Earth Day’s Bad Bet Against Humanity

The Malthusian mind does not see the human capacity to cooperate, trade, discover, invent, and adapt.

When Paul R. Ehrlich, the famed Stanford University biologist and author of the bestselling 1968 book The Population Bomb, died last month, he was 93 and unrepentant for a lifetime of doom-mongering. In the book he warned, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” In 1970, he predicted, “Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come—and by the end, I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.” Over the succeeding decades, he maintained that less-than-cheerful disposition. In 2013, he wrote that “a global collapse appears likely.” In 2018, he stated that a “shattering collapse of civilization is a ‘near certainty.’” In 2024, he gave his last interview, reiterating his position that humans are destroying the planet and committing civilizational suicide.

Ehrlich’s confident and, to some, attractive demeanor made him a television star with more than 20 appearances on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show—a record unmatched by any other individual guest. Slowly but surely, the techno-optimistic 1960s (Star Trek 1966-1969, The Jetsons 1962-1963, Thunderbirds 1965-1966, etc.) gave way to the doom and gloom of the 1970s. Consider the 1973 film Soylent Green, set in an overcrowded and overheated New York City in 2022. Food is scarce, and most people survive on processed wafers made by the Soylent Corporation. A detective played by Charlton Heston investigates the murder of a wealthy businessman and uncovers a horrific secret: Soylent Green, marketed as a new food source, is made from human remains. Its final revelation made “Soylent Green is people!” one of cinema’s most famous lines.

The first Earth Day—April 22, 1970—came during the transition from optimism to doom and gloom, and Ehrlich played a role in that. He served on the steering committee put together by Earth Day founder Sen. Gaylord Nelson and spoke on campuses across the country. So it’s not surprising that, as the Columbia Climate School has noted, Earth Day was infused not only with the usual and more understandable environmental concerns over pollution and carcinogens, but “Malthusian” worries over overpopulation and overconsumption of resources.

The first Earth Day was a massive success. About 20 million Americans participated. Lectures and rallies took place at more than 2,000 college campuses, 10,000 elementary and high schools, and thousands of other locations around the country. Forty-two states adopted resolutions endorsing Earth Day, and Congress recessed so that legislators could take part in activities back home. In September 1970, Congress strengthened the 1963 Clean Air Act. That December, President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency.Long before Ehrlich warned we were stripping the planet of resources, the English preacher and economist Thomas Robert Malthus wrote in his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population that human numbers, if left unchecked, grow geometrically, while food supply grows only arithmetically. From that simple and, as it turned out, badly mistaken idea, he concluded that humanity would always press against the limits of subsistence. If people multiplied too quickly, nature would restore balance through war, famine, and plague. Those were his “positive checks” on overpopulation and overconsumption. He regarded them as awful, but also as inevitable unless societies adopted “preventive checks,” such as celibacy, that limited reproduction. It is easy to see why Malthus’ argument seemed persuasive. For most of human history, harvest failures could ruin entire populations. Malthus looked at that long record and saw a pattern. The problem was that he took a pattern that had held for centuries and assumed it would hold forever. He mistook a long chapter of human experience for an eternal law of nature.

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In fact, Malthus had already lost his main argument before his essay even appeared in print. Between 1700 and 1798, the population of England rose from 5.2 million to 8.44 million, an increase of 62.3 percent. Over the same period, nominal GDP per person rose from 12.37 British pounds to 23.97 pounds, an increase of 93.8 percent. The nominal price of a four-pound loaf of bread, a staple that fed much of the poor, rose from 5.2 pence to 7.4 pence, or 42.3 percent. Because incomes rose much faster than the price of bread, the latter became 36.2 percent more abundant, not less. Put plainly, as England added more people, the bread of the poor became easier to afford.

Why did Malthus miss what was happening? Partly because the Malthusian thinking, shared by Ehrlich, reduces human beings to their appetites. It sees more mouths and stomachs, but not more hands and minds. It assumes that each additional person means one more claimant on a fixed stock of food and other goods. What it does not see is the human capacity to cooperate, trade, discover, invent, and adapt. Human beings are not trapped in the same ecological logic as bacteria in a dish or buffalo on a plain. We exchange with one another. We build institutions. We create tools. We improve production methods. We substitute one material for another. We grow more from the same soil—sometimes much more. In other words, we create new knowledge. Atoms without knowledge are mostly useless. New knowledge organizes atoms into fertilizer, irrigation systems, container shipping, refrigeration, or high-yield seeds. That is the variable that Malthus ignored and that led to Ehrlich’s very public humiliation.

Unlike Malthus and Ehrlich, the University of Maryland economist and Cato Institute senior fellow Julian Simon understood that scarcity is not the end of the resource story. It is just the beginning of a human response. Higher prices signal a problem. Those higher prices then encourage knowledge creation, and new knowledge leads to greater abundance. And so it was that in 1980, Simon proposed a 10-year futures-style bet. Ehrlich, along with ecologist John Harte from the University of California-Berkeley and John P. Holdren, a Berkeley scientist who later became President Barack Obama’s science adviser, jumped at the opportunity. The bet ran from September 29, 1980, to September 29, 1990.

