Your main concern has been the population bomb as you call it in your book.

Do you feel that this takes precedence over any other type of pollution and

certainly human pollution?

Yeah, it takes precedence in the following sense.

The reason I named the book The Population Bomb was in 1968 when I wrote it, everybody was getting

concerned about pollution, but people hadn't seen the other element.

I thought the emphasis ought to go there.

The thing that's important to remember about population

control is that if we want to avoid a tremendous rise in the death rate, we absolutely must have

a tremendous decrease in the birth rate. Now because the world's population is so young it

means that even if we got a tremendous decrease in the birth rate if the

average family completed family size immediately moved down to the vicinity of two

we would still face 40 or 50 years of rapid population

growth. There's a tremendous lag time built into it because those young people, the 40% of the people

in the world that are under 15, are going to have children and grandchildren

before they get old enough to die of old age. So we have this

tremendous built-in lag time, which means that we've got to start instantly on

population control only because we know it'll take so long.

Renowned scientist Paul Ehrlich has been in the public spotlight for half a century now. Showered with accolades and heralded in the press,

his message has been remarkably consistent.

There are too many humans using too many resources, and the only way to avert catastrophe

is population control, strictly administered by a centralized supranational government.

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