The New Population Bomb

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 MEN: And from your point of view, what did he get wrong?

 In One ofMOTHER'S oldest issues, Paul Ehrlich essentially admitted that the battle to feed humanity is over ...and lost.

Tobias: Wrong? Very little except that he approached the subject too gingerly. When Dennis and Donella Meadows wrote Limits to Growth several years later, out of the Club of Rome findings, they were a bit more strident in their cautionary tale, and plotted five or six of the primary behavioral tendencies of human consumers with regard to waste, energy use, effluents being ejected into the troposphere, a number of quantifiable pieces of data that they collected, analyzed on a computer at a time when people weren't analyzing data on computers, and recognized the trends, all of which Ehrlich had intimated but which gave a new generation of quantifiability. That would lead, of course, a few years later, to the Global 2000 Report. Ehrlich could have been more strident. Keep in mind, we were preoccupied with Vietnam. We were not preoccupied with overpopulation. If anything, we were desperately concerned that we were losing too many people.

MEN: Fast forward to 1993. You wrote World War III in 1993. Could you give an overview to our readers on what has happened since Ehrlich's doomsday scenario.

 Tobias: Well first ...the human population has added a couple of billion to the planet. If you consider that at the time of Karl Marx in the 1850s the human population was 1.5 billion, just on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution... MEN: And now we've hit 5.5 billion.

Tobias: Nearly 5.7 billion right now. It

is going to certainly exceed 6 billion by the year 2000, and according to the preprojections from the U.N. Cairo Conference on Population and Development in 1994, the most optimistic scenario sees the human population achieving a "ceiling" of about 7.8 billion, a figure that is patently absurd and is acknowledged to be so by most of the conveners to the conference.

MEN: Why is it absurd?

 Tobias: Because by simply examining the most recent data from every country in the world with respect to their indices, their fertility rate, the number of children per couple, their death rate, their infant and child mortality rates, their life expectancies, their income generation ability, which translates normally into increased health care and more food on their table, all add up to at least a doubling of human population, which was the third high projection of the U.N. Conference: namely, something like 12 billion or 12.5 billion people. Now I tend to believe, and I'm increasingly, I think, falling out of favor with more and more statisticians because they're nervous about the vision of a world populated by 12.5 billion people, but I actually foresee a world populated by more like 15 billion people.

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