[debate] population controls and the Paul Holdren controversy

Wed Jul 22 11:22:39 UTC 2009

I am also not fond of Fox News, but they weren't entirely off base here.

While I'm not really familiar with the facts in this case, I will note a few things:

In the late 1960's and early 1970's, there was widespread concern about population growth, and some of the more easily frightened intellectuals proposed some quite unsavory things because they felt the threat was so great.  Apparently Holdren co-authored a book which suggested that forced abortions and sterilization may be necessary.  Whether he wrote the sections in question is unknown.

Holdren was not alone, of course.  I recall reading some of Larry Niven's books from that time, in which he assumed that a future, overpopulated Earth had strict limits on procreation - despite several other planets having been colonized.  (In fact, his awesome character Beowulf Schaeffer is an albino whose home planet was settled by people who weren't allowed to have children on Earth due to such "deficiencies" as albinism.)  Harry Harrison (whose Stainless Steel Rat novels I enjoy) nonetheless got just about everything wrong in the 1966 novel "Make Room! Make Room!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Room!_Make_Room!

I read this in the 1990's, and couldn't help laughing at the prediction that Americans would be starving by the millions (at the time I was reading the novel) due to a lack of food.  Really hilariously bad stuff.  This novel was the starting point for the film "Soylent Green", but I must sorrowfully inform you that Soylent Green is really . . . a mixture of soybeans and lentils.  I know, I know, kind of anticlimactic for anyone familiar with the film.

It is unlikely that Holdren was considering the scourge of global warming at the time, because many of the same people were also predicting famine and death due to the coming Ice Age, which was a clear and present danger.  Seriously, a few years ago I saw an old documentary from, I think, 1973, with Leonard Nimoy narrating about the perils we faced from global cooling.  I first encountered the fears of the coming ice age in the late 1970s when I bought some old copies of "Mad" magazine at a yard sale.

Seriously.  I can't make this stuff up.  And other people besides myself remember this as well, which is one reason why there are so many skeptics of global warming.

So, while the Fox News piece certainly went for the jugular in their hit piece on Holdren, pulling out the most controversial sections from a book he co-wrote almost 40 years ago - despite the fact that the views were common then and that Holdren has doubtless changed his mind in the years since - it is still a reasonable thing to look at a person's track record.  Occasionally being wrong is no great shame, but if Holdren has been consistently wrong in the past, as some claim, then he may not be the man for this job.