A Darker Shade of Green: Apocalypse . . . Now?

A Darker Shade of Green (full series)
Environmentalism’s Origins in Eugenics | The Great Apple Scare of 1989 | Apocalypse . . . Now?

This is the third article in a series about the intellectual history of the modern environmental movement.  

Following its success in the war on DDT, many on the environmental Left went on to champion overt population control. At its core was the lust for power: Too many humans were too quickly consuming the Earth’s resources, leaving destruction in their wake—so their numbers needed to be curbed.

The campaign largely began when biologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich published The Population Bomb in 1968. The book was a terrifying glimpse into the dystopic future when “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death”—in the 1980s.

“POPULATION CONTROL—or RACE TO OBLIVION?” the book challenged readers, before launching into its mantra of “Too Many People,” “Too Little Food,” and “A Dying Planet.” The Population Bomb teems with themes of misanthropy: “The story is depressingly the same,” write the Ehrlichs. “People want large families. They want families of a size that will keep the population growing.” The couple even defended eugenics as part of their population control program:

If. . . those at the lower end of the genetic intelligence scale far outbred those at the upper end, the average I.Q. in the population could be expected to be reduced by a few points. If such a change were detected, average I.Q. could be returned to its previous level by the proper breeding program.

Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s efforts were joined by John Holdren, a physicist who co-authored a 1977 textbook with the couple entitled Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment. In the book, the three advocated for compulsory sterilization by “[a]dding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods.” They even suggested instituting a Karl Marx-style “Planetary Regime” to “control the development, administration, conservation and distribution of all natural resources.”

Population controllers have always had a strong sense of urgency. As Paul Ehrlich told CBS during an interview in 1970, “most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born. Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come.”

The Left listened closely to Ehrlich. Communist China’s one-child policy, created in 1979, was just one result of this global campaign. The International Planned Parenthood Federation joined with other groups like the Population Council and the United Nations Population Fund to pressure women in Middle Eastern, Asian, and Latin American countries to use IUDs; to forcibly sterilize millions of people; and even to shower remote villages with birth control pills in the hopes the Third World would stop reproducing so quickly.

But surely that was then, and this is now, right?

In 2009, the Obama administration appointed John Holdren to serve in three impressive-sounding positions: Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology, and co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. When Holdren vacated the position in January 2017, he touted his role in taking “unprecedented action to address climate change through the successful December 2015 Paris [Climate Accord].” “Global climate change is real,” Holdren wrote in 2013, “and it is serious.”

Holdren isn’t the only aged leftist to pivot to global warming as the next chic crisis. In May 2013, the 81-year-old Paul Ehrlich told the next generation at the University of Vermont that the only way to stave off the imminent collapse of civilization is to dramatically reduce “fossil fuel” consumption. Then, of course, we need to promote birth control, give complete control of resource allocation to the government, and “rework the entire agricultural system” to control food consumption.

Sound familiar?

Disturbingly, population control lives on today as an accepted part of the Left, albeit as a subsection of “climate change.” When the Earth reached the 7 billion-person mark in 2011, New York Times columnist and self-described progressive Nicholas Kristof proposed this solution to “overpopulation”:

What’s the impact of overpopulation? One is that youth bulges in rapidly growing countries like Afghanistan and Yemen makes them more prone to conflict and terrorism. Booming populations also contribute to global poverty and make it impossible to protect virgin forests or fend off climate change. Some studies have suggested that a simple way to reduce carbon emissions in the year 2100 is to curb population growth today.

Yes, that’s right—high birthrates create Islamic terrorists in the Middle East, impoverish the Third World, and will soon be the death of us all. But “we’ve seen that family planning works,” Kristof added. “Women in India average 2.6 children, down from 6 in 1950.”

While Kristof later claims that “what’s needed isn’t just birth control pills or IUDs,” but “women’s rights,” he neglects to explore why India’s birth rate dropped so rapidly after 1950.

“In the 1970s and ’80s,” wrote science journalist Charles C. Mann in January’s edition of Smithsonian, the India government “embraced policies that in many states required sterilization for men and women to obtain water, electricity, ration cards, medical care and pay raises. Teachers could expel students from school if their parents weren’t sterilized.”

Mann was blunt: “More than eight million men and women were sterilized in 1975 alone.”

Those frightening statistics echo an anecdote related by Paul Ehrlich, who recalled his close encounter with the supposed horrors of the Third World during a 1966 trip to Delhi, India:

The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. As we moved slowly through the mob, hand horn squawking, the dust, noise, heat, and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect. Would we ever get to our hotel? All three of us were, frankly, frightened.

