The Foundations Are Cracking
The environmental movement has two founding saints. Paul Ehrlich, whose 1968 book The Population Bomb predicted mass starvation and global collapse. Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring launched the modern environmental movement and led to a worldwide ban on DDT. Both were wrong - demonstrably, measurably, catastrophically wrong. And both continue to be venerated as untouchable authorities by a movement that claims to be evidence-based. The question is not whether they were wrong - the evidence on that is settled. The question is why a movement that prides itself on “following the science” refuses to follow it when the science contradicts its founding myths.
This is a companion to the series on the institutions behind political parties. The Green Party and the broader environmental movement did not emerge from nowhere. They were built on an intellectual foundation laid by Ehrlich and Carson. If that foundation is unsound and it is then the entire structure built on top of it deserves the same scrutiny.
Paul Ehrlich: The Man Who Was Wrong About Everything
Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb in 1968. It was one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. It sold millions of copies. It was assigned in universities. It was cited by governments. It shaped the global conversation about population, resources, and the environment for decades.
Ehrlich’s thesis was simple: population growth would outstrip food production, leading to mass starvation in the 1970s and 1980s. He wrote: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
He predicted that by the 1980s, England would not exist - not in the political sense, but it literally would not be able feed itself and would have ceased to function as a nation. He predicted that the United States would experience food riots and that democracy would collapse under the pressure of resource scarcity. He predicted that the oceans would die, that the planet would run out of essential minerals, and that civilization itself would not survive the twentieth century.
None of it happened.
Global food production per capita rose steadily through the 1970s, 1980s, and every decade since. Famines became less frequent, not more - and when they occurred, they were caused by war and political failure, not by absolute food shortages. The world population doubled from 3.5 billion in 1968 to over 8 billion today, and the proportion of people living in hunger fell dramatically. Prosaically, England still exists.
Ehrlich was wrong about every specific prediction he made. Not some of them. All of them. The environmental journalist Stewart Brand, who was deeply influenced by Ehrlich in his early career, later said: “Ehrlich was wrong about everything, but he was wrong in the right direction.” That sentence is a perfect summary of the movement’s relationship with evidence. Being wrong is acceptable as long as you were wrong in a way that supports the cause.
Ehrlich never lost his academic position at Stanford. Never retracted his predictions. Never apologized. Never faced professional consequences for being wrong. He is still cited, still interviewed, still treated as an authority on population and resources - fifty years after every specific claim he made was falsified by events.
Why? Because his errors were useful. Ehrlich’s apocalyptic predictions created the sense of crisis that the environmental movement needed to justify its policy agenda. If the problem was not urgent - if technology, markets, and human ingenuity could solve it - then the radical restructuring of society that environmentalists wanted was harder to justify. Ehrlich’s wrongness was functional. The movement needed him to have been right, so it pretended he was.
Rachel Carson and the DDT Disaster
Rachel Carson is the untouchable saint of environmentalism. Silent Spring (1962) is routinely ranked as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. Carson is credited with launching the modern environmental movement, and deservedly so - the book’s impact on public consciousness and policy was immense.
The problem is that the policy Carson inspired had a human cost that dwarfs any environmental benefit the DDT ban achieved.
DDT was the most effective anti-malarial insecticide ever developed. It was cheap, safe when used properly, and devastatingly effective against the mosquitoes that transmit malaria. The World Health Organization estimated that DDT spraying in the 1950s and 1960s saved tens of millions of lives. Malaria was eliminated from Europe, North America, and much of Asia through systematic DDT use.
The scientific claims in Silent Spring - that DDT caused cancer in humans, that it would cause bird populations to collapse, that it was a permanent environmental poison - were overstated at the time and have been largely disproven since. The National Cancer Institute, the American Medical Association, and the World Health Organization all concluded that there was no evidence that DDT caused cancer in humans at the levels found in the environment. Bird populations did not collapse. DDT breaks down in the environment faster than Carson claimed.
