# The Population Bomb [[Paul Ehrlich]]'s 1968 bestseller, published in **May 1968** by Ballantine Books in partnership with the [[Sierra Club]]. It turned overpopulation into a mass-audience emergency and made [[Carrying Capacity]] a household argument. It sold **two to three million copies**; sources differ on the figure. - **Authorship.** Anne Ehrlich co-wrote it, but the publisher insisted on a single credited author. - **Origin.** The Sierra Club's executive director, David Brower, commissioned it. He hoped it would shape the 1968 election and called it "a first-rate battle tract." - **Ehrlich himself** died on **March 13, 2026**, at 93. ## The argument The 1968 text opens with its forecast: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." The book made three moves that matter for the vault: - **Compulsion as the fallback.** "We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail." Ehrlich proposed taxes that rise with each additional child and luxury taxes on childcare goods. He raised sterilants in the water supply and set them aside for now: "If the choice now is either such additives or catastrophe, we shall have catastrophe." - **Triage.** He endorsed the Paddock brothers' proposal to sort countries into those that could be saved and those that could not, with India in the second group, and to cut food aid to the hopeless. "There is no rational choice except to adopt some form of the Paddocks' strategy." The India prediction was quietly dropped from the 1971 edition. - **Celebrity.** Ehrlich first appeared on *The Tonight Show* in February 1970 and went on to make more than twenty appearances. That made him the public face of the population movement just as Earth Day arrived. ## What happened next The famines did not come on the scale predicted. The Green Revolution's yield gains outran the forecast. The book's most famous refutation was a bet: - **The Simon–Ehrlich wager.** In September 1980 Ehrlich bet the economist Julian Simon $1,000 that five metals (copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten) would rise in real price over the decade. They fell, and in **October 1990** Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for **$576.07**. - **No retreat.** That same year the Ehrlichs published *The Population Explosion*, with Anne credited this time. In 2009 Ehrlich wrote that the book's most serious flaw was that it was "much too optimistic." In 2015 he said, "I do not think my language was too apocalyptic." ## Why it is in this vault The book is a **gateway text**. Its institutional offspring is [[Zero Population Growth]], founded in 1968 by Ehrlich, Richard Bowers and Charles Remington and renamed Population Connection in 2002. ZPG was the organization [[John Tanton]] led as national president (1975–77) before he founded [[FAIR]] in 1979. Ehrlich himself later sat on FAIR's advisory board. The book supplied the crisis framing and the moral license for coercion. Later restrictionists kept the framework and swapped in a new variable: when global births stopped being the problem, *who* was arriving became the problem. That is the route from population ecology to immigration restriction, and from there to [[Passive Eugenics]] and the [[Ecofascism]] of [[The Camp of the Saints]] readers. The book's predictions failed, but its framework survived by moving from one variable to another. ## See also - [[Paul Ehrlich]] · [[Garrett Hardin]] · [[Malthusianism]] · [[Carrying Capacity]] - [[Zero Population Growth]] · [[Sierra Club]] · [[Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization]] - [[John Tanton]] · [[Tanton Network]] · [[FAIR]] · [[Passive Eugenics]] · [[Eugenics]]