Beloved Beasts by Michelle Nijhuis

Author:Michelle Nijhuis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2021-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

While Soulé was counting lizard scales in the Gulf of California in the early 1960s, the public’s sense of planetary crisis was escalating. Global vulnerabilities to famine and disease, exposed by the Second World War and vividly enumerated by Fairfield Osborn and William Vogt in their twin 1948 jeremiads, seemed to many in North America and Europe to be greater than ever.

Soulé’s sense of crisis was shared by biologist Paul Ehrlich, his graduate adviser at Stanford. Ehrlich had been fascinated by butterflies since his childhood in suburban New Jersey; in high school, he worked for the curator of the butterfly collection at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in exchange for discarded specimens. From his own research, Ehrlich knew that butterfly populations tended to grow until, hit by food or space shortages or an outbreak of disease, they crashed.

Ehrlich had read both Osborn and Vogt as a college student, and the looming resource shortages they described convinced him—and many others—that humanity was headed for a butterfly-like crash. In 1968, at the invitation of David Brower, then the director of the Sierra Club, Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, co-wrote a book on the subject. It became not only a bestseller but a lasting metaphor: The Population Bomb.

Ehrlich thought the book’s title was alarmist—he initially wanted to call it Population, Resources, and Environment—but he was, in Stewart Udall’s words, willing to “err on the side of … occasional ‘hyperbole.’” The opening scene of the book, in which the Ehrlichs recount a taxi ride through the crowded streets of Delhi, is pure Vogt: “The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming … People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.”

The Population Bomb drew little attention at first, but Ehrlich was unusual among scientists for his comfort in the spotlight, and his frank, highly quotable warnings soon earned the book a gigantic audience. “It’s really very simple, Johnny,” Ehrlich said to Johnny Carson during one of his many appearances on The Tonight Show. More people meant less food per person, and more starvation. It was, Ehrlich said, “already too late to avoid famines that will kill millions.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.