the great pleasures of life. But of course, we need to do everything we can to give those children healthy, happy lives. And in the United States, the Republican Party is dedicated first to killing women, because that's what you do when you ban abortion, and second to making the lives of any children who are not rich, as miserable as possible. So they're a two-fold threat to humanity. And it's really, really grim.
Nandita Bajaj 08:39
Yeah, well said. In fact, that's one of the main priorities we're focusing on is pronatalism, and coercive pronatalism that is on the rise through a lot of mandates, like the one you talked about. In fact, that's one of the questions we'll ask you a bit later. But I want to touch on what you just said about the rectangle. With population and consumption, you're absolutely right. It's become inappropriate now to talk about population growth, especially in high income countries. We know that rich countries certainly outsource their environmental degradation, through extraction of resources, creation of pollution in the global majority, or through global harms, like adding greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere. You've had the opportunity to travel around the world and have seen some of this degradation yourself. What are some of the ways that you've seen population growth impact some of the high fertility countries?
Paul Ehrlich 09:43
Well first of all, one has to make the point that the so-called developed countries, the rich countries of course, became such destroyers of the environment by growing so large, so population growth was a huge thing there. Poor countries often do not take advantage of the demographic situation, although they're doing much, much better now than they did a long time ago, because they tend to overuse their local environment, on top of the fact that rich countries are pushing them to overuse their local environment. So, for example, in Africa, if we had a reasonable world, and we did not have a nation-state system, which is clearly outdated, because all the problems, the existential problems that face humanity, none of them can be solved within nations. In other words, you're not going to fix climate disruption within nations, you're not going to fix biodiversity destruction among nations. After all, the nations of the world are jointly destroying the oceans, and so on. But there are lots of opportunities where poor nations could, if they change their patterns, improve their situation. Hopefully with help from the rich nations and with redistribution from the rich nations. But where you have to have many children in order to have the farm labor that's necessary for you to survive, where the kids have to walk miles to get water, or walk miles to get firewood, and so on. It's very difficult for a poor nation, to just say, "Oh, well have fewer children." And fortunately, a whole series of poor nations have seen this problem. In Asia, a bunch of poor nations saw the problem and are now moving on to becoming more rich nations, adding to the overall pressure of consumption on the planet. We are just one species, we're all basically the same. There aren't any smarter or dumber, maybe women are smarter than men, I could believe that. But basically, we've got to get together to solve this problem. And when people say, "Oh, the way to solve the problem is to add to the consumption of the poor," that's correct, in one sense, and in some places, but the basic thing is not to add to the general consumption, but to reduce the consumption in the rich. We talk about rich countries' growth - we should be talking about rich countries' shrinkage.
Nandita Bajaj 12:17
Right.
Paul Ehrlich 12:17
What is needed, as every scientist who's looked at it carefully knows, is shrinkage of the size of the human enterprise. That means gradually having fewer people and consuming less overall, which means rich countries giving up a lot of consumption, so that poor countries that need it can have more consumption. And this is one of the things that should be discussed continuously in the UN, it should be a topic in local governments, and in none of them is it. It's always growth.
Nandita Bajaj 12:49
Yeah.
Paul Ehrlich 12:50
The President of the United States, who I have met and know is a good guy, basically still has to say, "The US economy has to be kept growing," when actually he should be saying, "Yes, gasoline prices have increased because of the hideous war that Putin has started in the Ukraine, but gasoline prices are still too low." And because we want to totally discourage the use of fossil fuels. In the process of doing it, though, we have to find ways to make sure that poor people who need to drive a car to get to work still can afford to do it. So it's a very complex system that has to be looked at from above. And almost all the discussion of economics that we see in the world, the exception of people like Partha Dasgupta, is basically insane. Economic departments consist of usually a group of daydream believers, who think that everybody can always have more, and their solution to every problem is to grow. And that's cancer's solution to every problem.
Nandita Bajaj 13:57
We couldn't agree more. One of the things that often gets missed out in these critical conversations, especially that are denouncing population as an issue is the impact of overpopulation and overconsumption on other species and the anthropocentrism that is dominant in these dialogues.
Paul Ehrlich 14:19
Well, you know, you say it's anthropocentrism, but it really isn't, because the other species that we're wiping out are our life support systems. Basically humanity, particularly rich humanity, is busily sawing on the limb it's sitting on. So when we destroy biodiversity, we're destroying ourselves. We cannot survive, we cannot get food, we can't do virtually anything without the cooperation of a vast array of other organisms, which most people think casually, "Who cares?" Well, you only should care if you eat or breathe. Otherwise, you know, you can just forget it.
Nandita Bajaj 15:00
Exactly, yeah.
