‘The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.’
Robert Louis Stevenson
‘You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something sometime in your life.’
Winston Churchill
The Elephant in the RoomAllowing the world population to rocket to the unsustainable levels of today is an act of criminal negligence on the grandest scale. It has happened with just a few murmurs of admonishment. The natural world has a way of telling us we’re making a tragic mistake. We know population pressures have put the planet in peril, so why aren’t we urgently implementing all of the simple, compassionate measures to help stave off the worst of the impacts facing us? We know how many of us there are now, how few there were in the past, and we have a good idea of how many there will be in the future. We have watched as our populations have expanded, with only a small number of disparate groups pointing out the dilemma we now face.
There are many reasons why virtually all discussion of population has been brushed under the carpet. There are many vested interests at play, each putting up their smokescreen of self-interest to cloud the realities of overpopulation and climate breakdown. It is in their interest that the status quo remains. It is profitable to continue with business as usual, and a growing customer base is always good. For manufacturing, construction, finance, farming, food processing and the military, a growing population is good news: there is money and profit in a growing population.
Only when we delve deeper into why we’ve allowed our numbers to boom do we realise the magnitude of the situation and how addressing it is not as simple as we might hope. If we were logical, had foresight and had used basic common sense we wouldn’t be where we are now. The world could have been a far, far better and happier place if we had taken some simple, sensible measures. There are many reasons why the dangers of population growth are ignored. Each reason has a straightforward explanation, based on social norms and accepted practices that are hard to talk about, let alone change.
The Emperor’s New Clothes
Overpopulation and its ramifications are subject to scale paralysis that no single entity has the ability to manage and direct. There is a collective powerlessness when confronted by problems whose size and complexity seem overwhelming. Being such an immense and global issue, it is easy to pass the buck. There are always more urgent issues at hand that need to be discussed. As no single entity is ultimately responsible, no one takes responsibility.
As the climate warms and changes, more unforeseen emergencies will crop up, which will push the question of family planning further and further down the agenda. For this reason, it is even more important that the subject is put in the public eye and kept there permanently.
Population is easy to understand, yet is rarely discussed by the mainstream. Even some of the scientific community become silent, disregarding population growth in statistical analysis. Suggestions for how to reduce carbon dioxide generally include any factor other than population. When you realise it is the underlying cause of virtually all the world’s problems, a veil is lifted. You ask why nothing is being done; why no one is talking about it. You see all the charities and good causes doing their great work, but realise the hard work can’t and won’t pay off, as it does not get to the root of the problem. There is a complete mainstream blackout of the impacts of personal fertility choices - the subject is brushed under the carpet.
An enlightened few are brave enough to signal that there is a serious issue that needs to be discussed. Scientific American has called population ‘the most overlooked and essential strategy for achieving long-term balance with the environment.’
Amitav Ghosh, talking about his 2016 book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, says: ‘It’s like death, no one wants to talk about it. The problem is of such a scale that we are dwarfed by it.’ He predicts a ‘politics of the armed lifeboat’, where the poor of the global south will be left to their doom while the rich go unscathed.
Karen Shragg, in her 2015 book Move Upstream: A Call to Solve Overpopulation, says the mainstream view of overpopulation is a collective blind spot that just isn’t being seen. The public and media must cure this affliction and face the facts head-on. It has to be talked about openly and without any fear of reprimand.
Ignorance is BlissA large proportion of people are unaware of or complacent about the increasing signs of the Anthropocene; it isn’t on their radar as it doesn’t affect their lives directly. People either carry on in blissful ignorance or turn a blind eye to the slowly unfolding human-managed dismantling of nature. Our minds operate on a human timescale. The changes appear very gradual to us, but on a geological scale they are happening at lightning speed.
Fundamental changes to nature are happening in our lifetimes. Only thirty years ago, a drive through the countryside in the summer would leave windscreens covered with splattered insects by the end of a journey. Today our windscreens are left almost clean. The insects just aren’t there. The buddleia was covered in butterflies on summer days. Today there are a few – the odd red admiral or tortoiseshell – but a fracton of their previous numbers. This isn’t our memory playing tricks on us: we have changed an entire ecosystem, built up over millions of years, in one generation.
As nature disappears and cities grow, we pay less attention to its gradual vanishing. We become more and more detached from the natural world and become more anthropocentric. Children used to witness the magic of nature directly today, excitement and wonder are often experienced remotely, mobile phone screen.
We see the present as normal. It's not. It’s an abnormal normal. We see getting in to our cars every day and joining the hundreds of thousands of others as normal. Almost every car is polluting, along with every other car in every town, in every country. This is a temporary extreme. 100 years ago peace and quiet reigned everywhere. 100 years from now it will be peaceful again, a world where you will still be able to travel, but without the congestion, pollution and noise.
Maligned Malthusians
If you are worried about overpopulation and chat with someone who disagrees with you, you are often labelled as being ‘Malthusian’. It is meant as an insult, but personally I now take this as a complement, and welcome the label with a smile.
Malthus is seen by some as a misguided prophet of doom because what he said didn’t happen, and is therefore proof that we don’t need to worry about overpopulation. Where their logic quickly falls apart, however, is that just because nothing happened then, doesn’t mean it won’t happen in the future. Just because population has exploded and not collapsed yet in no way precludes the possibility that population will collapse at some point.
Thomas Malthus was ahead of his time in foreseeing the way the world was heading with his Essay on the Principle of Population. His work also influenced Charles Darwin in looking into the formulation of the theory of natural selection, and inspiring Darwin to formulate On the Origin of Species.
