Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. On March 13th, biologist and environmentalist Paul Ehrlich died. According to his obituary in Nature, he was, quote, pioneering and controversial. But in reality, his book, The Population Bomb, is perhaps the best example in recent memory that ideas have consequences and bad ideas have victims.
His catastrophic predictions about overpopulation, and I quote here, encouraged mass sterilization programs in India and the one-child policy in China and influenced how children everywhere were viewed and valued. His predictions were also, as Chuck Coulson noted in 2001, spectacularly wrong. Even 25 years later, Coulson's analysis of the population bomb and why Ehrlich missed so badly here remains spot on. Here's Chuck Coulson. In 1968, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich famously declared that the battle to feed humanity is over.
He predicted that during the 1970s, the world will experience starvation of tragic proportion, and hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.
Well, it didn't quite turn out that way. In fact, almost none of the dire predictions associated with what Ehrlich called the population bomb came to pass. That's because the doomsayers didn't understand what it really means to be human. Ehrlich's was only the most dramatic expression of a worldview that saw reducing birth rates as the key to not only humanity's, but the entire planet's fate. In this view, people were akin to parasites.
They consumed resources and gave little, if anything, back. Population had to be contained both for our sakes and for the sake of the earth. As a 1970s Smithsonian exhibit put it, population, the problem is us. The fear was so acute that groups like Planned Parenthood recommended making abortion not only legal, but compulsory. They propose tax penalties to discourage marriage, and they propose government encouragement of homosexuality.
Well, it turns out that all we really should have feared was our irrational fear about population growth. It goes without saying that Ehrlich was wrong about mass starvation. The only deaths from starvation since the population bomb was published had been the result of war and man-made famines. What's more, not only is there food in abundance, natural resources haven't run out either. In 1980, economist Julian Simon made a wager with Ehrlich that any five metals Ehrlich picked would be cheaper in 1990 than 1980.
Simon won the bet hands down. Today, many natural resources, including oil, cost less, if you adjust for inflation than they did in 1980. The population doom and gloomers were wrong about almost everything, yet their predictions and policy recommendations shaped an entire world's attitude toward population. Their mistakes were more than math errors. Their worldview didn't permit them to see what makes man unique.
Their naturalism, the belief that the natural world is all there is, caused them to see man as just another animal, an animal that consumed food and other resources at a much higher rate than other animals. Remarkably, this static understanding of man made no allowance for human ingenuity. It never stopped to consider that our God given intelligence would enable us to find a way to feed our growing population, or that our intelligence would help us find resources where previous generations hadn't thought to look. Instead, it makes us the equivalent of sheep, rabbits, and other animals. And that's why they were so spectacularly wrong and why we shouldn't listen to them now.
This goes to show you that any account about the nature and destiny of man must start with a biblical account of who man is. Man alone among the creatures of the earth is created in the image of God. Any worldview that doesn't acknowledge this fact and grasp its implications will inevitably fall into error as we saw with the population doomsayers. Because the problem isn't people. The problem is not appreciating the true significance of our humanity.
In short, Ehrlich's world view blinded him from reality. Not only did he get humanity wrong in his predictions, he also misunderstood the physical world.
Now had his ideas merely remained in his book to be analyzed and critiqued in an academic way, the damage done would have been minimal. But his ideas, as ideas tend to do, grew feet and walked out into the real world of image bearers, and then wreaked havoc on the world. Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. If you appreciate these daily commentaries about the culture, please leave us a review wherever you download your podcast.
And find more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment at breakpoint.org. Educators, join us in Colorado Springs June 15th through the 17th for the 2026 Rooted Educators World View Summit. This year's theme is created and called Biblical Anthropology for Christian Education. We'll hear from John Stone Street, Sean McDowell, Megan Allman, Elizabeth Urbanowitz, and more. Save $50 when you register by March 31st with the code Rooted 50.
Register at colsoneducators.org slash rooted. That's colsoneducators.org slash rooted.
