Head-Bangers: Keeping the lights on

While The Population Bomb is the book with which Ehrlich is most closely identified, he wrote dozens of others, including important and fascinating works on birds, human ecology, and conservation biology. He was as insightful as he was prolific, and his work deserves continued attention.

The challenge before us is therefore larger than “teaching men how to succeed”. It is to teach them how to succeed without destroying the world that makes success meaningful and, when necessary, how to transform the systems that place those goals in conflict.

Justice is neither owned nor taken away. It is a state of being, a condition that arises whenever life is allowed to exist in its own way. When that truth is remembered, the language of rights will fall silent, and what remains will be the only thing that ever mattered: the unbroken relationship among all that exists.