Suddenly Vogt’s ideas were everywhere. As Ehrlich put it, “No effort to expand the carrying capacity of the Earth can keep pace with unbridled population growth.” Others—many others—echoed his words. If humankind continued to exceed its limits, the biophysicist John Platt warned in 1969, “we are in the gravest danger of destroying our society, our world, and ourselves in any number of different ways well before the end of this century.” On the first Earth Day, in 1970, eighty-two-year-old Hugh Moore distributed hundreds of thousands of handbills about population and free audio tapes featuring
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