Paul Ehrlich died two weeks ago. I read The Population Bomb a while ago and heard him speak in many interviews. I recently listened again to a few recordings of his and read a few articles of him. In each he was speaking to people who liked him and agreed with him so he spoke freely. In each he called people who disagreed with him “idiots” or something like “people who can’t count to twenty without taking their shoes off.”

He wasn’t perfect. Nobody is, but though he acknowledged he was wrong on some points, he didn’t take responsibility for mistakes. He just said that he would be right in the long run. He didn’t acknowledge that he didn’t take huge factors that would affect his predictions into account. It sounded like always people who disagreed with him were wrong, rarely himself.

I do not agree with people who say things like that since the Green Revolution enabled global population to grow beyond his predictions that we haven’t overshot the planet’s carrying capacity, which means that if we keep exceeding it, natural causes will cause our population to drop below the carrying capacity, which will have decreased, owing to the pollution and depletion we caused by that overshoot.

Even if I agree with his view, his way of communicating undermined his message. When his predictions were off, he showed no humility. I didn’t see him change his message. He fueled his opposition by acting self-righteous even when he appeared wrong—actually, especially when he appeared wrong.

Many of his suggestions of handling the problem of overpopulation sounded inhuman and monstrous, like letting people starve. Even to the extent they would have been overall helpful if implemented or the best of all possible solutions, which I don’t believe, he sounded a lot like eugenicists. Eugenicists started off with reasonable understanding of science and intent to help people, but didn’t adjust their views when evidence showed their understandings unfounded and when their methods required coercion and violated consent.

I’m not saying Ehrlich was a eugenicist, only that he shared some of their inflexibility and disregard for the consent of people affected. Like them, he also favored giant, national, even global initiatives that are hard to stop once started, even when shown ineffective, counterproductive, or even complete.

Maybe there’s no way he could have known what approaches would work and which would fuel his opposition, so he can’t be blamed for trying what felt best, but did he make any difference? Is it possible his work net harmed his goals?

His Potential

His book The Population Bomb sold millions. He appeared on the Tonight Show 22 times, more than nearly anyone, including conversations lasting over an hour. He made probably tens of millions of people aware of the problems of overpopulation who wouldn’t otherwise have been. Many organizations formed to decrease population, but is there any sign that population growth slowed?

He proposed solutions that were top-down to the point of being coercive or, if not coercive, based on convincing people it was for their own good. That is, his approach was all management, little to no leadership; all extrinsic motivation, little to no intrinsic. Yet if his proposals were for people’s own good, shouldn’t he have been able to influence people without hitting them over the head with information and insulting people who disagreed with him, even when he appeared wrong and they appeared right?

He presented himself as a scientist. Even if he acknowledged his human population work wasn’t pure science and outside his academic training, and not something we can run experiments on—that we have just one planet and one shot if we overshoot to where collapse is inevitable and catastrophic even existential—he still missed a giant signal from nature: his techniques weren’t having the effect he predicted.

Can anyone show that his work affected human population levels in any way? It looks like what community he built was temporary while his fueling of those who opposed him enduring. Again, I’m not attacking his understanding of population or his long-term goals. I welcome being shown I missed something, but I think his communication methods undermined his goals and made him the enemy of many whom he was trying to help.

Trained as a physicist, I know that leadership is not as amenable to scientific research as hard sciences, but we can see repeatable patterns in it, which means there’s some science to it. Why didn’t he apply a scientific approach to his approach?

Ehrlich, as best I can tell, missed any scientific approach to his methods of influence. He stuck to his original methods, as far as I can tell, in the face of overwhelming evidence that his methods were failing. Then he just pushed harder, which I think undermined his methods more.

It seems more than possible that his net effect was negative, not that we can experiment to measure what could have happened otherwise. He had a voice and potential influence beyond nearly any scientist. As best I can tell, he squandered it, self-righteously insulting people whom the public saw as more right than him.

What We Can Learn From Him

We can learn from him and his experience. From the ways he succeeded, we can learn to learn the science as he did. We can learn to present findings in ways that appeal to people, as he did, and to befriend people with influence, as he did.

My greatest lesson from the ways I believe he failed is to learn the social and emotional skills of leadership, especially to listen, develop self-awareness, empathize, be humble, be compassionate, speak to be understood, take responsibility especially for one’s mistakes, acknowledge our flaws and blind spots since we all have them, and so on.

Most of all, we can learn to evaluate our results and change our techniques and approaches if they are not getting the results we want. We can seek others to help find our blind spots, since we all have them. We can try to grow outside where we think the answers are if we don’t find them.

For those who like him and want to make his intended results of a non-coerced reduction of human impact on the biosphere to sustainable levels is to learn to lead effectively to enable that result that he didn’t. I think it may be the best way to honor him and make his legacy one that future generations will consider positive.

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