Over the weekend, one of recent memory’s worst human beings dropped dead, and we can’t summon up much regret over his passing.
Paul R. Ehrlich, an eminent ecologist and population scientist whose best-selling book, “The Population Bomb,” was celebrated as a prescient warning of a coming age of food shortages and famine but later criticized by conservatives and academic rivals for what they called its sky-is-falling rhetoric, died on Friday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 93.
His death, at a nursing facility in the retirement community where he lived, was caused by complications of cancer, his daughter, Lisa Marie Daniel, said.
That was how the New York Times’ obituary began. It would later characterize Ehrlich’s prognostications as “premature.”
Reason magazine did a bit better job of fleshing out Ehrlich’s legacy:
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