AnthropocentricismWe are obsessed with ourselves and the obsession increases as we remove ourselves ever further from nature. The further we are removed from nature, the greater the illusion of human supremacy grows. Media bombards us with perpetual advertising, brainwashing billions of us into a false world of shopping and consumerism. We are removed from reality. Overpopulation and climate breakdown are things most people couldn’t care less about. We are fixated with ourselves as individuals, worrying about our looks, our fitness and our clothes. Increasingly, we are shallow and self-centred, not looking outwards to help others and the world, instead sinking further into narcissism. Advertising, media, magazines and shopping channels encourage this to make money through preying on people’s weaknesses in self-worth and self-perception, encouraging the belief that spending money and buying products will somehow cure us and make us happy.
Billionaire Techno-Optimists
Some people are convinced there will be a silver bullet to solve all population and environmental problems. Humankind is indeed ingenious and has created technologies beyond our dreams, but in a world of finite resources trying to techno-fix our way out of an unsolvable dilemma is simply wrong.
Billionaires often arrive at their immense wealth through having a good idea while being at the right place at the right time. In an age of global marketplaces, where a business idea can be rolled out worldwide, revenues and profits multiply rapidly as often only a limited physical infrastructure is required.
The billionaire Elon Musk built his fortune through a stroke of luck with his involvement in eBay. This gave him a fortune that he has put to use in many technologically innovative ways, but with one conviction that is obviously wrong. Musk believes that there is a ‘population implosion’ happening where there won’t be enough young people to support the old. Without doubt, there will be a change in the demographic, but the problems created by the old outnumbering the young are tiny compared to those of increased overpopulation.
Another example of a techno-fixer with honourable but misguided intentions is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. He and his wife Priscilla Chan in 2016 announced that they were committing $3 billion to ‘cure, prevent or manage all disease’. The billionaire couple plan to give away nearly all their money to help solve the world’s problems. This is a noble aim, but one that is short-sighted and anthropocentric. Its main result will be to increase human longevity and thus population still further, so adding to every other overshoot and resource problem facing the world.
Current economic systems give money and power to capitalists who have no interest in the future of the planet and are only concerned about making money and expanding their business empires. Money is power, and the power is in the wrong hands. This immense wealth could easily solve the world’s problems if a fraction of it was directed towards meaningful and benevolent causes. Barring the likes of the Gates Foundation, those at the top are too far away from those at the bottom to recognise the true situation.
Stuck in a Rut
You have a job, which you enjoy, you work every day, you get paid, you pay your bills – you’re a good person, a model worker. But are you part of the problem? The Western middle class and working people around the world carry on their everyday lives without a care, assuming this is the way things are and the way things will stay. But will the status quo continue? On our present course we are heading for the iceberg that is dead ahead. We are constantly fed the lie that we have to keep going to keep the economy growing. We don’t really have a choice but to carry on. We can’t just stop; we have families to feed and bills to pay.
The list of apparently respectable professions that actually contribute to the destruction of the planet is long, and yours may be on it. The oil industry is an obvious one, but there are many others. Architects? Buildings are great for people, but bad for the environment. Then there is every profession that goes with it: builders, suppliers, salespeople, installers. We are all connected to our insane desire to build and expand in what we call improving the world. This has had incredible benefits for the health and well-being of billions of people, but we have to stop. We’ve gone too far and now our actions are more detrimental than beneficial. The question is how we escape from the very, very deep rut we’ve got ourselves into.
Shot by Both Sides
Denying that population should be addressed is like denying climate breakdown. We are far beyond our carrying capacity. Our numbers and consumption are the root cause that must both be taken into account and acted upon. However, any mention of population to many in the political arena and you may as well talk to a brick wall. The world may be crumbling in front of our eyes, but many still are in denial.
The Left – ‘Rich Racist’ Accusations
An accusation often thrown at anyone who speaks about population and is also white and middle class is: ‘You’re racist – you only want to tell Africans to stop having babies so you can carry on with your own overconsumption. Don’t you know the average Westerner consumes about 20 times as much as the average African?’
This argument is based on the assumption that blame is being passed from the rich to the poor; the poor in question generally being from Africa. The presumption here is that addressing fertility rates is just an excuse to allow rich Westerners to continue their lives of overconsumption while telling poorer people to stop reproducing. The long-held left-wing resentment of the rich telling the poor what to do ignores the fact that the aim is to help communities in poorer countries. Following this logic, you are only allowed to help poorer countries become richer through material aid and not address fertility rates. In reality, this results in populations rising still further, which perpetuates the poverty trap. There is a major error of judgment in saying that anyone with power or influence must only be acting out of self-interest, when the opposite is true.
Of course, families should be helped out of poverty, but this must be done in conjunction with the provision of family planning and an aim for smaller family sizes.
The Right – Rising Populations are Good for Business
Right-of-centre politics believes that population increase is a good thing. The more people there are, the more consumers there are to exploit. The more consumers there are, the more profits there are for companies. Governments also encourage this model: the more company profits there are, the more people are employed, the more voters are happy and the more tax revenue is collected. The vicious circle is in place.
Government Population Fatalism
Governments around the world have let themselves off the hook of looking at population by pointing to the demographic transition theory. This says that nothing else is needed – development is the best contraceptive and populations naturally level off as societies grow increasingly wealthy. Without any significant objection to this from the public, it is the easy option to take as no unpopular decisions have to be taken.
Group Failure
Another reason why overpopulation is ignored is group failure. A crowd of people stand by and watch while someone on the street is robbed. Why should you do anything? There are other people around, so why should it be you who takes the risk? If you were the only person there, you probably would help. But why should it be you? Everyone else thinks the same, so nobody acts. If you were physically present in a disaster area, you would help – you would work day and night to save people after a tsunami. But when it’s not nearby, it’s not your problem, so you do nothing. The same is true with having children. Even if you know of the collective impact of an unsustainable population, why should you personally do anything? After all, your few children won’t make a difference. Multiply this thought by a hundred million, and it does make a difference.
People would rather watch a football match than the results of crop failure and starving children. Most people switch over or switch off. It may seem cold and dispassionate not to act to help the subject who produces the most emotional response. However, the best response is not the one that makes us feel good; it is the one that makes the world a better place.
