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« Back to How Should Humanity Prosper? main page    Transcript for: How Should Humanity Prosper?TTBW 1214 How Should Humanity Prosper?PBS feed date 5/13/2004 Funding for Think Tank is provided by: At Pfizer we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have twelve thousand scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer. Life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. (opening animation) WATTENBERG: Hello,I’m Ben Wattenberg. Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich has been at the pessimistic forefront of the modern ecological movement for nearly four decades. His book, The Population Bomb, published in 1968, was an intellectual spark that contributed to the popular view that mankind was running out of control. Many scientists have maintained that most of Ehrlich’s gloomy views were wrong. Needless to say, Ehrlich disagrees. Now he has a new book out co-authored with his wife Anne Ehrlich. It too takes a dark and alarmist view of the human condition. Our guest today, Paul Ehrlich, professor of biology at Stanford University, cofounder of the group Zero Population Growth, and the author or co-author of more than 40 books, most recently, 'One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption and the Human Future.' The topic before the House: How Should Humanity Prosper? This week on Think Tank. (musical break) WATTENBERG: Paul Ehrlich, welcome to Think Tank. I wondered if we could begin with you setting forth to us, fairly briefly, the theme of the book that you and your wife, Anne Ehrlich, have written entitled One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption and the Human Future. EHRLICH: Well, there are several themes. One of the main ones is that while we have now made a lot of progress on the population problem - it’s still with us but we’ve made a lot of progress - that we haven’t gone very far on the consumption problem. That the issue of what kind of impact we have on our life support systems is a function of how many people we have but also of what each person does. When you look at consumption there’s a very big difference ecologically between consuming by driving a Humvee and consuming by buying a Van Gogh. They’re both consumption but in terms of the impact on the environment they’re very, very different. So one of the themes is to try and bring consumption into the discussion because even the economists haven’t thought very much about it. We thought a lot about population. We know a lot about what to do about it; we know what the factors are. Don’t know that about consumption. WATTENBERG: I mean, you say in your book that we ought to - instead of consumption we ought to concentrate more on intellectual and spiritual matters, but the fact is that Americans and people around the world really like to drive their automobiles; they like to have two cars. If they have a child at home they like to have three cars. They like Humvees; they like SUVs. I mean that’s what people like to do. EHRLICH: Well the issue is A: why - well, two issues. Why do they like to do it? And are they going to be able to continue to do it? But I’m not - a typical question would be is it better to have a Humvee or a small sports car that burns relatively little gasoline when we’re over in Iraq right now trying to you know, hold on to our gasoline supplies basically? So it’s - we ought to think about what life is for. What do we really enjoy? We ought to think harder about consumption. But we don’t give answers here. We talk about a lot of the issues - how you decide what is good and bad in consumption. WATTENBERG: Let me, if I may, give you a short list. And I’m sure you’ve had this done to you before because people have criticized your predictions. EHRLICH: People have criticized me? WATTENBERG: Yes, sir. EHRLICH: It’s hard to believe. WATTENBERG: People have even criticized me. EHRLICH: Oh, you’re kidding! WATTENBERG: These are a few of the forecasts from The Population Bomb and some of your earlier works. You said that life expectancy in the United States would be dropping to 42 years by 1980 because of pesticide-induced cancers and it is not 42 years; it’s 78 years. That there would be 200,000 deaths from smog disasters in Los Angeles and New York. That U.S. population would drop to 22 million. It’s now 300 hundred million. That there would be food riots in America, causing the President to dissolve Congress. That there would be countries launching nuclear attacks on the United States because of our use of pesticides and that hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death. And I have others. You’ve got the idea. EHRLICH: I got the idea. Let me give a couple of answers. The first answer is let me tell you, if I thought today what I thought in 1968 I’d be a lousy scientist. Things move on. So I’m not going to tell you everything I said in The Population Bomb I’d support it today and it’s correct. But what you just had was a researcher who failed to read the introduction to that chapter, which says 'what follows are scenarios'; little stories that help you think about the future. I can’t guarantee every last one of them is from the scenarios because, for example, we did predict that a lot of people were going to die of starvation, and in fact a lot of people have but not as many as we