Tim Palmer reported this story on Monday, November 2, 2015 12:42:53

TIM PALMER: Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb dropped like one on its readers in the late 60s.



It presented an apocalyptic vision of humanity strangling the globe through overpopulation, and the dystopia it predicted was to arrive within 20 years; hundreds of millions would starve to death in North America in the 80s; Western societies like England would cease to exist in a generation.



The book sold in its millions.



Paul Ehrlich concedes he blew the timing. He didn't foresee the great scientific advances in crop production - the Green Revolution - that averted the threat of mass starvation in the 70s and 80s.



Ffor decades, he paid the price: derided as the ecologist who cried wolf.



But he doesn't think he's wrong, and in a new book - Killing the Koala, Poisoning the Prairie - the Stanford Professor in Population Studies sets out more reasons why our current way of life is very much on borrowed time.



PAUL EHRLICH: Basically it all boils down to us over-consuming; that's a function of having too many people, and too many rich people, consuming too much per person. Of course, there's roughly two to three billion people on the planet who don't consume enough, so we have a very complex situation.



My colleagues have attacked me on that. Jim Brown, a member of the National Academy, said that Anne and I were crazy to say there was a 10 per cent chance of civilisation surviving; he says it's only 1 per cent.



So we're having a battle over that.



TIM PALMER: Are you prepared to put a timeframe on that? Given that timeframes have in the past caused some-



PAUL EHRLICH: No, no, time frames are difficult. I wouldn't put a time frame on it, but I would say I would be very happy if I knew now that my great grandchildren in 2060 or 2070 could still lead something like the life that you and I lead.



TIM PALMER: So only 50 years away? Civilisation-



PAUL EHRLICH: It could be less.



TIM PALMER: -will meet that challenge. What would you identify as the single greatest impending challenge to civilisation?



PAUL EHRLICH: There are a couple of things that we would call discontinuities. For instance, I and many other people think that the chances of a large-scale or even a small nuclear war are extremely high now, particularly between India and Pakistan or, of course, between, as we push Putin around, a full-scale one; and that would end - either one - would end civilisation as we know it, but how can you predict when that might happen?



And the other thing of course is the disease situation worse than Ebola, which could also change everything almost instantly.



But if you look at the general trends: the climate disruption, the poisoning of the planet; if you look at the loss of biodiversity, which is the loss of our life support systems and so on, I would expect what we're having now: continuing deterioration - as the population grows: less democracy. Automatically less democracy if the population grows.



All that stuff is going to come together and is going to make an awful mess. We're in the start of the mess now.



TIM PALMER: Decades ago, of course, your focus was strictly on the raw numbers of population, what the Earth could carry without starving itself, and of course famously your book 'The Population Bomb', which caused a sensation - I think it sold two million copies at the time - but you became the punching bag for conservative anti-ecologists, who said that you failed totally in your predictions - because you did predict that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 70s and 80s, tens of millions of North Americans.



You accept of course that the Green Revolution is-



PAUL EHRLICH: Well yeah, but you know it's interesting. Norman Borlaug, who I knew, who is the inventor of the Green Revolution, told me how right I was, and said in his Nobel Peace Prize speech that it would buy him a couple of decades, maybe, to solve the population problem, and spent much of his later years working on the population problem.



But the main problem with the conservatives in this case and today is they can't read. What they attacked, what I said in The Population Bomb, was the battle to feed all of humanity is over. Right now we have about 800 million people starving and more than two billion who are micronutrient-malnourished. They just don't happen to be Donald Trump.



TIM PALMER: So you don't resile at all from what you wrote in The Population Bomb?



PAUL EHRLICH: No, I'd write different things today. Listen, what scientist would say exactly the same things 40 years later? You learn a lot, and for instance, the people that I talked to, and I probably should have talked to other people, were much less optimistic about the Green Revolution as others, thinking that farmers would not adopt it very rapidly.



And it turned out that they adopted it very, very rapidly if they were rich enough to drill the wells and buy the fertiliser that worked.



But there's still a huge debate about whether, in the long run, it's going to have been the right thing, because we face another situation today with two and a half billion people, more people than were alive when I was born, coming on the planet now and around 2050.



We don't have any Green Revolution waiting for them.



TIM PALMER: That was my next question. Your predictions were defeated by an unexpected scientific achievement. Do you now say that we're at the limits of science, science can't expand again to take care of this potential apocalypse?



PAUL EHRLICH: That's, I hope science can take care of the impending apocalypse. But it was a very different situation at the time of the Green Revolution in that we had a working in-hand technology. There is no such thing in the rich world that-



TIM PALMER: In the absence of such technology, you seem to not believe that it's within mankind to change behaviour to live within these constraints?



PAUL EHRLICH: My entire research over the last 20 years has been on that exact question. That is: how can we move cultural evolution in a direction to solve these problems, to get foresight capacity, to close down everything that looks towards the future?



The world is run by gigantic corporations who look to the next quarter. It should be run by small family corporations that look to the next 200 years.



We also have, of course, faith-based economics. And faith-based economics is the fundamental problem. That is, economists have the faith that on a finite planet, their cure for everything is growth, and as a very famous economist, Kenneth Boulding, said in 1966: if you think you can have perpetual growth in a finite system, you're either a madman or an economist.



And they're still at it.



TIM PALMER: Ecologist, author and Stanford professor, Paul Ehrlich, I was speaking to earlier.



You can hear a longer version of that interview on our website.