Paul Ehrlich and Kenneth Watt were not considered heavy hitters, they were considered sensationalists. And while they were wrong in specific predictions, they are right to warn about the carrying capacity of Earth for humanity. I doubt mankind will change its nature in time though, so I have been preparing a cookbook which I am sure will be a hit in the future, "101 Entrees using Soylent Green", although it will only be available via Amazon Kindle, as paper is sure to be prohibitively expensive at the time of its publishing.
Sensationalists or not, the views were widely promoted just like Rachel Carson's dystopia of a silent spring with people waking up to an absence of birds singing. Today's climate change/global warming evangelists are no strangers to sensationalism.
What the 1970 crowd missed or woefully underestimated is the rapidity that technology would play in ruining their forecasts of doom timetables. It may be the same thing that's happening today where simply a multitude of technologies, as was spoken of in Herbu's videos earlier, is going to make an unforeseen impact in reducing emissions. A problem if not a danger to me is governments looking to impose their ideas of what ought be done by laws that are not so easily undone when they're no longer relevant.
But I do agree with you my friend that it is not wise to challenge the carrying capacity of our planet. Or to keep looking to extend it even though we are able to. Yet that is what we're doing because there are always unintended consequences in what may appear to be the most noble of intentions.
My mother had two sisters and two brothers. There were at least two more children but they died while young. None of them spoke especially kindly about their father who blamed his economic woes on how many kids there were. From time to time his anger over the never ending needs of the family to be clothed and fed rose from verbal anger to beatings. None were spared. That is until one day her oldest sister stood up to him and wrested the piece of wood that he used to inflict his anger from his hands and told him he had no business bringing so many children into the world if he couldn't care for them. She said some other things but the beatings stopped that day.
I read somewhere that the average global lifespan was something like 35 years in 1900. Today it's more than double that. So a billion people today are consuming double the resources from those in 1900, more or less. The otherwise noble efforts of bringing potable water, AIDS medicine, looking to eliminate malaria in countries, has the unintended consequence of placing additional demands on the earth's resources. Reading articles that talk about human lifespans of 200 years being within reach also means that a billion people today will have resource consumption of 5-6 billion people in 1900, give or take. Artificial insemination and other fertility techniques that often result in multiple births also create additional needs for resources. It's this population thing that IMO is the big problem. But how to get it under control and bring it down?
