And the Earth Gods Were Angry; And the Earth Gods Decreed to the Quivering Humans, "Until the End of Days You Shall Eat Your Own Dead"

Paul Erlich wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, when Environmental Scares were even more faddish (and profitable) than they are now. (1962's Silent Spring was a smash bestseller.)

So Paul Erlich entered the filed of environmental catastrophe entrepreneurship.

he Population Bomb is a best-selling book written by Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich (who was uncredited), in 1968. It warned of the mass starvation of humans in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. Fears of a "population explosion" were widespread in the 1950s and 60s, but the book and its author brought the idea to an even wider audience. The book has been criticized since its publishing for its alarmist tone, and in recent decades for its inaccurate predictions.

That Wikipedia article is good reading, detailing several of Erlich's overblown predictions (which he now claims weren't predictions, merely "scenarios" to help the reader think about the future). One criticism lodged at him -- besides the obvious one, "He got everything, everything wrong" -- is that his book was almost completely unoriginal, drawing as it did from previous Malthusian Catastrophe books from 1948, but made up for his lack of originality with outlandish predictions and strident emotionalism.

Well, what's old is news. Paul Erlich has some new outlandish, emotional predictions for you.

I'm sorry, I mean "scenarios to help you think about the future."

Newsbusters also kicks this brokedown hippie's ass up and down the block for a while.

He actually re-predicts -- or re-scenarioizes -- his scaremongering nonsense, claiming that the issues that will be facing us will be: "Is it okay to eat the bodies of your dead because you're so hungry?" He says that prediction scenario to help you think about the future is coming "ridiculously" fast.

I liked Newsbusters' quote: The Huffpo non-contributor who interviewed Erlich allowed that Erlich's many, many not-even-close predictions scenarios to help you think about the future failed to actually happen.

Or, as this guy put it, the predictions scenarios "didn't eventuate."

Didn't eventuate?

WTF?

posted by Ace at 02:05 PM

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