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 bestseller. 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 was active on our campus and many others, urging us to have few children, or preferably, none at all.
Ehrlich’s baleful projections had their roots in the assertions of Thomas R. Malthus, made around the dawn of the 19th century. Malthus believed that the human population could grow geometrically while the production of the goods necessary to sustain human life could only grow arithmetically. The tragic inevitability, then, was that the size of the human population was capped at levels prevailing when Malthus was writing (i.e., about 1 billion people), and whenever human procreation would try to push that number higher, the limits to production would mercilessly smash the human population back down to its inexorable, nature-imposed cap.
In addition to the perceived danger of overpopulation, the environmentalist ideology is permeated by anti-capitalist sentiments. Many greens believe that the immense productive capacity of capitalism, which has elevated standards of living to previously unimaginable heights, is actually a curse on the human race, since (according to their belief) the more economic production increases, the more pollution and environmental despoliation result.
Happily for the human race, Malthus’s theory and its neo-Malthusian derivations, such as Ehrlich’s theory of a catastrophic population explosion and deadly ever-increasing environmental degradation, have proven spectacularly wrong. Those doom-and-gloom theories grossly underestimated the resilience, adaptability, and common sense of human beings.
The green neo-Malthusians also failed to grasp that human beings are producers, not just consumers, of wealth and that a larger human population means more intelligence, creativity, ingenuity, innovation, and production. Indeed, Earth’s growing human population hasn’t led to impoverishment, but to ever-higher standards of living.
Here are some specifics: In the mid-1970s, there were approximately 3.5 billion people on Earth and 2 billion of them were poor and hungry. Forty years later, there were 7.3 billion people and 767 million in severe poverty. In November 2022, the human population reached 8 billion. In less than two full generations, the proportion of severely poor humans has plummeted to 1 in 9 from 5 in 9. The population explosion has been the opposite of the environmentalist prediction of a disaster for the human race.
Look at poverty in a longer-term context: In 1820, near the dawn of the age of capitalism, 94 percent of people were poor. Indeed, throughout all of human history before then, only a tiny elite prospered while more than 90 percent of humanity barely subsisted. At the end of World War II, there had been significant progress, but more than 70 percent of the people alive were severely poor. Then look: In 1981, 43 percent of humans were severely poor; in 1990, 36 percent; 2010, 16 percent; 2013, 11 percent. This is an astonishing achievement.
A cautionary note: While we’re on a trend to potentially eliminate severe poverty entirely by 2030, don’t count on that happening. Flawed humans have an amazing capacity to mess things up. Just look at Venezuela today. In 1950, Venezuela had the fourth-highest per capita gross domestic product in the world. Today, crippled by socialist policies, Venezuela has been reduced to an economic basket case with people starving to death.
The great tragedy of the environmentalist movement has been its unwavering fixation on the demonstratively erroneous belief that the human race is on a collision course with disaster because there are simply too many people. The acceptance of this belief has caused environmentalists laboring under the Malthusian illusion to characterize human beings as a “cancer,” “vermin,” a “plague,” and other luridly damning terms. Many greens waste countless hours dreaming of ways to reduce the number of people on Earth. Yes, in thrall to their pagan beliefs that humankind is an affront to nature, the more fanatical environmentalists are contemplating genocide (or perhaps we should call it “giga-genocide,” since they envision the culling of more than a billion souls from the human population).
The bottom line: The doom-and-gloom scenarios trumpeted by environmentalists for decades have been about as wrong as wrong can be. Their predictions are useful only as a reverse barometer—that is, if they say things are going downhill, they’re likely getting better. There’s something about the environmentalist ideology that blinds them to how the world works. People enrich the world. Capitalism enriches people. If we ever have an environmentalism that accepts the premise that people matter, it will happen when greens learn to value people and capitalism.