Science, Ethics, Morality and the Media
We have chosen to turn a blind eye to effectively address climate breakdown and its causes –consumption and population. The science is there, with research and evidence routinely provided, yet we carry on regardless. There is a crisis unfolding that we ignore, while we live in a collective delusion and participate in a failing system. We are fed stories 24 hours a day to remove ourselves from reality, to grab our attention with trivia and to take our money. Virtually all news says nothing about the crisis. We continue down the wrong path, believing this is how it will always be. We become shallow and without morals, caring only for our own personal wellbeing, without a care for the greater good. Governments and the media are unable or unwilling to take action, and this will continue until the threats become so vast as to be unstoppable.
Climate breakdown, overpopulation and animal extinction is happening now and the media ignore it. Television and the media are run by organisations whose only purpose is to make money. There are no ethical or moral choices to be made. If it will sell, it will be broadcast. If it is in the slightest bit controversial, a programme may not be broadcast – even if it is a well-made, multi-million pound documentary by one of the world’s most respected broadcasters, David Attenborough. In 2011, the final episode of Frozen Planet was not shown by ten of the 30 broadcasters who bought the series, because it was about climate change. The episode, On Thin Ice, was dropped by the Discovery Channel in the US because of ‘a scheduling issue’. This was an excuse to hide the truth that the episode had been censored because of climate scepticism in the US. When programmes such as this are not broadcast, is there any wonder why half of Americans do not believe climate change is real? A spokesman for Greenpeace said: ‘It’s a bit like pressing the stop button on Titanic just as the iceberg appears.’
News, by definition, needs to be new. To catch our attention, it needs to be exciting and dramatic. The news is always about conflict, the economy, terrorism and accidents. Climate and overpopulation are relegated. When climate and environmental stories appear, they are mentioned briefly and routinely before moving on to the next story. World average temperatures setting a new record is now a commonplace news story and has been repeated several times over the last 15 years. Yet this news is like no other news ever reported – it is the most dangerous, life-threatening news we could hear.
Global temperatures are rising. We know what the causes and consequences are, but we collectively shrug our shoulders and carry on regardless. Humans are programmed to respond to sudden danger, like realising we’re about to fall off a chair or a cliff. The basic animal instinct doesn’t appear for long-term issues like overpopulation and the environment. It’s even worse for overpopulation, as people increasing in number is barely news. What’s the danger there? We’re just people, doing what people have always done. We’re not hurting anyone – but put us all together and look at the results and we really are hurting something –the planet’s own life-support systems.
What is a newscaster to do when reporting another story in which yet another animal is put on the critically endangered list? Or when the ice caps retreat to their new lowest level ever recorded…again? They do as they are told, following the same script, then move on to the far more exciting news of who won the football.
As the reported effects of population-driven climate breakdown become more frequent, their individual impact becomes less and less newsworthy. The effects of climate breakdown drop further down the list of newsworthy stories. The nature of the news is that it only ever reports the symptoms, never the cause. The floods caused by the hurricane are in the news. Climate breakdown causing the hurricane is not mentioned. Overpopulation causing the climate breakdown doesn’t even register.
Complacent Journalism
One example of the complacent mainstream media portrayal of population was the 2017 UN annual population survey, which was reported in British newspaper The Guardian. With forecasts of global population rising to eight billion by 2023, The Guardian wrote that the expected drop in European population was something to worry about:
‘All European countries now languish with fertility rates below replacement level, meaning that populations will inexorably decline.’
‘Eastern Europe is likely to be particularly badly affected by population trends, with numbers likely to fall more than 15%.’
This kind of reporting further embeds the false notion that a reducing population is bad. The opposite is true: a declining human population is good in every way imaginable for wildlife, the environment and humans themselves.
Misanthropy, Sex, Human Nature and Human Rights
We are genetically programmed to have children, the human race is just like any other species and our minds tell us to carry on as our genetic markers tell us to. We can't help it on an individual level and consequently a social and ultimately global level. We like sex. We love love. It makes us happy and is as natural as breathing. Our levels of serotonin and oxytocin rise; we are content with love and sex. It has to be this way in the natural world, otherwise we wouldn’t last long as a species. What we have to realise is that it has an end result too. The good news is that we have freely available contraception, so you can enjoy unlimited sex all your life without the worry of falling pregnant. We’ve never had it so good.
We are socially expected to have children. Bringing a new person into the world is a profound part of your life, with all the responsibilities that come with it. It is natural, beautiful and brings joy and meaning to your life.
However, in an overpopulated world, it is also the most damaging thing you can do for the planet, adding the impact of an entire new lifetime of human consumption. What are the implications of those rights on the rest of society and the non-human world? What has priority, the right to give birth or the rights of the planet? We give ourselves rights, but the natural world has no lawyers or anyone to speak up for it. If nature could speak and had control over the world, human overpopulation would be a crime and would not be permitted. Despite the facts and logic and science telling us where we are heading we carry on following our basic instinct.
Are there moral and legal rights to have children? Should you have the freedom to procreate ad infinitum? What right do you have to criticise someone with a large family? It’s their choice. By shying away from talking about population, people will continue to breed without considering the consequences of their actions both on the child itself and on the wider world.
Politics and EconomicsEconomics and politics are manmade constructs. Science is based on pure research and facts. Evolution is a theory that has been proved beyond reasonable doubt, though it is never an absolute fact. Overpopulation is also a fact, and it ramifications can be predicted, not with absolute certainty, but with a very high degree of probability. The scientists and statisticians can inform the politicians, though the decisions are entirely in the hands of the politicians. To put economics and politics above science and facts, is where our system fundamentally fails.
The Quiet Crisis: Dave Brower [executive director of the Sierra Club] expressed the consensus of the environmental movement on the subject in 1966 when he said:
‘We feel you don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.’
The consensus of economists is to support the never-ending Ponzi scheme of eternal growth, with arguments saying we need a growing population to take care of the elderly and to pay for pension schemes. It is an outdated and fundamentally illogical economic theory.
