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A Tribute to two scientists: Paul Ehrlich and Madhav Gadgil
Last edited Thu Apr 9, 2026, 01:24 AM - Edit history (3)
I am starting work in my field today after an extended break from work (which got worse around March 2025). I do not think I have worked seriously in my research area after mid-April 2025.
And this is a tribute to two male scientists who were both champions of civil rights and of the environment and respectively maligned or ignored. Anyone who poses a real threat to this machine of drivel.
Today when Cesar Chavez has been accused of rape and Noam Chomsky’s extensive association with Jeffrey Epstein and his comments about MeToo hysteria are out there, I would like to say that this society’s heroes and demons tell us a lot about who the growthist and anti-humanist machine allows to be respected. Which people are attacked for their “privilege” as more and more of us have to consider ghastly “transactions”.
I used to be afraid to openly admire Paul. There are few things worse imo than convincing embattled people that environmentalism or science are closed off to anyone unless it is through a specific pmc approved, liability conscious style of communication or a mobbing cult with odd mood shifts. That limits the mind and the imagination.
Paul was more of a humanist than most of his (sleazy and or stupid) detractors. They merely happen to be more popular no matter how often their shitty predictions fail because they have larger support groups or cults.
Today as women’s rights are embattled more and more I post a tribute to a much misunderstood scientist. I wish it was not posthumously.
Most of the so-called independent thinkers popular in these societies are content with rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic and shouting down everyone with an actually serious counterpoint, as crises escalate.
And women’s rights are ubiquitously seen as non-essential.
As a childfree Indian female scientist I am familiar now with parasitic, coercive control (none of it from my family, friends, doctors or colleagues) and with exploitation of different types. This hideous drivel is used to attack a woman’s right to earn a living and to safeguard her health without having to suck up to random men. And I reject lousy, carefully curated, bullshit-heavy systemic narratives. In memoriam Paul:
https://thebulletin.org/2026/03/understanding-the-fragility-of-our-planetary-home-the-legacy-of-paul-ehrlich/
Understanding the fragility of our planetary home: The legacy of Paul Ehrlich
By Michael E. Mann, Peter Gleick, John P. Holdren | Opinion | March 31, 2026
The death of famed biologist Paul Ehrlich on March 13 at 93 has occasioned a flurry of commentary in the press and on social media, some of it thoughtful, some of it scurrilous, and most of it insufficiently attentive to his remarkable contributions to science and to public awareness of the environmental threats faced by humanity.
If readers have only a cursory knowledge of Ehrlich’s work, it’s likely from his famous 1968 book, The Population Bomb, or from his subsequent popular books and media appearances. His stark assessments of the worsening prospects for humanity in the absence of limits on population size and total material consumption certainly garnered substantial public attention. But they were also rooted in his deep understanding of ecosystem processes, the indispensable services they render to human society, and the battering they were already receiving even in the 1960s from air and water pollution, pesticides, toxic wastes, and the accelerating destruction of natural habitats.
Ehrlich’s views were shared by most other leading experts in the field, but few were willing or able to present the science so publicly, so unfiltered, and so eloquently. We are quite sure that it was both the content—so inimical to the view that advances in science and technology will allow population, consumption, and economies to grow endlessly and without any limit—and Ehrlich’s fearless and colorful exposition that accounted for the intensity of the counterattacks…and apparently still does.
By Michael E. Mann, Peter Gleick, John P. Holdren | Opinion | March 31, 2026
The death of famed biologist Paul Ehrlich on March 13 at 93 has occasioned a flurry of commentary in the press and on social media, some of it thoughtful, some of it scurrilous, and most of it insufficiently attentive to his remarkable contributions to science and to public awareness of the environmental threats faced by humanity.
If readers have only a cursory knowledge of Ehrlich’s work, it’s likely from his famous 1968 book, The Population Bomb, or from his subsequent popular books and media appearances. His stark assessments of the worsening prospects for humanity in the absence of limits on population size and total material consumption certainly garnered substantial public attention. But they were also rooted in his deep understanding of ecosystem processes, the indispensable services they render to human society, and the battering they were already receiving even in the 1960s from air and water pollution, pesticides, toxic wastes, and the accelerating destruction of natural habitats.
Ehrlich’s views were shared by most other leading experts in the field, but few were willing or able to present the science so publicly, so unfiltered, and so eloquently. We are quite sure that it was both the content—so inimical to the view that advances in science and technology will allow population, consumption, and economies to grow endlessly and without any limit—and Ehrlich’s fearless and colorful exposition that accounted for the intensity of the counterattacks…and apparently still does.
A society that disproportionately attacks people who highlight where this cannibalistic model of growth leads will inexorably end up attacking the state, attacking women’s rights, attacking civil rights, but dress it up in the type of stealth Cato propaganda popular with insufferable pills like Betsy Hartmann, Naomi Klein and Teen Vogue.