Alan Ware 15:01
That's the ecologist perspective that of course you've had and I heard an interview that you were influenced by Vogt, an early book that you read.
Paul Ehrlich 15:10
Oh, yeah, the Road to Survival I think it was, yeah. It's interesting, that Vogt and Osborne, who was unfortunately, somewhat of a racist, and the so-called Neo-Malthusians, which included me, and a bunch of other people like Garrett Hardin, and so on. I ran across an article by a historian recently who claimed that we basically were in large part responsible for bringing a global view to human problems - that it was the first time that people had really looked at the world as a single unit. And of course, one of the things I pushed very hard and failed at, is getting people to consider the arts and humanities as one of the important ways of changing people's view of other people, and of the world, and of our situation. And the best example, I know there is a single example, is that one picture of Earth from outer space.
Nandita Bajaj 16:11
Right.
Paul Ehrlich 16:12
Which changed people's minds about how infinite our resources were.
Alan Ware 16:17
Kind of reminds me of Aldo Leopold, who, when he was a young man was a wolf hunter, right? Because they thought wolves are bad. And ecology, as that became known in the twentieth century, realized the usefulness of a keystone, right, or top predator species in the food system web. So that ecologist perspective is pretty young.
Paul Ehrlich 16:38
Oh, he was a he was a fortunately a brilliant writer.
Alan Ware 16:41
Right.
Paul Ehrlich 16:42
I mean, one of the things of his that I tend to quote, which I can almost remember is, "Human beings live in a world of wounds that thinks itself whole."
Alan Ware 16:51
Wow.
Paul Ehrlich 16:52
He and Herman Daly, who is a one of the pioneering economists who said many things, but one of them was: economists consider externalities, costs, or benefits that are not captured in market prices. And one time, Herman said, "If the survival of humanity is external to your model, you probably need a new model."
Nandita Bajaj 17:16
That's right.
Paul Ehrlich 17:17
The way they do the numbers is ridiculous. For instance, the entire monetary system, the fractional reserve banking, depends on growth. It won't work unless the population is growing. But we haven't even, I hate to say it, managed to solve the most immediate existential risk - that of a large scale nuclear war. Actually, even a medium scale nuclear war would end humanity. May not kill every last person, but civilization would be long gone, and so on. And yet, we don't teach that in our schools. Even the discussion, which has come now, in the last few weeks, come in because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. People still talk like it would be possible to have a limited nuclear war without escalation. And it turns out that every war game that's been done, the famous Proud Prophet war games, and so on in the 1980s, all showed you can't do it without escalation. And escalation means everybody goes, and yet we don't teach that in the United States these days. I don't know what it's like in Canada, but the universities are totally silent on the big issues of the day. We don't teach about nuclear war, we don't teach about climate disruption. We don't teach everybody. A whole series of things should be required, the existential threats should be central in universities, to freshman education, and in high schools and at middle schools. They should all be discussed, including population size, including the rights of women, the war on women, the fact that throughout the world, women do not get equal rights and equal opportunities with men. There's a lot of things that we, who are connected with universities, ought to be doing and aren't. I haven't heard of a single teaching about nuclear war, even though a attorney friend of mine asked me whether or not Russian missiles can reach Alaska. I mean, it's the level of ignorance, particularly among the politicians, is really scary.
Alan Ware 19:26
Have you seen over your decades in academia, less of siloing and specialization? Has there been a greater move towards interdisciplinary or getting past those specializations?
Paul Ehrlich 19:38
I can't give you, without using bad words, my opinion. But there has been some superficial emphasis on interdisciplinary study. But of course, all the smart professors have been doing interdisciplinary stuff all along. There's not a university department within which you can solve any major human problem. So all the smart people are interdisciplinary to start out with. But the problem is, the university structure is based on the ideas of Aristotle. Now, I knew him and he was a pretty good guy, but his ideas were kind of old-fashioned for today. I've worked hard to bring Stanford University into the twentieth century - it's still in the nineteenth. But the basic problem is the disciplinary structure itself. In Finland, middle schools are now being reorganized to not look at subjects, but to look at problems. And maybe that's the way to go. But the universities ought to be trying to lead the way in dealing with the existential problems that humanity is now facing. But one of those existential problems is the fact that we financialized the world, and the issue is where does the money come from to support the universities? And the answer is, it comes often from dumb state legislators or from rich imbeciles. Like, there's actually one man who thinks population ought to be kept growing, so we can occupy the entire universe. And we're going to terraform, that is make Earth-like Mars, so we can move there. This idiot probably doesn't even know that Mars is smaller than Earth, so it won't take care of us for long. But this is an imbecile who got a lot of money on building sportscars and thinks because he's incredibly rich, that he's not an imbecile. And I don't think anybody has the nerve to tell him that.