The machine begins to fall apart under the stress of overproduction while we delude ourselves and carry on regardless. The economic system is simplistic and growth-oriented, with no reference to the real world of ecosystems and finite resources. Economists are treated with respect purely because they have the key to making money, with no consideration for anything else. An example of the mind-set imposed on us is describing the economy as ‘stagnating’ if it isn’t growing, implying that it is unhealthy or diseased in some way. In reality, it may be becoming ‘sustainable’, without the need to grow. The words seep into the media and the general mind-set, making us think we have to constantly strive for never-ending growth.
No real change will happen without a seismic event being the cause, so the majority carry on regardless. Saving the world shouldn’t be about politics. But changing the way we live is ingrained so deeply in law and policies that it is unavoidable. Politics is a messy, rancorous world of vested interests, money and power. The environment and things that are actually beneficial for the planet as a whole are put aside. Business and oil and concrete and plastic can make you rich. Money is power, and power is influence in the political sphere. So what chance do a few environmentalists have of being heard in the maelstrom of the capitalist system? Why save the newt when you can make lots of money, drink lots of wine, buy a big house and show off to your friends?
Politics and economics are two sides of the same coin. They both want to keep our shaky system afloat and will do anything they can to do so. Science and politics are not easy bedfellows, but science should win as science is based on fact. Politics and economics are theories. Overpopulation is a fact. Resource depletion is a fact. War and killing are facts. Environmentalism is apolitical and should be the bedrock of law. There are many examples of outrageous and unnecessary governmental expenditure, with US arms expenditure being the pinnacle. The US is the prime global funder and supplier of arms and equipment, with over $500 billion dollars of annual military expenditure. It spends less than a tenth of that figure on aid. $500 billion spent on environmental causes would bring unprecedented benefits for the well-being of the world.
The world has been built on capitalism, the exploitation of anything and everything that can be exploited, in the pursuit of profit. There are rules and regulations to try to keep some semblance of order, but politicians are beholden to companies making as much profit as they can, so they can take some taxes to keep the rest of the infrastructure working. The rich do very well and the rest of the general population scrapes by and makes ends meet.
Economists measure GDP, the product of the entire country. The higher this is, the better the economy is doing. In purely financial terms, this is the measure of success. In almost every other measure, this figure is meaningless. GDP does not take into account a person’s well-being; how many trees there are; how clean the streets are; the health of the population, or anything to do with the functioning of our life-support system, the planet itself. A country could cut down all its forests and deplete all its fisheries, and this would show only as a positive gain to GDP.
‘Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist.’
Kenneth E. Boulding
GDP as a measure of success is invalid. GDP is the measure of a country’s performance economically, not a per-person measure, which is a flaw in itself. Why does the news not report GDP per person? If the population of a country increases by 10 per cent, its economy will undoubtedly grow too. It may grow by 5 per cent. A 5 per cent increase in GDP would be great news, according to politicians and economists. But this 5 per cent increase also equates to a decrease per person if the population size increase is taken into account, which is never mentioned. Also, adding 10 per cent to population has many negative impacts, on housing costs, traffic levels, pollution, etc. Even an increase in GDP per person still implies that an increase in GDP is a good thing, whereas in reality it is still the cancer of unsustainable perpetual growth.
So should we continue with our obsession about economic growth, or leave that to the insular world of the economist and move on to a better measure of personal well-being? You can easily be rich, but also unwell and unhappy. Politicians deal with many issues: tax, social security, crime, pensioners, wars, healthcare. With so many things to think about, they never look up from their work and consider the bigger picture. They don’t think about the long term. They are too busy thinking about problems immediately in front of them. They are constantly fire-fighting, worrying about keeping people happy and thinking of themselves and their party staying in power at the next election. They are not concerned about the future of the planet.
There is a flaw in democratic politics. Should there be a rethink of the entire political system to have a long-term policy to make the world a better place? Or is it more important to worry whether a tax should be raised from 20 per cent to 21 per cent? Politicians will do all they can to avoid talk about population, which leads to sensitive topics such as sexual behaviour, human rights, culture and religion. They believe that population concern isn’t a vote winner, so why even talk about it? The subject is too big, too controversial, so it isn’t brought up.
Politics and economics are too short-sighted and narrow-minded to deal with the looming crisis. In the UK, for example, the Conservative government has agreed funding for the Hinkley Point nuclear power plant at a cost of £50 billion, while dismissing innovative and green tidal lagoon schemes. The reason given is the increase in price for customers’ electricity that would result from the lagoon schemes. After the nuclear disasters seen across the globe, how can a dangerous, massively expensive scheme be given the go-ahead when it will last for only 25–40 years and then sit for thousands of years as a radioactive waste danger area?
Compare this to the simple technology of the tidal lagoon scheme and the answer should be obvious. The tide generates electricity created from the power of moving water – the same free and inexhaustible power we have been harnessing for hundreds of years to grind wheat into flour in millhouses. The lagoon systems would be used to generate vast quantities of perpetual, clean and free electricity. The lifespan of the tidal power schemes is expected to be 50–100 years. In reality, it could be hundreds of years if maintained effectively – a green legacy for our children, producing virtually free electricity. So why are we not jumping at the chance?
Housing Supply and Demand
As the population grows, so does the demand for housing. Any news story mentioning the lack of housing always frames the story as a ‘housing crisis’, never a ‘population crisis’. The reality is that demand has outstripped supply due to the ever-increasing rise in population, putting pressure on councils to build more properties, often to the chagrin of local communities who feel squeezed, alienated and pressured by the ever-present encroachment of construction. Areas in London delude themselves that they live in ‘villages’, although the historic village itself was swamped by the megacity a century before.