Ehrlich’s group chose five metals: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. They fixed the starting value of the chosen quantities at $1,000 in 1980 and agreed to compare the inflation-adjusted value of that same basket 10 years later. If the real price of the basket rose, Simon would pay Ehrlich’s group. If it fell, Ehrlich’s group would pay Simon. The wager, therefore, used prices as a proxy for scarcity. When the term ended in 1990, all five metals were cheaper. Ehrlich sent Simon a check for $576.07, reflecting a 36 percent decline in the inflation-adjusted price of the basket. The check was signed by Paul’s wife, Anne Ehrlich. There was no accompanying letter. Simon replied with a thank-you note and offered to raise the stakes to $20,000 for a future bet, but Ehrlich declined.

The Simon Abundance Index, which Dr. Gale L. Pooley and I publish every year on Earth Day, is named after Julian Simon. It is a deliberate continuation of the quantitative analysis of the relationship between population growth and resource abundance that Simon’s bet with Ehrlich began. Unlike Simon and Ehrlich, who measured the abundance of resources in inflation-adjusted dollars, we look at “time prices.” Money prices are distorted by inflation and disputed deflators. Time prices solve that problem by dividing a good’s money price by hourly income, showing how long a person must work to buy it. They capture both falling prices and rising wages, require no inflation adjustment, and allow comparisons across countries and centuries. Time is universal, cannot be printed, and reflects the real cost people pay: hours of life. Time prices provide a clearer, simpler, and more meaningful measure of resource abundance than money prices for ordinary people.

Data visualization by Amanda Swinghamer Henderson.

By this measure, the last 45 years have been a rout for the pessimists. The 2026 report says that the Simon Abundance Index stood at 636.4 in 2025, up from a base of 100 in 1980. That means Earth was 536.4 percent more abundant in 2025 than in 1980. All 50 commodities, including fuels, such as crude oil, coal, and natural gas, food, such as chicken, beef, and lamb, and metals, such as aluminum, copper, and gold (yes, even gold!), in the dataset were more abundant in 2025 than they were in 1980. The global abundance of resources increased at a compound annual rate of 4.2 percent, doubling about every 17 years. In the 42 countries tracked by the report—accounting for 85.9 percent of global gross domestic product and 66.3 percent of the world’s population—none saw lower resource abundance in 2025 than in 1980. That is not what a species trapped in Malthus’ arithmetic is supposed to produce.

The mechanics of that gain matter. Between 1980 and 2025, time prices for the 50 commodities fell by an average of 70.9 percent. What required an hour of work in 1980 required about 18 minutes in 2025. The same hour of work that bought one unit of a typical commodity in 1980 bought 3.44 units in 2025. That is a 244 percent increase in personal resource abundance. At the same time, the world population grew by 85 percent, from 4.44 billion to 8.21 billion. Put those two changes together and you get the index’s central finding: For every 1 percent increase in global population, population-level resource abundance grew by about 6.3 percent. Resources growing at a faster pace than the population is what Pooley and I call superabundance. It is the opposite of Malthus’ conjecture that each additional person leaves less for everyone else.

The critics sometimes retreat to complaining about the short-term noise, as though any temporary spike in prices confirms the Malthusian creed. Our report addresses that, too. In 2025, 27 commodities became more abundant, and 23 became less abundant. The abundance of oranges rose the most, by 65.6 percent, while coconut oil’s abundance fell the most, by 36.3 percent. But commodity markets always swing because weather changes, disease hits crops, wars disrupt transport, and investment arrives late or early. Simon never argued that every price falls every year in a straight line. He argued that scarcity signals provoke adjustment. A temporary setback is not a vindication of Malthus. It is often the first stage of a correction. That is why the long trend matters more than the annual changes.

Data visualization by Amanda Swinghamer Henderson.

Our findings do not show that pollution is imaginary or that every environmental question has been solved. It has not. But environmental problems should be addressed as side effects of human flourishing, not as evidence that human flourishing itself is a mistake. The Earth Day mentality blurred that distinction. It converted planetary stewardship into misanthropy. It taught millions to look at a growing population and see only a burden, never a contribution. It treated the human animal as uniquely destructive when, in fact, people are the only animals who can recognize ecological damage and fix it. It is new knowledge—human knowledge—that gives societies the capacity to clean rivers, regulate toxins, build sewage systems, improve fuel efficiency, and move from dirtier technologies to cleaner ones. A poor society burns what it can find and dumps what it cannot manage. A rich society can afford scrubbers, pipelines, wastewater treatment, research labs, and better rules.

The green extremists often speak as though abundance is the disease, when in fact abundance is usually what makes environmental improvement possible. And so, despite half a century of doomsaying, the Earth is not collapsing under the weight of humanity. It is supporting far more people who can command far more resources with far less labor than their predecessors could. That is not the picture of a planet in terminal decline. It is the picture of a planet made more habitable by the one species clever enough to improve it. The Earth is not a museum piece. It is a working planet inhabited by learning beings who desire and are entitled to flourish.

This article was originally published in The Dispatch on 4/23/2026.