Paul Ehrlich and the vital role of women in this century

I heard a very interesting commentary from earthsky.org today about worldwide human population regarding Paul Ehrlich Name:  photo Paul Ehrlich.jpg
Views: 620
Size:  8.0 KB and the books he and his wife wrote, one of which was called “the population bomb” and one other called “Population Bomb Revisited[1].

In the article, it says:
“Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich is famous for his 1968 book The Population Bomb. Like many before him, Ehrlich said that equal opportunities for women might be key to maintaining Earth’s population at a reasonable level. He told EarthSky:

One of the things, for example, that we can do to get our population gradually shrinking is to give full rights to all women, make sure they have the same pay, all the same opportunities and so on.

Ehrlich and other population experts point out that women with the same opportunities as men tend to have fewer children. As opportunities for women have increased, that trend has been seen in many places on Earth.

In 2003, for the first time in human history, more than half the women in the world lived in countries or provinces where the rate of reproduction was below the replacement level. That is, those women were having fewer children than the number required to replace themselves in the next generation. That’s going to be important, according to Paul Ehrlich.

That’s because, the best estimates we can make are, with present technologies you might be able to support 1.5 billion people permanently on the planet. And we are seven now, and is the projections are correct, we’re going to add 2.5 billion people by 2050.”


Article from which the above quote came from is the earthsky.org website. Note, I underlined the part of the article that I think is most pertinent to what I think is the gist of it.

[1] There is a nine page document that the link above that is the “population bomb revisited” which goes to (what I believe is ;) the actual complete (?) text writing of (it); “population bomb revisited”.