The increase in house-building has knock-on effects on all civic infrastructure, increasing pressure on roads, schools, and healthcare and adding to the taxes required to fund these. While there is pressure on housing, the rich get richer as their house prices increase, while the poor get poorer with increased rents and smaller houses. The other winners are the house-builders, reaping huge profits by squeezing as many properties as they can onto the smallest amount of land, leaving barely a patch of grass, euphemistically called a ‘garden’ by the estate agents. The overall loser as more properties get built is nature and the environment, squeezed out and forgotten as human need and greed takes precedence over wildlife, with birdsong drowned out and replaced by the omnipresent drone of engines stuck in traffic.
Ingrained Policies
Countries have laws and policies that are designed to help families with children. Superficially, this is a good thing. Free education for all is also a good thing, as is free healthcare for all. There are tax benefits for working parents and all kinds of benefits to ease the burden of bringing up a family. All of the provisions made for families are well-meaning, but these same policies can have unforeseen consequences. The system is open to abuse and manipulation, with children seen as a means to gain an income and free housing – not the best incentive for introducing a new life to the world. Is it fair that a taxpayer funds all of the above when they have no children? Why should a child-free person pay for the healthcare and education of someone else’s child?
Immigration Politics
Overpopulation, immigration’s big brother, is hiding under the stairs. Immigration is a tricky subject, but it is directly related to population and should be discussed openly.
Migration is often a result of overpopulation, and overpopulation causes food and resources shortages, which leads to conflict. Historically, in times of war, refugees were welcomed. Today, with social pressures resulting from overpopulation, refugees are often denied the right to flee conflict. The political vacuum created in Libya after the fall of Colonel Gaddafi in 2011, for example, saw tens of thousands of people wanting to escape North Africa for a potentially better life in Europe. People were faced with the stark choice of staying in a dangerous, war-torn political vacuum created by the West, or risking their lives crossing the Mediterranean.
Talk of immigration inevitably flags up possible racism. It can be perceived to be racist to talk about immigration because it suggests that you don’t like foreigners. This may be true for a minority of people. However, if immigration causes population to rise, then it is a legitimate subject to talk about in terms of harm to the environment caused by an increased population. This is one factor that causes many environmentalists to shy away from any talk about population growth.
These accusations have further removed population from the agenda, which has contributed to allowing human population to increase unabated for the past decades, causing immense environmental damage. The door is then left open for the subject to be latched on to by the hard right, who are not afraid to talk about it.
Accusations often come from the left, whose egalitarian principles promote a free movement of people, but without any thought for the damage these principles have in the real world. In a perfect world, free movement is to be applauded and is a benevolent aim, but the world is far from perfect and we are far from being able to return to an open-door policy.
Brexit and Trump
Immigration was one of the factors influencing both Brexit and Donald Trump’s election victory. Both countries have liberal immigration policies that are resented by some of the population. The UK public voted to leave the EU despite warnings from all political parties, economists, banks and institutions. The subject of immigration was brought back into the daylight and discussed openly.
The UK is a great country, with London, its beautiful capital city, a multicultural oasis of tolerance, culture, innovation and openness. It is the envy of much of the world and a destination of choice for many. In an ideal world, borders would be open, and the European urban young would enjoy freedom of movement. They rightly see Brexit as a freedom removed, and one day that freedom may be restored. But while immigration and overpopulation remain, it is likely that Brexit and border controls will remain too.
Donald Trump’s election was also partly a result of a section of the country feeling disenfranchised and ignored. These voters believe their way of life has been eroded by globalisation and competition from abroad. Many people, often rural and less financially secure, have seen their livelihoods diminish as jobs have been taken by immigrants coming from poorer countries and willing to work harder for less pay. Trump’s promise to ‘build a wall’ was a vote winner. Again, the underlying cause of immigration is the large and growing populations of other countries, from people looking for a better life in the United States.
It is likely that neither Trump nor Brexit would have happened if the world had addressed the global population crisis.
ReligionReligion should be a force for good, with altruistic intentions of treating your fellow man with respect. But religious groups can be the trickiest to talk to about population. The older and more fundamentalist the religion, the harder it is to change. Religions are also subject to the vagaries of man and can be manipulated for nefarious and personal purposes, which makes population and family planning even harder to discuss. Religions have had significant effects on family size and therefore population size, as there are teachings directly related to access to contraceptives and their use.
Islam has no doctrine on population. There is nothing in the Koran that forbids family planning; it explicitly says you should only have as many children as you can afford.
Religion is part of human nature. Many people like to have something to believe in. We feel happier when we know there is something or someone else in charge, a higher force that will make sure everything is OK. We crave this reassurance. The stability and tradition of hundreds of years of religious belief is passed on from one generation to the next. The belief of billions of people continues despite science and technology explaining the world around us. We often think we know everything, and with Google and science we can find the answer to almost anything. But we are also easily manipulated and fall for obvious fabrications. The fallacies of religion are all around us, adorned in costumes to keep the believers believing. With the most powerful country in the world still having the phrase ‘In God We Trust’ written on its currency, what chance do we have of amending some of the fundamental elements of religion?
Science Vs Religion
In many cultures, religion is deeply ingrained, making acceptance of new facts a real challenge. They close their doors to any mention of science and logic and are unable to change. Religion has always had a hard time explaining science, as it boldly, logically and straightforwardly demolishes centuries of innocent but naïve belief. In most cases, the two can coexist reasonably well and differences are explained away, accepted or ignored, though there are examples where science has been considered blasphemy, as with Copernicus proclaiming that the Earth orbits the Sun.
A more recent clash came in the 19th century, when Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution directly contradicted teachings from the church and resulted in a huge upset for the church. But there were no consequences for the real world; merely arguments between science and religion. Scientific theories and religious teachings usually only affect what we believe in superficial ways. However, with contraception and the effects of religious practice on population size, the consequences are on a different scale in that they have fundamental impact on both an individual and a global level.