expected. And the reason is that the agriculturalists I was talking to were overly pessimistic about how rapidly the green revolution would spread. WATTENBERG: The argument that’s made is that starvation in the world as we know it now has become a political weapon of tribes and countries fighting each other. Not a lack of food. EHRLICH: I think that’s correct, in fact. I mean I think... WATTENBERG: I mean the Food and Agricultural Organization shows that caloric intake per person has gone up I think about 30 percent in the last thirty years. EHRLICH: Between 600 and 800 million people still don’t get adequately fed, but they would be adequately fed if it wasn’t for wars, corruption and problems with the distribution system. Now there’s another underlying question where the answer is much less clear and that is whether the techniques we use to expand food production rapidly have gotten us into other cul-de-sacs, but that’s a long debate and nobody really knows the answer to it. WATTENBERG: Let me give you one other list and then I’ll try to stay off the list. EHRLICH: That’s okay. WATTENBERG: This is data from the Environmental Protection Agency on air pollution and they’ve been keeping records since 1976. Ambient air pollution for lead have dropped by 97 percent; carbon monoxide by 72 percent; sulfur dioxides by 67 percent and so on. You’re familiar with that data. And all this happened while automobile travel grew by 150 percent and the U.S. economy grew by 160 percent. And the same is true on different levels for water. I mean the same direction is true in water. EHRLICH: No, it’s not quite so true in water quality. There are other problems with water quality. But let me address that because I think it’s a really important point. One of the things we can be proud of as Americans is that we led the way - and in fact the Nixon administration was very big in it at the time - in passing some really landmark legislation on controlling air pollution, controlling water pollution and so on. We were the country that was really at the head of all of that and we should really be proud of it. We did a good job. If we hadn’t done that we’d be in worse shape today than we are today and I think that’s a wonderful thing. WATTENBERG: Many of your dire predictions are based on as your formula indicated before, on the growth of population which in fact The Population Bomb and your later book The Population Explosion spells it pretty clearly. But the new United Nations forecast, you know, for the first time in their history their middle-term forecasts are below the replacement level. It’s not 2.1; it’s 1.85 EHRLICH: Depends on for where, and when. WATTENBERG: Yes, but this is the global statistics. Population will be going down and I think rather sharply. And yet your new book is - maybe it’s a little mellower than some of the other books, but it’s still quite alarmist. And it’s all linked to too many people. EHRLICH: Well, population is a big factor. Now, first of all as you know, we’ve never predicted anything about - every prediction we’ve ever - everything we’ve ever cited in the way of predictions about population size have come from the UN, except often massaged by the Population Reference Bureau, which I think you’ll agree is a neutral ground. But sometimes, you know, UN has to take anybody’s numbers and if the country wants to lie about it then the PRB takes a look and does a sample survey or something. So, I think if you look carefully at them you’ll find that none of the projections have us stopping growth. The most optimistic is seven-and-a-half/eight billion people. We’re now at 6.3 WATTENBERG: And then declining. EHRLICH: And then eventually, hopefully - I mean let us hope, but let me finish. When I wrote The Population Bomb in 1968 we had three-and-a-half billion people and people said, 'Well, the population explosion that you predicted never occurred.' Well A: I didn’t predict it but B: we have added more people since then than were alive when you and I were born. That is you know, we were at 3.5; now we’re at 6.3. So that’s almost three billion more people and there were only two billion alive. And there seemed to be enough to me then by the way. WATTENBERG: Let me give you another one which is I guess the U.N. started taking and publishing those numbers in 1950. From 1950 to the year 2000, a fifty-year span, population almost tripled. And now they are predicting for the next 50 years it won’t triple but it will go up by about a third. EHRLICH: A third. WATTENBERG: So in other words you’re talking about a factor of one-ninth the amount of growth. And then coming down. EHRLICH: But that’s wonderful. You want to remember two things, though. One is that the planet does not care about percentage or proportional growth. It counts on how many actual people are being added and of course when you’re adding billions and billions and millions of more people, even though it’s a decline in the rate, you’re still putting a lot of pressure on the systems. A second thing is that what you don’t have in your litany are the things that I had in The Population Bomb about concerns about epidemic disease, basically a prediction that we’re going to have AIDS. If you’ll talk to the people at places like the CDC, my colleagues, all scared witless of the chances of a killer flu, think that only that AIDS is only the first