[The following letter is being circulated for endorsement by Dr Eric Ross and Loes Keysers, two well-known experts in the field of population at the Institute of Social Studies, the Hague. The two scholars are disturbed by the award of the Dr Heineken Prize by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences to the neo-Malthusian, Paul Ehrlich.]
To the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW):
We, the undersigned, condemn the decision of the Academy to award the 1998 Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize to Paul R. Ehrlich. While we acknowledge the merit of Professor Ehrlich's research on the dynamics and genetics of butterfly populations, we also believe that he exemplifies the errors that occur when biologists attempt to extend their generalisations to the far more complex world of human societies.
By this award, the Academy cannot fail to be seen to endorse such errors and the ecological reductionism which they embody and to fail to appreciate the true nature and import of Ehrlich's work, and its dubious and grave political and ethical implications.
In conferring this award, the Academy refers to the fact that Ehrlich has "propagated his ideas in a very consistent and scientifically correct way". The most consistent feature of his writing, in fact, has been the strongly polemical nature o his views on poverty and human population, dating from the publication of his alarmist work, The Population Bomb, first published under the auspices of the Sierra Club in 1968.
Since then, rather than seeking to comprehend the reasons for population trends or to acknowledge our increasing understanding of the complex ways that poverty influences human reproductive strategies, Ehrlich has continued to describe population growth in simplistic and emotive terms, comparing it at times to the growth of a cancer, portraying it — for both the developing world and developed nations — as the principal cause of poverty, urging at times the most draconian measures in the name of humanity. But, rarely has he given serious attention to the structural sources of human deprivation.
Despite the scientific aspect of his arguments, Ehrlich's writings have consistently epitomised the perennial tendency of contemporary neo-Malthusianism to mystify the real origins of population trends in the developing world and their relationship to the political economy of underdevelopment. In this regard, they remain true to the original Malthusian agenda.
In presenting "over-population" as the root cause of most human ills, such arguments threaten us with apocalyptic scenarios that tend to foreclose reasoned debate about alternative explanations which might lead to suggestions for more radical systemic change.
Fear of impending famine, global warming and widespread deforestation all are persistently attributed in the end to the reproductive habits of the poor, while the contradictions and motives of capitalist development are minimised — subsumed within bland references to "growthism" — and the determinants of fertility, like other aspects of the survival strategies of the poor, are obscured in the process.
As the newly issued UN Human Development Report observes, global inequities are deepening. This owes much to an unrestrained world capitalist market and the impact of structural adjustment and their combined adverse consequences for the world's poor and their environments.
Increasing poverty, decline in social services, increasing concentration of natural resources in the hands of private interests, are all diminishing the opportunities throughout the Third World (and in poor regions of the North) for individuals, in particular women, to make the decisions they might wish regarding their own livelihoods and reproduction.
Yet, in his recent book, The Population Explosion, Ehrlich pays scant attention to such developments; he fails to address the crucial role of the World Bank, the IMF or the WTO (but endorses the North American Free Trade Agreement) or to analyse more generally the nature of the global economic and political forces that are currently driving millions of people in developing countries to seek precarious livelihoods in countries of the North.
Even more insidiously, in the name of science, along with other prominent neo-Malthusians, he justifies policies to restrict such movements on the grounds that they are only the result of the "excess" fertility of the poor.
The association of Ehrlich's name with such organisations as Californians for Population Stabilization — which advocates a restrictive US immigration policy in the name of "environmental sustainability" — effectively underscores the nature of the political agenda with which his work, implicitly or directly, has long been associated. We are dismayed that the Academy has failed to appreciate this aspect of Ehrlich's work, or wishes to seem to endorse it.
[The writers request those endorsing this statement to inform the Academy at: KNAW, Het Trippenhuis
PO Box 19121
1000 GC Amsterdam
The Netherlands
fax (31-20) 620 4941; e-mail <vodoc@bureau.knaw.nl>
with a copy to:
Loes Keysers
Women, Population and Development
Institute of Social Studies
PO Box 29776
2502 LT The Hague
The Netherlands
fax (31-70) 426 0799; e-mail <keysers@iss.nl>]