The New Population Bomb

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MEN: His primary assumption being that the ability to feed ourselves increases arithmetically whereas population tends to increase geometrically. In other words, human populations can never, practically or mathematically, keep up with their own numbers. The food will inevitably run out once a certain critical mass of humans is reached.

Tobias: Well... essentially, yes. Malthus's best vindication came with the Irish Famine, which was compounded by the Western audience that was watching. And it was further complicated by the conspiratorial involvement of the British government, many would argue ...historians would argue, which helped induce and force the massive carnage within Ireland. Those historical complications aside, the sheer reality of a regional distribution problem resulting from a variety ...from a maze of problems affecting the potato crop resulted in millions of deaths. Malthus, in a sense, was proven right by Ireland, but was far more vindicated later on between the period of about 1850 and 1880 when China witnessed a wave of successive famines resulting in the death of an estimated 50 million to 70 million people. Now, there was the Taiping Rebellion that added to the carnage, but the bottom line was people were hungry and there was not sufficient food for them. So the millions of people that Malthus has predicted in the early 1700s who were going to starve to death did starve to death .... Ehrlich was also brilliantly perceptive and predictive.

MEN: In The Population Bomb?

Tobias: Yes, written in 1968. It was written in six weeks, as I understand it. It does read like a book that was written quickly, and many within the population realm have assailed it for slight inaccuracies or inconsistencies of tone. I have not been concerned at all with that, and I haven't read it for those things. I think it was a break-through book, I think it was a courageous book. I think it helped trigger certainly Club of Rome, Global 2000 Report, and a subsequent generation of reports in Japan, in Canada, in The Netherlands. I think what it did to shake up people was as important as what Rachel Carson [Ms. Carson's book, Silent Spring, is generally given credit for launching America's awareness of the environmental damages of pesticides and other industrial chemicals] did to shake up people.

 MEN: What was Ehrlich's essential point?

 Tobias: His acknowledgment that we are in a state of crisis ...that the human population is exceeding the carrying capacity of planet Earth by leaps and bounds. He offered the IPAT equation in which human impact is equivalent to the size of its population multiplied by its level of affluence and scope and range of its technology—an equation that encompasses our numbers, our affluence, our consumerist behavior, and our tendency to extract the maximum amount from any given piece of land. He got all of that right, and it didn't take a brain surgeon to figure those things out. It did take an ecologist of his standing to put it out there in a fairly provocative manner, and it would be read by millions of people. It was a bestseller. And it took Paul himself, who is an outspoken, volatile, articulate individual, to go out on the news circuit and promote his book the way he did. All of those factors combined. He is media-savvy and you have to be if you're going to be a scientist of influence.

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