The Myth of Overpopulation

This is an excellent synopsis, quite lengthy, of the false science that led to the “red alert” of the late 60s and early 70s about a doomsday crisis looming on the horizon of planet earth that would bring on world-wide starvation and ensuing epidemics due to there being too many people and too few resources to feed them all. I remember it well. I was a high school student in a Catholic institution run by the Irish Christian Brothers. My economics teacher and football coach, a layman, used to rant on and on about overpopulation in his outrage over Humani Vitae. I sat there in his class shaking my head, but afraid to speak up. Of course, I wasn’t really equipped to, for I did not know enough to argue the issue. Mr “T” actually said that mankind is going to have to depopulate the earth by sending people to the moon or Mars or elsewhere. And this was before Star Trek. Well, the misinformed man should have stuck to football for, even as regards economics, I learned nothing in his class, except how to read the stock market page of the NY Times. I guess he had the OK from the ICBs to attack Humani Vitae.

The Catholic World Report, James V. Schall, S.J.: Back in the early 1970s, in the heyday of unceasing rancor over Humanae Vitae, a great number of books were published that prophesied disaster for the human race. Among the most famous was Paul Ehrlich’s widely read The Population Bomb. At that time, we were given various apocalyptic scenarios about the end of things caused by our own uncontrolled breeding. We were soon to starve to death. The world, then with a population of around three billion, was running out of food, clothing, gas, and just about everything else. Things could only get worse. Resources were “limited”; no more new ones were imaginable. The Catholic Church was often singled out as contributing to this approaching demise of the human race since she taught that the world was made for man. Her weird stance on human breeding was “irrational”. Her views on marriage and children were said to go against the principles of, you guessed it, “modern science”. Full article is here.