Paul R. Ehrlich: We're never all going to agree with each other. We ha...

By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth's population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.

Paul R. Ehrlich

population levels people

Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticides, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide - all can be traced easily to too many people.

Paul R. Ehrlich

car water people

Solving the population problem is not going to solve the problems of racism, of sexism, of religious intolerance, of war, of gross economic inequality. But if you don't solve the population problem, you're not going to solve any of those problems. Whatever problem you're interested in, you're not going to solve it unless you also solve the population problem. Whatever your cause, it's a lost cause without population control.

Paul R. Ehrlich

population-problem religious war

To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer.

Paul R. Ehrlich

witty inspirational funny

In ten years [i.e., 1980] all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.

Paul R. Ehrlich

sea animal years

In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches.

Paul R. Ehrlich

extinction pushing humanity

I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.

Paul R. Ehrlich

alarmists england years

The mother of the year should be a sterilized woman with two adopted children

Paul R. Ehrlich

mother children years

Overall, The Population Bomb was probably too optimistic. I was writing about climate change - Anne and I actually wrote the book. We discussed whether or not you'd have to take a gondola to the Empire State Building, and that sort of thing, but we didn't know at the time whether the climate change would be in the direction of heating or cooling. We just didn't know enough about it.

Paul R. Ehrlich

optimistic writing book

We ought to take good care of everybody we have on the planet, but we ought to regulate the rate at which people join us. The old saying is, "It's the top of the ninth inning, and humanity has been hitting nature hard, but you've always got to remember that nature bats last."

Paul R. Ehrlich

bats humanity people

There are substitutes for oil; there is no substitute for fresh water.

Paul R. Ehrlich

substitutes oil water

There's no question at all that the population explosion will come to an end. The two basic choices are it'll come to an end because we control our reproduction, and in many areas we have started to do so, or we'll end up with a high death rate. You have to take a personal moral stand on this.

Paul R. Ehrlich

population choices two

Anyone who opposes methods to control the birth rate, is automatically voting in favour having the death rate go up.

Paul R. Ehrlich

birth-rate favour voting

Actually, the problem in the world is that there are too many rich people.

Paul R. Ehrlich

problem people world

With taxes, if they aren't working right, we can change them with a stroke of the pen. It's basically a market-type mechanism. People make their own choices. You run the taxes, and you get the results.

Paul R. Ehrlich

choices running people

My first policy move would be to try to get a conversation going in the US about what people stand for and what we really want. Do we want to keep adding people to the world and to our country until we move to a battery-chicken kind of existence and then collapse? Or do we want to think hard about what really is valuable to us, and figure out how many people we can supply that to sustainably?

Paul R. Ehrlich

country moving thinking

I kind of like carbon taxes because we already know how to apply them. We already have apparatus in place. When we talk about these other solutions - like a billion tons of iron filings in the ocean or putting sunshades between us and the sun - they're huge. We have no idea if they will work. We have no idea what their nasty consequences might be. And it's unlikely we can do them anyway.

Paul R. Ehrlich

iron ocean ideas

Organisms are starting to move in response to climate change all over the place. Bees are disappearing and we don't have many of the native pollinators left to replace them. We're in deep trouble; there's no question about it. But ecologists tend to think of something that's going to be bad in ten years as very fast, and of course, politicians only think of things in a two-, four-, six-year cycle.

Paul R. Ehrlich

years moving thinking

Stanford may be the best university in the world, but you can get all the way through here without knowing where your food came from, without being able to say where we came from, without being able to give a coherent description of why the climate is changing and why we should be concerned about it. So I started teaching a course in human evolution and the environment that's open to all Stanford students, no prerequisites.

Paul R. Ehrlich

knowing teaching giving

So, regarding the time frame, I'm only too willing to admit that my crystal ball, like everybody else's, is cracked. If I could predict precisely, I would have started predicting the stock market and would now be living with a bunch of young women on Bora Bora, having bought it.

Paul R. Ehrlich

bora-bora crystals balls

We're never all going to agree with each other. We have to learn to value the diversity. It's one of the presumable principles of our government that isn't followed nearly enough - one of the jobs of the majority is to try and make the minority feel comfortable.