“Humanity is very busily sitting on a limb that we’re sawing off,” declared failed doomsday butterfly biologist Paul Ehrlich.Ehrlich’s prediction contributed to a chorus of scientists in a 60 minute interview declaring we are living in the Earth’s sixth mass extinction.The 90-year-old doomsday prophet famous for his 1968 book “The Population Bomb” resurfaced last week for a 60 minutes CBS interview preaching the tired old lies that have been repeatedly proven untrue for the last 50 years.His book, highly respected by the scientific community, initially written to influence the ‘68 election, predicted hundreds of millions of people would die within the decade from famine driven by overpopulation.In its heyday, “The Population Bomb” sparked widespread environmentally-focused panic among the masses and elites alike.Despite Ehrlich’s failed predictions and misleading data, this panic continues to infect new generations today.From Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez wailing that the “world will end in 12 years” if climate change is not addressed to the climate clock in the heart of Times Square ticking down the years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds to irreversible damage to the earth, we are a people fearful of apocalypse. SEE ALSO: Inside the great fear: climate activism and its hopelessness Ehrlich’s book begins with the same sense of defeatism and urgency, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” In a 1970 CBS interview he declared, “Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,” meaning the end of earth’s capacity to support humanity.Yet, this proved entirely false.The green revolution and the implementation of fertilizers for mass crop production worldwide actually contributed to an increase in global prosperity and population size, while simultaneously producing enough food to sustain it.When this book was published, there were merely 3.5 billion people on the planet.Today, there are over 8 billion.Eight billion people, wealthier and better fed than at any other point in recorded history.Yet, the same prophecies continue to be pronounced, and perhaps even more astonishingly, continue to be respected, even when it comes from the mouth of a wizened, defeated prophet.This ideology has serious moral and financial consequences.In the omnibus spending bill signed into law by President Biden before the end of the year, more than half a billion dollars were allocated for “family planning/reproductive health, including in areas where population growth threatens biodiversity or endangered species”.Why send money to Planned Parenthood, although they did that too, when you can write sterilization and abortion into the budget directly? SEE ALSO: DeSantis keeps proving the corporate media wrong When human existence itself becomes the problem, our solutions get ugly fast. In response to this book as well as at Ehrlich’s outright suggestion, China enforced the one-child policy resulting in coerced abortions across their country. India required sterilization for access to pay raises, water, electricity, and ration cards.The Philippines dropped birth control pills out of helicopters over remote villages. The West successfully slashed fertility in poor sectors of their countries through agencies like The International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Population Council, the World Band, and the United Nations Population Fund. In NYC, more African American babies were killed through abortion than born in 2016.This immoral anti-human ideology has no place in a sane society.In a 2018 interview to celebrate his book’s fiftieth anniversary, Ehrlich responded to the criticism that the book used insect models to predict human population consumption “the mathematics are the same, insects or people”.This is a direct divergence from the Judeo-Christian philosophy of the traditional West, that man is created in the image of God, with capacity for reason and the responsibility to steward.Here the mathematics fall behind.For if man can create, he can adapt and innovate, with fertilizers, drip systems, and crop rotation. He can provide food to a growing population and where sin has marred the land, restore it with grace.But if man is not wise enough to follow the first commandment of Scripture, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it,” he proves himself dumber than the beasts.Catie Robertson is an intern with the Convention of States Project, a project of Citizens for Self-Government.