None of that mattered. The political momentum Carson created was unstoppable. The United States banned DDT in 1972. Other countries followed. The WHO stopped supporting indoor DDT spraying in the 1970s, despite its proven effectiveness against malaria.
The result was predictable and indeed predicted at the time. Malaria, which had been driven back to the margins of the developing world, surged back. In Sri Lanka, a DDT spraying program had reduced malaria cases from 2.8 million in 1948 to just 17 in 1963. After DDT was restricted, cases rose to over half a million by 1969. Across sub-Saharan Africa, the return of malaria killed millions of people - most of them children under five.
The precise death toll is debated, but the most careful estimates put it in the millions. The World Health Organization’s Roll Back Malaria program, launched in 1998, eventually reversed course and again recommended indoor DDT spraying for malaria control. By then, the damage was done. Millions of people had died from a disease that could have been prevented by a chemical that had been banned based on claims that turned out to be wrong.
Carson did not intend this. She was writing about the overuse of pesticides in American agriculture, not about malaria control in Africa. Silent Spring barely mentions malaria. But the policy momentum she created did not discriminate between DDT sprayed on crops in Iowa and DDT sprayed on the walls of huts in Mozambique. The ban swept everything away.
Like Ehrlich, Carson never faced professional consequences for being wrong about key claims. Unlike Ehrlich, she died before the full consequences of her work became clear - Carson sadly died of breast cancer in 1964, two years after Silent Spring was published. But her legacy is no less complicated for being unintentional. The millions of malaria deaths that followed the DDT ban are a direct cost of the environmental movement she to found.
The Pattern
Ehrlich and Carson are not isolated cases. They are the first two entries in a pattern that defines the environmental movement to this day.
The pattern works like this:
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A claim is made that the environment is in imminent danger. It is stated in apocalyptic terms - “hundreds of millions will starve,” “spring will be silent.” The claim attracts enormous attention and creates political momentum.
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The claim turns out to be wrong, overstated, or based on selective evidence. The specific predictions do not come true. The causal mechanisms are weaker than claimed. The costs of the proposed solution emerge only later.
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The movement never admits the error. The person who made the claim is not discredited but venerated. The policy remains in place even after the evidence against it accumulates. New apocalyptic claims replace the old ones - resource scarcity gives way to climate change, ozone depletion gives way to biodiversity loss - and each new claim benefits from the crisis credibility that the previous claim created.
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Anyone who points out the pattern is accused of being in the pocket of industry, denying the science, or wanting to destroy the planet. The movement’s reflexive defensiveness is not an accident - it is a structural necessity. If you admit that Ehrlich was wrong, you must also admit that Carson was wrong. If you admit that Carson was wrong, you must ask what other policies are being pursued on the basis of claims that have not been properly audited.
This is the same pattern that defines the climate debate today. A prediction is made. It does not come true on the predicted timeline. The goalposts are moved. The prediction is replaced with a new, more urgent one. Anyone who notices the pattern is accused of bad faith.
What This Means
The environmental movement has an intellectual accounting problem it has never been willing to acknowledge. It canonised two figures who were demonstrably wrong about their central claims - not wrong in minor details, but wrong about the entire thesis. And it has never reconciled itself to that fact.
This matters because the same movement is now demanding the most expensive and far-reaching policy transformation in human history on the basis of models and predictions that have the same structure as Ehrlich’s and Carson’s. Apocalyptic scenarios. Tight deadlines. Certain disaster if we do not act immediately. The same pattern that was wrong in the 1960s and 1970s is being used to justify policies that will cost trillions of dollars and reshape every aspect of economic life.
The question is not whether climate change is real - the evidence that the planet is warming is overwhelming, and I have never disputed it. The question is whether the institutional structure that produced the Ehrlich and Carson catastrophes has been reformed, or whether it is producing the same kind of overconfident, politically convenient, evidence-resistant predictions that it has always produced.
The history of the environmental movement suggests that the answer is not encouraging.
Next time: the Conservative Party and whether it has ever had an intellectual foundation worth auditing at all.