In 1968, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich predicted hundreds of millions would starve to death over the next decade, many of them Americans, and the world would generally decline into chaos in his book The Population Bomb.

A retrospective on Ehrlich’s forecast is the subject of a new “Retro Report” in The New York Times. A 12-minute video feature produced by Sarah Weiser with support from the Pulitzer Center is accompanied by a column from Clyde Haberman.

“I do not think my language was too apocalyptic in The Population Bomb,” Ehrlich says in an interview, “my language would be even more apocalyptic today.” His basic premise remains true, he says: “We have a finite planet with finite resources and in such a system you can’t have infinite population growth.”

“I was trying to bring people to get something done,” he says, and he still sees humanity’s dominance over the natural world as a danger to our own life-support system.

But things have changed since The Population Bomb was published almost 50 years ago. Population growth has not continued unabated and in most parts of the world has slowed to at or below replacement level.

One aspect of the story that is somewhat glossed over but helps explain these changes is about rights.

“The idea that every woman should have as many babies as she wants is to me exactly the same kind of idea as everybody ought to be permitted to throw as much garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want,” says Ehrlich. The reason that is so reflexively offensive to most people – besides the fact it compares human beings to garbage – is the same reason forced sterilization is: it treats people like numbers and assumes they’re not capable of making “good” decisions on their own. Of all the ideas about population espoused during this time, this might be the most important fallacy.

People – and not just women – have proven that given a choice and the means to exercise that choice, most will choose to have fewer children than the very high rates of fertility being experienced during the 1960s. Fertility rates in North America, Europe, Latin America, North Africa, and Asia have declined to near or under two children per woman. And even in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, where fertility rates remain highest and population-scarcity concerns are still very real, they are also trending down.

Contemporary conversations about global population and the environment therefore tend to focus on ensuring that people in fast-growing areas are able to exercise their reproductive rights and sustainably manage local natural resources. This idea was canonized during the 1994 International Conference on Population Development which established the primacy of rights over numbers-based policies. In some regions, access to contraceptives and related health services is still very poor. In others, gender dynamics make it difficult for women to make their own fertility decisions, whether because of child marriage, patriarchal traditions, or lack of education and employment for girls and women.

Women’s empowerment, agency, education, access to health services – these are the contemporary population issues that development organizations and reproductive health and rights advocates are fighting for. “All too often media stories about population focus more on the wrongs of the past, rather than on the rights of today,” says Wilson Center Director of Population, Environmental Security, and Resilience Roger-Mark De Souza.

Sadly, the focus on global numbers – either on the most rapidly growing places in the world (there are too many, we’re doomed!) or the least (there are too few, we’re doomed!) – often wins our attention.

“Just like politics, all population dynamics are local,” says ECSP’s Meaghan Parker. “Delving more deeply into national trends in West Africa or subnational differences between states in India, for example, will quickly reveal that some parts of the world are inarguably facing a population-resource challenge. Meanwhile, Japan is clearly also facing an aging issue. Understanding how these different growth trends interact with the environment requires a more nuanced conversation than we generally have.”