Reacting to the bomb to come

I was doing some research at the public library the other day, paging through LIFE
magazines from 1970. Ecology—as in acid rain, etc.—was an issue of
great public concern at the time, with predictions that within a decade
people would be wearing gas masks to survive pollution. Even more
urgent, though, was “population pollution.”

I remember this, of course, and know that my generation was
profoundly shaped by it. But I had forgotten the details, and now I saw
them again. A biologist saying, for example, “Each American baby
represents 50 times as great a threat to the planet as each Indian
baby.”

A sense of dread about the future was forming already in the 1960s. Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb
in 1968 and used the image of a disease: “We can no longer afford
merely to treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth; the
cancer itself must be cut out. Population control is the only answer.”