• @intensely_human@lemm.ee
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    011 months ago

    Here’s one:

    “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Ehrlich said in an often-quoted 1970 Mademoiselle interview. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

    quoted from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-didnt-first-earth-days-predictions-come-true-its-complicated-180958820/

    World population in 1970 was 3.7 billion, and is 8.0 billion now. Ehrlich predicted that the carrying capacity of the planet had been met, and yet the population has more than doubled without the mass starvation his model predicted.

    • @CanadaPlus
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      11 months ago

      Yeah, they also thought birth rate would stay steady. It’s dropped like a rock instead.

      It is true that agriculture got better in that time. It probably will again. There’s no hard limit being suggested here, though.