Some of his major ideas are: in place of shortages of supply in the developing world, attention should be shifted to long age of population; if the world is to be treated like a spaceship then it has to have a powerful captain and in the absence of this, the different countries should be seen as life boats, some of which are overcrowded; commons cannot be managed because it is in the individual interest of all that they are exploited to the detriment of collective welfare; developed countries should not supply food to less developed countries facing starvation unless they decide to reduce their population size. To him the combination of welfare and freedom is the root cause of what he calls the run away growth. To prevent this either social welfare considerations have to go or laissez-faire birth control (freedom to breed) will have to be restrained. It is not possible to maximize two things simultaneously: population size and welfare. There is a need for mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of people affected.
Paul R. Ehrlich declared that the battle to feed humanity is over and in the coming years the world will face scarcities, famines, drop in life expectancy, extinction of life in several regions, and smog disasters. He drew the attention of people to connection between hunger, deforestation, droughts, traffic congestion, drug abuse, global warming, widening hole in ozone layer, acid rains, increasing use of pesticide, inadequate sewage treatment plant, and aid and population growth. The Population Bomb, published in 1968, summarises his major ideas. The argument was further carried out in The Population Explosion written by Paul R. Ehrlich jointly with Anne E. Ehrlich. Ehrlich looked at the future state of mankind as an alarmist and attributed the emerging crisis not only to the population growth (P) but also to the rising affluence (I) and technology (T). Affluence is defined as per capita level of resource consumption, and T as the environmental impact per unit of consumption. |
