SURVIVORSHIP

Dr Paul Ehrlich, the American biologist (an entomologist specializing in butterflies) and Stanford professor, just died at age 93. As expected, through social and traditional medias folks are all a twitter with condemnations and demonizations, most of which read to me as some kind of weird revisionist history. As we love doing, people look back with hindsight and proclaim the future was simple and obvious and, as a result, perfectly predictable. And to get there they pretend all the revolutionary innovation and world-altering coordination was inevitable. Or, because I can't get answers from them and so must be left to assume, I don't see how they can make the claims they do without demanding all of the above.

CONTEXT

Ehrlich became known for the highly influential and controversial book he co-authored with his wife Anne: The Population Bomb, published in 1968. A confluence of major historical events arrived to inspire their work. Aside from being at the height of the nuclear arms race and Cold War (with stalemate in Korea, the Berlin wall going up, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and large-scale combat operations in Vietnam...), China had just experienced what I estimate was on par with the worst-ever human catastrophes. Between 1959 and 1961, the modern, mechanized, post-war world at the apex of the chemical revolution saw one of the worst man-made famines in the history of our species. Though aggressively concealed at the time and exposed only through rumour, the world slowly became aware that somewhere on the order of 30-50 million lives were lost. This disaster only mirrored the Soviet famine in the 1930s (which killed something like 40% of the Kazakh population and 15% of Ukrainians) and Bengal in the 1940s. And all of these were not unlike what was repeated in all corners of the globe in nearly every decade of the 19th century, where the Irish famine, for example, took 25% of the population and a third of all Ethiopians were killed. Then as now, things had never been better in terms of education, scientific awareness, and technological advancement; and yet the result was world-historic catastrophe.

From there, in 1962, just a year after China's famine, while she was dying of cancer, the marine biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson published her hugely influential work Silent Spring. In it, Carson noticed the problems of overharvesting and our rapidly degrading most living and life-sustaining systems. She combined that with spelling out how the mantra of "better living through chemistry" was actually a double-edged sword. Carson noted how, to everyone's horror, the organic phosphates humanity was busily spraying over all our plants, foodstuffs, and selves, and all leaching into our soil and waterways, wasn't just sickening and killing us but so many of our furry, feathered, and finned friends as well. Her work, as you know, is said to have sparked what became the environmental movement (and resulted in her being labelled, in the era of the Red Scare, a Communist and enemy of America and even modernity).

Paired with these terrifying truths was the sudden awareness that exponential growth was real and the world was amidst an astonishing population explosion. In prior epochs it had taken humanity centuries, millennia, and more to double our numbers globally. For instance, the human population of two thousand years ago is estimated at roughly 200 million. It took on the order of a thousand years to add another 200 million. The jump from there to our first billion took just two-and-a-half centuries and the next doubling, to two billion, only century more. By the time the Ehrlichs were writing in the '60s, it looked like the another two billion people would be added in under fifty years (which is exactly what took place). And where were most of those billions going to be born? Almost all of them in the poorest and war-torn nations already struggling to feed their existing populations. As the text on the original cover of the Ehrlichs' book offers, "While you are reading these words four people will have died from starvation, most of them children."

These realizations, surrounding finite natural resources and our degradation of those, previously underappreciated aspects of our interconnectedness with living and non-living systems, and our ever-straining food supply all caused the pair to offer a grievous warning. Despite their primary concern being for human suffering and, especially, the excruciating horror of the brief, whole-life starvation of children, the Ehrlichs were and continue to be labelled monsters who, of all things, don't care about human life. And now, today, upon Mr Ehrlich's death, these concerns and this warning is being framed as unjustified, even ludicrous. And yet, as I see it, the reasons folks get away with saying so are threefold: because the Ehrlichs were largely right; people and institutions took the threats and warnings coming from all directions very seriously and responded with gargantuan, unprecedented adjustments, investments, and actions; and with such focus and commitment emerged a whole series of near-miracles from the worlds of science and engineering.

"REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH"

In light of the population explosion and the ongoing threats to global food security, in their 1968 work the Ehrlichs proposed "We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail. We must use our political power to push other countries into programs which combine agricultural development and population control." And that's exactly what followed, and immediately so. In 1969, the year after the publication of The Population Bomb, the UN founded their global population control program, the UNFPA (the UN Fund for Population Activities). Of course we do not use these words any longer, instead we call the organization the "Population Fund" and go with the euphemism "reproductive health" for the work they do. But what does the United Nations Population Fund actually get up to? They deliver educational programs in the developing world to break taboos against abortion and birth control and offer hundreds of billions of pills, IUDs, implants, and condoms to folks each year. They've been doing this now for more than fifty years. Let that sink in if you've never considered it. Not only did the program not exist prior to the Ehrlich's work (and the birth control pill, for example, was only nascent and hardly being used, with only ~12 million women on them in 1968 but closer to 45 million by 1975, almost all of whom were outside the US), but in their 50th anniversary publication the UNFPA cites Paul Ehrlich and his book several times as being hugely highly influential in the culture and partially inspiring the global population control movement and their organization at the heart of it. They remind us that Ehrlich was interviewed by Johnny Carson on multiple occasions, actually almost two dozen times and once for more than an hour, which was a huge deal (that would be more significant that having a bi-weekly sit down with Joe Rogan in the current era...) The result, they tell us, was that "[t]he book became a bestseller, and soon the notion of 'overpopulation' and questions about what, if anything, should be done about it were being debated in living rooms, lecture halls and the halls of government worldwide."

Likewise, in 1970, China was noticing that a population explosion could threaten her well-being and plans at modernization. The country swiftly began encouraging the citizenry to marry later, wait to have kids, and have fewer of them. Internationally, however, they were forwarding the opposite messaging. At the first World Population Conference, held in Bucharest in 1974, for instance, the Chinese delegation claimed population was not a determining factor in economic growth or a nation's prosperity. And they argued that the global drive promoting birth control was little more than an evil imperialist agenda cooked up by dastardly Western countries to hinder developing ones. But by 1978 Chinese authorities were so convinced of the problem that they endorsed stronger population control measures than anyone else with their own "family planning" model and one-child policy. In 1980 the policy was formalized and backed by strict enforcement, said to be for the alleviation of the nation's growing economic, social, and ecological problems.

You can ascribe whatever positives or negatives you like to all of this population discussion. What I notice is that, half a century later, there's only one universally recognized driver of poverty reduction — which is also considered by most economists, sociologists, and public health experts as foundational to human development and economic growth: that is "reproductive health" (*whispered* also known as "population control"). And the people delivering this to the world at scale on behalf of all of humanity, especially to those who can least afford it, recognize the impact of the Ehrlichs' work and the debate it engendered. That set of facts cannot be any clearer.

THE GREEN REVOLUTION

What also arrived after the book's publication was the Green Revolution. From 1965 to present, we've seen an almost unimaginable increase in drought resistant food varieties and high-yield ones, too, particularly in critical cereals such as wheat and rice but also maize, sorghum, and millet. (Shout out to the huge and crucial government and foundation investments in science, see the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center for example, and to Borlaug in Mexico, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work, and Swaminathan in India who pioneered tremendous advancements.) These efforts were in the works prior to the Ehrlichs' publication and, with reason, Paul was hugely skeptical of the promises and the lack of acknowledgement of any possible downsides. By the time their book came out the Green Revolution was still largely a dream, only really demonstrating its power in the 1970s when many poorer countries saw a doubling and even tripling in their annual production of key crops.

For instance, wheat production in India in 1955 was under 9 million tonnes and a decade later was only roughly 10 million. The first high-yield wheat crop was planted at scale in 1971. And by 1975, with this new seed paired with improved irrigation, the country was producing 29 million tonnes on the same area of land. Rice production there followed a similar path, catapulting from 27.5 million tonnes to nearly 49 million. And in Mexico, driven by these novel varieties, wheat and rice production saw the same doublings and the country went, like Indian, from being dependent on food imports to being an exporter. To be clear, all of this was so sudden and such a shock that these places had so much food so rapidly that they famously didn't even have the storage or transportation capacity to deal with it.