Nandita Bajaj 21:41
You know, a couple of times, you've brought up women's rights and the inequities and inequalities. And we're actually starting to see a backsliding of democracy, as women are becoming more liberated. And we're seeing lowering of fertility, which is actually really coming off as a threat to a lot of politicians like the kinds you mentioned, who are sounding these baby bust alarms. And so, we know in over the last fifty years, there has been a lot of focus on women's empowerment, girls education, contraception, which definitely has yielded some excellent results, and is an absolutely necessary component of our efforts. But what we're also trying to do, and what we think we ought to be doing, is going deeper into questioning these deeply ingrained cultural values that place motherhood, parenthood generally, but especially for women, as some kind of an ultimate achievement in life. It's it's a mandatory role. It kind of creates this assumption that they'll want to have children, even though many don't, and increasingly, many aren't. And we're now seeing a lot of countries with declining fertility rates. There's a strong push by governments, like the one you earlier mentioned with what's happening with the abortion bans, to keep women having babies for the sake of economic growth and political power. We at Population Balance are pushing hard against this pronatal bias. Do you have any thoughts or recommendations for how we might best do this?
Paul Ehrlich 23:19
Well, if I had an easy answer, of course, I'd have tried to give it a long time ago, because among other things, my boss is a woman, and turns out I married a woman, I have a mixed marriage. The issue is, I think, and unfortunately, I have take a fifty-thousand foot view of this, and that is we need to re-educate humanity. People have no idea of what human beings basically are like, what the human history has been. For example, right now, I was just reading proof on a paper trying to point out to people that what they think of as normal is not. That is, the average person today, I think because of COVID, or because of Putin, think that normal was the situation in say 2014, just pre-Trump, before the huge disaster, before an actual certifiable imbecile became president of the United States. And actually, that's nonsense.
Nandita Bajaj 24:21
Right.
Paul Ehrlich 24:22
We are a species that's been around for three-hundred thousand years. The present industrial world was created because of agriculture. And that only goes back a few thousand years. Things were totally different for human beings a few thousand years ago. There weren't enough people to have overpopulation. Everybody lived in groups where they couldn't divide into different races. They were much more cooperative. Women generally had much more egalitarian places, as far as we can tell. Of course, the biggest problem talking about that is we have very little information from, say three-hundred thousand years ago to a few thousand years ago. And so one has to speculate and look at recent hunter-gatherer groups, foraging groups, to know what it was like. But there's no question at all, that the normal human situation is very different from the industrial civilization, which is based on a one time bonanza of fossil fuels, which, in my view, can't be replaced, and in the view of many scientists, at least, is unlikely to be replaced. What's happening now is there as a great, great advances in renewable energy forms, solar, primarily solar, at least, because wind is also solar. But it's not replacing the fossil fuels, fossil fuel use is still going up. And so it from the fifty-thousand foot level, we've got to ask a lot of questions and have them discussed in our societies rapidly. What kind of life is reasonable for a human being? But the basic point is, it's not just energy, it's material, it's social issues that tells us we're too big. And there should be lots of discussion in the - first of all, how do we organize a planet? The nation state system clearly doesn't work. You can't solve our big problems with it. How do you reduce it? Many of the problems we face are the same ones that were faced in the United States by the thirteen colonies trying to organize into a nation that could do things that only nations can do like control borders, but also retain some useful and interesting social diversity. For instance, one of the questions I think ought to appear repeatedly in education systems are: are borders ethical? Is the fact that your nation happened to get some good fossil fuels, or happened to get a lot of great forests and so on, mean that you're the owner of those and nobody else can have any kind of access to them? That usual line is how did our oil get under their sand? And so these are the giant questions that in my view, have to be answered gradually over, hopefully a few decades, but very rapidly, really, in terms of historic time, if we're going to avoid another Putin episode, or we're going to actually deal with the coming climate disruption, which is already causing all kinds of problems, and we barely started into it. Same thing with the acidification of the oceans, and so on. All these problems need to be tackled now. And the first thing that I think we have to do is get young people like you out on the streets, saying, "Teach us about this - are borders ethical? Is it better to have more people now, or have more people over a long-term and have them have better lives? Do we want to consider a fetus a full person, or do we want to consider that basically, at certain stages, it's just blueprints that can be made into a full person, we're not going to value all the blueprints - sperm have all the genes you need to make a human being." But I don't think you're going to persuade young men to stop masturbating. So there's just all sorts of problems we need to discuss, and making little changes no longer going to suffice. And that's why I think we need to basically have teach-ins, have protests, and to try and educate people of the world to get along together to solve their problems, because they can't do it any longer individually, or even as nations.
