Paul Ehrlich opened his 1968 book “The Population Bomb” with a scene recounting returning to his hotel through a crowded Delhi neighborhood on a stifling night in the mid-1960s. He described the physical sensation of overpopulation: people eating, washing, arguing, begging – “people, people, people, people.”
From that visceral opening, he declared that famine, conflict and nuclear war would sweep the globe in the 1970s because of overpopulation. Hundreds of millions of people would starve to death regardless of any crash programs launched to prevent it. Ehrlich argued for population control, chillingly describing population growth as a “cancer” that needed to be cut out.
