Paul R. Ehrlich
Paul R. Ehrlich was born on May 29, 1932, in Philadelphia, a place that situated him within the cultural and intellectual life of the eastern United States during the mid-twentieth century. A citizen of the United States, he received his early education at Columbia High School before continuing his studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Kansas, where he developed the academic grounding that shaped his later work.
Ehrlich worked as a biologist, demographer, environmentalist, and university teacher, practicing across fields that connected the life sciences with questions of human population. His notable work, The Population Bomb, stands as the publication most directly associated with his name. He worked in the English language throughout his career.
The breadth of recognition he received over the course of his career was considerable. He was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, the Crafoord Prize in Biosciences, the Heineken Prizes, the Blue Planet Prize, and the Heinz Award. He was also elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, an honor reflecting the international dimension of his standing as a biologist and environmentalist.
Ehrlich died on March 13, 2026, in Palo Alto. His career as a biologist, demographer, environmentalist, and university teacher, together with the publication of The Population Bomb and the awards and fellowships accumulated over decades, formed the concrete record of his professional life from his birth in Philadelphia to his death nearly ninety-four years later.
Quotes by Paul R. Ehrlich
Paul R. Ehrlich's insights on:
There’s all of this stuff where we have so much debate over nonsense; it could be cured if we had a better educational system, if we trained people to really try and look into things on their own. That’s a tough thing to do, particularly with the educational system staggering.
All scientists who’ve looked at it know we have to phase away from burning fossil fuels. That means we’ve got to put a lot of effort into alternate energy technologies, but we’re still subsidizing fossil fuels and not subsidizing most of the alternatives. It’s not going to be an easy transition.
If we were redesigning around people instead of around automobiles, which I think the market is more or less going to do, although too slowly, than I’d be a lot cheerier.
We’ve all got to get together and demand something better out of our government and out of each other. We’ve got a system that’s making us working harder, and isn’t giving us satisfaction. We’ve got to sit down and decide what the hell we really want to be as human beings.
For example, I’m a great fan of pornography, but I don’t see any reason not to restrict it so that people walking down the street who hate pornography don’t have full color pictures outside of movie theaters. Let them be in a different district. I’m kidding about pornography, but you get the point.
With taxes, if they aren’t working right, we can change them with a stroke of the pen. It’s basically a market-type mechanism. People make their own choices. You run the taxes, and you get the results.
We’re never all going to agree with each other. We have to learn to value the diversity. It’s one of the presumable principles of our government that isn’t followed nearly enough – one of the jobs of the majority is to try and make the minority feel comfortable.
There’s no question at all that the population explosion will come to an end. The two basic choices are it’ll come to an end because we control our reproduction, and in many areas we have started to do so, or we’ll end up with a high death rate. You have to take a personal moral stand on this.
Chinese are already more on board than we are. China is the only country that actually discussed in formal government documents how important it is to control the size of your populations if you’re going to limit emissions.
We ought to take good care of everybody we have on the planet, but we ought to regulate the rate at which people join us. The old saying is, “It’s the top of the ninth inning, and humanity has been hitting nature hard, but you’ve always got to remember that nature bats last.”