NYTimes | In
Mr. Pearce’s view, the villain is not overpopulation but, rather,
overconsumption. “We can survive massive demographic change,” he said in
2011. But he is less sanguine about the overuse of available resources
and its effects on climate change
(although worries about the planet’s well-being could be a motivator
for finding solutions, much as demographic fears may have helped defuse
the population bomb).
“Rising
consumption today far outstrips the rising head count as a threat to
the planet,” Mr. Pearce wrote in Prospect, a British magazine, in 2010.
“And most of the extra consumption has been in rich countries that have
long since given up adding substantial numbers to their population,
while most of the remaining population growth is in countries with a
very small impact on the planet.”
“Let’s
look at carbon dioxide emissions, the biggest current concern because
of climate change,” he continued. “The world’s richest half billion
people — that’s about 7 percent of the global population — are
responsible for half of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile,
the poorest 50 percent of the population are responsible for just 7
percent of emissions.”
To
some extent, worrying about an overcrowded planet has fallen off the
international agenda. It is overshadowed, as Mr. Pearce suggests, by
climate change and related concerns. The phrase “zero population
growth,” once a movement battle cry, is not frequently heard these days;
it has, for instance, appeared in only three articles in this newspaper
over the last seven years.
But
Dr. Ehrlich, now 83, is not retreating from his bleak prophesies. He
would not echo everything that he once wrote, he says. But his intention
back then was to raise awareness of a menacing situation, he says, and
he accomplished that. He remains convinced that doom lurks around the
corner, not some distant prospect for the year 2525 and beyond. What he
wrote in the 1960s was comparatively mild, he suggested, telling Retro
Report: “My language would be even more apocalyptic today.”
