More (#1) from The Bet:

Fears of a Malthusian calamity that would intensify global conflicts prompted radical prescriptions. In their 1967 book, Famine 1975! the brothers William and Paul Paddock argued that the United States should apply the concept of military triage to its international food aid. Countries should be separated according to whether they “can’t be saved” (Haiti, Egypt, India), were “walking wounded” (Libya, The Gambia), or “should receive food” (Pakistan, Tunisia). The Paddocks’ ideas of triage and limits to food aid resonated in Washington, DC. President Johnson had refused to send American wheat to India in 1966 until that country adopted a vigorous family planning program. According to presidential adviser Joseph Califano, Johnson told him, “I’m not going to piss away foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems.” How much Johnson and other American policy-makers believed that India faced a Malthusian crisis— and how much they needed to use the idea of a famine to sell Congress on continuing the Food for Peace export program— is a matter of historical argument. The massive scale of the eventual American relief effort is indisputable: over a two-year period, roughly one-quarter of annual US wheat production was sent to India.

And:

Wading into American politics inevitably meant that Zero Population Growth would have to tackle controversial issues such as birth control, abortion, and women’s rights. Ehrlich’s push for measures to reduce population growth thus drew on the 1960s sexual revolution and efforts to separate the pleasure of sex from reproduction. As a biologist, Ehrlich did not view sexual intercourse as anything sacred. He attacked “sexual repression” and celebrated sex as “mankind’s major and most enduring recreation.” Ehrlich waged an aggressive campaign against Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical “Humanae Vitae,” which affirmed the Catholic Church’s traditional proscription of most forms of birth control. Zero Population Growth continued this fight in the early 1970s, advocating forcefully for abortion rights and access to contraception. In California, Zero Population Growth sought to help pass a proabortion ballot initiative. Ehrlich, who served as the organization’s first president, urged the legalization of abortion and removal of restrictions on contraception in the interest of population control. Ehrlich mocked the association of a fetus with a human being as “confusing a set of blueprints with a building.” After New York passed a liberal abortion law in 1970, Charles Wurster, a founder of the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, wrote exultantly to Ehrlich, “I wouldn’t have dreamed this could have happened so fast! This bill is now LAW in the State of New York.”

And:

One summer, a mentally ill woman who had grown obsessed with Ehrlich broke into their house and began living there with her dog, while the family was away at the Colorado field station. When the police came to investigate, they found the Ehrlich’s house in disarray, with piles of papers and books in apparent chaos. The place had been ransacked, they thought. It turned out, however, in what would become a family joke, that this was just the way Paul and Anne lived.