His statement would have clearly been wrong even without the green revolution. Without it starvation could have increased, but it had not been going up (at least adjusting for the size of the world's population, and probably not even in an absolute sense) even before the revolution. Off in to the distance its possible with no green revolution that his predictions would have been correct, but not in the time frame of a few years that he was talking about. To get starvation on the level he was talking about as quickly as he was talking about, you would not only need to have no green revolution, you would have had to have a collapse in world food production. He didn't just say there would be starvation (on a truly massive scale, and starting very soon) in the third world. He also said there would be large scale starvation in the developed world.
Gotcha. He didn't qualify his statement enough. How absolutely evil!
I didn't say he was evil. He made a ridiculously wrong prediction. One not just proven to be wrong later, but one that was ridiculous even when he made it. It goes well beyond not qualifying his statement enough. If he said "a lot of people will starve", his prediction still would have been wrong, not just "not qualified", but it would be understandable, and not ridiculous. But he said it would happen on a very large scale (larger than ever before), very soon, and that there was nothing that can be done. He didn't just not qualify he rejected all possible qualifiers.
Also it wasn't just because of his ignorance of the green revolution in 1968. Even without it there would not have been starvation on the scale he predicted unless world food production collapsed (not just failed to increase as much as it did), and after the green revolution was well under way (continuing or accelerating a longer term trend of food production growing faster than population growth) he was still making predictions of imminent doom. He just pushed them back. In the late sixties the doom was to come in the 70s. In the 70s he thought it would come in the 80s. Even in 2004 he was claiming that he was right, just that the timing was off. (While at the same time saying he never made predictions despite having made them again and again.)
In addition to his statements about starvation he also made the following predictions and statements -
In 1969, Ehrlich suggested in Rampatis that by the mid-seventies "smog disasters" would cause 200,000 Americans per year to drop dead, with "hundreds of unattended people choking out their lives outside of New York's hospitals." The Population Bomb declared that it was "not inconceivable" that some new disease arising from environmental conditions would kill 500 million people. The idea that India could "ever" become self-sufficient in food production, Ehrlich said, was a "fantasy."
findarticles.com
“we can be reasonably sure . . . that within the next quarter of a century mankind will be looking elsewhere than in oil wells for its main source of energy."
Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich, The End of Affluence (Rivercity, Mass.: Rivercity Press, 1974, 1975), p. 49.
“Perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future…."
“If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
- Paul Ehrlich, quoted in Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 35. |
