LIFE

A memoir from the renowned biologist, ecologist, and conservationist.

Ehrlich (b. 1932) is best known for his 1968 international bestseller, The Population Bomb; his memoir is less controversial but entirely entertaining. For decades, he has been a well-known, sometimes contentious public figure, a “natural-born loudmouth.” Less well known is his day job as an entomologist who has made major contributions to evolutionary science. Readers reluctant to experience another environmental-destruction polemic will be pleased that the first half of the book describes the author’s life before The Population Bomb. Ehrlich delivers an amusing account of a science-obsessed childhood, college at the University of Pennsylvania, pursuit of a doctorate at the University of Kansas, and the surprisingly nasty politics that accompanied his climb through academia. University teaching is not a lucrative career, and writing began as a supplement to his “inadequate salary,” but research grants, sabbaticals, and fellowships enabled him to travel the world, from the Arctic to the tropics to Australia and Africa. On the downside, travel exposed him to a great deal of human misery. “Although we saw plenty of poverty in Southeast Asia, at least in the places we visited it was not with the same immense press of people or with the same depth of poverty or lack of sanitation we found in India,” he writes. “Our experience there really brought home to us how lucky we were.” Critics of Ehrlich’s iconic book point out that the population explosion predicted in 1968 never happened and that technology has vastly increased food production. In response, he makes the plausible argument that today’s Earth is, in fact, overpopulated, and hunger remains widespread. Supplying food and energy to this excess population is exhausting the soil, wiping out wildlife, destroying the environment, and warming the planet. He maintains that, far from being a voice of doom, “I was actually wildly optimistic about what would be accomplished if society’s leaders and the public were alerted to the dangers ahead.”

Consistently interesting stories from a famous scientist’s busy life.