The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970's the world will undergo famines--hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate, although many lives could be saved through dramatic programs to "stretch" the carrying capacity of the earth by increasing food production. But these programs will only provide a stay of execution unless they are accompanied by determined and successful efforts at population control. Population control is the conscious regulation of the numbers of human beings to meet the needs, not just of individual families, but of society as a whole.

The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich (1968)

A particularly popular (if that's the right word) end of the world scenario from the mid-'60s on was overpopulation.  Ever since Malthus published his idea that population growth would always outstrip food production, the prospect of having too many mouths to feed had been a concern for social planners, politicians, and colour supplement writers.  And with the post-war baby boom of the '40s and '50s it began to look as though the crunch was just around the corner.  For most of the 20th century, the threat of growing populations was just another hurdle to be cleared by science, but by the '60s Paul Ehrlich and other doomsayers it was a cause for alarm.   Taking  a straightedge to population trends and running a pencil line to infinity, they predicted that by the '70s hundreds of millions  would starve to death, hundreds of thousands of people in Los Angles would die from air pollution, a universal age of scarcity would occur by 1985, the US population would collapse to 22 million by 1999, and England would "cease to exist" by 2000.

These sort of predictions were reflected in films like ZPG (1972) and Soylent Green (1973).  In the latter, based on the novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, New York City by 2022 (1999 in the book) has become a Calcutta-like warren with a population of 40 million people, a 50% unemployment rate and government-encouraged suicide clinics.  Sweltering under a constant 100° F due to a rampant greenhouse effect, the people subsist on a variety of synthetic foods, such as Soylent Green, which is made from sea plankton.  Or so everyone thinks.  In fact, the ravening cancer of an ever breeding mankind has stripped even the oceans of their food and the government is desperately trying to keep secret the fact that the world has been reduced to involuntary cannibalism and Soylent Green is made out of people.*

These sort of predictions came from some fairly sloppy methodology that looked at current trends and production figures and projected them into the future as if nothing would ever alter the curve.  If population was growing at a particular rate, then it would do so forever.  If oil or iron ore reserves were so large, then no more would be discovered.  If food production grew at such a rate, it would never increase.  It's a bit like watching a man climb a flight of stairs and from that fact predicting that he would therefore ascend forever, if I have only so much food in my larder I will inevitably be eating the rugs inside a month or that if autumn grows cooler then all the world will freeze forever. 

Thirty years after the fears of overpopulation were at their height, things have changed markedly.  Rather than looking forward to being overwhelmed by a tidal wave of people we recognise that overpopulation is a local problem that has less to do with rampant breeding than abject poverty and corrupt governments.  In fact, the West's population problem isn't that one of being crowded out and starved, but of a wealthy, obese people who can't be bothered to reproduce themselves to the point that countries like Italy and Scotland face the prospect of extinction if trends continue.

*Rumour has it that the final line of Soylent Green was a last minute rewrite on the part of the studios who felt there was a lack of impact in, "Soylent Green is chicken!  (pause) Actually, that sounds pretty good."

Only a rumour, mind.

Homer Simpson weighs in on Soylent Green.

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