ish Academy of Sciences, the Heinz Environmental Prize and the United Nations Sasakawa Environmental Prize (USC 4).The most well known of his books is the 1968 best seller “The Population Bomb.” This book has been widely acclaimed and criticized. The book argued forcefully that the world was headed for catastrophic overcrowding, food shortages and starvation. Many of his critics are quick to point out his predictions have yet to materialize (Bailey 1). Erlich’s response to his critics was expressed in an interview with Jim Motavalli from the Environmental News Network:The one resource we will never run out of is imbeciles. The new book Anne and I wrote basically takes on all of the arguments of the “don’t-worry, the environment is in great shape, all we need is unconstrained capitalism and everything will be fine” crowd and we take the arguments one after another and present the scientific community’s consensus on it. But it’s like creationism, you just can’t put some of these things down. There’s just an anti-intellectual, anti-science trend that is very serious in the United States, fed by idiots who just keep publishing this nonsense (4).In response to the errors in his predictions he said;The Green Revolution (which spread fertilizer technology to the Third World in the 1960s) created a small miracle in doubling and tripling small crops, but there’s no reason to think that will be repeated. There are limits to what you can get in terms of crop yields. I make mistakes, all of my colleagues have made mistakes, but one of the things that we’re forced to do is get our stuff carefully reviewed by our colleagues before we publish it so we maintain our scientific reputations. Professor Julian Simon says that we now have in our minds and libraries enough information to keep the human population growing for seven billion years. Well, I did a little calculation. ...