Nandita Bajaj 24:57
That was just brilliant, especially the question that you brought in about are borders ethical? Because if you, if you actually start tracing back to all of this growth-ism, and the competition to become a GDP superpower, and all of the pressures that are then placed on capitalizing people, pressuring women to have more children to grow a country's military, to protect its own borders, to grow a country's religious base, political base, or an economic base - all of it really does stem from the nation state model. Whereas as you were speaking about looking at hundreds of thousands of years ago, when we were living in more collaborative, community models - competition, obviously was still at play with other tribes. It's become more like a pandemic now.
Paul Ehrlich 29:43
In the early days, of course, if you didn't like the neighboring tribes, you could move away.
Nandita Bajaj 29:48
Right.
Paul Ehrlich 29:49
There is, I would say, still almost a major theory of the origin of states, is the so-called Circumscription Theory of - I believe the guy's name is Robert Carneiro. I don't remember exactly, but he basically said that it was when it wasn't possible to move away anymore for one reason or another, that states began to develop. But again, you know, states don't have to be competitive. But the values of cooperation are not fully appreciated, and there are several things that have happened that made the situation worse. The development of massive religions, that major thing in reducing the ability of women to have decent lives. If there was inequality for women in some hunter/forager groups, it became solidified and massive, with the development of the gigantic, crazy religions. So that's one thing that's going to be very difficult to deal with. But of course, the major religions at least give some credence to getting along, not killing, and so on. So maybe we could develop a religion of cooperation for the entire planet. You don't have to have supernatural monsters in it. You can just do things that are really good for kids and people, and not worry about ghosts, demons, saints, and all that sort of nonsense. But I don't think you'll get popular if you broadcast that.
Alan Ware 31:13
Preferably a religion that's based on some ecological principles, right?
Paul Ehrlich 31:17
Yeah, it should be evidence-based. Let's put it that way. I have never seen the slightest sign that there was any advantage to anything that was faith-based, even though a lot of it - we do take things on faith, of course. I take on faith that if I stepped down, my foot will hit the floor. But it's evidence-based, I've stepped down many times.
Nandita Bajaj 31:39
Right.
Alan Ware 31:40
So we all need to love something in order to care for it. You grew up in Philadelphia, New Jersey, which sounds like quite urban places. How did you end up getting interested in the natural world?
Paul Ehrlich 31:51
The answer can be very short, my parents sent me to camps - to a YMCA camp, and so on, all of them had nature programs. And I was never in a really urban area. You know, in Philadelphia, I was in a suburb, which had lots of empty lots-
Alan Ware 32:08
Oh, okay.
Paul Ehrlich 32:09
Big area. And then in New Jersey, there was the Orange Mountains, which were basically partly empty at the time, so I could collect butterflies around the house virtually. And of course, as soon as I got the money to get a car when I was seventeen, then I could go to Lakers, New Jersey and collect very special butterflies and so on. So it was a natural progress. And the fact that my mother encouraged me to do that sort of thing, to raise tropical fish, which I did, so you sort of brought nature into the house and had little microcosms. So there's lots of ways to introduce kids to nature, even if they're stuck in a big city.
Alan Ware 32:47
And that was not such a big city. I think you mentioned Levittown. And all the suburbanization that happened after the war.
Paul Ehrlich 32:54
Right after the Second World War, there was a lot of random development. So urbanization was a big mistake, actually.
Alan Ware 33:03
Yeah, kids like you at the time had those empty lots to observe things. And now fewer and fewer kids have those empty lots.
Paul Ehrlich 33:10
One of the things we ought to do is tear down strip malls and make empty lots.
Alan Ware 33:14
Right, yeah. It'd be great. So you and other conservation biologists have seen a lot of what you love disappear over the time that you've been studying it. What kind of losses have affected you most?
