Scientists in Warning to Humanity : Population Threat Rivals Nuclear War

The world’s population--now at 5 billion--is doomed to reach at least 8 billion, posing a threat to humanity second only to nuclear destruction, a group of concerned scientists warned Saturday.

“Arresting global population growth should be second in importance on humanity’s agenda only to avoiding nuclear war,” Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich said at an annual conference on science and world affairs.

The conference was being held at the Black Sea resort of Dagomys in the Soviet Union and the statement by the scientists was released by Stanford.

Ehrlich, speaking for the Club of Earth--11 leading American population biologists--said overpopulation and rapid population growth compound such problems as rapid climate change, the depletion of nonrenewable resources and increasing international tensions.

The scientists, all members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, did not say when the 8 billion population will be reached, but Ehrlich said, “The population explosion will come to an end one way or another and quite possibly within the lifetimes of most people today.

“The only question remaining is whether we will halt it ourselves by limiting births or whether it will be halted for us by some combination of ecological collapse, famine, plague, and thermonuclear warfare.”

The scientists appealed to all nations to follow the example of the 40 world leaders who signed the 1986 Statement on Population Stabilization to work for a world in which the numbers of people are compatible with everyone being free of want and fear.

Erlich’s book “The Population Bomb” led to formation of the ZPG, or Zero Population Growth movement in the late 1960s.