Paul Ehrlich Was Early, Not Wrong

Paul Ehrlich (public domain)

When Paul Ehrlich died recently (March 13, 2026), many of the obituaries and articles about him repeated a familiar judgment: he was alarmist, even brilliant, but ultimately wrong.

His 1968 book, The Population Bomb, warned of mass famine and ecological collapse that did not arrive on schedule. Critics still point to the famous Simon–Ehrlich wager as proof that he misunderstood the future and missed the advances in our capabilities to extract “resources” (i.e. nature, including soil, water, trees, etc.) that would make them cheaper.

Today, a new generation has revived that argument under a more appealing name: abundance. The idea is simple and seductive. Human ingenuity, markets, and technology create a world of ever-increasing plenty. More people mean more ideas. More ideas mean more innovation. More innovation means more “resources.” The abundance crowd sees all of the Earth as objects put here for us, and if we just keep innovating, we can keep growing in population and in abundance.

Essays like Revisiting the Simon-Ehrlich Wager 40 Years On are typical of the “Ehrlich was wrong, look at the abundance!” perspective the infinite growthers have today. Their conclusion is: Ehrlich worried about limits, but history proved him wrong. Prices fell, supplies expanded, and humanity innovated and adapted.

This argument rests on a profound and dangerous blind spot. It defines “abundance” almost entirely in terms of price and availability in human markets, while ignoring the condition of the living world that makes those markets possible.

Yes, many commodities became cheaper. But how did that happen? It happened because our technology innovations pushed beyond the ecological limits that Ehrlich saw in the 1970s and enabled the liquidation of the natural world for human use faster and at greater scale than he could have possibly imagined.

Industrial agriculture is the clearest example. The so-called Green Revolution dramatically increased yields through fossil fuels, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, and global trade. It allowed the human population to surge far beyond what local ecosystems could support.

Those increased yields simplified and degraded ecosystems by replacing diverse landscapes with monocultures, depleting soils, draining aquifers, and driving massive declines in insects, birds, and other wildlife.

The same pattern holds more broadly. When “resource” prices fall, it usually reflects increased efficiency and extraction, meaning we get more out of nature, faster. Economists celebrate this as progress; ecologists recognize this as liquidating nature for our use.

The abundance the infinite growthers describe is simply temporary abundance for one species out of ten million at the expense of the living world.

Even the logic of efficiency can backfire. As technologies make “resource” use cheaper, we usually end up using more of those resources overall. This is known as Jevons’ Paradox or the rebound effect. In a growing economy, efficiency does not reduce pressure on the Earth; instead that pressure accelerates.

This is where Ehrlich’s deeper insight still matters. He was pointing to a basic reality: exponential growth on a finite planet must eventually collide with limits.

What we have done, over the past half-century, is simply delay its consequences by drawing down the very systems that sustain us. The result is a strange, unstable condition: apparent abundance alongside real decline and an utter disaster for the natural world.

We have more food, yet less fertile soil per person, and we’ve destroyed forests, prairies, wetlands, rivers, aquifers... just about every ecosystem you can imagine, to get that food.

We have more goods, far beyond what we actually need (bobbleheads?!), yet fewer wild animals.

We have more energy, and a destabilized climate.

Even in the original Simon-Ehrlich wager (1980-1990), there were hints of this. Ehrlich bet that the price of five metals would rise, representing scarcity, and Simon bet they would fall, representing abundance. Simon won; prices fell. But price is not the same thing as physical or ecological abundance. While Ehrlich lost on metal prices, today in 2026, his concerns look far more prescient.

Take copper, one of the metals at the center of Ehrlich’s famous wager. For a time, its price fell, and critics declared victory. Today, copper has surged to record highs, driven by supply constraints and rising demand.

Instead of asking “Is X cheaper,” we need to be asking: are ecosystems healthier? Are soils, forests, fisheries, and freshwater communities being replenished or depleted? Are wildlife numbers increasing or declining? Are humans becoming more or less dissociated from the natural world?

If we ask these questions instead, we get a very different answer, illustrated well by this graph:

Changing distribution of the world’s land mammals. Our World in Data.

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So what does this mean for us in our own communities?

It means we should be cautious about the comforting story that technology will always outrun limits. It means questioning what we really mean by “abundance.” It means recognizing that growth, while it can feel like prosperity in the short term, always comes at the cost of long-term resilience.

We are not exempt from these dynamics. We see them in strained water systems, rising costs of living, and the quiet disappearance of species and landscapes we once took for granted. We see them in the tension between continued development and the capacity of the land to support it.

Ehrlich understood the limits to growth on a finite planet, but he underestimated how far we would go and how destructive our methods would become to avoid them.

The tragedy of his legacy is that we still don’t get it. We point to cheaper commodities and call it victory, even as the living world grows poorer.

That is not abundance. It is overshoot, temporarily disguised as success.