Concern over limits to human carrying capacity on Earth came to a head in 1968 with Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb, which predicted that ‘hundreds of millions would starve to death’ in the 1970s from overpopulation. In 1972, an influential book, The Limits to Growth, used early computer simulations to explore the grave consequences for the ‘natural ecological balance of the earth’ when populations grew beyond a ‘global equilibrium’. In 1994, Ehrlich stated that ‘the present population of 5.5 billion … has clearly exceeded the capacity of Earth to sustain it’. Paul
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