MEMOIR
Life: A Journey Through Science and Politics
Paul R. Ehrlich
Yale University Press, $45.99

The foreword to Paul R. Ehrlich’s Life is written by his daughter Lisa, who turns 70 next year. Her father is now 92, and Lisa succinctly sums up the challenges of being the child of one of the world’s most controversial scientists – evolving from the teenage embarrassment and angst of having a celebrity dad who would be receiving accolades and awards one day and death threats the next, to close confidante and taste-tester for many of his books, including this one.

Lisa was too young to give editorial advice on Ehrlich’s most influential and controversial book, 1968’s The Population Bomb. The book makes terrifying predictions of the dire consequences for our species of unfettered reproduction, and sold more than 2 million copies (a population explosion in itself, at least in the field of popular science writing).

Thankfully, many of Ehrlich’s most frightening fecundity forecasts have failed to materialise, including mass starvation in India, Egypt and China by the 1980s, largely due to the success of the “green revolution” and its vastly increased crop yields.

Paul R. Ehrlich (the “R.” to avoid confusion with German scientist Paul Ehrlich, who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1915), was born to Jewish parents in Philadelphia in 1932, which he describes as “one of the smartest things I ever did”.

Indeed, throughout this fascinating account of a very public life in science, academia and environmental activism, Ehrlich makes reference to being fortunate enough to have lived through nearly a century of dreams, discoveries and disasters. He remembers being a teenager and celebrating the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a surgical end to a ghastly war, before warning in his 40s, along with Carl Sagan and others, of the looming catastrophe of nuclear winter that could follow any third world war.

From nuclear winter to global warming, from a childhood collecting butterflies to seeing his nets emptied by DDT, Ehrlich’s book is a rambling collection of memories, anecdotes and thumbnail character sketches.

Much of Life was written during the COVID-19 pandemic, and while pandemics and plagues were among the nightmares he’d predicted in 1968, he insists that “in retrospect I can see that, while many considered me overly pessimistic, I was actually wildly optimistic [about] what would be accomplished if society’s leaders and the public were alerted to the dangers ahead”.