60 Minutes Gone Wild
Promoting a Discredited Doomsday Alarmist
The New Year’s Day 2023 edition of 60 Minutes included a story titled “The Vanishing Wild,” that is derisively referred to in the news industry as click-bait material. The main goal of click-bait material is to not to inform, but to have the story shared on the internet and posted on social media. “The Vanishing Wild” is an alarmist story intended to get the audience riled up with predictions of a global demise of nearly all of mankind.
The story’s main point was simple. Food supplies are becoming scarce and soon starvation will set in and people will die off.
This “we cannot feed the world” trope has been making the rounds of the political left for decades. Fascinatingly, it conflicts with other sacred cow campaigns being promoted by the political left.
On the one hand, they are insisting people will starve because there’s not enough food. On the other hand they want farms shut-down due to manmade global warming concerns. For example, as many as 3,000 Dutch farms may fall under the government axe because they are contributing to a climate calamity. But don’t worry, we are told. People can survive by eating insects.
One of the doomsday scenario guests in the 60 Minutes story was Anthony Barnosky. He stated there have been five mass extinctions in Earth’s history. And were are headed toward a sixth, he insisted. “And by mass extinctions, I mean at least 75%, three quarters of the known species disappearing from the face of the Earth,” Barnosky told correspondent Steve Pelley.
Another guest interviewed was Paul Ehrlich, a longtime gadfly in the doomsday movement, and who was repeatedly discredited by real-world events over the past 50 years. Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, a smash best-seller in 1968. Ehrlich’s thesis was that the world was becoming overpopulated at too fast a rate and that the end was near for mankind.
Doomsday theorist Paul Ehrlich predicts world end
Those people who did not subscribe to Ehrlich’s the-end-is-near view he described as the “uninformed Americans, ‘experts’ and nonexperts alike,” “ignorant,” and “irresponsible.” The present-day coronavirus pro-mandatory mask, vaccination, and lockdown crowd uses the same playbook to describe anyone who dares question them as “uninformed” or “deniers.”
The subject of imminent global starvation was not even open to debate, according to Ehrlich. The science was settled, he claimed. He insisted there was widespread consensus throughout the scientific community and the conclusion was no longer debatable. (Again, “not open to debate,” “settled science,” and “widespread consensus” were pervasive during the coronavirus pandemic.) “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” he wrote in the prologue of his book. Civilization was likely doomed.
Ehrlich argued that the very slim chances of global survival rested on the shoulders of Americans, who comprised less than 5% of the world population. Sacrifices must first begin in the U.S. Of note, Ehrlich dismissed the responsibility of the two most populous countries, China and India, from having to adopt the drastic steps he advocated the U.S. must first take.
Would Americans “be willing to slaughter our dogs and cats in order to divert pet food protein to the starving masses in Asia?” Ehrlich wrote.
One proposal often mentioned, according to Ehrlich, was “the addition of temporary sterilants [sic] to water supplies or staple food” in order to achieve a zero population growth. It was imperative people immediately stop breeding, he argued. Government officials should sterilize everyone to end reproduction.
In his book, Ehrlich forecasted one of three scenarios would likely occur. First, there would be global food riots owing to shortages and war could break out. He cast the U.S. as the worldwide villain because of this country’s insistence in using agricultural chemicals that would have been banned by the U.N.
Second, more than one billion people would die in one year alone because of disease and plague precipitated by overpopulation.
Third, people would simply perish due to mass starvations. “Hundreds of millions of people will starve to death” in the 1970s and ’80s, he wrote.
Most of the grim results would occur by the 1980s and the calamitous outcome would be well-known before the year 2000. After the publication of The Population Bomb, Ehrlich made an updated pronouncement that the U.S. population would dwindle to less than 23 million people by 1999.
World population doubled since 1968
The world’s population has doubled since The Population Bomb was published and extreme poverty has fallen dramatically in the five decades since.
Global poverty a mere fraction from 1968
Ehrlich was so popular with the liberal crowd that they could not get enough of him. He made twenty appearances on NBC’s Tonight Show to hype his claims, according to author Jack Cashill.
World events proved Ehrlich embarrassingly wrong in his overpopulation and starvation prognostications. Yet, he is still revered by the political left and was used by 60 Minutes as an authority on the world that awaits us.
Mark Hyman is an Emmy award-winning investigative journalist. Follow him on Twitter, Gettr, Parler, Post and Mastodon.world at @markhyman, and on Truth Social at @markhyman81.
His books Washington Babylon: From George Washington to Donald Trump, Scandals That Rocked the Nation and Pardongate: How Bill and Hillary Clinton and their Brothers Profited from Pardons are on sale now (here and here).