Laura E. Huggins responds to The Times' July 24 Op-Ed article "The world's biggest problem? Too many people." Huggins is a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and at the Property and Environment Research Center. She was co-editor of the book "Population Puzzle: Boom or Bust?"
Mary Ellen Harte and Anne Ehrlich write, "Unsustainable population levels are depleting resources and denying a decent future to our descendants. We must stop the denial."
We are in denial for a reason. For more than 40 years, climaxing around the first Earth Day, the public has been bombarded with apocalyptic tales of disaster regarding population growth. Paul Ehrlich, for example, a Stanford professor, prominent prophet of population doom and contributor to this op-ed article, predicted in his 1968 bestseller "The Population Bomb" that millions of people would die of starvation during the 1970s because the Earth's inhabitants would multiply at a faster rate than the world's ability to supply food. Six years later, in "The End of Affluence," a book he co-authored with his wife, Anne Ehrlich, the death toll estimates increased to a billion dying from starvation by the mid-1980s. By 1985, Ehrlich predicted, the world would enter a genuine era of scarcity.
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