ABSTRACT
B y 1970, the United States and Canada were among the wealth -iest nations in the world. Like most affluent nations, the two countries had low birth rates, but immigration from other countries caused their populations to
growing population-and rising resource
consumption and pollution-became a source of concern to many environmental-
ists and the public. Overpopulation Concerns. The pos-
sibility that the planet faced an overpopulation crisis came to public notice in 1968 with the publication of The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University professor of population sUldies. The book predicted that global population pressures would soon reach such a level that, in the best-case scemuio,
fully one-fifth of the three billion people on Earth in 1968 would die of starvation by the late 1970s. Attempts to increase agliculurral productivity would only worsen the food shortage in the long run, Ehrlich wrote, because high-yield methods of agriculurral production caused erosion and relied too heavily on toxic pesticides (see also 122-23 ) that would evenulally damage the soil. To prevent this outcome, Elu'lich recommended programs to coerce people to have fewer children.
