Editor's Note, September 2026
Written by Marian Starkey | Published: September 8, 2026
It’s been over 20 years since I was a graduate student of Population and Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), but I still haven’t forgotten my favorite professor from the program. Tim Dyson, PhD, (now Emeritus Professor of Population Studies) was beloved in our department due to his energetic darting back and forth in front of the whiteboard and his jolting exclamations about the synthetic production of ammonia — the Haber-Bosch process!! — being the reason agricultural yields grew enough to feed billions more people in the aftermath of Paul Ehrlich’s famine warnings of the late 1960s. (When I was at LSE in 2004/2005, the world population was just over 6.5 billion — up from 3.5 billion when Paul Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, published The Population Bomb; today, the world population is estimated at 8.3 billion and is still growing by about 70 million people a year.)
Prof. Dyson made learning about the Green Revolution and its role in the “ginormous” growth of the human population engaging and interesting and ensured that we understood that without it, such explosive population growth could not have taken place.
In the wake of Paul Ehrlich’s death in March of this year, journalists and editorial boards across the country gloated about his famine forecasts being wrong because of the huge increases in crop yields that have occurred since his warnings. Because none of the articles we saw addressed the environmental catastrophes the Green Revolution has unleashed, our Communications Manager and resident blogger, Olivia Nater, wrote an excellent post for our website detailing the consequences of modern agriculture. In order to make sure our members see it, we’re including an expanded version of it in this issue. This iteration includes quotes from a written interview Olivia conducted with Prof. Dyson.
He told us that climate is the only subject he’s actively interested in these days and that he’s “afraid that the world faces a really disastrous situation.” Tying his present climate focus back to agriculture, he said, “the forcing of the world’s climate that is currently underway will almost certainly bring about much less stable conditions for the world’s farmers.”
Editor and journalist Jonah Goldberg wrote in a March Los Angeles Times opinion piece that Paul Ehrlich had been “so wildly wrong [… and] so obviously wrong from the beginning.” He also said that “Global food production has exploded.” He included no details about how that happened or what the repercussions have been, taking advantage of the fact that most people don’t get to spend a year learning from Tim Dyson about the Green Revolution.
We hope you find Olivia’s article informative and encourage you to write to us if you were involved in any aspect of the Green Revolution and/or work in agriculture today. We’d be very interested to hear from you!
Contact Marian Starkey: marian@popconnect.org