Population still huge problem as environment goes downhill

Forty years on, the message from Ehrlich, now 76 and the Bing professor of population studies in the department of biological sciences at Stanford, has barely mellowed. He and his wife have just published a new book, The Dominant Animal, the central theme of which is how one species, Homo sapiens, has become so powerful that it can significantly undermine the Earth's ability to support much of life.

It is undeniably timely as we lurch from one grim realisation to another: a climate crisis, then an energy crisis, now a food crisis. And underlying them all is the issue of population. When Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, there were 3.5 billion people on Earth; there are now 6.7 billion. "The connections are so obvious it's appalling that they're not made," he says. "Each person we add now disproportionately impacts on the environment and life-support systems of the planet."
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There is cause for guarded optimism. He says: "If you look at it historically, the rise of environmental consciousness has been extremely rapid. We're only 40 years into it. The trouble is, the environment has been going downhill far faster."