Hold Off On Holdren (Again)
The Latest Distraction from Actual Science Policy
SOURCE: flickr.com/nationalacademyofsciences
Conservatives have found another ludicrous charge to hurl against the president’s science adviser.
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Science, Cultured
Science Progress contributing editor Chris Mooney surveys the interactions between science, politics, and culture. He is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.” (Photo: flickr.com/sarahfelicity)
Last year, when we first learned that Harvard physicist John Holdren would serve as president Obama’s science adviser, I wrote a column about some of the baseless attacks that were being flung at him. They were pretty silly charges, easily refuted—but I had no idea what conservatives would come up with once Holdren had taken office.
On Fox News on Monday, Sean Hannity inaugurated a series looking at Obama’s policy “czars,” describing them as “a select group of unvetted, unconfirmed individuals who are now at the helm of a shadow government right here in the U.S.” His first example was Holdren—a very poor choice, as it happens, as Holdren was indeed confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve as head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “[Obama has] skirted the Senate confirmation process and has empowered individuals to see major offices now within the federal government, many of whom operate only under the supervision of the White House itself,” bleated Hannity. Who does his research?
Hannity then went on to describe Holdren as a “radical” and intone that he’s anti-American, wants to shut down our economy, and so on. But that’s really nothing compared to the other attacks that have surfaced online of late—and that have now made their way into the right wing Washington Times.
In 1977, more than thirty years ago, Holdren was the third author (with Paul and Anne Ehrlich) of a textbook entitled Ecoscience: Population, Resources, and Environment. It was a gigantic tome, fully 1,051 pages in length. In one vast 66 page chapter devoted to “Population Policies,” the authors surveyed a gamut of measures that had been undertaken or considered to control human population growth—including the most extreme. Those included coercive or “involuntary fertility control” measures, such as forced abortions and sterilizations.
However, to describe these measures is different from advocating them. And in fact, the Ehrlichs and Holdren concluded by arguing that noncoercive measures were what they suppported: “A far better choice, in our view, is to expand the use of milder methods of influencing family size preferences”—such as birth control and access to abortions. In fairness, their text does read as dated today, ripe for quote mining. They were writing in very different times thirty years ago; but even if they were defending these positions then (and they weren’t), that hardly means that they do today.
But you may as well forget about context—historical or textual—when dealing with attack dogs. A website called Zombietime scanned passages of the textbook online, and intoned, “Forced abortions. Mass sterilization. A ‘Planetary Regime’ with the power of life and death over American citizens. The tyrannical fantasies of a madman? Or merely the opinions of the person now in control of science policy in the United States?” The information zinged around, and eventually made its way to the Washington Times, which wrote of Ecoscience: “Several selections from the book have been highlighted at blogs critical of Mr. Holdren, particularly passages that appear to advocate sterilization, forced abortions and consideration of an ‘armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force’ for population enforcement capabilities.”
Only at the end of an article insinuating that these were Holdren’s positions did the Times actually quote the staff of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which then refuted all the claims.
Paul and Anne Ehrlich have also refuted the charges—they sent out an email observing that “We were not then, never have been, and are not now ‘advocates’ of the Draconian measures for population limitation described—but not recommended—in the book’s 60-plus small-type pages cataloging the full spectrum of population policies that, at the time, had either been tried in some country or analyzed by some commentator.” In his Senate confirmation hearing—yes, Fox, there was one—Holdren also rejected the idea that he supports government-mandated efforts at population control.
But wait, you may be wondering: How do I know that the Ehrlichs are right about the their 1977 text, and not the conservatives? Well, because I walked over to the Engineering Library on the Princeton University campus, where I’m located, and got the book. And I can see how one could misread a text this old—from such a different time. But nevertheless, the criticism of Holdren today on this basis is exceedingly thin and stretched. The book is three decades old; Holdren isn’t its first author; it takes a stance against such policies; and neither Holdren nor the Ehrlichs support these policies today, either. Couldn’t we talk about something that’s actually important and contemporary?
Holdren was just inducted as a foreign member of the British Royal Society—a huge honor. Oh, and he and other top Obama policymakers just released a critically important report on the impacts of climate change on the United States. Don’t expect Fox News segments on the importance of the latter.
Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”
Comments on this article
“And I can see how one could misread a text this old—from such a different time.”
Are you kidding me?
You will dismiss the ludicrous assumptions in Holdren’s book because it’s “3 decades old”?
How about the fact that HE WAS WRONG in his “intellectual” assumption on population?
And Holdren was just as wrong to “back-door” advocate the dark means other countries could use to control population just by going through the ways to implement control.
Holdren may reject “those methods” now, because he was WRONG, but just as with eugenics and man-made-global warming, these bleating “scientists” were all for it then.
