Prof. Paul R. Ehrlich – Global Challenges: 50 years on

Biologist and ecologist, Prof. Paul R. Ehrlich joins me 50 years following the release of his book ‘The Population Bomb’ to discuss the current state of affairs. We discuss the impact of global agriculture on the population and the impact this has had on our health.

Selected Links from the Episode

Prof. Paul R Ehrlich books:

The Population Bomb
The Population Explosion
Jaws: The Story of a Hidden Epidemic

Jane Mayer's book - Dark Money
Unstress episode with Allan Savory on the fate of civilisations
Millennium Alliance for Humanity and Biosphere - MAHB website

Download the PDF transcription
Dr. Ron Ehrlich: Hello and welcome to “Unstress”. I'm Dr. Ron Ehrlich. Now some fifty years ago a book was published about the global challenges of overpopulation. At the time the world's population was 3.5 billion people, and the book was called “The Population Bomb”. It caused quite a stir. It was followed up in 1990 by another book by the same authors “The Population Explosion”. The authors of these books were Paul R. Ehrlich professor of population studies of the department of biology at Stanford University and he was also the president of Stanford Centre for conservation biology. The book was co-authored by his wife who is also an associate director of that same centre.

Now needless to say the surnames caught my attention. I mean I just love the ring of calling someone Professor Ehrlich, but I digress. The premise of the arguments was the world could not sustain a population explosion which was based on the levels of food consumption, not to mention other consumables that were going on in the Western world at the time and also based on the level of food production that was going on in the 1960s and 70s.

Then a major thing happened. It was called the “Green Revolution” when the productivity of global agriculture increased drastically as a result of new advances. And what were those new advances? Well, new chemical fertilisers and synthetic herbicides fungicides and pesticides were created, which of course resulted in higher productivity.

As well as that, modern new varieties of crops that were high yield were also developed and introduced. Crops like high-yield, semi-dwarf, high gluten wheat. We've talked about that in other episodes. Governments gave huge subsidies to grain growers and corn and wheat and soy particularly something and something called high fructose corn syrup was introduced into the food supply. Never before consumed by humans but it was a cheap way of sweetening foods and found its way into many processed foods and actually became an integral part of that revolution.

Multiple cropping was also introduced which is when a field is used to grow two or more crops throughout the year so that the field constantly has something growing on it and for that, it's highly dependent on chemicals.

Now it's interesting to juxtapose those advances that revolution with some interesting developments in health during that period which is still going on today. For example, in the mid-1970s autism affected one in 10,000. Today, in parts of America it is one in 50. Herbicides, pesticides, synthetic chemicals anyway. Also, cancer. Now even allowing for the increase in life expectancy which we all congratulate ourselves for cancer rate so allowing for that fact cancer rates have increased by 25 to 30 percent since 1975 and has significantly increased in children. Also, since the early 70s.

So, that was when the Green Revolution started and what about autoimmune conditions, diseases? The body actually attacking itself of which there are now over 80 diseases have gone through the roof. And then there's also of course diabetes and obesity which are at epidemic proportion.

So, while Paul Ehrlich predicted mass famines and disease at first glance it was easy to say he might have overstated the potential problems from overpopulation, look how well we've done we've now got seven and a half...