Politics Get Lost in PBS’ ‘Population’
One wonders how Paul Ehrlich lives--if he owns a car, eats a whole foods diet, buys consumer goods, recycles everything, votes (and for whom). Ehrlich went from a humble biologist specializing in butterflies to the author of “The Population Bomb,” and his dire predictions of civilization’s collapse from the weight of overpopulation turned him into one of the first environmentalist gurus, whether he wanted to be or not.
He also became a figure of intense controversy when he argued in his book that the only solution to overpopulation was government-imposed population controls worldwide, if voluntary measures failed. While the Third World would have to severely control its birth rate, Ehrlich argued, the First World would have to dramatically produce and consume far less. Without the two in tandem, Ehrlich saw only global disaster.
Does Ehrlich, one wonders, practice what he’s preached?
Biologist David Suzuki is a longtime friend of Ehrlich, and as host of PBS’ “Paul Ehrlich and the Population Bomb,” he makes it known that he’s on Ehrlich’s side. This is probably why we never learn if Ehrlich’s lifestyle is in keeping with his dicta for the rest of us.
Being a fellow biologist, Suzuki empathizes with Ehrlich’s key contention--that just as habitats have carrying capacities for butterflies, so the Earth has a carrying capacity for humans. Too many people consuming too many resources creates an irreversible trend from plenty and wealth to starvation and poverty.
This program reviews Ehrlich’s case as lucidly as possible, and Ehrlich’s key ally, physicist John Holdren, handily buttresses the case. But there is a gaping hole at the center of Ehrlich’s politicized biology. Because Suzuki doesn’t dabble in politics, he never confronts Ehrlich with the Achilles’ heel of his formula for turning off the population bomb.
Ehrlich himself acknowledges to Suzuki the dilemma of the First World imposing limits on consumption, but that’s nothing compared to the politics behind Ehrlich’s population control scenario. For it can only work under a dictatorship, a kind of eco-fascist state decreeing birth practices to every family. China now imposes an Ehrlich model, the single-child policy, and Ehrlich supporter Judith Bruce looks very uncomfortable arguing for it: It is, she says fidgeting, “a fairly explicit social contract” guaranteeing survival, housing, education and a livelihood.
Not freedom, though, which is why this Ehrlich model may work but is so abhorrent. We hear only weak retorts to Ehrlich from ecologist Barry Commoner and commentator Ben Wattenberg (on “The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson”), but stronger ones from economist Julian Simon, a powerful critic whom Ehrlich dismisses as “imbecilic.”
The solution that combines ecological sense and democratic values never gets a hearing during this hour. That is sad.
* “Paul Ehrlich and the Population Bomb” airs at 10 p.m. Sunday on KCET-TV Channel 28.
