In this heartbreaking weekend of
the Hurricane Helene aftermath, I've had this 1971 Ballantine paperback sitting at my desk for a while. I kind of just want to blog it while things are already depressing and then just shuffle it out of the way.
How to Be a Survivor: A Plan to Save Spaceship Earth, by
Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich and Richard L. Harriman, isn't the cheeriest of topics, but it caught my interest a year ago when I was
looking at advertisements in the back of Ray Bradbury's
The October Country and other vintage paperbacks.
If it isn't clear from the cover, this is an alarmist book. In the opening pages, Ehrlich and Harriman write: "But crowded, hungry, and miserable as much of mankind is today, tomorrow seems destined to be much worse." Their primary concern was that the world's population was, in 1971, at a tipping point that would imminently cause cascading failures in global food and health systems. Or that simmering geopolitics would lead to a world war, waged with nuclear and chemical weapons, that would be too catastrophic for civilization to rebound from.
Like I said, cheery stuff. But not too terribly unlike the news and stressors we deal with on a daily basis in 2024. Our
Spaceship Earth (a phrase popularized, but not invented, by
Adlai Stevenson in a 1965 speech to the United Nations) is certainly listing to the side a bit.
We could generously say that the authors' alarmism was correct but somewhat misfocused. Others of that era already knew about the ways in which we were
degrading the environment and
warming the Earth with fossil fuels. But Ehrlich and Harriman seemed much more concerned with the global birthrate and overcrowding.
Other critics aren't so generous, especially when it comes to Ehrlich, who also wrote 1967's
The Population Bomb and who, at age 92, is still warning about doomsday. In 2023, James Woudhuysen, a journalist and professor of forecasting and innovation,
wrote:
"All forecasters make mistakes. But few forecasters have been as consistently wrong as biologist Paul Ehrlich. ... It is important to understand just how consistently and absurdly wrong Ehrlich’s predictions have been. ... The reason Ehrlich always misses the mark is not just down to bad luck. He relies on a kindergarten understanding of political economy, in which multiplying human beings always run up against the limits of Spaceship Earth. What all his forecasts ignore is how human ingenuity, risk-taking ambition and technological innovation can overcome the apparent physical limits of the planet."
* * *
There are some interesting and divergent takes about
How to Be a Survivor from
reviewers on Goodreads. One writes: "A book with some good ideas, most of which are based in fantasyland. For example, the authors rightly spend appreciable time blasting the incompetence, inefficiency and corruption of the federal government, yet inexplicably suggest an alternative of even more bureaucracy to take its place." That's a fair point.
A recent reviewer discusses the urgent need for meaningful political action, though she's clearly discussing the climate crisis more than global overpopulation: "This [book] explains why anyone's chance of survival is directly dependent on political action forcing the governments of the world to face up to the environmental crisis. Individual efforts without political action just aren't enough."
Finally, there's this Goodreads viewpoint from 2011, which I find incredibly discouraging: "Thankfully this has proven to be total bunk with time. I regretfully read this as an impressionable freshmen in college in 1971. I keep around to remind myself to be skeptical."
"Total bunk" is taking it a bit far. Maybe the alarmism of Ehrlich and Harriman was, in part, a schtick to sell books. But I think it might also be argued that their hearts were in the right place. They want a better planet and more hope for human civilization. Consider what they're getting at in this passage:
"In the new society, education will be a subject of great importance. Children will learn early that their own well-being is dependent upon the well-being of all other human beings and upon the well-being of the world's ecological systems. They will also learn how to care for Spaceship Earth, to keep it running smoothly into the indefinite future. They will grow up to consider it their pleasant duty to spend at least part of their time serving as crewmen on Spaceship Earth. They will expect to participate on a regular basis in the governance and maintenance of the ship, and to spend part of their time in the service of the fellow passengers. They will also expect to continue their education throughout their lives so as to maximize the value of both their contribution to society and of their own existence."
To bring this to a conclusion and circle back to Hurricane Helene, I think these weekend tweets about the devastation in Appalachia may seem alarmist, but they represent the truthful urgency of the situation we find ourselves in right now on our rapidly warming and changing planet:
Anna Jane Joyner: "I’ve told my family many times that we can never sell our houses in Asheville because it’s one of the safer places in the US re: climate impacts. Never ever imagined it would get wiped out by a hurricane before our home on the Gulf Coast. Nowhere is safe. It doesn’t feel real."
Jeff McFadden: "People keep talking like collapse is some future event. Modern society cannot build towns, cities, roads, bridges, dams, and interstate electric grids as fast as they're burning up and washing away. This is a collapsing system."
Sarah Richardson: "Hardly any news about entire towns being destroyed, and hardly any national news about Phoenix reaching 114 degrees at the end of September ... the climate change denial is strong."
Meanwhile, Old Man Banjo just wants naps, cuddles and Temptations treats,
but, then again, he's not an elected official tasked with solving problems