UC Berkeley: agitated LaRouche supporters shout down Paul Ehrlich

People who were at the event say that the Lyndon LaRouche supporters were not traditional hecklers, offering brief criticisms to points they disagreed with, but rather, they were very frothy, loud, and out of control. Police were called to have them removed. They shouted remarks about genocide and oppressed of the third world.

The primary focuses of Professor Paul Ehrlich's research is butterfly evolution, and he also has written several famous books about the concept of human density and carrying capacity.

There is an interesting type of cross political alliance of people who support and oppose his opinions. Julian Simon is the most famous opponent of Ehrlich, and has debated him on several occasions. Simon is a free-market optimistic economist who expresses the idea that increased density of people can create a higher average standard of living, and human ingenuity has the potential to solve most political problems. Joining him are many who argue that current political systems are unable to encourage family planning in an equitable fashion based on resource use and equal power among different areas of the planet. They say that any state control is most likely to only demand changes in 3rd world countries while first world countries that use more resources won't be required to amend behavior.

On the other side, many environmentalists agree with the concept that human population can place negative pressures on the planet, and could have an upper limit, and they might say that there are different possible routes to collectively regulating population stresses.

Many people have noted that the Lyndon Larouche group, also called the Federalists, have increased their numbers and presence on the UC Berkeley campus this semester. They have a table on Dwinelle plaza and near the BART station quite frequently, and followers try to stop pedestrians to interest them in their materials. The laRouche group engaged in political violence against the Communist Party in the 1970s and has fluctuated in popularity since then. One of the themes expressed in their paper, and their journal '21st century science and technology' is that pretty much every commonly listed environmental concern is a fraud: global warming, the ozone hole, human overpopulation, etc.