of many new diseases. Where do they come from? They come from animal populations that our larger population is pressing closer and closer to and making bigger chances of transfer. WATTENBERG: That is part of the human condition. I mean going back to the Black Death and the influenza epidemic of the... EHRLICH: You think that’s a good idea? WATTENBERG: I don’t think it’s a good idea. It’s... EHRLICH: It’s tied to population. One of the main things that causes it is too many people. WATTENBERG: Well, it didn’t cause the Black Death. EHRLICH: Well the Black Death was a very different disease from the ones we’re ... WATTENBERG: And the flu epidemic ... EHRLICH: It caused measles and the Black Death in a very real sense and that is none of those things afflicted people when they were hunters and gatherers living in very small groups. You couldn’t have measles until you had at least fifty thousand to five hundred thousand people in a single city. And the same thing with the Black Death. So I mean, you can’t say that it’s disconnected from the demographics. WATTENBERG: No, that begs the question, and I don’t want to get mean-spirited, but that if you didn’t have any people then you wouldn’t have any people diseases. EHRLICH: No. That’s true but the other issue is... WATTENBERG: Part of life is having diseases. EHRLICH: I mean. for instance, let’s look at the issue for the United States. We now have 300 million people. Nobody has ever come up with a reason to have more than 140 million people alive at the same time in the United States. And the issue is if you like people and want to have the maximum number of people you can have, would it be a better idea to have say 140 million people and have the country last ten thousand years or see how many you can jam in in the next hundred years and have the country collapse? In other words it’s not a matter of differences. Honest people can differ in where they think the proper level is that will be sustainable. But I don’t think any of us want to see the population grow to the point where the nation collapses or the world collapses. WATTENBERG: What would make America collapse? You fly over - this is the old clichŽ - you fly over this country and with the exception of the one, two, three coasts you have this vast open country. You have towns that are with full infrastructure that are begging for businesses and people to come in. Why do you think America’s going to collapse? EHRLICH: Well, first of all the issue is the United States doesn’t come close to living on its own resources. One of the reasons we have an immigration problem is that huge numbers of people are following the flow of resources into the United States. If for example a lot of the people are right about the amount of oil that’s going to be pumpable at economic prices, the U.S., if it doesn’t get on fast to a transition to non-fossil fuel supplies is going to be in deep trouble. The other thing is I get - yeah, when you fly over the middle west it looks empty. What do you think all that green stuff is out there? In other words, one of the main sources of our economic stability is our wonderful agriculture. Our deep rich, you know, prairie soils. If there were cities over all that we wouldn’t have the agriculture. And the rest of it that’s empty, you know, say look at the relatively empty areas of Nevada and Utah and so on. Well, when you fly over the moon you don’t see anything either. In other words, it’s not really people versus space. It’s people versus the resources they need. WATTENBERG: Yes, except... EHRLICH: Australia’s a lot emptier than we are but they can’t deal with anything like our population. WATTENBERG: You’re from the west. Demographers now talk of leapfrog counties where instead of just suburban growth piling one on another you have whole new counties being set up fifty miles away and in today’s high-tech world with computers and cell phones and everything else, you can really set up a business anywhere. EHRLICH: That’s true. And it’s happening by the way. Where I work in the summers we have now huge battles between the cattlemen and the developers. WATTENBERG: Sounds like a western movie. EHRLICH: No, it used to be the cattlemen and the environmentalists. Now the cattlemen and the environmentalists are on the same side and the developers are on the other. But the - again, there’s limited numbers of area and for instance in Colorado where I spent my summers for the last forty years water is the thing you die over. I mean water law and water battles are just big time and that’s a big problem as you know in parts of the east, too. WATTENBERG: One of your books, I guess it was the original one, talked about triage, which was the idea that some countries simply couldn’t make it and we really ought to just give up on them. They’re all going to starve to death. One of these, as I recall it, was India. That was one of the three groups: you said some nations are going to make it, some are doubtful, and some are just ready for the trash heap. India is now growing at 8 percent a year, it’s a prosperous nation, it’s a scientifically advanced nation, it’s still got a lot of poverty. They’re exporting food. One reason is that in the early 1990s they did away with socialism and they went to a market economy. As you look back on that sort of a prediction do you say, 'Well gee, I was wrong about India'? EHRLICH: I would say it was a very bad kind of prediction. In other words that was based on a book by a couple of agricultural economists and I would not cite it that way now. The word is not yet in on India. