'Population Bomb' or ‘Humanity on a Tightrope’

What does family mean to you? Paul Ehrlich made his mark as a world famous environmentalist with the publication of The Population Bomb in 1968. Ehrlich now believes that our very survival may depend on expanding our capacity for empathy and our understanding of the human family.

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• Paul R. Ehrlich Bing Professor of Population Studies and president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Standford University; co-author Humanity on a Tightrope

"Humanity on a Tightrope : Thoughts on Empathy, Family and Big Changes for a Viable Future" makes a valiant attempt at addressing these formidable world issues from an interesting, but maybe too idealistic, point of view.

"Humanity on a Tightrope," to be released on Nov. 16, is a rich book that delves into the root of the world's most pressing problems: the lack of empathy in mankind. The whole book revolves around this central idea of how we human beings as a whole global family should develop more empathy toward each other to ensure a sustainable future.

The authors are familiar faces on campus. Paul Ehrlich is the Bing Professor of Population Studies and a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, and psychologist Robert Evan Ornstein Ph.D. '68 is a former Stanford human biology professor. Together, they present the pressing situation in which the world is in now: bleak and bloody history, tension between religious groups and a general indifference or even strong antagonism toward "them," people who are not part of "us."

... Even Ehrlich and Ornstein, the authors themselves, freely admit that "we're discussing what is required to reach sustainability, not what will be easy or even possible."

There are, then, two ways of interpreting the book. Either you can see the book as pervaded with the sense of hopelessness, since even when the most cheerful human empathy experiment results are illustrated, we are reminded that humans are still so far away from stopping global warming, from maintaining world peace or from addressing extreme wealth inequality. Or, you can view the book as an outline of the best way of living, the happiest way of living, because we might just have been suppressing our natural sense of empathy for others all along in the capitalist society. Maybe, if we do have more empathy for others, we will be happier.

However, the decision is ultimately up to the reader. With a smart pun of humanity teetering on the tightrope just as the tightrope performer, Ehrlich and Ornstein showcase their beliefs in the super-power of empathy – that it can save humanity and save the world we live in.

Remarks
Ehrlich's critics claim that he made other predictions that did not come to pass in addition to his prediction of massive starvation of the 1970s and 1980s... and hopefully his bleakness of what are world has become will pass as well.

Ehrlich's response - In a 2004 Grist Magazine interview,^[10] Ehrlich acknowledged some specific predictions he had made, in the years around the time the Population Bomb was published, that had not come to pass. However, as to a number of his fundamental ideas and assertions he maintained that facts and science proved them correct.

In answer to the question: "Were your predictions in The Population Bomb right?", Ehrlich responded:

Anne and I have always followed U.N. population projections as modified by the Population Reference Bureau -- so we never made "predictions," even though idiots think we have. When I wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, there were 3.5 billion people. Since then we've added another 2.8 billion -- many more than the total population (2 billion) when I was born in 1932. If that's not a population explosion, what is? My basic claims (and those of the many scientific colleagues who reviewed my work) were that population growth was a major problem. Fifty-eight academies of science said that same thing in 1994, as did the world scientists' warning to humanity in the same year. My view has become depressingly mainline!