Paul Ehrlich 33:26
Well, the butterfly which I did my major research on for forty years or so, is now extinct, the populations I worked on. Combination of climate disruption, nitrogen deposition from automobile exhaust, and so on. I've gone to many places where I've either worked on something before to find out it's gone, or gone looking for it where it was reported, and it's gone. All over the world. For instance, I used to, when I was a kid, get out National Geographic maps and dream about collecting the butterflies in distant places like New Guinea. When I finally got to New Guinea in 1965, I discovered that most of the places I wanted to go to collect butterflies, were seas of kunai grass, and it was only because of the intervention of a couple of entomologists and cultural specialists in particular, who directed me and got me transport to the few patches of native vegetation that were left - even then. So, around the world biologists have just watched biodiversity disappear. And for instance, one of the things that's happened is that in the old days when I was a kid, and I went to a bar, the lights around the bar, the neon signs, usually had mobs of moths swarming around them - different species, some of them very large and beautiful. They're gone now. Even in Costa Rica, where we worked twenty-five, thirty years ago on moth diversity. Now the arrays of moths we got then in light traps are pretty much gone. And of course, who cares whether the insects are gone? Well only again, if you eat, because they pollinate our crops, they - if you didn't have insects, you'd be wading through feces and dead bodies all the time because they take care of those, in other words. And of course, many of the things that we value greatly, like birds, are dependent upon them. So we're watching the diversity of the world decay away rapidly and nothing at all is being done about it. It's "Plow it under, pave it over." The Stanford has a new school that's going to be run mostly by engineers whose plans are to plane the planet flat and build roads everywhere, not understanding, of course, that we'll all be dead before they finish. Because we'll starve to death. You know, just just the automobile exhaust alone will help change the temperature to the degree that many, many things won't be able to survive. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand this, you have to be either a gardener or a tropical fish fancier. And if you're a tropical fish fancier, remember what happens if you live in, say, the northeast. If the heater in your thermostat, a thermostat heater goes out in your tank, you come in in the next morning, and all your valuable fish are dead on the surface. If you plant a palm tree, say Boston, Massachusetts, in the summer, you may find that after the winter, the palm tree's somehow gone. Organisms evolved to be in very special temperature niches. And what we're doing is rapidly changing them, changing them so fast that evolution can't keep up, can't even start to keep up, actually. And that brings me to another topic. And you asked me why I ended up writing a book called Jaws about the shrinkage of the human jaws. Anybody who's interested in population issues, in my view, has to be interested in what happens to the people we have, and particularly to the children we have. And the human jaws are shrinking because of the Agricultural/Industrial Revolution. It's got nothing to do with genes. It's entirely environmental. And we can change it and fix it. And I happened to run into a brilliant orthodontist who knew what they were doing, filling people's mouth with metal braces, and having people on CPAP machines. Many people today have terrible problems with their asleep, because their jaws are too small. And they have to sleep on special machines, and all that's fixable. So it was a great pleasure for me to be able to collaborate - I'm still collaborating with Dr. Sandra Khan, who's an orthodontist, and other orthodontists who are interested in actually changing the fact that human jaws are shrinking, saving children from jaw shrinkage, and from lives living on CPAP machines, and having braces that are not going to work on their mouths. So all these things are connected. And one of the things that we have to remember is that as we change the environment, we are changing people all the time. Nearsightedness is becoming very common in some areas. We don't yet know whether that's because we've changed the light regimes that people face. You know, we used to all go to bed when it turned dark, and wake up when it got light and sometimes sit around fires for a while. But now, we have light on all the time. And we also have people who stare at phones all the time rather than looking into the distance. And those things may very well be involved in what we're finding in kids, that in many areas, they're getting nearsighted. So what we've done is in our huge population explosion, we've carried our hunter-gatherer genes into a McDonald's world.
Nandita Bajaj 38:59
Right.
Paul Ehrlich 39:00
And it ain't working in many dimensions. There are many, many mismatches between our normal situation, which I mentioned before, and the new situation, which is entirely different.
Alan Ware 39:12
And that affects the jaw within your lifetime. You're not talking about a jaw-
Paul Ehrlich 39:16
Yeah, no, right. They've done interesting studies showing, and we show in the book, in Jaws, pictures. What the grandfather looks like, who lived in a native village, and then the son who spent part of his time in a city, and then the grandson who's in the city and you look at the jaws. If you excavate cemeteries from three-hundred years ago, or five-hundred years ago, turns out the jaws are much bigger than they are today. And if you go back and look at hunter-gatherer jaws in collections, which has been done, they don't have any small jaws and crooked teeth. Small jaws and crooked teeth are something that are a result of agriculture, industrialization. Dr. Kahn is working very hard now, with a German scientist actually, on where the major changes take place. And that looks like that a major change that moves you towards small jaw is resting your jaw in the wrong position and your tongue in the wrong position when you're a very young child. Your tongue should remain locked up against your palate, for your jaw to develop properly. And it doesn't much, in part, because of stuffy noses. Because one of the things we've done is moved inside where allergens are very common. And so upper respiratory infections are much more common than they used to be. They block your nose, when they block your nose, you mouth breathe. Mouth breathing is very bad in many dimensions, one of which is it tends to shrink your jaw, but they're all population-related issues.
Nandita Bajaj 40:55
Right.
