Paul Ehrlich didn’t just get things wrong, his ideas were objectively harmful.

This is the position of Richard Tren, who was writing this weekend in The Common Sense.

He was reflecting on the death of biologist and environmental campaigner Paul Ehrlich, whose predictions about population growth now seem totally misguided, and whose influence, he argues, had damaging real-world consequences.

Ehrlich died this month in California, at the age of 93.

Tren’s analysis returns to Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb, which warned that rapid population growth would drive mass starvation and ecological collapse. Ehrlich’s argument helped shape a generation of environmental thinking, but Tren contends that it also hardened support for policies that treated human life less as an asset than as a burden.

That matters because, in Tren’s telling, Ehrlich’s ideas did not remain academic. He links the rise of population-control thinking in the 1970s to a broader retreat from malaria control in parts of the developing world, and to coercive sterilisation and abortion programmes in countries such as India and China. His argument is not simply that Ehrlich got the future wrong, but that bad ideas, backed by elite institutions, can produce terrible human costs.

The core of Tren’s critique is that Ehrlich misunderstood what people are. He saw rising populations mainly in terms of rising consumption. Tren argues the opposite, that human beings are also producers, inventors, and problem solvers. On that reading, the great rebuttal to Ehrlich was not rhetorical but practical. The Green Revolution, driven by figures such as Norman Borlaug, helped expand food production even as the global population surged.

That is why Ehrlich’s legacy remains contested. Since The Population Bomb appeared, the world’s population has grown from about 3.5 billion to more than eight billion, while average calorie availability has also risen sharply. For Tren, that is not a minor forecasting error. It is evidence that the most influential doomster of the modern environmental age fundamentally misread humanity.