The Population Bomb

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 12 March 2018

⏱️ 45 minutes

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Summary

The geographer Danny Dorling; Lionel Shriver, the author and patron of Population Matters; and Stephen Emmott, author of 10 Billion, join Matthew Sweet and an audience at Sage Gateshead to debate whether we should have fewer children.

In 1968 a Stanford university professor, Dr Paul E. Ehrlich, published The Population Bomb. This call to arms became a global bestseller, influenced public policy and made its author a celebrity. It predicted mass starvation in the US and an England underwater by the year 2000. It also suggested adding ‘temporary sterilants’ to the water supply as a way to stem the ensuing crisis. For decades it has come under fire for its alarmist tone and laughable foresight but with global population set to hit ten billion by 2050, will Ehrlich eventually be proved right?

Danny Dorling is Professor of Geography at Oxford University and the author of Population 10 Billion. His research focuses on housing, health, employment, education and poverty. His recent books include Do We Need Economic Inequality? The Equality Effect, and he co-wrote Why Demography Matters.

Lionel Shriver’s novels include The Standing Chandelier, The Mandibles, and the award-winning We Need to Talk About Kevin. Lionel is a regular columnist at The Spectator and has written for numerous other publications including for The Wall Street Journal, New Statesman, and The Economist. She is a patron of Population Matters.

Stephen Emmott is the author of Ten Billion, which he performed as a drama at the Royal Court Theatre. He is a Professor at Cambridge. His work develops new computational methods and ways of thinking about complex living systems.

Producer: Craig Templeton Smith.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?
0:23.3	It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.
0:28.8	Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.
0:32.1	Hello, I'm Matthew Sweet.
0:33.8	Welcome to BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas discussion program, which brings together leading artists, writers and thinkers in conversation and debate.
0:42.8	If you enjoy what you hear, do subscribe. Search for the Arts and Ideas podcast.
0:48.3	And while you're there, please rate and review us. It'll help other people find us.
0:52.2	This is the BBC.
1:06.6	The battle to feed all of humanity is over. The birth rate must be brought into balance with the death rate or mankind will breed itself into oblivion.
1:11.3	We can no longer afford to treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth.
1:16.3	The cancer itself must be cut out.
1:18.8	The battle cry of the biologist Paul Erlich sounded 50 years ago in his best-selling book
1:24.8	The Population Bomb, which predicted billions dead of Larsa
1:28.6	by 1974, famine in America by the 1980s, and London destroyed by the year 2000.
1:36.4	That didn't happen, of course, nor did his suggestion that we might consider leaving the
1:40.9	Earth in spaceships. But by the end of this century, the world's population
1:45.5	is predicted to rise to 10 billion. It's about 7 billion right now. Using space travel to find
1:52.4	Laban's realm seems an even more distant option than it was in 1968. If we're right to think
1:58.9	of there being a population bomb, it's still ticking. Perhaps Ehrlich simply
2:03.3	miscalculated the date of the detonation. Well, let me introduce the panel who are going to tell us
2:08.6	which wires, if any, we should be cutting. Stephen Emmett is a computational scientist, an author
2:14.9	of 10 billion, a book that develops the arguments and the doomsday scenarios
	...

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