Paul Ehrlich 40:56
If we hadn't switched our diets and become agricultural, we would not have been able to grow our populations the way we have. One nice thing, apparently, about hunter-gatherers, which I like a lot, is that leaders weren't elected to run the whole show, there would be a hunt leader who was the best hunter, there would be a healer, who was the woman who really knew all the medicinal plants, there was the arbitrator man or woman who was best at settling disputes. Whereas if you look at Donald Trump, there was absolutely nothing he was good at. And yet he became president. I mean, he was a crook. He couldn't run a business. He didn't know anything - he's basically uneducated, hardly spoke English. And yet he became the leader.
Nandita Bajaj 41:43
Right.
Paul Ehrlich 41:43
Well, it'd be nice to go back to a system where you had leaders like Joe Biden, who had a lot of experience and worked very hard at big problems, who was well educated. That's the kind of leader you want to have. But probably only say, in a political area, you should have some scientists that analyze what's happening to your environment, and help make correctives and so on. You know, we need people with different talents. But we should value those who have the talent, not those that belong to the union, or got elected by a bunch of crooks.
Alan Ware 42:16
And smaller scale population would help that because then you have a chance to know the person face to face, or at least you run into them more easily, though.
Paul Ehrlich 42:26
You're right, we're a small group animal.
Alan Ware 42:28
Right.
Paul Ehrlich 42:28
And we have, through most of our history, we existed in groups of fifty, to a hundred, to a hundred and fifty. And we still see the tendency towards that in your number of colleagues, the number of people, you send your Christmas cards to, and so on. We're adapted to that, and as you say, then everybody speaks the same language, they're genetically closely similar. It's a much different world from the one now. You could adjust to living with fifty or a hundred people. Now we're trying to live with fifty million, or eight billion people.
Alan Ware 43:03
Right.
Paul Ehrlich 43:04
And it's not that we can't do it - we have to recognize it and adjust what we do to face it. Something like one million people in one way or another, attended Princess Diana's funeral. Now, I was flying into London that day and saw the streets absolutely lined with mobs. I have the urge to relate the people that I see automatically, or that I hear about, and I'll bet you do, too. What makes soap operas? If you're reading a really good novel, and the hero gets killed, we feel bad. We are tuned to be empathetic with people we see or relate to. And of course, that's used widely in advertising. If you realize it, you can control yourself, and so on. So we have the basic tools, but we haven't found out how to control ourselves in ways that would help us survive.
Nandita Bajaj 44:00
And you know, to your point, both what you said earlier about your relationship to the species that you were studying, you felt that you had a relationship to them and when you have a relationship to something, you're more likely to care for that person or that being or, or nature, biotic or abiotic. And it also makes me wonder about access to nature. You talked about the expansion of suburbia and concrete jungles that are more and more preventing the new, young generation from actually having any access to any semblance of, of nature, of green spaces. Most of us are surrounded by dense, crowded, loud, urban spaces. And you know, for those of us who have some access, at least, you know, for example, when I go out for a walk in my nice Toronto neighborhood, breathe fresh air and go to a nice park, I know I feel deeply grateful to have that. And then I also lately have been asking this question is, "Why should this be a privilege? Why don't we all have the right to nature and the right to solitude and the right to be left alone when needed to?"
Paul Ehrlich 45:14
That's a very good question. My graduate student, Gretchen Daly and Anne and I wrote a paper about that about thirty years ago saying that we thought an optimum population for Earth might be around one billion people - one to two, which was about the size of the population in 1900. And why we said that was that it would give a chance for people to have different circumstances, that is, there'd be enough wilderness for people who wanted to live in or enjoy wilderness, they could do it. There would be enough people to have big cities if your big thing was opera, or fine restaurants. And of course, if you designed, though we didn't say this, but if you designed the world with different state systems, the people who maintained and took people around to see the fantastic animals of Africa should be able to make as much money at that as somebody building sportscars. And that, in fact, you could make those privileges highly valued, and make the people who are in a position to deliver them highly valued and highly paid. But it's interesting, you know, in the end of the normal, shall we say, for instance, in North America, there was a huge thriving Native American civilization. Agriculturalists at the time. But they were so advanced in their thinking about human beings and human rights, that the Enlightenment thinkers listened a lot to Native American philosophers who thought that people were crazy in the way they had developed the industrial system, where you had wage slaves, basically. And of course, before that real slaves, you know, you could not have had something like the triangular slave traffic, without huge populations, and without the competition between nations, and so on. So there's a lot to learn from both hunter-gatherers and early agriculturalists. And there's actually a fine literature on it, but most people don't pay any attention to it.
Nandita Bajaj 47:16
And you know, when you speak about financializing the system, we've stooped to such a degree of being obsessed to our economy, that we have financialized human beings. We look at babies as commodities, as humans, as capital, and, you know, working towards economic inputs, rather than people who have the right to self-determination and the right to a good life and the right to all the things you just mentioned.
