8.3 billion humans: are we too many?

Sometimes I secretly make this bet: at what point in the lecture I’m giving on ecological challenges will a member of the audience stand up to challenge what is being said, since the terrible reality of the current population explosion has not yet been mentioned? It works almost every time. Because this anxiety, formalized at the end of the 1960s, had a lasting impact on an entire generation.

It must be said that the figures are impressive: since 1945, at the end of the war, the world population has almost tripled, now exceeding 8.3 billion people. An evolution so incredibly rapid that a couple of American scientists, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, published a work in 1968 with an evocative title The P-bomb. “P” for “population”, of course.

Died on March 13, 2026, Paul was also a seasoned ecologist, evolutionary biologist and specialist in the dynamics of animal populations. But its transposition to human populations turned out to be erroneous. No doubt he was blinded by a pessimism which went so far as to demand the forced sterilization of women who had already had their quota of children.

Since then, we have come a long way: Pope Francis’ calls for integral ecology have been the best remedy against sterile pessimism to take care of future generations.