World famous ecologist Paul Ehrlich told a University of Wisconsin crowd Thursday that contrary to popular belief, the most pressing environmental issues are in fact related to overpopulation and overconsumption.
Ehrlich, the Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University and author of the 1968 warning on global overcrowding “The Population Bomb”, emphasized the need to shrink world population in a moral, non-drastic fashion without making significant interventions in the birthrate or age ratio.
He diverted the audience’s attention away from looking to find more fossil fuels to focusing on finding a way to safely emit these fossil fuels.
“We are not running out of fossil fuels; we are running out of environment to discard the carbon dioxide from these fossil fuels,” Ehrlich said.
Despite all of the efforts he and the Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior contribute to helping the environment, including his new book “The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment,” Ehrlich noted the public will continue to have trouble becoming well-informed.
“The information we put out will always be countered by the disinformation that others are putting out,” Ehrlich said.
A central idea of Ehrlich’s lecture was society’s need to change the culture of consumption through the help of social sciences. The needs for a stricter cost-benefit analysis on what we emit into our environment, an increase in empathy for other humans and a call for a reduction in automobile reliance were other key points of emphasis in Ehrlich’s lecture.
However, students had mixed reactions to his lecture. Nick Bartolerio, a UW senior, said he thought Ehrlich was talking almost exclusively to people who shared his environmental and political viewpoints.
“[Ehrlich] spoke well because he was in a friendly environment where everybody agreed with his views, so it was safe for him to voice his controversial feelings of political, media and public ignorance,” Bartolerio said.
Ehrlich went on to accentuate the degree of ignorance many have about the environment, saying that our government has an “imbecilic left” and an “idiotic right.”
“I thought he went on tangents a lot and he referred to George W. Bush a lot, which is funny, but not very productive,” UW graduate student Rachel Mallinger said. “But, at the same time, he is engaging, charismatic and clearly passionate about the topic.”
Ehrlich was critical in his view of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” in particular, as it failed to present a feasible solution.
Although Ehrlich promoted a carbon tax as a way to limit public carbon dioxide consumption, Malinger too thought he failed to give conceivable ways to solve the grave problems he presented.
“In terms of practical solutions for consumption, he really didn’t have too many big solutions, and I felt that he made a lot of unsupported statements and criticized many solutions without necessarily giving his own,” Mallinger said.
