Paul Ehrlich and his wife, biologist Anne Ehrlich, arrive in New Zealand for a series of talks on population on Aug. 22, 1971. George Lipman/Fairfax Media via Getty Images.
Paul Ehrlich — often called alarmist for dire warnings about human harms to the Earth — believed scientists had a responsibility to speak out.
By Bill Kovarik
The Conversation
March 16, 2026
Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, who died March 13, 2026, in Palo Alto, California, was a scientific crusader whose dire predictions about population growth, world hunger and environmental collapse made headlines and sparked controversy for decades.
Sometimes called a “prophet of doom” by his detractors, Ehrlich was among the most public figures of the environmental movement. He was admired and often honored for his prophetic warnings. But he was also excoriated when his worst predictions failed to come true.
Ehrlich founded Stanford’s Center for Nature and Society in 1984 and wrote more than 40 books and over 1,100 scientific articles on ecology, the environment and population dynamics. He is best known outside of academia for writing “The Population Bomb” in 1968, along with his wife, conservation biologist Anne H. Erhlich, who survives him.
The book became a bestseller that was reprinted more than 20 times and translated into multiple languages. It starkly predicted that population growth would exhaust Earth’s resources, leading to wars and social collapse.
Ultimately, the book both popularized and polarized the U.S. environmental movement.
As a scholar of communications and environmental history, I see Ehrlich’s difficult fight for the environment as emblematic of the vast chasm between science on one side and political culture influenced by the mass media on the other side.
And I see Ehrlich’s passing – along with others of his generation, such as Carl Sagan, E.O. Wilson and Jane Goodall – as a loss for a world that needs visionaries and public scientists now more than ever. Public understanding of science and technology is critical for political discussion, for environmental preservation and, in the words of British physical chemist C.P. Snow, for the sake of “the poor who needn’t be poor if there is intelligence in the world.”
The battle over the book
“The Population Bomb” opened with a verbal blast: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” And because the “stork had passed the plow,” the Ehrlichs wrote, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Overpopulated India was doomed, they contended, and England “will not exist in the year 2000,” following a massive social and environmental breakdown.
Bill Moyers (June 5, 1934 – June 26, 2025), one of the world’s leading journalists, died in New York recently.
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