Forty years after the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s influential book The Population Bomb, a new scholarly, peer-reviewed magazine, the Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development, thinks that it is time to take stock. And in a fascinating series of articles, it contributors demolish Ehrlich’s population pessimism. This is essential reading – and it is freely available. Here are a few highlights:

Two of the journal’s editors, Pierre Desrochers and Christine Hoffbauer trace the intellectual history of The Population Bomb back to two forgotten 1948 best-sellers, Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet and William Vogt’s Road to Survival. These books launched a Malthusian revival in the 50s and profoundly influenced Ehrlich. However they point out that the effect of these books was due to exaggeration, erroneous data and alarming predictions. Ring a bell?

"...the only things that really sets apart The Population Bomb from other contemporary writings on the alleged population-resource problem is its emotional appeal and alarmist tone. It seems hard to deny that this was indeed the main lesson learned by the present generation of environmental writers from the Ehrlichs’s success…"

Another article, by Paul Dragos Aligica, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, assesses the contribution of the late economist Julian Simon, Ehrlich’s most dogged opponent. Simon always insisted that there are absolute limits to growth is absurd, but Aligica shows that he also had moral concerns:

"... ultimately his views were rooted in deep moral convictions. Simon was always eager to denounce the anti-humanism of those who think ‘that additional poor persons in this generation do make others poorer in this and future generations,’ that human lives matter less than lives of animals or that humans are the cancer of the Earth."

A long, well-documented piece by Indur M. Goklany, a co-editor of the journal, "Have increases in population, affluence and technology worsened human and environmental well-being?", answers it in the negative.

"Contrary to Neo-Malthusian fears, population is no longer growing exponentially. Second, from a historical perspective, food, energy and materials are more affordable today than they have been for much of human history. Third, despite unprecedented growth in population, affluence, consumption and technological change, human well-being has never been higher, and in the last century it advanced whether trends in environmental quality were up or down."

But the Journal does not neglect Paul Ehrlich. In "The Population Bomb Revisited", he and his wife Anne insist that its basic message was and is right. "Perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future," they say. And they conclude that:

"We think, with all its warts, The Bomb did exactly what we had hoped – alerted people to the importance of environmental issues and brought human numbers into the debate on the human future. It was thus a successful tract, and we’re proud of it."

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