Yes, it is something else. It is tyrany. Let’s call it by the ugly name it deserves.

Jokes aside, the ‘population control’ crowd /does/ have a following in Europe… less among environmentalists or even ‘liberals’ than among technocratic believers in what I would call a ‘managerial state.’ Mikhail Gorbachev is prominent in the movement, as one example… but so are quite a few European conservatives of the Franco-esque stripe.

The population control people frequently /call/ themselves enivironmentalists, but their fundamental approach has a lot more in common with the 1910s and 1920s theory that if one simply properly managed every aspect of human life then one could engineer utopia. That’s NOT environmentalism, that’s something else entirely.

I realize supporters of Ehrich’s nonsense are fairly fringe on the left, but are they really so far out of the mainstream of environmentalist thought? Fringe or not, the ability to influence the World Bank as well as European biotech policy makes them pretty powerful.

I agree with you that political instability and corruption are among the largest contributors to hunger. However, I’m not ready to say that the “real challenge is no longer technological.” Right now almost 20 percent of the world’s wheat crop is in imminent danger due to wheat rust. What Norman Borlaug giveth, nature could taketh away in the blink of an eye if we discount the importance of continued technological innovation.

It is important to distinguish ‘environmentalists’ from the Ehrlich-ites who buy into the ‘population bomb’ nonsense. Ehrlich wrote his book even as his theories were being disproved by Borlaug’s actual work, and the majority of those committed to his theories are a small fringe group as disparate from the mainstream of environmentalist thought as David Duke is from mainstream conservative thought. They are pretty damn loud, but most credible environmentalists and economists (even ‘leftists’ like New Dealers and Radicals) see Borlaug’s work as direct refutation of most of Ehrlich’s core theories. The ‘population bomb theory’ is that population growth will always outpace food production, and Borlaug’s Green Revolution has proved that total food production can very easily outstrip total population growth.

The real challenge of feeding the world is no longer technological. The biggest reason for famine today is the system of distribution and its susceptibility to political instability, corruption, and economic depression.

I’m tremendously amused that we both wrote of Borlaug’s death right away.