Paul Ehrlich 47:44
Well, one of the things the economist discovered, and I may have said it before, but I'll say it again, once, when they've done the surveys, Japan, the United States, other places, about money and happiness, it turns out that the more money you have, increases your happiness, up to the point where you can be well fed, housed, and clothed. And after that, it doesn't increase happiness at all. So the billionaires and the millionaires and so on aren't any happier than people often in poorer countries who have the basics that they need, and are able to enjoy life and have parties and drink fermented beverages, and make love and so on, regardless of how many jewels or automobiles or whatever you have. So this whole consumer push is a very bad thing for humanity as a whole. And, again, it doesn't make people happier.
Nandita Bajaj 48:46
Yeah.
Paul Ehrlich 48:47
And that, in my view, is what you want. You want to give people the basics of life and the opportunities to get happy.
Alan Ware 48:54
That is kind of a silver lining that there is so much unnecessary consumption that so many of us could have quite a bit less consumption and be happier.
Paul Ehrlich 49:04
Absolutely. Because with the consumption, you've got to protect your junk.
Nandita Bajaj 49:08
That's right.
Paul Ehrlich 49:09
I was thinking, you know, do I want to be a billionaire? How many people who have to hire to clean my house, guard my money, to refuel my yacht?
Alan Ware 49:18
Yeah.
Paul Ehrlich 49:19
But there are very powerful forces trying to teach people other things. And that comes back to another one of these big questions. How do you control that? What do you do about people with these crazy theories of you know, the the Jewish space laser gang and the Hillary Clinton is a cannibal and all.
Nandita Bajaj 49:38
Right.
Paul Ehrlich 49:38
I mean, those of us who are in education have always thought that a, with the exception of shouting fire in a crowded theater that there should be free speech, and that the more people knew, the better off they would be and so on. But we missed the controllers that come in and change all that and it needs a lot of thought to see how you protect speech without other equivalents of shouting fire in a crowded theater, that is yelling that an opponent is a cannibal ought to be fact-based, I would like to have the pictures of the person actually eating a friend or something. But I mean, these are gigantic problems that you're dealing with. All of them have a demographic component in them. So ignoring population is the first step to going in the wrong direction, not that population is the entire story, not that population ever will be the entire story for a species like Homo sapiens, but population in a species that has gained its prominence through cooperation. That's how we occupied the entire world. You cannot ignore population when you're trying to figure out how to make that species happy.
Alan Ware 50:58
Yeah, we are this is hive, right, a hive animal that's grown eight billion strong, but unlike the bee hive, we have cars and houses and cities.
Paul Ehrlich 51:11
And no overall queen. Maybe we'd be better off with an overall queen.
Alan Ware 51:18
So this reminds me of a new book you're working on. It's about depopulation of species, not focusing on extinction. So what is the significance of depopulation?
Paul Ehrlich 51:27
The new book is on population extinctions. And the reason is that most of the emphasis on the biodiversity crisis is - we're losing species. But much more important is, the number of individual populations in species is disappearing. For example, if we lost the honeybee in North America, they just disappeared, we would have something on the order of a twenty-billion dollar financial deficit and a much less nutritious diet. But we wouldn't have lost the species. Honeybees are still over Africa, South Asia, and so on. So the emphasis on species loss is wrong. We should be looking at primarily population loss, which is on the way to species loss. But by the time you lose the species, you've already lost most of the value to Homo sapiens. In other words, if you're interested in the ecosystem services, the natural services other organisms provide to us, you need to have lots of populations of them. For a while, all the populations of Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers had disappeared, except one in Cuba. Well, most people who love the aesthetics of birds and are bird watchers couldn't afford a trip to Cuba to see it. So that basically, from a functional point of view, the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker was extinct before it went extinct in Cuba because you couldn't see it. And the same thing goes for the organisms that pollinate our crops, that decompose our wastes, that control the organisms that bring disease to us, etc., etc. The critical thing is you have to have lots of thriving populations. And if you say, "Well, only one percent of species have disappeared," you may already be dead, if ninety-nine percent of the populations are gone.
Alan Ware 51:30
And it seems like humans being generalist species, that the generalists do well, the raccoons, the possums, the coyotes, the bears, is that true?
Paul Ehrlich 53:31
The cockroaches.
Alan Ware 53:32
Cockroaches. So all the specialists get really driven out, it seems like.