Fail.
July 16th, 2009 at 8:23 amTim,
July 16th, 2009 at 10:13 amIf Mr. Mooney’s quote in this paragraph is true (my emphasis added), how did Mr. Holdren and his co-authors advocate for the measures you seem to think he did?
“A far better choice, in our view, is to expand the use of milder methods of influencing family size preferences”
A far better choice? But not the only choice?
So “Forced abortions. Mass sterilization. A ‘Planetary Regime’ with the power of life and death over American citizens.” is an option?
July 16th, 2009 at 11:10 amPaul Ehrlich is simply lying. In the prolog to The Population Bomb, he wrote, and I quote ‘We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail’. Later in that book he advocated a federal Department of Population and Environment, which would, inter alia, promote the ‘development of mass sterilizing agents’, agents discussed later by him, his wife and Holdren, in Ecoscience, in some of the excerpts quoted. He said the US should have supported India in setting up a program of compulsory vasectomies. And I quote, again: ‘We should have sent doctors to aid in the program by setting up centers for training para-medical personnel to do vasectomies. Coercion? Perhaps but coercion in a good cause’.
You might recall that India later did institute such a program, with horrific results.
You can walk over to your University Library, as I did, Chris, and look that up. You could also look at Human Ecology (Ehrlich, Ehrlich and Holdren,1973). This was not a textbook, but a passionately-written book of advocacy.
After a quick review of the Indian vasectomy program, compulsory sterilization of mothers with more than three children, and ‘compulsory implantation of steroid capsules at puberty with removal for childbearing with official permission only’, they wrote ‘Compulsory control of family size is an unpalatable idea, but the alternatives may be much more horrifying’. I’m sorry, but that’s not a rejection of the idea — particularly when you consider that two years previously, Ehrlich, in a volume edited by himself and Holdren, had predicted a US population of 22 million in the year 2000 thanks to mass ecological catastrophe. It is clear Holdren and Ehrlich thought the ‘horrifying alternatives’ were not hypothetical, but in fact destined to occur.
So now, in 2009, science is predicting a different ecological catastrophe, and Holdren is in the position of advising the White House on responses to it. Given his previous advocacy of drastic coercive measures to forestall an earlier (incorrectly) predicted catastrophe, isn’t it reasonable to ask if he will give similar advice today?
July 16th, 2009 at 11:31 amYou can’t simply dismiss this as a description but not support of these ideas. People have a right to be very concerned when the Director of Science and Technology of the USA espouses ideas that would make a Nazi race scientist proud.
It appeared very clear to me that Holdren was being very specific about “planetary regimes”, legal support for his ideas, the Constition, and how international bodies could be used to implement these policies.
We have a right to be concerned after the long horrific history of eugenics that haunts humanity to this day and when this is not the first time the US government has discussed the repopulation agenda. See Kissinger’s NSSM 200.
July 16th, 2009 at 12:49 pmIt looks like Chris is right about the attacks against Holdren being unfair, but at the same time it is annoying to see him repeat the false and easily checkable claim by Paul and Anne Ehrlich that they have never supported coercive population control methods.
Presumably this is an example of the narrative being more important than strict accuracy for Mooney.
July 16th, 2009 at 2:43 pmI’ve read the book too, Mr. Mooney, and came to different conclusions. Anyone can read whole scanned pages of the book at Zombietime.com to get the context just right. Paul Ehrlich is a consistently wrong nut, and Holdren was also a nut for endorsing his views to the point of being a co-author. It’s sad that Chris is defending Ehrlich.
Saying it was 30 years ago means nothing unless their views have changed. That Holdren recently said that he rejects forcible abortion and sterilization is much more meaningful… but it’s worth recognizing that such views are still embraced by some on the left.
July 16th, 2009 at 3:50 pmI was alive when these books came out and read and cited them in the 1970s for forensic high school debate on population control to deal with the gloom of planetary overpopulation and resource depletion. Neo-Mathusians, they were called (just as Jared diamond has more recently revived thee same). Alll fashionable worries since proved wrong (cf, the bet with Julian Simon).
Mooney is excusing the outrageous. Forced sterilization and one-child per family measures that China enacted in this era were widely admired by the Erhlich’s and their ilk (ie, Holdren). Back in the 1970s, the literati, including academically ambitious High-Schoolers, seriously advocated their views.
It is one thing to be wrong and fail to admit it – another to defend the indefensible. These ZPG-types possessed the same “good intentions” that drives James Hansen to talk of prosecuting AGW “deniers” in show trials, or Al Gore’s dangerous hyperbole today – the kind of climate Mccarthyism Bjorn Lomborg recently denounced as “simply treason against reason.” http://www.scienceprogress.org/2009/07/hold-of-holdren-again/
Being a famous angst-filled scientist means never having to say “I’m sorry-I was wrong.”
