"There's no vicious debate in the scientific community about whether the global climate is going to change—and whether that will be disastrous for humanity,” says Paul Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford. “It’s just a question of how large the damage is going to be.”
He and Anne Ehrlich, his wife, a senior researcher in biological sciences, are sitting in his rather cluttered office in the Herrin Building. Photos and posters plaster the room. The place looks settled.
It should. The Ehrlichs have been on the Stanford faculty since 1959. But their partnership goes back earlier: they’ve been married for half a century. The couple has written eight books together on environmental issues, and their latest, One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future (Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2004), is a kind of anniversary commemoration.
In it, they argue that humankind faces the fate of Nineveh, the ancient Assyrian capital that crumpled under the effects of deforestation and unsustainable irrigation. But this time, they warn, the devastation will be global. In short, we are accelerating toward ecological suicide.
The encyclopedic work reads like a status report for the environmental movement, and an indictment. Timothy Wirth, PhD ’73, president of the United Nations Foundation and a former Colorado senator, deems the book “a brilliant account of the issues that should be at the top of the nation’s agenda but have been all but ignored.”
At the heart of the matter: politics. Paul was boosted to fame in 1968 with his landmark The Population Bomb. It was one of the books that alerted the world to the dangers of unchecked population growth and helped create a social movement. Beginning with the Nixon administration, he says, the nation embarked on effective, incremental change. “We put in some of the best environmental legislation in the world. It was not enough, but it was good.”
But that momentum faded, the Ehrlichs write in Nineveh. “President Bill Clinton’s administration did surprisingly little to address [environmental and humanitarian] issues, and the George W. Bush administration has been determinedly moving in the opposite direction.”
Paul blames Bush—and Reagan before him— for measures “destroying 30 years of progress. This country can ill afford another four years like the last four years,” he says.
Moreover, the Ehrlichs say, legislators usually identify red-hot, urgent priorities—and push to the back burner medium- to long-range problems they believe can be solved easily when the time comes.
“When something like global warming is discussed, it is always as one more political issue rather than something well established by abundant scientific evidence and potentially much more threatening to civilization than Saddam Hussein could ever have been,” the authors write. As evidence of that threat, they cite the 15,000 French who died in the 2003 heat wave, which also sparked forest fires in France, Spain and Portugal.
The authors criticize both sides of the political divide. Conservatives are “blithely confident that decay of the human environment, even if serious, will not be a grave problem for those with the financial means to keep their personal surroundings safe and pleasant,” they write. “Those on the right believe that their end of the lifeboat is unsinkable.” Liberals wish to distribute resources more democratically, but don’t understand that we are staring at the bottom of the box. “Those on the left think that if the lifeboat’s load were appropriately redistributed and properly balanced, its capacity would be essentially infinite,” the Ehrlichs write.
Besides global warming, overpopulation remains a big item on the authors’ agenda, despite critics’ jabs that their direst predictions haven’t come true. Since the Ehrlichs were born, in the early 1930s, the world population has exploded from 2 billion to 6.3 billion—and it’s still booming, despite falling birth rates in many developed nations. The impact, they say, threatens the world’s resources within decades.
“I have severe doubts that we can support even 2 billion if they all live like citizens of the U.S.,” Paul told the New York Times recently. “The world can support a lot more vegetarian saints than Hummer-driving idiots.”
Even a relatively modest 2 billion increase in the next century would be a “gigantic addition,” says Paul. “Let’s put it this way, if you’re driving a car into a wall at 50 mph, and slow down to 30 mph, you double your chances of surviving. But that doesn’t make it a wonderful event.”
Nineveh points out that the lopsided distribution of population perpetuates inequities in wealth distribution. The average European cow earns $2.50 per day in government subsidies, while almost half the Earth’s population lives on less than two bucks a day.
The authors also cite the ongoing dangers of runaway consumption in the West. In the year 2000, the United States, with less than 5 percent of the global population, used about 23 percent of the world’s energy. The size of the average U.S. home built in the last half-century nearly doubled, despite smaller households.
In 2002, more than half the passenger vehicles sold in the United States were fuel-inefficient light trucks and SUVs—and Americans own more than a quarter of the world’s cars.
What can be done? The Ehrlichs still think it’s possible for individual action to circumvent a rush toward doom—but only if people bother to be well-informed about the human predicament. They find it astonishing, for example, that students can get a bachelor’s degree without knowing where their food comes from.
They also argue for more thoughtful behavior; in fact, they exemplify it. Paul walks 1 3⁄4 miles a day each way to Stanford. They use solar-heated water at home. Foremost, in Paul’s view, they only had one child. The Ehrlichs are far from self-congratulatory, however, given the role of airlines in their lives. “We are adding carbon dioxide to the air so that we can attend meetings about global warming,” Paul comments wryly.
They also suggest reforming democracy to fit the 21st century. For example, perhaps multinational corporations should not be accorded the same rights as human individuals. The couple recommends that the UN sponsor a “Millenium Assessment of Human Behavior,” to measure how individual acts affect other people, the planet, our descendents.
What won’t work, in their view, is the complacent assumption that technology will fix all problems created by technology. Nuclear power did not solve human energy and food problems, and it produced events like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. The world’s poor are not being fed by leaf protein or algae grown on sewage sludge, once a hope for the future. And more freeways did not solve traffic problems.
An example closer to hand is Paul Ehrlich’s office, covered with papers. Wasn’t the electronic age supposed to get rid of paper clutter forever? He gestures helplessly. “That’s what everyone thought,” he admits, but the problem has become worse. “The paperless office has given way to the paper-swamped office.”
Given the sobering data in their books, it’s surprising how upbeat the Ehrlichs are. They conclude their book with a thought that could be their motto: “In the face of pervasive injustice and massive environmental need, idealism can be realism.” In person, they energize visitors with their enthusiasm and can-do optimism. Their staff admits it can be hard to keep pace. The couple is often on the road, and during the summer they navigate between Stanford and the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab in Crested Butte, Colo., where they’ve done fieldwork for more than 40 years.
Where does their hope come from? In Nineveh, they conclude that “all is not dark; that many human beings have had, and many still have, a vision of a world of peace and equality—and that substantial progress in that direction has been made.”
In the end, they have confidence in human nature. “Human beings are extremely clever: if they can get around denial, they’ll do something,” Paul says. Meanwhile, we have the Ehrlichs to remind us that the clock is ticking.
CYNTHIA HAVEN writes on arts and letters for Stanford.
