The Population Bomb
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrust their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. . . . [S]ince that night, I’ve known the feel of overpopulation."--The Population Bomb (1968) by Paul R. Ehrlich |
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The Population Bomb (1968) is book by Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich (who was uncredited), in 1968.
Context
In 1948, two widely read books were published that would inspire a "neo-Malthusian" debate on population and the environment: Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet and William Vogt’s Road to Survival. Although, they are now much less well known than Population Bomb, they inspired many works such as the original Population Bomb pamphlet by Hugh Everett Moore in 1954 that inspired the name of Ehrlich's book, as well as some of the original societies concerned with population and environmental matters. D.B. Luten has said that although the book is often seen as a seminal work in the field, the Population Bomb is actually best understood as "climaxing and in a sense terminating the debate of the 1950s and 1960s.” Ehrlich has said that he traced his own Malthusian beliefs to a lecture he heard Vogt give when he was attending university in the early 1950s. For Ehrlich, these writers provided “a global framework for things he had observed as a young naturalist."
See also
