The Population Council has since played a critical role in theoretical research on population questions and in development of contraceptive techniques. Some of these, such as Norplant, were intended for use in Western-sponsored population control programmes which provided means for Third World women to limit their fertility under circumstances that were rarely fully voluntary. In the shadow of Nazism and revelations about the Holocaust, eugenic ideas had to go underground. The principal vehicle for Malthusian fears became instead the threat of environmental catastrophe. Fairfield Osborn s Our Plundered Planet in 1948 marked the beginning of this new shift, culminating in 1968 when the Sierra Club commissioned and published Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich s book, The Population Bomb .
All poverty is caused by the continued growth of population .
Hardin argued that if people are allowed to breed freely, yet their children are all given equal rights to a limited commons, the world will be locked into a tragic course of action , leading to environmental destruction. Only private ownership of crucial resources and an inegalitarian distribution of the right to reproduce could prevent the tragedy, in Hardin s view. Such projects as the welfare state and land reform in developing countries were pointless, Hardin implied. The first official body of the US government to advocate neo-Malthusian policies was the President s Committee to study the US Military Assistance Program. Chaired by General William Draper Jr, the Committee recommended government financing of population research as part of security planning.