Correcting Our Work

MY NINTH GRADE SCIENCE TEACHER held up a small paperback book, and read from the back cover: "during the time it takes you to read these words, four people will die of hunger." Some smart ass kid in the back shouted out "then stop reading those words!" We laughed, but I knew the teacher wouldn't like it, and he didn't. The book was "The Population Bomb" by Paul Ehrlich, published in about 1968, a best seller. Ehrlich predicted that by the nineteen nineties there would be starvation all over the world, because the population was growing so fast, and the increase in food supplies would never be able to keep up. And it is a very persuasive book. Even today, when we know how wrong the book was, it is persuasive. You almost feel as if it still could happen, just not as soon as Ehrlich predicted. The population bomb is still ticking, unless I'm mistaken. Yeah, the birth rate is down, and all that, but...still, the world's population continues to go up, fast, and is closing on seven and a half billion now. Soon it will be eight billion. Then what? How far will it go? How far CAN it go? What Paul Ehrlich didn't take into account was the enormous increase in agricultural production during the past forty years, due mainly to science and technology. And we can continue to increase the food supply, to a point. In Ehrlich's time we didn't know about global warming, which is now, obviously, our biggest problem. So mass hunger might not be our downfall after all. Ehrlich is still a professor at Berkely, and well respected. It is no sin to be wrong in science; the only sin is in not admitting it, and correcting your work. Ehrlich has done this. Now we humans need to do it, collectively, and immediately.