Paul Ehrlich passed away this week. He was arguably the most influential ecological thinker of his generation. Paul was a towering human being and intellectual presence, driven by insatiable curiosity, a boundless reservoir of ideas, and an unwillingness to remain silent in the face of injustice, folly, or environmental destruction. For the past fifteen years, I have had the privilege of calling him a friend.

Ehrlich was, first and foremost, a brilliant scientist. Over an extraordinary career at Stanford University that spanned six decades, he authored hundreds of peer-reviewed articles and dozens of books — many co-written with his wife, Anne and partner for some 70 years. These publications have been cited in peer reviewed articles well over a 100,000 times, a remarkable testament to his scholarly impact. As a boy growing up in Philadelphia, he developed a fascination with butterflies and, by high school, had already become something of a prodigy in their study. He liked to say that had he gone into business, he might have been able to study butterflies for a few weeks each year on vacation; as an academic, he was lucky to have spent his life getting paid to do so full time. So are we.

As his career evolved, Ehrlich expanded his scientific reach. Recognizing that birds attracted broader attention than butterflies, he not only became a leading lepidopterist but also a distinguished ornithologist. Yet the scope of his work defies disciplinary boundaries. His pioneering research on coevolution, his early documentation of biodiversity loss, and his studies of butterfly behavior and population dynamics helped establish modern field-based evolutionary ecology, securing his place among the most important biologists of the twentieth century. But he also researched and published in areas as........

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