Paul Ehrlich: The man who bet England wouldn’t exist by the year 2000

About this episode

The episode discusses Paul Ehrlich's predictions about population growth and food scarcity, and examines why they did not come to pass.

Paul Ehrlich’s bestselling book The Population Bomb opens with an apocalyptic paragraph. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” it states. “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” Professor Ehrlich, who died last week, made a simple argument. The global population was outrunning our capacity to produce enough food to feed everyone. Famine, disease and nuclear Armageddon would follow if the population was not controlled. The book made him a celebrity, and he regularly spoke in public, warning of the imminent threat to humanity. Sometimes his warnings were quite vague in terms of the timescale, but other times not - he was reported as saying in 1968 that if current trends continued, by the year 2000, the UK would be a “small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people". "If I were a gambler," he was quoted as saying, "I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000". But the UK did not collapse, the global death rate did not increase, and we have more food…

People in this episode

Guest: Vincent Geloso

Topics covered

• population growth
• food security
• predictions
• apocalypse
• environmental science
• economics

Keywords

• Paul Ehrlich
• The Population Bomb
• population apocalypse
• food production
• UK
• predictions
• famine
• death rate

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: BBC Radio 4

Books & works: The Population Bomb

Places: England, UK

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