Critical thinking is not about finding safety in places that best case are honestly only “Not batshit crazy racist, sexist, pro apocalyptic”. That is most mainstream drivel. No wonder it is too toothless, insipid or laden with sophistry to successfully oppose even crazier bullshit.
A covert embrace of the status quo as long as it is more equitably tacky, sleazy and myopic is inconsistent and dishonest and angers most people who only vaguely know they have been screwed over. In 200 years of industrialisation, except more disease and perverted maladaptive “creativity” you cannot find anything more viable.
I do see cool stuff-including right here on Du and other rare things I engage with voluntarily. For it to survive you have to be brutal with the junk and I will be.
I am out of patience with drivel. It is insulting to almost everyone except outright morons and why are we as a society primarily catering to morons? Who can that serve? It is not a bit when you have thought all this forever and not wanted to say it to these douchebags.
It requires constant thought and non mechanical thinking not a running autopilot calculation of how to not piss off the least reasonable people in any group who intimidate everyone else and garner (pseudo) elite (i.e. wealthy through brute force robber baronhood) or mob support. I thank Lucien Greaves especially. Yasha Levine and Chris Ketcham are very cool. But they are too kind. It needs some balance from people who are not impressed by those who never call out the blatantly disingenuous and bullying, as long as it is not one tribe’s bullies but the other’s.
It is not surprising that the politicians or media persons who successfully target their messages to milk this pile of confused impulses, emotions and lies for their personal ends are neither very nice nor particularly bright.
Both the environment and abortion rights etc are casualties when it is the egregiously loathesome Jacobin YIMBY type. Props to Nathan Robinson and Current Affairs for offering an alternative to the Jacobin.
And to DU always for enduring me. It is not bullshit. I..yeah..lol.
Madhav Gadgil is another scientist whose warnings were rejected over and over again with attacks using a parasitic and nonsensical narrative about growth and jobs shilled by the corrupt, communist state of Kerala with support from outright lunatics like P.C.George.
All these societies are uhhh “addicted” to stupidity and it was really annoying to have to listen to this soup of pap.
I live in India and am taking something to court that is a clear assault on women’s rights and ..That at least is clear. It started in Si Valley.
This is a problem with tech not India or the US or at least not anyone decent in either country of whom there are many along with the clueless and oblivious and outright shady.
I have to think carefully about how to write about the rest more precisely and
This is a democracy and I hope to eventually get the courts to support me and codify into law regulations that prevent this from ever happening again. I mostly work alone because I don’t have working class roots. I have white collar roots and don’t believe the nuclear family or only children etc are threats to anyone. I am very grateful to Yasha Levine for giving me the courage to attack some “leftist” dogmas. He is a really decent man Yasha.
I really couldn’t have survived without the kind of support that the pure intelligence of the actual humanist left (all the people I thanked in this last post for the nonce). You don’t know how much I needed you as I dully endured years of “help” that drove me damn near crazy.
The nuclear family, only children like me, loners etc are not the source of Thatcherite atomization, anymore than mobbing and forcing bulk processing and hyper scaling in multiple countries is somehow humanist let alone democratic.
When Madhav Gadgil’s warnings were ignored and floods devastated overdeveloped areas there were crickets followed by the usual panicky scrambling, theatre and other pointless goddamn drivel.
As my “beloved” (this is not a bright enough crowd for subtlety) “friends” in tech would put it, those floods were inevitable! Really forward thinking society this.
Hey you Apple creeps, I mean price gougers.
Think ahead. That’s what my feminine reasoning strategy is down to damn you all. Price gouger better than snoop. Assholes better than creeps. Anything better than creeps.!
And you go around claiming tech will save the world! Am I supposed to pretend you tech creeps have not engineered a coup against civil society with the dumbest damn people in every other field? Cut it out.
And no I won’t be in your goddamn hashtag Female Cult in Science!
Thanks to you have I been reduced to the creepiest damn calculations known to (wo)man such as Josh Hawley/Ajit Doval and Ragy Thomas/Palathingal somehow net canceling out, without Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon or that rogue’s gallery of tech creeps associated with Epstein or child porn presumably piling on.
Yeah real nice. Oh put a sock in it.
“I am a tech
I couldn’t stand being a coyly delicate modest female rather than finally saying “Omfg you bloody brainless creeps -shill your pathetic videogame or whatever it is elsewhere. Fuck Portal.”
“But can’t a game or a tv show or a child’s innocence change the world???”
Yes. When coupled with a police case with teeth and a legal precedent stopping such parasitic and creepy trash. But that’s awkward to communicate to each new obviously insane set of people replacing the last set of crazies.
You can’t fool all the people all the time. Don’t you have any brains? This a lopsided model of reality where two daft fields (computer engineering and economics!!!!!) are the “brain” of the world controlling reality. It is no such thing. These are fields that are famously out of touch with reality.
