Ehrlich, Paul R. (1932–)

Paul r. ehrlich, the Bing Professor of Population Studies at the Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University, is an entomologist and author on human overpopulation. He is wellknown around the world for his book The Population Bomb (1968).

Ehrlich was born on May 29, 1932, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He earned his B.A. in zoology at the University of Pennsylvania, and his M.A. from the University of Kansas. In 1957, he completed his Ph.D. at the University of Miami, and then worked at the Department of Entomology at the University of Kansas. Two years later, Dr. Ehrlich joined the faculty at Stanford University and became a professor of biology in 1966, and Bing Professor eleven years later. His academic interests were initially in the field of entomology, but he has also become interested in the field of population growth. His first book, published in 1960, was How to Know the Butterflies. It was followed three years later by Process of Evolution.

In 1968, The Population Bomb was published. It expanded on ideas raised in an article he wrote for New Scientist magazine in December 1967. In the book, Ehrlich predicted that the world might face major famines between 1970 and 1985 owing to a massive growth in population and the inability of food supplies to keep up with this. Some scholars saw Ehrlich in the mold of early 19th-century economist Thomas Malthus, who had also predicted that the population was increasing at a rate that was outpacing the ability to produce more crops. Ehrlich said that he was more influenced by William Vogt's Road to Survival (1948), which he had read while at high school.

There has been extensive criticism of Ehrlich's ideas, since the widespread famines he predicted did not occur, and because other scarcity-reducing innovations have occurred over the recent period of population growth, including the Green Revolution, in which agronomists developed ways of increasing food production. His supporters argue, however, that his book reinvigorated debate on the issue of overpopulation.

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich and others formed the Zero Population Growth group. He issued a revised version of his The Population Bomb in 1971, and has since written many more books, including The End of Affluence (with A.H. Ehrlich, 1974), The Race Bomb (with S. Feldman, 1977); Machinery of Nature (1986); and The Birder's Handbook (with D. Dobkin and D. Wheye, 1988).

His most recent major works were One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption and the Human Future (with A.H. Ehrlich, 2004); and On the Wings of Checkerspots: A Model System for Population Biology (co-edited with Ilkka Hanski, 2004). He has also published over five hundred articles.