The second half of the 1960’s saw a surge in frightening visions of humanity’s future. Science fiction novels about a dystopian world and films about mankind’s struggle for survival all found a curious, if not keen, audience. But none created more controversy, fear and debate than the writing of an American Biologist by the name of Paul R. Ehrlich.

Paul Ralph Ehrlich was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in may 1932. He was inspired by the subject of ecology at an early age when, in high school, he read William Vogt’s Road To Survival (published in 1948), a book that became highly inspirational to the environmentalist movement of the 1960’s.

Ehrlich achieved a bachelor’s degree in zoology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1953. He held a number of research positions there, before accepting a position at Stanford University in 1959 where, 7 years later, he became a professor of biology.

Although much of Ehrlich’s research was in the field of entomology, he became increasingly concerned with the issue of uncontrolled population growth, believing that humanity should “treat earth as a spaceship, with limited resources and a heavily burdened life-support system”. Otherwise, he feared, “mankind will breed itself into oblivion”.

Paul R. Ehrlich wrote hundreds of papers on the subject of unsustainable human population growth. He summarised his findings and predictions in The Population Bomb, which he published in May 1968.

Written when the earth’s population was still at 3.5 billion, less than half today’s figure, The Population Bomb warned of the urgent dangers of overpopulation, primarily mass starvation, societal upheaval and environmental degradation. The book pulled no punches in delivering its warning message, opening with the line: “The battle to feed all humanity is over”.

Although initially ignored, The Population Bomb gained popularity and went on to sell millions of copies. It became one of the most influential books of the 20th century, as well as one of the most hotly debated and frequently criticised.

The Population Bomb was published at a time of conflict and social upheaval. In it, Ehrlich argued that many of the day’s most alarming events had a single, underlying cause: “Too many people, packed into too-tight spaces, taking too much from the earth”. He claimed that unless humanity controlled its numbers, most of us would face “mass starvation on a dying planet”.

Most notable of the book’s predictions was that, in the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people would starve to death, having stripped the earth of natural food resources. Ehrlich claimed that starvation was inevitable and “nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate”.

It was this conjecture, mostly, that gave critics and overpopulation deniers fuel for their counter-argument, when the mass starvation that Ehrlich predicted did not occur.

Arguably, Ehrlich’s prediction only proved wrong because he underestimated the extent that man could and would go to provide the additional food and resources necessary to support an ever increasing population. He would not have been aware of how quickly technology would advance in the latter decades of the 20th century, and how those advances would be employed in agriculture, livestock breeding and the further extraction of natural resources from the planet.

Paul R. Ehrlich’s knowledge and research work remains highly regarded, and he has been the recipient of multiple biological and ecological accolades over the years, including The Eminent Ecologist Award of the Ecological Society of America (2001) and BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Ecology and Conservation Biology (2013).

Despite its popularity (and notoriety) over the years, The Population Bomb is not widely in print today and copies can be costly to acquire. This is probably testament to how uncomfortable the topic of overpopulation still is and how, with mankind now exceeding 8 billion, few people remain prepared to publicly discuss the need to control population growth.