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152 7 Although Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb is remembered as a classic of the environmental movement, few signs of a movement existed when it appeared in 1968. By the spring of 1970, however, Americans could hardly pick up a magazine or newspaper without seeing mention of ecology and the environment. Seemingly overnight, several concerns converged into a movement with the power to bring about new forms of thinking and even shape public policy. As historian Donald Fleming put it two years later, “an extraordinary diverse concatenation of impulses suddenly flashed together.” Nothing signified the movement’s arrival better than April 22, 1970, when upward of twenty million Americans participated in Earth Day, a national “teach-in” designed to call attention to the health of the planet. Growing concerns about population growth, both internationally and at home, contributed to the sense of environmental crisis.1 After the appearance of The Population Bomb in 1968, several factors energized and transformed Malthusian concerns: biologist Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” appeared in Science; Pope Paul VI issued his famously controversial Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life); a strand of the women’s movement started pushing hard for birth control and abortion rights; and President Richard Nixon issued a statement about population growth to Congress. In late 1969, Senator Gaylord Nelson, deeply worried about population growth and a host of environmental problems, called for a rally on environmental problems— what became Earth Day. With support mounting, environmental Malthusians grew uncharacteristically optimistic. Writing to Hugh Moore in December 1969, Planned Parenthood funder Harold Bostrom expressed his sense that “the big breakthrough is coming. We will bring together the power of the conservationists, the birth-controllers, the anti-pollutionists, those against crime, war, poverty, insurrection and social Strange Bedfellows Population Politics, 1968–1970 “Our world is no longer an endless frontier.” —Senator Gaylord Nelson, 1969 STRANGE BEDFELLOWS 153 decay—all societies under one roof. . . . Our voice will boom and the rich will listen , the poor will listen; the politicians will listen, and eventually, we will have the Pentagon and the Red army listening.”2 That so many strange bedfellows—women’s liberationists, Richard Nixon, and environmentalists—supported some form of population limitation suggests the multiplicity of meanings the idea could take on, as well as the sense of frustration and even crisis that gripped many Americans. It also suggests the narrowness of the moment—within a few short years attacks from both the left and the right of a quickly widening political spectrum would make Malthusian arguments much less appealing. Garrett Hardin, the Tragedy of the Commons, and Coercion As a sense of crisis grew, so did calls for strong governmental regulation of reproduction. Calls for coercion had been heard before, but as long as the government hesitated to get in the business even of family planning, such action seemed remote. By the late 1960s, however, political leaders in both major parties seemed newly willing to consider new roles for government. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb intensified the calls for strong action. Strong action could take many forms, and population control meant different things to different people. For some, it meant reducing population growth through voluntary measures; for others, forced sterilization and abortions. In between these “voluntarist” and “compulsionist” positions was a “population control” position that avoided direct coercion, but called for socioeconomic measures, such as education, governmental propaganda for small families, and eliminating tax breaks for children. Ehrlich was a mix of the second two. He wanted noncoercive population control in the United States, but, in a 1970 textbook (co-authored with his wife Anne), pointed out that if such means should prove insufficient, laws “could be written that would make bearing a third child illegal and that would require an abortion to terminate all such pregnancies.” In the developing world, he continued to consider coercive measures, as in The Population Bomb.3 Among prominent Malthusians, the person who called for the strongest forms of coercion was not Ehrlich but University of California–Santa Barbara biologist Garrett Hardin (1915–2003), whom one local journalist called a “more deadly version of Dr. Paul Ehrlich.” In December 1968, Hardin published an essay in Science entitled “The Tragedy of the Commons,” a philosophical defense of coercion so influential, especially in environmental circles, that it was called the “Magna Carta” of compulsory population control.4 Hardin had studied population dynamics under the well-known ecologist W. C. Allee at the University of Chicago in the 1930s. During...

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