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the end in India and so I think they made some wonderful progress although they’re exporting food while there still are a lot of hungry Indians. But I agree with you. I think that that was a bad - I would not... You know when people say 'what wouldn’t you do again?' I would not mention triage again; that was a mistake. I was a young man. WATTENBERG: What about there was this Club of Rome study? EHRLICH: Limits to growth. WATTENBERG: Limits to growth. What, the early ’70s, I guess? EHRLICH: Early ’70s. Yes. WATTENBERG: Early 70s. And they said we’re running out of resources. It was very Ehrlichian in its prognostication and then a few years later they said, 'Nah, we had it wrong.' Did they have it wrong, or did they have it right? EHRLICH: Well, actually they had it wrong in part because they didn’t listen to me. Because Dennis and Dana came to me and showed me some of their stuff and I said, 'It’s fine, but take the dates off the lines.' In other words, I’d already learned from the reaction of The Population Bomb, particularly from the reaction to the scenarios, which I had made very specific, having specifically said they were just scenarios. I said, 'Don’t put the dates in. They’re going to kill you. You can’t predict the future. You’ve got to show what the general trends look like from now and as you go along you’ll change the trends.' WATTENBERG: It seems to me having read not all of your work but a lot of your work... EHRLICH: You haven’t read all of my work? I haven’t either; don’t worry. Anne writes a lot of it. WATTENBERG: Right. The whole idea of substitutability - in other words people were saying we were running out of copper. Well, then we went to fiber optics. Now you got cell phones. That’s radio waves. That really doesn’t need any natural resources. Do you think that you tend to underplay the role of the human imagination in changing these things? If they’re not fixed then you just can’t draw a line that says... EHRLICH: Not at all. Actually I’m a great fan of technology. I think there are wonderful things we can do with technology. What I’m not a fan of is, you know, taking a straight line extrapolation on anything and assuming that that’s what’s going to be the future. You can say, 'If we do such and such and this continues then this will happen.' The three things that are most important that the biologists and ecologists keep pointing out for which no substitutes have sensibly been found are deep rich agricultural soils, fossil ground water and biodiversity. And we’ve looked very carefully at what the possibilities are of substitution and there certainly are some, but there are all kinds of problems with them. And I’ve also, by the way - I wouldn’t give anybody the impression that I’m a fan of socialist systems. Any ecologist can tell you that when they took down the iron curtain one of the things we learned was we couldn’t move our industries in there when we thought we could because they didn’t have clean enough water or housing that the technologists would accept and so on. So there’s no question that India and a lot of other places have benefited from adapting market systems. WATTENBERG: Did you support the Chinese 'one child only' law that said any Chinese couple can only have one child and did you in one of your books indicate that America also might have to go to population control where the government would tell people how many children they could have? EHRLICH: Well, what we always said, and I would still say it today and I think China’s almost an example of it is if you don’t deal with these problems while you got some room to play and do it by building consensus and do it by many of the ways we know to bring down birthrates that’s got nothing to do with the government dictating how many kids you have. That eventually you can have what happened in China. That is somebody wakes up and says, 'oh, my God'. You know, actually they did it because they had mistaken some of their census data and some of their production data and where they thought they were making per capita progress they weren’t and they panicked and did something that a lot of us considered to be better than nothing but far from ideal. They consider social responsibility a much bigger part of their lives in their cultural traditions than we do. We’re much more of the, you know, cowboy independent. What the individual wants is the key thing rather than what the society needs. So, I think it’s probably a mix. There certainly are large numbers of people who hate it. I mean as you know in the minority areas and so on there’s so much resistance to it that a minority particularly out in the countryside and so on, two or more children is accepted. And they’re really concerned with some of the consequences ’cause in a - in the orientation of their society daughters are virtually worthless and sons are really important, so they got a lot of sons growing up now who are going to have a very difficult time finding wives. WATTENBERG: And there’s a great deal of both infanticide and abortion. Gender selection of abortion. EHRLICH: That’s right. So