Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

On March 13th, biologists and environmentalist Paul Ehrlich died, according to his obituary in nature.

He was, quote, pioneering and controversial.

But in reality, his book, Population Bomb is perhaps the best

example in recent memory, that ideas have consequences and bad ideas have victims. His catastrophic

predictions about overpopulation, and I quote here, encouraged mass sterilization programs in India

and the one-child policy in China and influenced how children

everywhere were viewed and valued. His predictions were also, as Chuck Colson noted in 2001,

spectacularly wrong. Even 25 years later, Colson's analysis of the population bomb and why

Ehrlich missed so badly here remained spot on. Here's Chuck Colson.

In 1968, Stanford Professor Paul Erlich famously declared that the battle to feed humanity

is over. He predicted that during the 1970s, the world will experience starvation of tragic

proportion, and hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.

Well, it didn't quite turn out that way. In fact, almost none of the dire predictions associated

with what Erlich called the population bomb came to pass. That's because the doomsayers didn't

understand what it really means to be human. Erlicks was only the most dramatic expression

of a worldview that saw

reducing birth rates as the key to not only humanities, but the entire planet's fate. In this

view, people were akin to parasites. They consumed resources and gave little, if anything,

back. Population had to be contained both for our sakes and for the sake of the earth. As a 1970s Smithsonian exhibit put it,

Population, the problem is us.

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