Back in the 1970s, when the world was still reeling from literary wake up calls from such people as Rachel Carson ("Silent Spring") and Paul Ehrlich ("The Population Bomb"), the noted science fiction author Philip Jose Farmer ("Riverworld") wrote a story called "Seventy years of DecPop."

The premise was that a mad scientist created and unleashed an aerosol which rendered 99 out of 100 humans infertile. The story consisted of a series of vignettes from the seventy years subsequent to that action. The basic premise is that despite the emotional and logistic turmoil of the population being decreased by some 80%, humanity and the world would be happier for it.

A lot of people, badly frightened by the grim forecasts that Carson and Ehrlich had made (Ehrlich predicted a vast die off of some 65 million people in the United States alone by the end of the 1970s) read the story with a certain amount of wistfulness. The only other options were the Malthusian nightmares of famine, plague and war. Farmer’s scenario seemed an easy way out.

The good news, of course, is that Carson and Ehrlich were wrong. Both underestimated the technological progress humans would make that would increase the world’s food supply by nearly 100% while developing more efficient and cleaner industry. We have starvation in the world, certainly – some 75 million people a year die of malnutrition and/or bad drinking water. But our numbers have increased well beyond what Ehrlich saw as the breaking point.

The bad news, of course, is that Carson and Ehrlich were right. Our technology and other advances have done nothing but delay the inevitable. We lose an estimated 300,000 acres a year to topsoil depletion and urbanization in the United States alone, and it’s far worse in other parts of the world. Nearly 40% of the world’s population has little or no access to safe drinking water. The news from our oceans is flat out terrifying, with commercial species of fish depleted by 90%. The Grand Banks, hailed when I was a kid in the 60s as an endless source of food, are closed in the hopes that they aren’t so badly overfished that the species can’t make a comeback. Global warming, no longer a theory, threatens to greatly reduce the amount of reliable crops we can grow due to changes in and increased fluctuations of the weather. With SARS comes the intimation that the next, long-overdue, pandemic may be upon us. This administration’s reckless disregard for the environment, and cheerful use of nuclear materials in war, exacerbate the problems of pollution. Just this past weekend, the administration quietly issued a executive order permitting development of areas currently closed off due to PCB contamination. When you buy that home in the new subdivision, just remember that we all gotta die sometime.

Sir Crispin Tickell, Director, Centre for Environmental Policy University of Oxford, wrote, "As was well brought out in a paper by Warren Hern in 1994, there has been rapid growth of one such species, leading to its invasion and destruction of adjacent ecosystems, colonization of all available niches, and (in terms of its behaviour as well as biology), increasing similarity of appearance, function, and social structure. In terms of factors of increase within the last century, human population rose by four, air pollution by around five, water use by nine, sulphur emissions by thirteen, energy use by sixteen, carbon dioxide emission by seventeen, marine fish catch by thirty-five, and industrial output by forty."

An Austrian group, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), forecast that the human population will not continue to grow exponentially (well, it can’t – the earth has a finite surface), but will level off in seventy years (Farmer’s favorite number) at 9 billion (Arthur C. Clark’s favorite number).

Whether nine billion is a sustainable number is open to conjecture. Ask 1,000 experts what an optimum sustainable human population on earth might be, and you might get 1,000 different answers. The main point of delineation falls along the twin estimates of earth’s adaptability, and the ability of our technology to keep us going.

The earth is more adaptable than we feared, but not as much as we hoped. Evolutionary adaptation and renaissance is more common, and occurs more quickly, than we thought it did in the 1960s. Short of nuclear war, there isn’t much we can do that will destroy all life on earth that won’t eliminate us long before the last cockroach falls. If the entire human race were to suddenly drop dead tomorrow, in a million years there would be no sign of us, save for PCBs and slightly elevated radiation counts in some places. Some existing life form, descendants of cats or raccoons maybe, might be space-faring beings in three million years.

A favorite ploy of right wingers is to pretend that environmentalists put nature ahead of people. But nearly every catastrophic prediction made involves the earth, and life on earth, surviving, but humanity, or at least humanity’s civilization, getting wiped out.

We’ve learned that there have been dozens of "events" that have wiped out 90% of life on earth. While evolution leads to an ever greater number of more diverse life forms, the fact is that not only is the earth not more diverse than it was 250 million years ago, but it may be less diverse. The reason for this is that something comes along that wipes out most life forms. An asteroid hits the earth (which is what is believed to have eliminated the dinosaurs), or a massive volcano causes a mini ice age that eliminates summer for three or four years (like the one in Indonesia that caused the 300 year hiatus in human civilization known as "The Dark Ages).

The life forms that have been around the longest are the simplest life forms. But the cockroach, humble as he might be, had to compete with dinosaurs, who were at least as intelligent and biologically and genetically advanced as birds, and lived to see them all die. In the event of a catastrophe, it’s the top of the food chain that dies off first. There are more advanced species (chordate) that have gone extinct than there are presently in existence, and it includes some pretty tough and resilient characters. (When I was a kid, dinosaurs were cold blooded, sluggish, and stupid, much like Republicans. We now know that they were quick, agile, and adaptable, and may have been warm-blooded and might even have been as intelligent as, say, members of the cat family. The fact that dinosaurs lasted 100 times longer than humanity has been around and survived a number of extinction-level events before the big astro-smash finished them off is testimony to that.)

Given enough time, something will happen that might drive humanity down to a few millions and wipe out our civilization. That is certain. It’s one reason why I’m such a strong supporter of space exploration. If we’re on other planets, other star systems, we won’t be wiped out by one single comet or some sort of accident with the sun.

But saying that we will be hit by some sort of extinction level event, or that climate change will occur anyway, or that a war will reduce the surplus population, is a bit like deciding that if you drive a car long enough, you will be involved in a serious accident, and so you drive into a brick wall at 90 miles an hour "to get it out of the way."

There are a lot of things the universe can do to mess us up. It’s happened a lot of times in earth’s history, and it will happen again. And life will survive.

But we might not.

And that’s what makes the claim that environmentalists put the earth ahead of humans so very silly. Most scenarios don’t involve destruction of the planet. Just change.

We are our own worst enemy. There are too many of us, and that, above all else, is what makes us vulnerable; population pressures lead to war (no longer just a childish spat between villages that leaves both sides able to reform in quick order), poisoning of air and water, and alteration of weather and climate. All of which can destroy our civilization, and could destroy us.

There is an answer to stabilizing our population, and it goes against the poisonous logic of the Malthusians and the Social Darwinists.

The answer is to make sure everyone is fed and has adequate access to clean water, shelter, and education.

There are nations on earth that have Zero Population Growth now. If it weren’t for Immigration, America would be close to that level. Nearly all of those nations have this in common: generally good living standards for the general population, with adequate food, water, education, and shelter.

The nations with the exploding birthrates are those with widespread lack of such amenities. Crack open an almanac and look for yourself. Population growth is an almost straight line correlation to wealth and personal security, and in the exact opposite direction to that which Malthus believed.

You want to stop the population bomb? Feed the world.