The controversy over John Holdren’s co-authored book Ecoscience has reached the White House.

According to this article in the Washington Times, both the White House and John Holdren’s office have issued official statements from Holdren and his co-authors in which he distances himself from the words published in Ecoscience 32 years ago. From the article:

When asked whether Mr. Holdren’s thoughts on population control have changed over the years, his staff gave The Washington Times a statement that said, “This material is from a three-decade-old, three-author college textbook. Dr. Holdren addressed this issue during his confirmation when he said he does not believe that determining optimal population is a proper role of government. Dr. Holdren is not and never has been an advocate for policies of forced sterilization.”
…

The White House also passed along a statement from the Ehrlichs that said, in part, “anybody who actually wants to know what we and/or Professor Holdren believe and recommend about these matters would presumably read some of the dozens of publications that we and he separately have produced in more recent times, rather than going back a third of a century to find some formulations in an encyclopedic textbook where description can be misrepresented as endorsement.“

(The second quote above is from page 2 of the article.)

In my original report, I asked Holdren “to publicly renounce and disavow the opinions and recommendations he made in the book Ecoscience.”

I ask my readers: Do you think this counts as the renunciation and disavowal I requested?

And who wants to take up the challenge from the Ehrlichs issued by the White House to look into “some of the dozens of publications that we and he separately have produced in more recent times” to uncover “what we and/or Professor Holdren believe”? Seems like territory ripe for exploration! Post any research you uncover either here in the comments section, or on your own blog. Anything that John Holdren or the Ehrlichs have written since 1977 is fair game — according to the Ehrlichs themselves.

It’s quite unusual for a blog post to cause such a fuss that it elicits a response from the White House. Why did they bother responding to my post and not the countless other posts critical of the Obama administration?

[Note: Yes, I know the Washington Times is owned by the Unification Church, and is known to have a conservative slant, but in recent years they’ve become more mainstream and it looks like they’ve diligently done their homework this time.]