None of this was anticipated never mind a safe bet or guaranteed. This was a scientific revolution and a revolution for human flourishing. No amount of dollars, sweat, or time was sure to deliver these results. To any rational person a doubling of crop yields, and almost overnight as happened, would have required nothing less than the discovery of a whole new planet, and highly fertile Earth-like one very nearby. How else?! It was maybe the closest thing we've ever had to a human-made miracle and resulted in those of us born after that time living in a fundamentally different world to that of our ancestors. This really cannot be overstated. And further improvements in seed varieties, fertilizers and pesticides, irrigation methods and mechanization, and management have only enhanced the situation while also continuing apace, causing food production to exceed our exponential population growth. None of that was simple and given but costly and hard-earned. And, you might notice, had we merely doubled our global food production after 1960 (still a effectively a miracle), rather than tripling it, the world's population would have topped out around the turn of the millennium and not continued to climb unimpeded.

But there were countless downsides. Ehrlich was right to be worried as new intensive farming and chemical fertilizers didn't just deliver more food but decimated, and continue decimating, countless fresh water systems, to consider just one aspect. For instance, if you don't know about the Aral Sea, once the fourth-largest body of fresh water on the planet (for scale, roughly the size of Lake Ontario and which looks as vast as an ocean when standing next to it), go have a look. The lake's bottom is now traversed by camels and goats who nap in the shade of the rusted-out hulls of fishing vessels who once trolled the sea but now rest in the sandy, sunburnt seabed because, in just one lifetime, between 1960 and 1995, the lake was drained to only 10% of its prior volume, largely for cotton production, leaving behind toxic salt plains and resulting in intense dust storms and severe health issues for surrounding populations, to say nothing of the ecological catastrophe. But killing waterways wasn't a Soviet phenomena or a 20th century one. It's almost guaranteed that wherever you live there are streams, rivers, lakes, or aquifers, and perhaps all of the above, that were drained to extinction (or merely to levels that will not be recovered for centuries or eons) or otherwise made unsuitable to life by poisoning from pesticides or through eutrophication due to over-fertilization of cropland. Today we remain a long way from preventing such or recovering from what was done, even 50 years after some of us noticed a problem and started combatting it.

You might also notice that what didn't happen in the half century since our food production explosion was the fortification of our food system. Most places only operate on a highly unjustifiable and precarious reliance on global stability and abundance. For instance, in the town I live in, in one of the best situated and most advantaged places on the planet (in terms of geography, mild climate and abundance of water, proximity to global markets, political and economic stability and more), all of our grocery stores, farmer's markets, wholesale distributors, and warehouses hold just a few days worth of food. And the vast majority of that food, especially what most folks are eating, come from other countries. And we pair our 11,000km pears and 5,000km tomatoes with trends like decimating the number of farmers (or even people with the most basic agricultural knowledge), much of our agricultural land not being farmed (to sustain high food prices), all while paving over too much of the territory that should be producing food and replacing it with 4,000sq/ft homes. This is a multigenerational delusion not robustness and long-term security. And where is the situation so different? In what Western nation can you go where a whole generation of people don't think all this could be righted by planting a handful of fruit trees, by foraging sea greens, dandelions, and wild berries, or who think any vegetables at all will grow without the vast amounts of manure harvested from scored of large domesticated animals? (I've sat through lectures, meetings, conferences, and secular sermons with folks espousing this suicidal nonsense, usually from the audience, in ten cities on two continents for two decades now.)

Even if you view Ehrlich and his warnings on population as ludicrous, it is irrefutable that his message directly inspired the saving and uplifting of billions of lives, according to the very people and organizations doing the work. Had a movement toward large-scale population control and revolution in agriculture not taken off, along with harsh restrictions on pollution and overextraction coerced by environmentalist types, it's hard to see how Ehrlich's fears of worsening mass suffering would have been avoided. Thinking otherwise looks to me like a curious form of survivorship bias. Though people may have wanted all of these things we apparently feel entitled to and the universe owes us, ever-more food and new and improved technology ever quarter, no one had good reason to bet on any of it or merely be optimistic these would arrive one day. So, you don't have to like Ehrlich. And he may have been a terrible person and full of terrible ideas and turned out to be wrong on many fronts. Fine. Just recognize his tremendous impact, the good and the bad. Is that so hard?