Paul R. Ehrlich, la Bombe P

Auteur du célèbre livre La Bombe P paru en 1968, Ehrlich avait prévu les problèmes que posent l'explosion démographique. Malgré certaines critiques concernant le ton alarmiste de son oeuvre, il n'en reste pas moins qu'aujourd'hui la conscience du problème de la surpopulation a augmenté partout dans le monde grâce à lui.

Concernant les prédictions de famine faites dans son livre, Ehrlich y répond simplement dans une interview de 2004 pour le Grist Magazine :

"Anne and I have always followed UN 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!"

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb