PAUL EHRLICH WON THE DEBATE: Just read the comments.
Responses to that 2021 article were similar: “Maybe fewer humans will help the planet and some of humanity survive.” “At an early age, I saw that the explosion of humans on this planet was ruining the world for future generations and all other living species.” “Mother Nature has an answer to her pressing concerns and we are not needed.”
And the New York Times published four letters in response to its latest piece on low and falling birth rates, and all four were against babies.
Four letters printed in the NYT today. Every single one calls falling birthrates a good thing.
— Matthew Hennessey (@MattHennessey) March 9, 2026
This isn’t unique to the New York Times readership, though. The Washington Post’s former letters editor wrote that many of her writers really thought people were bad.
When I was the letters editor at The Washington Post, it was consistently shocking to me how many letters we got suggesting it would be a good thing for the human race to just go extinct. https://t.co/H9f3RCcuj9
— Alyssa Rosenberg (@AlyssaRosenberg) March 9, 2026
Sure enough, when I wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about how to make your life easier by having many children, the 6,000 comments were almost all negative.
“In this world of over-consumption having so many kids seems selfish. More than that morally reprehensible … relies on a patriarchal view of the family.”
“The planet is already overpopulated. The author’s disdain for science and the nature of exponential increase is obvious.”
The sad fact is that millions of people believe the planet is overpopulated. That view is grounded in a belief that humans are basically bad.
Related:
Paul Ehrlich is now dead. It's very rare that you have an intellectual who so clearly would've been a Mao or Hitler if he had the chance. Ehrlich hated humanity, and as reality proved him wrong again and again, he doubled down, proving this was no mere intellectual error.…
— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) March 16, 2026
“It’s very rare that you have an intellectual who so clearly would’ve been a Mao or Hitler if he had the chance.” Perhaps not as rare you might think.