it’s a long way from ideal, particularly from our cultural point of view and I guess the point of view that Anne and I would have is we never want to get anywhere near that in the United States where we’d be better off - where our birthrates after all are - where are the lowest birthrates in the world? They’re in Italy and Spain and France and Germany and they didn’t have any kind - they in fact had family - you know, most of them have family allowance programs. So it’s - one thing is crystal clear. In the west it is possible to have birthrates around where in my view they ought to be without any coercion at all. WATTENBERG: Well if you have birthrates of the sorts you have in Italy and Spain you would run out of people in a few hundred years. They are so far below what is required to... EHRLICH: That’s right. They’re below replacement but... WATTENBERG: Way below replacement. EHRLICH: Yes. Way below replacement but after all, the situation that built up in the world really hasn’t even been building rapidly for more than fifty or sixty years, and you don’t have to go there forever. I mean, you know, it’s an issue of - I mean from my point of view I would like to see the poor people of the world be able to consume more and one of the ways to do that is have the rich people who are the big consumers have their populations shrink for awhile. But again, one can differ on that and there - of course you get a big immigration problem with that because if you try and solve the problem - the age structure problem of people getting older by having immigrants you create other kinds of problems. We have a very complex society. WATTENBERG: Let me ask you as a final question, as sort of a wrap-up here. The environmental movement for so long, and it still is regarded as sort of a motherhood kind of a - every even conservative Republican is 'oh, I’m an environmentalist' and so on and so forth. But it’s always been sort of seen as a moderate and do-good movement. Now you have some groups, the Earth Liberation Front, the animal rights groups, the anti-logging groups that are not only actively destroying property but risking other people’s lives and being referred to in the papers as extremists and terrorists. Is this a valid criticism of what is happening in the environmental movement? EHRLICH: It’s a valid criticism of what’s happening in part of the environmental movement. I have seen animal rights groups do things that are totally insane. WATTENBERG: They throw blood on my mink coat. EHRLICH: Oh, no, worse than that. I mean for example in Africa, in Zimbabwe, there were herds of elephants not in parks and they were agricultural pests. You have people that make $600 bucks a year from market garden and a herd of elephant comes through and you’re out of income in five minutes and so the local people were killing the elephants. And the USAID put together a program in which they organized hunting of the elephants. So we get an Italian businessman, he pays $1,000 to off an elephant, they kept the herds for a maximum production of big tusks you know, for trophies. WATTENBERG: Aphrodisiacs when ground up. EHRLICH: Yes, right. Right. Exactly. They shot the ones who were closest to the villages to keep them out and they split the money up among the villagers so they had an extra $1,000 a year income. You know, win, win, win. The elephant herds get bigger, the villagers get richer, the Italian businessman that wants to kill an elephant gets to kill an elephant. The animal rights groups put so much pressure on Congress that the USAID program was killed. Now, to me, that’s just totally insane. Anyway, I don’t approve of anybody killing anybody else for their principals or harming them or destroying them. I mean, we - one of the things we need in this country is a lot more rational discussion between people who are willing to admit that they are different but they come to different conclusions. I’d like to go back to days when Jack Heinz and Tim Wirth - you know, a Republican and a Democrat - were working together on environmental issues and you know, doing economics and so on on both sides of the aisle. You look at Nunn-Lugar; there are lots of examples still but not enough of people who are willing to understand that people can differ but at least try and find out what their differences are and try and find ways of solving those differences. Particularly in our society. WATTENBERG: Well in that spirit of bipartisanship and discussion, let me thank you on behalf of Think Tank for joining us, Paul Ehrlich, author of the new book One with Nineveh. And thank you. Please remember to send us your comments via email. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. (credits) We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 1219 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20036. Or e-mail us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tank, visit PBS on line at www.pbs.org, and, please, let us know where you watch Think Tank. Funding for this program is provided by: At Pfizer we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have twelve thousand scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer. Life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. We are PBS. 1 Back to top  Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved. 
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