Partially, yes! Population is #1 strain on resources. However, the political climate around 1970s was more like population would create large scale food shortages, famines, and without interventions, population would keep on growing forever. We at least now know that population peaks with prosperity, and food is largely a solved problem.
We're on the verge of ecological collapse, undergoing an insane mass extinction event with ocean acidification and methane release going off the charts. I can't even begin to conceive of your reality.
The point is that this is not what people were worried about in the 70s. Even halving the population we’d still have all of these problems. While we obviously don’t suffer from famine, at least not globally.
Those predictions have completely failed and were replaced by new issues.
We're not yet suffering from famine, because new technologies allowed us to extract way more food than anticipated from the same surface area. However, these practices are not workable long term. You can't actually extract the amount of food we are currently extracting from our agricultural land for another 100-200 years. If we try, we'll ultimately leave the soil in such a bad state that will not grow much of anything - and mass starvation will happen long before then.
"We at least now know that population peaks with prosperity, and food is largely a solved problem."
Solved problem for now. A large part of world's agriculture is dependent on stable rainfalls and temperatures. If climate change gets bad enough, a big collapse in world's food production capability might happen.
"Solved problem for now." With "now" being the important word here.
We should not forget the significant amount of soil erosion. Not only, but especially in already vulnerable regions. While I will probably not get to feel it, the next generation will.
There are quite relevant studies already showing how the erosion of soil is already impacting agricultural yields. And that it is likely only getting worse from here on out.
>food is largely a solved problem
It really isn't...
Distribution is an issue, but the imminent capacity issue perceived in the late 1960s when The Population Bomb was written was already being solved when it was entering the popular consciousness (but the impact of the solutions had not been fully appreciated) by the Green Revolution through high-yield crop varieties and other advanced in agriculture.
Production of calories is a solved problem. Distribution of food to people in need on the other hand…
It's not really a solved problem, we're depleting many extremely slow to recover resources in order to produce the amounts we are today.
There's more to nutrition than calories. Generally speaking: the more nutritive, the more expensive.
Yeah, spoken like someone who only understands food as something that magically and without fail appears on their local stores.
*logistics of food is not solved?
Neither production nor logistics is solved at all. We have bought ourselves time, largely by racking up environmental debt on our planetary credit card. Food is still massively dependent on fossil fuel consumption (machinery, transport, fertilizer).
The good news is that the answer is to reduce the cost and carbon impact of energy production, and we’re making great progress here, but we cannot afford to take our foot off the gas, because although Ehrlich was wrong about the timing, he wasn’t wrong in his fundamental observation that the Earth has a finite carrying capacity.
The idea that he was off on the timing is wrong. He was wrong and continued to be wrong even as he insisted his predictions would come any day now
>However, the political climate around 1970s was more like population would create large scale food shortages, famines, and without interventions, population would keep on growing forever.
All of those things came to be - and we're on track for food shortages and famines too with the environmental crisis.
The latter has the qualifier "without interventions". The interventions just happened (widespread acceptance of abortion, "1 child per family", increased neoliberalization attack leading to less people being able to afford to start a family, cultural changes around marrying, loneliness epidemic, etc).
We are not on track for famines due to lack of food production. It's been solved.
There is more trade then ever people are richer then ever and therefore less likely to have kids. 1 child per family law was a gross violation of human rights that likely did not significantly change the birth rate compared to other countries