The Catholic Church
The Catholic Church puts its historical doctrines on the sins of contraception above the future of the planet. It has chosen to save face rather than change to help everyone’s future. So-called ‘Papal Infallibility’ means that a Pope cannot err in his teachings, so once something has been said, it must remain so. This is a double-edged sword as if a later Pope were to contradict an earlier Pope, one of them must be wrong. How could that be…if both were infallible?
According to the Catholic Church, contraception is wrong because it violates the design God built into the human race where the only purpose of sex is procreation. The pleasure that sexual intercourse provides is an additional blessing from God. But sexual pleasure within marriage becomes unnatural, even harmful, when it is used in a way that deliberately excludes the basic purpose of sex, which is procreation. So sex is only for making babies, while sex for pleasure is a sin. This view still persists today.
1963 saw the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control, whereby the Catholic Church’s decision on birth control was made by an interdisciplinary commission of experts: 72 participants from all over the world ruled that contraception would not be sanctioned. Four out of the 72 made the case that:
‘If it should be declared that contraception is not evil in itself, then we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches in 1930…. this would mean that the leaders of the Church, acting with extreme imprudence, had condemned thousands of innocent human acts, forbidding, under pain of eternal damnation, a practice which would now be sanctioned…’ (Morris, 2016)
In 1968, Pope Paul VI issued his landmark encyclical letter Humanae Vitae (Latin for ‘Human Life’), which re-emphasised the Church’s teaching that it is intrinsically wrong to use contraception to prevent new human beings from coming into existence. This includes sterilisation, condoms, spermicides, coitus interruptus and the pill.
Or, as Monty Python put it, ‘Every sperm is sacred’.
The Pope signed the Humanae Vitae and, in doing so, acted against his own convictions. This has resulted in the world’s biggest religion being told that birth control is a sin. Saying contraception is a sin is the real sin.
Another result of the ban of contraception is the resulting increase in abortions, which happens because of a lack of access to contraception. Abortions are still carried out, illegally and often unsafely, putting immense feelings of shame and stress on the women. This is totally unnecessary and could be changed by a stroke of a pen.
In March 2017 the Vatican held a Biological Extinction Seminar, which included guests from different scientific fields, including Paul Ehrlich, author of 1968’s influential Population Bomb. The Vatican’s own summary was fact-based, accurately saying that the world’s population is ‘shooting upward to the 7.4 billion of today’; ‘Since 1950, world GDP has grown 15 times while the world population has tripled’ and ‘that the current rate of loss of species is approximately 1,000 times the historical rate’, which are putting ‘huge strains on the earth’s capacity to function sustainably.’
The Vatican acknowledged that the current rate of loss of species is approximately 1,000 times the historical rate, with perhaps a quarter of all species in danger of extinction. It also recognised that per capita income of the richest 1.4 billion people averages $41,000; in contrast, the poorest one billion people, in Sub-Saharan Africa, have an average income of $3,500. The Vatican’s response was that we need positive human action for the sustainable development of biodiversity.
The Church did not recognise its historical error of judgement and only said that the answer for ‘Ending extreme poverty’ was ‘wealth redistribution’ accomplished with the help of an ‘intensive agricultural system’ and financial fixes. None of these proposals actually help to reduce consumption or address population growth.
The Catholic Church wants to be taken seriously as an authority that cares about and is seen to be addressing an issue, but ultimately it ignores the cause of the problem, which it exacerbates through its own policy of banning contraception. If the Church truly cared for the future of the planet it would change its policies and support the organisations desperately trying to help in these areas.
The Catholic Churches own doctrines are not observed by the country surrounding the micro-state of the Vatican, Italy, which has a TFR of 1.4 births per women, comfortably below replacement level. This is not the case for many African countries that take the word of the Church more seriously and where family planning is not widely available.
The Church’s challenge is whether it can admit to the serious mistake it has made and change its mind after such a long period of time insisting that contraception is a sin. The Pope is stuck between a rock and a hard place, but with over a billion Catholics in the world, a change would make so many people’s lives better.
US Right-wing Anti-abortion Christians
In the US, religious right-wing politics is powerful and influential. They have managed to dismantle the political consensus of the International Conference on Population and Development that had set out to give reproductive freedoms and access to family planning across the world, which would have prevented hundreds of thousands of unwanted pregnancies.
Since abortion was legalised in the United States in 1973, there has been an ongoing battle between the two ends of the spectrum. Most people outside the US are unaware of the raging conflict between the liberal left/Democrat and the religious right/Republican sides. The religious right is staunchly anti-abortion and aims to discredit the science behind the effect of population on the environment.
Pro-Life Vs Planned Parenthood
There is an ongoing battle between the two sides that directly affects families’ lives in the US. Pro-life are the anti-abortion side that says that ‘all life is sacred’, that any child conceived must be born, no matter what, as it is God’s will. Pro-choice argue that contraception – and, when necessary, abortion – are important freedoms and that all parenthood should be wanted.
Both sides use political framing to justify their arguments. One side promotes the ‘right to life’ of every unborn child; the other promotes the ‘right to choose’. Pro-choice constantly fights against religious and mainly Republican political bodies who want to ban abortion completely. Women and girls attending clinics are subject to humiliation and stress by banner-wielding protestors outside. Having an abortion can be a difficult decision to make and is harder when you are confronted by anti-abortion protestors.
‘Your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed…. That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth.’
Sister Joan Chittister
The Global Gag Rule
The United States switches from helping to hindering international aid for family planning with every switch from Republican to Democrat. One of President Trump’s first acts was to reintroduce the ‘Global Gag Rule’ that was previously rescinded by Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and reinstated by past Republicans, including George Bush.
It’s a short sighted irony that Trump opposes immigration but also has withdrawn vital American funding for family planning programmes in developing countries, because of a connection with abortion or just to please religious fundamentalists. There’s a total lack of holistic thinking, since without funding family planning, to stabilise and reverse huge population growth in these countries he is virtually ensuring that mass immigration will continue as an unstoppable force.
