-Overpopulation,
so long predicted,
has stolen upon us.
It's getting worse week by week.
-In the 1960s,
a new kind of fear began to spread across America.
-The U.S. could be busting out at the seams
by the end of the century.
-If we do not, by humane means, limit our numbers,
then numbers are going to be limited by more famines
and shortages and consequent social conflicts.
-The idea that human population
was outstripping the Earth's ability to support mankind
was a powerful one, and it was one man,
Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich...
-Population growth will kill you stone-cold dead.
-...who pushed the dramatic message home.
-If we continue to let population grow
and if we continue to exploit the underdeveloped countries,
if we continue to pollute the seas
with a wide variety of compounds and so on,
it's very difficult for me to picture things
holding together for more than another decade or so.
The basic point is so simple.
We have a finite planet with finite resources
and, in such a system, you can't have infinite population growth.
-Ehrlich, who had previously focused
his scientific research on butterflies,
laid out his hypothesis in a slim volume called
"The Population Bomb."
It was a call to action for many,
including a student Ehrlich advised:
Stewart Brand.
-There's too many people and we'd like to see people
have fewer children, and better ones.
-The whole idea that people make more people
who make more people, until there's too many people
and, by then, it's too late,
that's a very persuasive argument.
-Adrienne Germain, a women's health advocate,
found herself drawn to Ehrlich as well,
due to his support of birth control.
-The message was that we were already in a crisis
and, if we didn't have urgent and immediate action,
the world would simply destroy itself.
-Look at what the year 2000 will be.
Our cities are gonna be choked with people.
They're going to be choked with traffic.
They're gonna be choked with crime.
They're going to be choked with pollution
and they will be impossible places in which to live.
♪♪
-Paul's picture of doom and gloom looked real.
-Net world population
is increasing by 23 people every 10 seconds.
It's clear that world population growth
remains completely out of control.
-I bought it totally.
Many of my friends bought it totally.
I organized an event
for 60 people to starve in public.
-Maybe anybody who's thinkin' of having a third child
oughta go hungry a week.
-The mood became, "Don't have kids.
There's enough of them in the world
and, if your friends have kids,
it's fine if they feel uncomfortable about that."
-We had formed an organization called Zero Population Growth
and then Johnny took me on "The Tonight Show."
-Would you welcome Dr. Paul Ehrlich.
[ Whistling and applause ] [ Piano plays tranquil tune ]
-You have to get the death rate and birthrate in balance
and there's only two ways to do it.
One is to bring the birthrate down.
The other is to push the death rate up.
-I did the show maybe 20 times and we went from six chapters
and 600 members to 600 chapters and 60,000 members.
-We're starting in now.
This is the first step.
-The Bagleys belong to a growing number
of young marrieds who favor ZPG, Zero Population Growth.
-How many children do you have?
-Two. I have two children.
-Ehrlich's views on how to bring that birthrate down
were concrete:
"compulsion if voluntary methods fail,"
creating a "blacklist of people, companies, and organizations
impeding population control" in the United States,
"Responsibility prizes" for childless marriages,
a tax on children,
and a luxury tax on diapers and cribs.
-Our concerns about population became misanthropic
and it was taken with so much seriousness
that Paul Ehrlich would recommend things like
putting stuff in public water
that would make people not as fertile.
-Panic is not too strong a word to use
for some of the advocates that I referred to as true believers.
-It appears that large families are on the way out
and ZPG may be possible.
-The idea also took hold in the developing world,
where governments like India's
had already begun to embrace population control.
-The core message of the work,
population growth outstripping food supply,
resonated quite a bit
with India's elites, with the middle classes.
They much preferred to believe that the poor were poor
because of too many children, rather than being poor
because of an unfair and unequal economic system.
♪♪
-If you start with that problem definition,
then, it's almost inevitable
that there will be circumstances
where governments and other actors
will act in a way
that is coercive.
-In the mid-1970s,
the Indian government began a controversial program
to encourage mass sterilization.
-We do want to create an atmosphere
in which people realize the importance of this program.
-It led to abuses.
Access to food aid and housing were sometimes used as coercion.
Others weren't even given a choice.
-More than eight million sterilizations were performed,
many forcibly.
The people, in the words of one family planning expert,
were treated like cattle.
-Zero Population Growth is a tragic frame,
in the sense that it was assumed that there was no way out,
that people would just go on reproducing
until there really was
a desperate circumstance in the world.
-Ehrlich's message could be summed up
in a dramatic prediction.
-Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,
and by the end, I mean an utter breakdown
of the capacity of the planet
to support humanity.
Predictions do not necessarily come true.
The critics go in and look at these little stories
that won't come true
and, when they didn't come true, say, "Ehrlich was wrong."
-But Ehrlich says it could still be just a matter of time.
-One of the things that people don't understand
is that timing, to an ecologist,
is very, very different
from timing to an average person.
-How many years do you have to not have the world end
to decide whatever reason you thought the world was gonna end,
it actually maybe didn't end because that reason was wrong?
-Ehrlich predicted that, by the 1970s,
India would be starving.
Quite to the contrary.
The green revolution came to India
with a big bang and a boom, in such a rapid way
that India has never looked back.
-Although an estimated
three million children around the world
still die of malnutrition every year,
the green revolution's farming technology
helped lessen rates of hunger in the developing world
over the decades,
even as the world's population skyrocketed.
-There's a tendency to apply to human beings
the same sort of models
that may apply for the insect world.
The difference, of course,
is that human beings are conscious beings
and we do all kinds of things to change our destiny.
-That story is playing out today in parts of India.
In growing cities, like Chennai, in the south,
large families, once needed for farming
are no longer always seen as the key to success.
-Previously, my father used to have four children
and my grandfather used to have seven children,
but things have changed.
Even myself, I have only two children.
Even my sister is having only one kid
because, now, education become the first priority here.
-The population bomb was defused by urbanization;
by people getting out of poverty all over the world;
by having enough to eat, so you didn't have multiple children,
in the hopes that some of them would survive.
[ Horns blaring ]
It's somewhat ironic that what Paul Ehrlich saw
as a horrible, hellish vision of the future
is what turned the population bomb upside-down.
-Brand says that Ehrlich did succeed
in raising awareness about important issues,
such as the destructive effect
population growth can have on the environment,
even if some of his predictions didn't come to pass.
-If you ask me the question,
"Are there things that I have written in the past
that I wouldn't write today?"
The answer is certainly yes.
I expressed more certainty because I was trying
to bring people to get something done.
-But his core message remains the same today.
There are nearly four billion more people in the world
and they are consuming more resources than ever before.
-I do not think my language
was too apocalyptic in "The Population Bomb."
My language would be even more apocalyptic today.
The idea that every woman should have as many babies as she wants
is, to me, exactly the same kind of idea
as everybody oughta be permitted
to throw as much of their garbage
into their neighbor's backyard as they want.
-But, if the world were to succeed
in its decades-old task to curb population growth, what then?
-What if large population is not bad, but is good?
-What many more countries are already trying
to come to terms with is aging of the population.
-Japan needs more women to have children.
-America's in the midst of a baby bust.
-China is hoping for a new baby boom.
-The point at which population peaks,
around nine billion in the 2040s or '50s,
the story will not be, "Oh, my god.
We got nine billion people. How horrible."
It'll be, "Oh, my god. We're running out of people."
♪♪