SURVIVORSHIP

The American biologist and environmentalist Paul Ehrlich just died, aged 93. And, as expected, social and traditional medias are all a twitter with condemnations and demonizations, most of which read to me as some kind of weird revisionist history. As we love to do, folks today are looking back with hindsight and proclaiming the future was simple, obvious, and, as a result, fully predictable.

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. First, between 1959 and 1961 the modern, mechanized, post-war world saw one of the worst man-made famines in the history of our species, in China with somewhere on the order of 30-50 million lives lost. A year later, in 1962, 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 natural systems and combined that with spelling out how the mantra of "better living through chemistry" was actually a double-edged sword and, for example, the organic phosphates humanity was busily spraying over all our plants and 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 had her labelled a monster and Communist, in the era of the Red Scare). Paired with these terrifying realities was the realization of an unfolding population explosion. In prior epochs it had taken humanity centuries, millennia, and more to double our numbers globally. Two thousand years ago the human population is estimated to have been roughly 200 million and 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 another century. By the time the Ehrlichs were writing, it looked like the another two billion people would be added in under fifty years (which is exactly what took place.) And where were those people going to be born? In the poorest nations already struggling to feed the populations they had. As the text on the cover of the Ehrlichs' book offers, "While you are reading these words four people will have died from starvation, most of them children." The realizations surrounding our straining food systems and what looked like rapid depletion and degradation the planet's life sustaining systems caused the pair to offer such a grievous warning.

Today, with Mr Ehrlich's death, this warning is being framed as ludicrous catastrophizing. As I see it, the reasons folks get away with this are threefold: because the Ehrlichs were largely right; people and institutions took these threats seriously and responded with gargantuan, unprecedented adjustments, investments, and actions; and with that emerged a whole series of near-miracles from the worlds of science and engineering.

"REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH"

In 1969, the year after the publication of The Population Bomb, the UN founded their global population control program. Of course we don't call it that now, instead we go with the euphemism "reproductive health." But what does the United Nations Population Fund do? They deliver educational programs in the developing world to break taboos against birth control and offer billions upon billions (trillions?) of pills, IUDs, and condoms to folks. They've been doing this now for more than fifty years. And, not only did the program not exist prior to the Ehrlich's work (and the birth control pill, for example, was only nascent), but in their 50th anniversary publication the UNFPA cites Paul Ehrlich and his book multiple times as being hugely influential and partially inspired their creation. They remind us that Ehrlich was interviewed by Johnny Carson multiple times, which was a huge deal, and that:

The 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. A 1972 study commissioned by international think tank the Club of Rome and carried out by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology further heightened concerns about what continued rapid population growth could mean for society. In their study, The Limits to Growth, the researchers elaborated future scenarios based on differing assumptions related to population growth, food production, industrialization, pollution and consumption of non-renewable natural resources.

You can ascribe whatever positives or negatives you like to all of this population discussion. What I notice is that there is one universally recognized driver of poverty reduction which is considered foundational to economic growth and human development: "reproductive health." And the people delivering this to the world at scale, especially to those who can least afford it, recognize the impact of the Erlichs' work and the debate it engendered. That 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 government and foundation investments in science and to Borlaug in Mexico and Swaminathan in India who were crucial in pioneering these advancements.) These efforts were in the works prior to the Ehrlichs' publication and, with reason, Paul was hugely skeptical of the promises. 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 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. By 1975, after the introduction of a high-yield wheat variety and improved irrigation, the country saw almost 29 million tonnes produced. That's a scientific revolution and seemingly taken for granted today. Rice production in that country followed a similar path and by similar method, catapulting from from 27.5 million tonnes to nearly 49 million. In Mexico, driven by these novel cereal varieties, wheat and rice production saw similar doublings coming out of the same land usage. This was the closest thing we have to a human-made miracle and resulted in people living in a fundamentally different world. And improvements in seed varieties, fertilizers and pesticides, irrigation methods and mechanization, and management have continued apace, just outpacing our exponential population growth. None of that was simple and given but expensive and hard-earned. And notice that had we merely doubled our global food production from 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.

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 novel restrictions on pollution and overextraction, it's hard to see how Ehrlich's fears of mass suffering would have been avoided. Thinking otherwise looks to me like some kind of unjustifiable survivorship bias. Though people may have wanted all of these things we now clearly take for granted, no one had good reason to bet on any of it or merely be optimistic that they 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. Fine. Just recognize his tremendous impact, the good and the bad.