Dissertation Research: The Population Explosion: Population Growth, Environmentalism, and American Culture, 1945-1980

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

This is a Science and Technology Studies dissertation improvement grant. The proposed project will use a case study of Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb to shed light on the social origins of the American environmental movement. Funds from the grant will support travel to Palo Alto, Denver, Washington, and New York for the purposes of archival research and qualitative interviews. Ehrlich's Population Bomb helped biology recapture a social relevance not seen since before WWII. Environmental historians and historians of science, however, have yet to explore this explosion of neo-Malthusianism at the heart of environmentalism. Like the larger population control movement, Ehrlich's book at first appeared to unite Americans from across the political spectrum on a host of issues. It seemed to bring together conservatives and liberals on many of the most pressing issues of the day. American relations with the third world, racial unrest in the inner city, and suburban growth issues. Within a few years, however, Ehrlich and the population control argument became a target against which a vast array of groups defined themselves. Socialists and free-market conservatives, black nationalists and white conservatives, feminists and the new right, and even fellow environmentalists all critiqued Ehrlich's logic, sometimes bitterly. By the mid 1970s, it seemed a wonder that Ehrlich and The Population Bomb ever had the appeal that it once did. This research project returns to the 1950s and 1960s to examine the scientific/intellectual and cultural roots of the explosion of interest in population control during the early days of the environmental movement. It hopes to reveal the lasting contributions of Ehrlich's book, as well as to critically examine the ways in which unintentional race, class, and gender insensitivities played out in Ehrlich's logic. Reconnecting environmentalism with its neo-Malthusian roots has the potential to alter the way historians tell the story of the environmental movement's postwar emergence.