«Several of the anti-immigration organizations that abetted the White House adviser Stephen Miller’s rise to power, for example, owe their origins to the work of John Tanton, a former head of ZPG [Zero Population Growth] and a Sierra Club leader who diverged from mainstream environmentalism as it moved toward more neutral views on immigration. Foremost among them is the Federation for American Immigration Reform, on whose board of advisers Ehrlich once sat. A New York Times investigation traced much of the funding for FAIR and its allies to the late billionaire Cordelia Scaife May, who divided her giving among anti-immigration organizations, conservation nonprofits, and population-control groups, and pushed the last of these to take stronger stances on border security. (May’s foundation also funded an English translation and reissue of The Camp of the Saints, the white-supremacist novel that inspired the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.)
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Democrats inherited a different but no less influential set of priors from the population panic. Absent from liberals’ environmental agendas today are the coercive overtones and the paternalistic descriptions of the developing world. Yet as the heated debate over Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s recent book, Abundance, has shown, a significant faction of Democrats remains skeptical that a revived pro-growth politics can be kept consistent with progressive values. Protests in deep-blue communities against dense housing and green-energy infrastructure recall Ehrlich’s insistence that America is already overdeveloped. And the small but growing number of young people who cite climate change as the reason they do not want children reflects a view that, in its way, is gloomier than anything Ehrlich wrote.
The line in political discourse between counterproductive pessimism and clarifying realism has always been a fine one. In light of Ehrlich’s death, however, the staying power of The Population Bomb’s scarcity mindset should give us pause. It is not, in fact, a law of nature that we can’t make the world of tomorrow better than the one we have now [emphasis mine — John L.], and neither is the notion that the steps needed to get there are incompatible with broader civic values. Ehrlich built his reputation on unnervingly radical solutions to avoid what he believed was the planet’s imminent destruction. What he failed to understand was how, time and again, our ingenuity has proved that the limits to growth are not as immutable as we once believed.»
What Paul Ehrlich’s Fear of Scarcity Did to American Politics – The Atlantic
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