The rule is one of the most spiteful pieces of US legislation, based on religious prejudice that sees abortion as a sin, and it removes funding from any aid organisation that has connections with the practice. The effect of the rule is to slow or stop the flow of aid to developing countries, eviscerating health care and severely undermining family planning efforts in at least 26 developing nations, primarily in Africa. The UN estimates that at its height in 2005, the unmet demand for contraceptives and family planning drove up fertility rates between 15 and 35 per cent in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Arab states, Asia and Africa.
‘Overpopulation is a Myth’
One fringe denialist group is ‘Overpopulation is a Myth’, worth a mention here only as an example of the extremes some people will go to when trying to debunk the facts about overpopulation. This group promotes growing the population, insisting that overpopulation is a ‘myth’. Behind the group is the bogus US-based ‘Population Research Institute’, which promotes everything anti-abortion. Delve a little deeper and you discover that The Population Research Institute was founded by Father Paul Marx, the 15th of 17 children born to his devout Catholic parents.
Catholic.org says:
‘He knew the mortal harm that birth control would cause everywhere, including its effect on the loss of faith of Catholics and on the Catholic Church itself. And he organized a worldwide movement to meet these threats to life and family head on and defeat them.’
Marx devoted his life to the ‘pro-life’ world, travelling to 90 countries and promoting his 13 books, including The Death Peddlers, about a supposed coming push for euthanasia, which sold over a million copies.
The Overpopulation is a Myth website and other similar groups have arisen to counter any concern that there might be too many people on the planet. They have produced a set of videos to explain why population isn’t an issue. The first talks about the Reverend Thomas Malthus and claims that he ‘recommended killing off the have-nots of society’. In reality, Malthus was concerned that government welfare policies paying bonuses for additional children would result in starvation among the poor.
Responsible Blind SpotsIt is hard enough trying to talk about population when religions, corporations and climate change deniers do everything they can to silence you. It is even harder when people and groups who should be on your side are conspicuous in their silence, or even agree with the deniers.
There are many guilty parties who avoid any talk of population. The main line of reasoning taken by the deniers is that they are doing everything they can to tackle climate breakdown and environmental problems by encouraging reduced consumption of all types: food, energy, and resources. Population is simply not on the agenda. Some may recognise population as a cause and an issue, but treat it as an unchangeable fact. It is only mentioned as a cause, with no mention of any action to slow population growth. This is a mathematical half-formula, ignoring one of the two multiples that impact the environment: population.
All of the good work done by reducing consumption and becoming efficient in resource use is cancelled out by an increasing population size. Addressing population has pure and direct effects on improving the environment. One birth less is a full human lifetime’s worth of consumption saved (plus that of their offspring, ad infinitum).
The UK’s Green Party
The Green Party of the UK was founded in 1972 after Lesley Whitaker and her friends read an article in Playboy magazine by Paul Ehrlich about the dire potential consequences of overpopulation. Since that time, the Greens have gradually but fundamentally betrayed their original aims of pure environmental principles. Today many in the party have moved away from their principle-led origins and reject their own population policies.
Originally called the People Party and later the Ecology Party, the population policies caught on at a time when population was discussed openly as an issue that needed to be addressed. The party gained momentum and credibility under the chairmanship of Jonathon Porritt, but he later despaired at the party’s later reluctance to confront the truth about overpopulation. The Green Party still has the environment as a core principle but its original aims have gone after being hijacked by the hard left, which meant side-lining difficult issues such as population. It is now a party more associated with political motives rather than those based on true environmental values. Its populist policies are designed to win votes rather than address the original aims of protecting the environment. One of its policies is for large-scale house-building, which is one of the most environmentally damaging policies possible, no matter how ‘green’ the buildings themselves are.
One of the People Party’s original proposals was for the UK to have a population target of 20–30 million, a figure based on the carrying capacity of the country. This attracted vitriolic criticism from some corners of the press, which portrayed the party as anti-human and anti-immigration. Having similar policies on immigration to parties such as UKIP do today led to internal conflict, and the Greens had to distance themselves from groups at the opposite end of the political spectrum. The easiest, but unprincipled, option was to abandon any talk of overpopulation and talk instead only about consumption. It did not stand firm in its beliefs and explain the logic and truth behind its policies to a public which would have listened if arguments were made well. Unfortunately, the Green Party backed down, leaving the population question only in the hands of the least respected of all of the UK parties, UKIP, which gives the topic of population an unjustifiably bad name.
Looking at the Green Party’s population policy (The Green Party, 2003) , which was last revised in 2003, it addresses population practically and thoughtfully. The policies on population are still there, but they are never mentioned. The following excerpts of Green Party population policy lay out the aims and benefits of addressing population size and should be promoted as fundamental elements of Green Party policy:
Medium-term
Long-term
The Green Party also has a vocal minority of ‘Bright Greens’, who are even more militant in their condemnation of any mention of population than the party proper. Anyone who dares mention the subject is harassed, shouted down and accused of being racist, which further reduces the party's chances of being an honest and progressive environmental force in British politics.
World Wildlife Fund
The WWF is a great charitable organisation doing fantastic work raising awareness and acting to save wildlife throughout the world. It is a global brand whose mission is to save wildlife, but it is trying to fix a problem without ever mentioning the root cause: human overpopulation. While it is in denial and not addressing or acknowledging the fundamental cause, it is fighting a battle it cannot win.
Taking this position is like protecting all the furniture in a house that has a hole in the roof by covering each piece with a plastic sheet, while not fixing the hole in the roof itself. A real example of this position is the tiger in India. Today, there are fewer than 1,800 tigers in India according to the Wildlife Protection Society of India. This is a critically low number. Meanwhile, the number of humans in India is 1.25 billion, and growing by over 40,000 per day. That is half a million people for every one tiger. Switch the figures around and look again. Would the human be considered endangered if there were 1,800 humans and over a billion tigers in India? What can be done to save the wild tigers when a growing and dense human population takes the land required for the tigers’ habitat? The tigers become ever more fenced in and surrounded and don’t stand a chance, no matter how hard the conservationists try. The local population will naturally protect their families from the predatory penned-in tiger that is looking for food for its own cubs. Unfortunately, the tiger will inevitably lose.
