Anne H. Ehrlich

She served as one of seven outside consultants to the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s Global 2000 Report (1980).

In 1994 she received the United Nations Sasakawa Environment Prize with Paul Ehrlich and in 1995 they received the 1st Annual Heinz Award in the Environment.

In 1994-95, she served on a task group for academics and scientists for the President’s Commission on Sustainable Development.

From 1994 on she's publishing a series of newsletters titled “Ecofables/Ecoscience,” using science to debunk myths about humans’ relationship to the environment.

She is seen is one of the key figures in the debate on conservation biology. The essence of her reasoning is that unlimited population growth and man’s unregulated exploitation of natural resources form a serious threat to the environment. Her publications have been a significant source of inspiration to the Club of Rome. By 1993, the Ehrlichs’ perspective has become the consensus view of scientists as represented by the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity”.

For ten years she has been member of the Board of directors at the Center for Innovative Diplomacy, Pacific Institute, Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (1989-1999). Until 2003 she sat on the board of advisors for the Federation for American Immigration Reform. As of 1988 she serves on the board of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Environment, Development, and Security and as of 2002 of the New-Land Foundation.

She co-founded the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University with Paul Ehrlich, where she serves as policy coordinator after being an associate director from 1987 on.

Since 1987, Anne Ehrlich has worked as associate director and policy coordinator of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University.

She has served and serves on the board of a wide range of organizations; Friends of the Earth (1976-1985); Conferences on the Fate of the Earth (1981-1984); the Center for Innovative Diplomacy (1981-92); Redefining Progress (1994-96), the Ploughshares Fund (1990-2003) and the Sierra Club (1996-2002). She chaired the Sierra Club's Committee on Military Impacts on the Environment from 1985 to 1994. Until 2003 she sat on the board of advisors for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

The Ehrlichs argued that the human population was too great, and that while the extent of disaster could be mitigated, humanity could not prevent severe famines, the spread of disease, social unrest, and other negative consequences of overpopulation. By the end of the 1970s, this prediction proved to be incorrect. However, they continued to argue that societies must take strong action to decrease population growth in order to mitigate future disasters, both ecological and social.

The wordings "the population bomb" have first been used in a widely distributed 1958 pamphlet by advertising professional and entrepreneur Hugh Moore. The original edition of The Population Bomb began with this statement:

She married Paul R. Ehrlich in 1954. The couple has one daughter, Lisa, born in 1955. The Population Bomb has been devoted to Lisa, and The Population Explosion to their grandchildren.

From 1952 to 1955, Anne Ehrlich attended the University of Kansas and performed scientific research on population biology, publishing numerous scientific articles. She begun her scientific collaboration with Paul Ehrlich in the late 1950s through research on butterflies as a test system for answering key questions of biological classification, ecology, and evolution.

Anne Howland Ehrlich (born Anne Fitzhugh Howland; November 17, 1933) is an American senior research scientist emeritus in conservation biology in the Department of Biology at Stanford University and co-author of more than thirty books on overpopulation and ecology with her colleague and husband, Stanford professor Paul R. Ehrlich, including The population Bomb (1968), The Stork and the Plow (1995), with Gretchen Daily, and The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment (2008). She also has written extensively on issues of public concern such as population control, environmental protection, and environmental consequences of nuclear war.

The title refers to Rudyard Kipling's 1897 poem "Recessional", "Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!", alluding to the arrogance that went before the fall of historic Mesopotamian civilizations. Named a Notable Book for 2005 by the American Library Association, Ehrlich offers a lucid synthesis of the major issues of our time: rising consumption, still-growing world population, and unchecked political and economic inequity. Grounded in science, economics, and history, she puts political and environmental debates in a larger context and formulates a range of possible solutions for improving our future prospect, from local actions to reform of national government to international initiatives.