Paul Ehrlich - a life of dubious achievement....

The Financial Post, in its Junk Science Week Series, pays tribute to Paul Ehrlich...

Ehrlich Wins the Rubber Duck award for Lifetime Achievement. The candidates most often suggested by our readers as deserving of the award – Al Gore and David Suzuki – have lost out to Suzuki’s mentor, Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford biologist and author of the 1970 best-seller The Population Bomb. Ehrlich, who remains an honorary director of the David Suzuki Foundation, has been a profoundly influential figure in the environmental field with numerous prestigious awards over the decades, including an Institute of Biological Sciences, a United Nations Sasakawa Environment Prize and a MacArthur Prize.

Paul Ehrlich’s own words testify to his merit for his recognition by us today:

* “The battle to feed all of humanity is over ... hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” (1968)
* “By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.” (1969)
* “By 1980 the United States would see its life expectancy drop to 42 because of pesticides, and by 1999 its population would drop to 22.6 million.” (1969)
* “Smog disasters” in 1973 might kill 200,000 people in New York and Los Angeles. (1969)
* “I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” (1969)
* “In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” (1970)
* “Actually, the problem in the world is that there is much too many rich people...” (1990)
* “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” (1992)

A founder of Zero Population Growth, Ehrlich the Environmentalist advocated “compulsory birth regulation (through) the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired family size.”