July 17th, 2009 at 4:48 amWRONG LINK above.
July 17th, 2009 at 4:50 amRight link here
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25783305-7583,00.html
What are Holdren’s qualifications for science czar? If he’s stepping away from his population alarmism, he has admitted his life’s work was a miserable failure.
But, he isn’t admitting anything of the sort. He’s just now on to the “I” in “I PAT”, that is the climate hallucination, and not talking so much on the “P”. The rest of the Obama administration is taking care of the “A”. The “T” never did make much sense, but then again, neither did the “P” and the “A”.
I = P × A × T
Human Impact (I) on the environment equals the product of population (P), affluence (A: consumption per capita) and technology (T: environmental impact per unit of consumption).
July 18th, 2009 at 11:57 amSince Chris Mooney (conveniently for him!) doesn’t include any actual quotes from Ecoscience, here are some:
“Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.”
“A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men.”
“The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.”
“If some individuals contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children, and if the need is compelling, they can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility—just as they can be required to exercise responsibility in their resource-consumption patterns—providing they are not denied equal protection.”
“In today’s world, however, the number of children in a family is a matter of profound public concern. The law regulates other highly personal matters. For example, no one may lawfully have more than one spouse at a time. Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?”
The last quote ends in a “question” that is in rhetorical format. The Ehrlichs and John Holdren were effectively stating that the law should be able to prevent a person from having more than two children.
July 22nd, 2009 at 11:47 pmOops. I should have written, “Since Chris Mooney (conveniently for him!) doesn’t include many actual quotes from Ecoscience, here are some…”
And I also forgot one that Chris Mooney conveniently (for him and John Holdren) overlooked:
“Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market.”
“The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits…”
July 23rd, 2009 at 12:00 amI would like to hear Mr. Mooney respond to the comments above.
If they are correct, then he has been duped, at the least.
If they are correct, it sounds like Ehrlich, and possibly Holden, are lying.
July 27th, 2009 at 4:23 pmI had to look long and hard to find something that refuted the excerpted quotes. I could tell that they were likely descriptions rather than prescriptions, but I don’t think Fox viewers read enough to recognize that. Thanks Mr. Mooney.
July 28th, 2009 at 9:20 pmChapter 14 in Ecoscience is entitled “Changing American Institutions”
This is the quote from the first paragraph. Note that there is no discussion of whether American institutions need to be changed, but only on how they should be changed.
To portray Ecoscience as merely a description of other people’s opinions is rather dishonest. The book is not a collection of essays, a compilation of facts, or even a presentation of disagreeing views.
Instead, the authors show a clear opinion that in a crisis that the American government does have grounds for enacting population control measures.
The authors start with a statement that population control measures would be allowed by the Constitution. Then they go on to state that such measures would not conflict with the first amendment.
The authors then go on to describe their opinion that there are only two valid constitutional limits on policy control measures: due process and equal protection. There is no alternative opinion presented that says “hey…family size regulations (eg forced abortion) wouldn’t actually be legal for these reasons”.
Usually text books don’t take this approach. They represent multiple opinions on controversial issues.
Maybe Chris feels differently, but publishing a textbook that concludes that forced abortions would be legal is a pretty big deal. Unless of course, one happens to think that it would be legal to bring China’s one-child policy to the US.
July 30th, 2009 at 1:00 pmMy problem with Holdren has to do with his poor understanding of the Constitution.
He further stated: “that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution. [N]either the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution mentions a right to reproduce.”
But the Constitution does mention in the Bill of Rights: 9th Admendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
In other words, if it ain’t mentioned, the government doesn’t have the right – the peoople do.
If Holdren doesn’t understand that, he obviously should not be an advisor on any level.
August 27th, 2009 at 11:45 amThere’s a sick feeling in your gut when you hear someone casually describe all the options of the government forcing its death agenda on a mother (and a father). It is so disturbing. It should not be written about in an “ecoscience” book but in a book on the criminal history of communist regimes.
November 4th, 2009 at 11:13 pmI’m not a Republican or a Democrat. I am a member of a new breed that seeks truth and balance, not political affiliation. I don’t see how you can hold up for admiration the fact that “Holdren was just inducted as a foreign member of the British Royal Society—a huge honor.” Where are you coming from? These organizations all promote certain agendas. To have a scientist who is so politicized occupying a key role in the highest strata of our government to me is not a good thing. The global warming email scandal proves without a shadow of a doubt that politics and science do not mix. Wake up and stand up for what’s right.
December 1st, 2009 at 12:51 am