There is nothing in this for me except apparently creepiness and harassment as a confusing service. Who would sign up for that except some crackpot committed to creep rights? This will baffle me as long as I live.
Who this was intended for except people who are inured to seeing real creeps as some sort unchanging feature of reality with only the most annoying types of counter forces.
That is why I like Steve Chu. I do think about the deterioration of a world where now my main reaction to scientists is relief at finding someone who is: 1) not a creep; 2) not stupid and 3) not a jerk.
Because you know what? It is pretty damn stupid to be that intelligent and endlessly invested in being a creep and a jerk.
Maybe Lawrence Summers just isn’t that bright.
I have already dealt with 14 years and 8 months of drivel and today I would like to go and start work seriously as a civilized woman. I have set a hard deadline by which to finish a paper I have been working on for 17 years damn you, while distracted by what you apparently consider “progress” and I consider a cult operated slumlord from hell driven creepy and futile nightmare.
I wanted to post a tribute to Gadgil but all I found were various fraudulent and gushing drivel fests, each disgracefully shilling a new bullshitty thing while taking attention away from the topic at hand about how his work was ignored and diluted. I scornfully tossed aside this late to the party gushing after someone is already dead with bs missing the point. There was nothing sentimental about Dr. Gadgil for all his deep humanism.
In memoriam Dr. Gadgil. I cannot find the piece that struck me about how P.C.George threatened to break the legs of regulators and scientists etc. It fits the disgraceful behavior I have seen targeting my house and street for 5 years as I mourned my mom as this utterly contemptible and bottomless greed and avarice ramped up.
All I could find is more of the same grating and bloodless language that I have disliked all my life and which is why there is little meaningful environmentalism in India. Myopic fluff. Is it any surprise that malice can defeat that easily.
It is why I responded to the left I responded to.
It is the same homogenised and stale pap with a humanist sheen which essentially assumes stupidity in the reader and stasis (hat tip to Evgenia Kovda) as permanent.
I work all the time in cooperation with people who do not speak English. Can you just say condescending? So much of what passes for “left”. Or scary mob crap shamelessly purveyed as the common man’s anger but targeting some female scientist who won’t back down, but never Ambani or other creeps. Craven assholes.
Without examining why the left fails it is hard to see a future. Abrasiveness is not needed to avoid patronising (and exploitative if we are honest) homogeneity and deceit that fools no one, least of all those most impacted.
I am not running for office. I will never have an income from anything but my field. Why would I douchily usher in bs about how I would rather destroy all my resources forever and ever than say, okay this needs to stop. I am not mean spirited, but with all my faults I have never been stupid or insane. I can’t stand those people.
That’s a personal ..that is where the limits of free will lie.
I will file some complaints, but I am not unreasonable or crazy. But don’t be completely opposed to any form of society that isn’t a nuisance and a strain to women like me.
I am not an asshole. That doesn’t mean I am gullible or stupid. I just have difficulty estimating the precise level of crazy and daft I am dealing with.
It is contemptuous. English has helped most Indians. The colonization that needs to be kicked out is parasitic growthism and the demonization of marijuana. That’s the colonial legacy that Ambani is carrying on with his gold toilets and shameful weddings.
There is nothing humanist in an embrace of stupidity with more “popular” froth. Or blandly vacuous douchiness.
Andy Nikiforuk who is still alive knows that and I would like to thank him for drawing the left’s attention to stupidity, which is different from a dimwitted focus on IQ a la that silly ass Murray and those daft creeps at Edge Magazine, in the IDW and other fraudulent frauds.
I have suffered 😪and felt tortured 😱 by among other things the necessity to repress the caustic stream of consciousness inside my head to adjust to the presumed reasoning style employed by people responsible way more than me for this society. I have coped with dark humor as recommended by Ruth Cain.
I don’t want to change the world or lead a revolution, but I promise I will kick you out of my own life and home and street. I liked Lina Khan that way.
And again and again and again I am grateful to Chris Ketcham, Ed Zitron, Yasha Levine, Nathan Robinson, Matt Stoller, Lucien Greaves, Chauncey DeVega, Troy Farah, Dave Allsopp/elad/hatrack/DU etc for not having allowed me to turn into an outright misanthrope rather than the Carlin type I was (hat-tip to Matt Cerami).
Yes they are mostly white men. That is their main attribute! I am nonwhite and female. It somehow cancels out!
Look how you think. Is being white and male the dominant feature of all those I listed? Or is it that being white and male and caustic is less dangerous? As much as I respect Briahna Joy Gray and find her cool, I didn’t want to be kicked out even by Bernie or science. But the trash that is shilled by Google shrinks etc as mental healthcare proved to be too..bullshitty.
