Paul R. Ehrlich
Paul R. Ehrlich
Paul Ralph Ehrlichis an American biologist, best known for his warnings about the consequences of population growth and limited resources. He is the Bing Professor of Population Studies in the department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University and president of Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth29 May 1932
CountryUnited States of America
country moving thinking
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?
teaching knowing giving
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.
japan views years
The drilling idea is spherically senseless - it's senseless from whatever point of view you look at it. It'd take 10 years to bring any oil online, and it would probably go to Japan. It sure wouldn't help gasoline prices here. All the economists say gasoline is still too cheap in the United States anyway. So here we're having this huge debate over offshore drilling that is just straightforward nonsense, which won't surprise you.
oil water substitutes
There are substitutes for oil; there is no substitute for fresh water.
people would-be want
People have to decide, first of all, how they'd like to live, and how secure they want to be from disaster. After that, scientists can help determine what would be necessary to achieve that.
thinking people support
I don't think scientists can dictate from above what we should do, because it's not a matter of scientific decision. If you want to have everybody living like a Beverly Hills millionaire, then 2 billion people might be too many. If we want to have a battery-chicken kind of world, with everybody having an absolute minimum diet, you might be able to support 10 billion.
children hands should-have
Your children should have it impressed upon them that their adult life-style will bear very little resemblance to yours and that they should now be acquiring knowledge, skills, values, and tastes that will sustain them in less materially affluent circumstances. On the other hand, the fresh insights and imaginations of your children may help you find a viable future while there's still time.
bora-bora crystals balls
So, regarding the time frame, I'm only too willing to admit that my crystal ball, like everybody else's, is cracked. If I could predict precisely, I would have started predicting the stock market and would now be living with a bunch of young women on Bora Bora, having bought it.
years england alarmists
I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.
book writing optimistic
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.
country government chinese
Chinese are already more on board than we are. China is the only country that actually discussed in formal government documents how important it is to control the size of your populations if you're going to limit emissions.
ocean ideas iron
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.
mother children years
The mother of the year should be a sterilized woman with two adopted children
jobs government diversity
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.