Environment, Population, and Capitalism
Commentary
Environmentalism has been an ideology of gloom for at least six decades. One of the fixed beliefs in the environmentalist faith has been that people—real live human beings—have been a source of danger both to the ecology of our planet and to the human race’s very survival.
When I was in college, Paul Ehrlich’s alarming forecast of an environmental Armageddon, “The Population Bomb,” was a huge best-seller. Millions of Americans took seriously his dire warnings of ecological collapse accompanied by massive human suffering and ghastly death tolls. The population control group, Zero Population Growth (ZPG), was active on our campus and many others, urging us to have few children, or preferably, none at all….