And I tried 😪and tried 😭to be some sort of ghastly female (yeah I am a real martyr) whose actions and thoughts were a mystery and it was not just hard. It was beyond pointless. And above all impossible to do while trying to seem like anything but an insane woman or a hostage. I reject the former as an outright lie and the latter as fixable solo with a little help from my friends.
Evgenia Kovda, Nandita Bajaj, Marina Bolotnikova and Lyta Gold are cool though.
The people whose voices are in my head most lately are my best friend and my main mentor. My other best friend is my ex husband. I love him and consider him family.
No he is still in there as well. These are three people who will always be in my head. Along with another male scientist who made a deep impression. Mainly for not being stupid.
But my best friend is Indian and Green and has politics closest to mine on science and reality. And my main mentor focuses almost solely on science at least inside my head.
My ex husband and this other male scientist are white and male and in your best case very confusing society and I am in India dealing with our own indigenous creeps not the American creep brand. So yeah. The creep processing is more culturally confusing that way. My local vegan lady friend can help me with that. She helped me at a time when my confidence was rock bottom.
You are all crazy! Look at what you have become! No one can talk to any of you!
But whoever doxxed me in the last 5 years is toast.
A spoonful of honest sugar and all…
(Sighs)
The well-intentioned stuff was frequently worse torture than the outright malicious. Since you feel bad about labelling well-intentioned things torture. I tried so hard to be polite, but it ended up being insulting. Who could fail to see the parasitism and sexual harassment innate in these Panopticons and the dubious growth industries they lead to?
I have to go work. Cut it out. This isn’t an empty space damn you. I am right here. And not a bot. JD Vance isn’t alone in understanding why Catladies are best stuffed into loony bins run by nice people like the Blackstone Inc
Hell is other people. Though the guy who wrote that was a pervert too apparently.
This was not torture for me the way it would be for a pervert enabler, a charlatan or fraud.
But it was torture the way it is for a scientist who cannot agree with drivel. And kept trying to not say all that.
It is so misguided that if you don’t have anything to hide in the lowest common denominator sense that this isn’t torture. Look at the world we live in. It must be stuff you guys all support right? That’s what makes it torture.
Constantly having to agree with people and I already lost 15 years and my mom.
Paranoia?? No way. Come right in.. No really..try it now.
( 🙄 )
But it is not a joke conflict. At least let it be an honest one. Can Clayton Dalton, Adam Becker, Prof LeCun, Ryan Williams, Hemant Kappana (mostly white men! Maybe they are less stressed while inside the system and do I need more stressed people to add to my own stress? Actually Kappana got kicked out. See a pattern? One that isn’t mind boggling stupid nor a disgraceful three-body alien strategy) can translate from irate female (who really doesn’t file false allegations or start witch-hunts!!! MeToo hysteria!!!!) to self-absorbed, solipsistic, narcissistic douchebag unconnected with this?
We are all different. Getting rid of the solitary female is not necessarily going to help. An unbiased lens that honestly sees you all as crazy has its pluses. Tribal warlords and cults is not a dynamic I can work with. Modernity is only a problem when across the board a specific subset insists on only the most diseased forms of tech use, collectivism and individualism surviving.
It is not any isolated concept: anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-classism, anti trust, anti war.. though pro environment except in narrow myopic ways is universally unpopular. They all work together to make a society livable which this one is not.
Get on fixing society you all 😤..driving me crazy year after year. Idiots..
Or at least go and annoy just about anyone else. Ezra Klein/Tyler Cowen/Balaji Srinavasan/ Jessica Krause/Candace Owens/Nikki Haley: Go dox those assholes. All sides agreement now! I might have a knack for these culturally unbiased eclectic mixes.
The way you all think.. dear god..
It is not Wodehouse btw. It is Galileo that would fit this nightmarish ubiquitous imposition/inquisition.
Silent recs are cool. As the future looks complicated but not as hellish.
I envy people who think as long as it’s not bots it’s cool.
See you in a year. A world without deadlines is junk entertainment.
If these creeps use my street or home again this continuously objectionably, that is not good.
My brain has become okay. Mostly time and finally completely rejecting at least what I intuited to be this society’s uniformly terrible and predatory ideas.
And stupid. Have a nice year.
Thank you for hosting me Dave. Not many do.
I will always be a DUer much as I will always be a (mediocre) scientist (the sane kind though).
The barks are aimed at all the other riff raff. Not DU.
Now to those of you out there (the community of creeps etc). I have tried to indicate this over and over again-sometimes angrily, sometimes upset etc.
Now I am telling you dispassionately. Don’t keep trying to get away with stuff.
I don’t actually see my job or life as a joke or something to inelegantly stuff into some foul and disgraceful spectacle.
I was never lying when I was or am sympathetic. But not to morons ever.
Bye for now. Tech will change the world my ass..
Last Edit: 10:54 am IST, April 9, 2026.
-jfz9580m
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