The Ehrlichs later praised India as “a country whose government has been more than a decade ahead of ours in recognizing that population size is a matter for governmental concern and action” (emphasis in the original). It’s worth noting that a little over 2.8 million people lived in Delhi in 1966. Paris that year teemed with 8 million people. Yet “no matter how carefully one searches through archives,” according to Mann, “it is not easy to find expressions of alarm about how the Champs-Élysées was ‘alive with people.’ Instead, Paris in 1966 was an emblem of elegance and sophistication.”

But how popular is population control among left-leaning scientists? In June, Mann—who is not a conservative—was interviewed by Britain’s left-leaning newspaper the Guardian, where he was asked if he thinks “there is a deep-lying seam of misanthropy among ecologists.” Mann replied:

The environmental movement originally came from the upper-crust types who were the same people involved in eugenics [emphasis added]. They saw it as a cleaning up and purifying of nature, and that unless human reproduction was governed by wise people, very bad things would result.

You do still find that attitude. When I give talks, there’s almost always a guy in the audience, usually a silver-haired, distinguished-looking gent, who says: “The real problem is population and we’ve got to control it.” Then they say we have to reduce the population of the Earth by 50% or something.

The Population Bomb was (thankfully) wrong about the overpopulation apocalypse, and world population has risen from 3.7 billion when the Ehrlichs made their case, to 7.4 billion today (more on that here). But the book also galvanized the creation in 1968 of Zero Population Growth (ZPG), a group “dedicated to bringing population size under control,” and the book urged readers to “join ZPG.” Zero Population Growth is still around today; in 2002, it changed its name to Population Connection and has a 501(c)(4) lobbying affiliate which calls for supporters to “resist Donald Trump’s deadly political agenda”—an irony, given its own agenda involves “end[ing] the prohibition on USAID-funded abortion services overseas” (the Helms Amendment).

Today, population control is euphemistically termed “population stabilization,” and Population Connection markets itself as a health and human rights organization as well as an environmentalist one. It’s funded by grants from major left-wing grantmakers, too, including the Packard, Hewlett, and Arkay Foundations. Like The Population Bomb, Population Connection follows a similar neo-colonial solution to overcrowding in the developing world, charging the U.S. and Europe with limiting the reproduction and resource consumption of hungry Africans and Asians.

Paul Ehrlich, the original population controller, is still trying to convince the world that his promised apocalypse is just around the corner. In 2012, he told an interviewer with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that the countries of the world—beginning with the United States—should embark on a massive program to discourage parents from having more than two children and preventing the poor in developing countries from reaching the standard of living held in Israel. Ehrlich, who is Jewish, said: “The thought of 20 million Israelis is quite frightening when one drives the roads here. Israel could be the first developed country to adopt a demographic policy. It has to declare that true Zionists have small families.”

The importance of the foundation laid by The Population Bomb for future global population control policies cannot be underestimated. The book has served as a blueprint for the environmental Left’s vision of a totalitarian nightmare. In the forward to The Population Bomb, environmentalist David Brower—founder of the League of Conservation Voters, Earth Island Institute, John Muir Institute for Environmental Studies, and other prominent eco-activist groups—made a fascinating prediction:

We would like to predict that organizations which, like the Sierra Club, have been much too calm about the ultimate threat to mankind, will awaken themselves and others, and awaken them with an urgency that will be necessary to [the] fulfillment of the predicament that mankind will survive [in the future].

What in the late [1950s] had seemed heretical soon was not so . . . . In just two or three years it became possible to question growth, to suggest that DNA was greater than GNP [gross national product], to predict that man had enough genius to require that science and technology could be put to good purpose. He could limit his numbers.

Brower may yet be proven correct. In 2016, China revised its horrific policy amidst a demographic disaster (the Communist Party now allows two children, a cap that may be lifted in the future) resulting from female infanticide and a dearth of childbearing women, both consequences of the 1979 policy. In a grimly funny twist, Chinese couples now face intense pressure from the government to have more children in order to fix the mess—a new kind of control scheme for the 21st century.

In November, multi-billionaire Bill Gates announced he would spend $18 million on “family planning programs” to push population control on African women via the United Nations Population Fund. It’s something he’d been doing for a long time.

According to data from the website Foundation Search, since 2000 the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated a staggering $403 million in 224 grants to groups like the Population Council, Population Services International, Environment and Population Research Center in Bangladesh, the Population Resource Center, Population Concern in the U.K., and the Center for Development and Population Activities (scroll down for the data table ).

It’s a twisted take on charity: using tax-exempt private foundations to encourage poor Africans, Asians, Latin Americans, and Middle Easterners to forgo parenthood in service to a radical ideology.

Unfortunately, until the Left learns to grapple with its mixed history on the subject, it will continue to sacrifice the dignity of humankind in order to idolize its other political agendas.