Paul R. Ehrlich Professions : Population Biologist Born : May 29, 1932 Browse All Authors Top 52 quotes by Paul R. Ehrlich By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth's population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people. Paul R. Ehrlich population levels people Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticides, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide - all can be traced easily to too many people. Paul R. Ehrlich car water people Solving the population problem is not going to solve the problems of racism, of sexism, of religious intolerance, of war, of gross economic inequality. But if you don't solve the population problem, you're not going to solve any of those problems. Whatever problem you're interested in, you're not going to solve it unless you also solve the population problem. Whatever your cause, it's a lost cause without population control. Paul R. Ehrlich population-problem religious war To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer. Paul R. Ehrlich witty inspirational funny In ten years [i.e., 1980] all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish. Paul R. Ehrlich sea animal years In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches. Paul R. Ehrlich extinction pushing humanity I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000. Paul R. Ehrlich alarmists england years The mother of the year should be a sterilized woman with two adopted children Paul R. Ehrlich mother children years Overall, The Population Bomb was probably too optimistic. I was writing about climate change - Anne and I actually wrote the book. We discussed whether or not you'd have to take a gondola to the Empire State Building, and that sort of thing, but we didn't know at the time whether the climate change would be in the direction of heating or cooling. We just didn't know enough about it. Paul R. Ehrlich optimistic writing book We ought to take good care of everybody we have on the planet, but we ought to regulate the rate at which people join us. The old saying is, "It's the top of the ninth inning, and humanity has been hitting nature hard, but you've always got to remember that nature bats last." Paul R. Ehrlich bats humanity people There are substitutes for oil; there is no substitute for fresh water. Paul R. Ehrlich substitutes oil water There's no question at all that the population explosion will come to an end. The two basic choices are it'll come to an end because we control our reproduction, and in many areas we have started to do so, or we'll end up with a high death rate. You have to take a personal moral stand on this. Paul R. Ehrlich population choices two Anyone who opposes methods to control the birth rate, is automatically voting in favour having the death rate go up. Paul R. Ehrlich birth-rate favour voting We're never all going to agree with each other. We have to learn to value the diversity. It's one of the presumable principles of our government that isn't followed nearly enough - one of the jobs of the majority is to try and make the minority feel comfortable. Paul R. Ehrlich diversity government jobs Actually, the problem in the world is that there are too many rich people. Paul R. Ehrlich problem people world With taxes, if they aren't working right, we can change them with a stroke of the pen. It's basically a market-type mechanism. People make their own choices. You run the taxes, and you get the results. Paul R. Ehrlich choices running people My first policy move would be to try to get a conversation going in the US about what people stand for and what we really want. Do we want to keep adding people to the world and to our country until we move to a battery-chicken kind of existence and then collapse? Or do we want to think hard about what really is valuable to us, and figure out how many people we can supply that to sustainably? Paul R. Ehrlich country moving thinking I kind of like carbon taxes because we already know how to apply them. We already have apparatus in place. When we talk about these other solutions - like a billion tons of iron filings in the ocean or putting sunshades between us and the sun - they're huge. We have no idea if they will work. We have no idea what their nasty consequences might be. And it's unlikely we can do them anyway. Paul R. Ehrlich iron ocean ideas Organisms are starting to move in response to climate change all over the place. Bees are disappearing and we don't have many of the native pollinators left to replace them. We're in deep trouble; there's no question about it. But ecologists tend to think of something that's going to be bad in ten years as very fast, and of course, politicians only think of things in a two-, four-, six-year cycle. Paul R. Ehrlich years moving thinking Stanford may be the best university in the world, but you can get all the way through here without knowing where your food came from, without being able to say where we came from, without being able to give a coherent description of why the climate is changing and why we should be concerned about it. So I started teaching a course in human evolution and the environment that's open to all Stanford students, no prerequisites. Paul R. Ehrlich knowing teaching giving