Paul Ehrlich 53:37
Well, they go first. With a generalist, I mean, let's put it this way, the bears are doing fine. But when the average temperature of the planet has increased another, say, four or five degrees Celsius, the grizzly bears gonna go, they're not going to be able to handle that. The polar bears are already in trouble because of the disappearance of the ice. It's not overheating, yet, as far as I know. Disappearance of the ice, and the fact that a lot of the deadly chemicals, the ones that have more impact when they're in small quantity than large, they have the so-called hormone mimics, tend to collect in the Arctic. And there's reproductive problems in some of the Arctic animals because of them. Say nothing of possibly in Homo sapiens, because there are data indicating that sperm counts are dropping around the globe. We could be back to the days of women's liberation, you know, a woman without a man it's like a fish without a bicycle. We're doing lots of bad things. We can fix most of them. But one of the things we need to fix humanely and rapidly, in my view, is to start a gradual decline in the size of the human population. We can work hard and fast on consumption. We've done it in the past. We did it in the United States after December 7, 1941. Up to that time, we'd produced about almost four million cars in 1941. The next four years, we didn't produce cars, we produced aircraft and tanks and cannons. And they did the same thing in Japan. And they did the same thing in Britain and in Germany. So we can change, if we have the incentive, consumption patterns fast and humanely, but we can't change the human population size fast and humanely. We can do it humanely. And that's why we should have started fifty years ago, but we should certainly start now. And in a sense, there has been a start in many countries. In other words, fertility rates are dropping, but the annual increment of about eighty million a year is staying about the same because of course, the percent is applied to a larger and larger population every year. So we need to do more to reduce the size of the human population. But that's not what the politicians think.
Nandita Bajaj 53:37
I just want to wrap up what you said about the politicians. I think one of the first things really we need to fight against is the backsliding that's happening in a lot of democratic countries that are feeling threatened by the lowering fertility, and are putting in lots of roadblocks now for people and women to access reproductive health care, contraception, etc. And they are trying to revive this old idea of family values, because that's what produces more babies. So I think, to your point, we need to re-capture women's liberation. But actually now there's greater forces that we're going to need to fight against that are trying to take us back to the Dark Ages. One final question. How would you encourage sustainable population advocates to pursue their goals today, people like us, and in the coming decades, based on your long years of experience in trying to get the broader public to take the population issue seriously? You have mentioned quite a few suggestions of things, you know, we need to be doing in education and going to the streets to take direct action. But are there any big lessons you've learned from over half a century of being concerned about the issue that you'd like to share with us?
Paul Ehrlich 57:14
Well, there is one program that I think is very good that if it could be multiplied a thousand times would be helpful. It's I think the name of the group is Population Media-
Nandita Bajaj 57:24
Center.
Paul Ehrlich 57:25
Yeah, they do the soap operas, and I am a fan of soap operas.
Nandita Bajaj 57:30
Yeah.
Paul Ehrlich 57:30
And I think that, if that could be greatly expanded, that would be very helpful. I also think obviously, the target has to be mobilizing kids. And if you look at what has happened with climate disruption, and that wonderful young lady from Sweden, I think her name was Greta Thunberg, and so on. If you can encourage kids and get just a few of them out there of her caliber, it will help a lot. But of course, overall, you have to keep dealing with the straight politics and the elections. And there's not time. Already you can see around the world, if you skip the increasing probability of a nuclear war and just go to climate disruption, or to toxification of the planet, and so on, there's not many decades to go to get them fixed - we need to get them fixed fast. And if you turn the government of the United States over to a gang of thugs, then at least as far as the US is concerned, it's the end of the game. And we're so influential around the world, that I have serious doubts. So I don't want to be pessimistic. We can do it. Vote, organize, get other people to vote. It's really our lives that are at stake. Women's lives particularly, but everybody's life. Is that depressing enough for you?
Nandita Bajaj 58:42
It's realistic. It's the world that we live in.
Paul Ehrlich 58:52
Yeah, listen, I have a memoir coming out in January.
Alan Ware 58:56
Oh, wow.
Nandita Bajaj 58:57
Beautiful!
Paul Ehrlich 58:57
Which covers a lot of this stuff from Yale University Press. It's called Life. And I'm happy to talk about it. If I'm still alive, which is fifty-fifty, in January or February, we could do something.
Nandita Bajaj 59:10
That would be our honor. Thank you so much, Dr. Ehrlich, for your time with us today.
Paul Ehrlich 59:17
I'm glad to have helped. If I can help more in the future, and I have a future, let me know. After all, I am a propagandist.
Nandita Bajaj 59:26
That's right!
Alan Ware 59:26
Well, that's it for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. And to share feedback or guest recommendations write to us using the contact form on our site, or by emailing us at podcast at populationbalance.org. You might also be interested in joining our virtual podcast club which meets monthly on Saturday over zoom to discuss the ideas in a previous podcast episode. Learn more by visiting our website and if you feel inspired by our work, please consider supporting us using the donate button.
Nandita Bajaj
Until next time I’m Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for all your efforts in sustaining our beautiful life-giving planet.