Customer Reviews

The Stork and the Plow : The Equity Answer to the Human Dilemma

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A rising stock market easily distracts me from the realities lived by world neighbors. This book slowly, but inexorably brings the real world into sharper focus. I'm encouraged that someone is brave enough to take on so large an issue as global sustainability. The authors have responsibly reported their world view as it relates to sustaining the growing population with a precarious food supply / environment. It is a human view, marked with both optimism and pessimism. At times some points are belabored, but most are important to make. I forget, too soon, how destructive my impact is on this limited planet. I recommend this book as a refesher course in population and environmental issues in the modern world. It motivated me to increase my activities toward a more sustainable use of the planet's resources.

This book is a fascinating look at the race between agricultural production and population growth. To claim that Ehrlich and his co-authors are misanthropes (haters of mankind) is clearly bogus. The authors have a deep and abiding love of both mankind and the natural world that supports us. This came through to me on every page of the book. Clearly the authors don't love human behaviors that are unsustainable and destructive. No thinking person does.

The authors admit to mistakes that Ehrlich made in books he wrote thirty years ago, and look at why things have played out differently than he predicted. They have learned from their mistakes, and we can too by reading this book with an open mind.

The Sept. 25 reviewer calls this a "miserable gloom-and-doom tract. There is some truth to this. No thinking person can take a hard look at the current human situation without admitting to some scary trends. But this book looks for answers and finds them. Anyone unable to admit to the problems facing us will not be part of the solution.

Paul Ehrlich looks at the prospects of feeding the growing world population. The content is a sobering wakeup call. Continued population growth and finite resources of the earth present a bleak picture. Although the overall picture is somewhat depressing, Ehrlich describes some points for optimism including the trend in several areas for reduced or reversed population growth. This book provides a warning of what will occur if steps are not taken reduce population growth and prevent environmental degredation. Previous predictions of the doom of humankind have not come to pass, but attention should be given to the projections of this book and ideas that are presented as possible means to avert future disaster.

This book succinctly points out that over-population is the real
rattlesnake in the woodshed. Because correcting this will involve
limiting family size, politicians will not only ignore this they will
stubbornly refuse to even talk about it. The alternatives of war
famine and disease are the politically correct ways to control population.
Sad.

This book rehashes the worst sort of discredited malthusianism in the same tortuous, offensive manner as Ehrlich has in his previous works, principally through the use of emotional appeal, pseudo-science, and an unabashed contempt for species homo sapiens. "The Stork and the Plow" is a notably useless and irrelevant book: irrelevant because the problem it supposesto address is non-existent, and useless because it is mostlya regurgitation of what Ehrlich has been saying for the better part of four decades. If this miserable gloom-and-doom tract represents the cutting-edge work of the population-bomb fanatics, then they have already lost the debate

Paul Ehrlich began his doomsaying quest more than 30 years ago with "The Population Bomb" and, with the benefit of hindsight, covers the same ground again with "The Stork and the Plow".

Ehrlich (this time accompanied by his wife, Anne, and Gretchen Daily) admits that his earlier predictions were off the mark and even makes an attempt to address where those earlier predictions went wrong ... and then promptly repeats the same mistakes.

The anecdotes that show the suffering in sub-Saharan Africa are chilling. Such images cannot touch a feeling heart without making a lasting impression. The reasons for the suffering that the author recounts are right there within the body of the work - political upheval, maldistribution, misuse of agricultural capacity and oppressive poverty linked to all three. These problems, however, are treated as secondary to the tried and true "Population Bomb" nonsense.

As in his earlier work, Ehrlich still hasn't grasped the difference between finite resources and FIXED supply and demand. This is both poor science and poor history. The problem is not (even in the smaller framework of sub-Saharan Africa rather than worldwide) that sufficient food cannot be produced to accommodate population growth. It is those very problems that have been dismissed as secondary that prevent enough food from being produced and/or being made available to the people.

He also fails to note what has happened throughout the rest of the world. As these problems have been overcome by human societies across the globe, human misery has been lessened and birthrates (the supposed problem) have declined without intervention from any external source - which is clearly what is being advocated here.

The trends that Ehrlich discusses are not even accurate. Sub-saharan Africa lags behind the rest of the world in almost every category (per capita caloric intake, income, access to clean water and sewage), but that is because these things are improving at a slower pace than elsewhere, NOT because things are getting worse. And this is despite the political unrest that still rears its head across the continent.

The worst thing about this tome is that it risks concentrating efforts on Ehrlich's pet project rather than the real problems in the region.

How many times does the old Malthusian argument have to be defeated. If you have never read a Julian Simon book then please read "The Ultimate Resource II". He has been publicly exposing Ehrlichs false predictions for the past 30 years. Malthusian predictions were scary to me when I first heard them, I have been interested in population growth and the limits of the Earth's resousrces since I was in grade school, but Julian Simon thoroughly defeats any arguments for "serious changes" to be made. The wealth that humans create when allowed to trade freely is good for the environment. Mass starvations and environmental disasters occur when totalitarian governmental regulation destroy free markets and property rights...

ANOTHER OLD MAN'S BLATHERING ABOUT THE COMING CATACLYSM.HIS BOOKS AND ARTICLES ARE SO REPETITIOUS HE'S BECOMING A TRAGIC BORE AND NO LONGER AN INTERESTING READ.BY THE BY,ENOUGH OF THE "PARSON"ALREADY--THAT DOG WON'T HUNT.

When will this guy shut up? Never in the history of the planet has someone taken so much pride in making a fool of himself in public. Erlich needs to be forced to fend for himself in the private sector. He would almost certainly starve to death.