This scenario is played out throughout the world in many situations affecting thousands of species. The tiger receives more coverage than the toad, but the toad is suffering just the same. In all cases, it is the growth in human numbers, and their consumption of resources, which has caused the problem. The WWF, as the pre-eminent worldwide environmental charity, must acknowledge that we have the duty to look after the planet by considering how many people the world can hold. It must recognise that any increase in the human population directly, and negatively, affects all endangered species.
Marco Lambertini, WWF director general, said: ‘A strong natural environment is the key to defeating poverty, improving health and developing a just and prosperous future. We have proven that we know what it takes to build a resilient planet for future generations, we just need to act on that knowledge.’ But he ignores the fact that a strong natural environment will never be achieved while the human population continues to grow and so poverty will not be defeated.
Putting the spotlight and emphasis in the wrong place is a deception – it results in the wrong issues being tackled, so priorities are muddled, which produces disastrous results. The WWF’s own Living Planet Report 2016 estimated that, by 2020, human activity will have destroyed two-thirds of the world’s vertebrate populations relative to 1970, a mere 50 years ago. A first step to reduce these pressures would be to promote awareness of the benefits of smaller families, which the WWF isn’t doing.
The WWF’s 180-page Living Planet Report from 2014 says:
‘With another 2.4 billion people to be added to the human population by 2050, the challenge of providing everyone with the food, water and energy they need is already a daunting prospect. Unless we take significant steps to reduce the pressures we are placing on the planet’s climate and natural processes, it could prove impossible.’
WWF Founder Sir Peter Scott said:
‘You know, when we started the World Wildlife Fund its objective was to save endangered species from extinction, and I am now near the end of my career and we have failed completely. We haven't saved a single endangered species. And if we'd put all that money we had collected into condoms, we might have done some good.’
WWF Ambassador and Population Matters patron, Sir David Attenborough, said:
‘All environmental problems become harder – and ultimately impossible –
to solve with ever more people.’
Given the above statements and the obvious connections, why isn’t the WWF talking about human numbers?? Would it rather keep away from adverse publicity and let the natural world suffer as a consequence? If the WWF doesn’t recognise that overpopulation is an issue, what hope is there that anyone else will?
Hans Rosling
Hans Rosling was a charismatic Swedish statistician and presenter who did more to falsely allay fears of overpopulation than anyone else in recent history. With his over-optimistic presentations and confidence in his own numbers, he duped audiences into believing that population isn’t a problem.
Rosling’s main argument was that bringing people out of poverty helps to reduce population growth, but this is only half right. It is smaller families that lift people out of poverty – access to education together with affordable family planning has helped to decrease extreme poverty.
Rosling’s fixed projections for population growth are misleading, as they do not take into account the huge potential reductions in future population sizes that are possible when countries introduce proactive family planning policies – and the increases when they don’t. He assumed that ‘demography is destiny’, implying that family planning services are not necessary. His mistake was to believe that just because there has been a ‘demographic transition’ in the West that the same thing will happen in the developing world. This simply isn’t the case, as in many countries a large family is an achievement; the larger the family the better. The argument that increasing wealth in these, mainly African, countries will lower birth rates is false; it can have the opposite effect. Omitting any mention of influencing the future trajectories of his graphs leaves audiences without the knowledge of the benefits family planning can give. This false optimism and omission of such an important part of the story misled the public.
Rosling’s argument saying that bringing people out of poverty will lower birth rates is also wrong for a second reason. In countries where poverty is common, men and women do not have children because of their poverty. A man without money and pay will not have a wife and children as he cannot afford it. Bringing these people out of poverty therefore increases childbirth rather than decreasing it.
Rosling’s third error, of not considering climate breakdown, is the most serious. He made no mention of the fact that by bringing families out of poverty to lower birth rates, you are, by default, simultaneously increasing consumption and per capita carbon emissions. If the assumption that bringing families out of poverty to reduce birth rates turns out to be false, and birth rates stay the same, then the net effects are far worse than if no action had been taken. All that has happened is that wealth, and therefore consumption, and therefore carbon emissions have increased.
Giving families free access to family planning, together with education, is a far better route. Simply bringing families out of poverty can lead to debt and being sucked into the capitalist system of overconsumption. The better option is for families to live within their means and with sustainable family sizes, which will naturally lead to gradually accumulated increases in environmental stability and overall well-being.
Without a full knowledge of the facts, audiences left Rosling’s shows feeling that his facts and figures had explained that we have nothing to worry about, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Rosling’s trick was to cherry-pick facts to show that everything will be ok, while ignoring other equally true figures showing how dangerously close to collapse the world is.
‘...the only way to achieve [not growing to nine billion] is by killing.’
Hans Rosling (joking)
Rosling agreed that there are too many people on the planet, but said that we will be OK because as families get wealthier they naturally have smaller families. Therefore, we have nothing to worry about. All we have to do is work hard to encourage developing nations to create more wealth. He ignored the fact that while it is true that increasing wealth and education slows our population growth, the fastest way to use resources and destroy the environment is also by increasing wealth. He did not take consumption into account. Total human impact on the planet depends on per capita consumption and the number of people. The problem isn’t solved if the consumption per person has to increase in order to stabilise the population. Smaller families from education and family planning result in more wealth. He appeared on TV with studio audiences explaining his theories accompanied by entrancing graphics and statistics for population and wealth, whilst omitting any talk about the consequences of the inevitable resource depletion resulting from the increased wealth. He didn’t say how the increased population was going to manage as resources and food supplies struggle to keep up with demand.
Such was the reach of Rosling’s work that he was named one of the 100 leading global thinkers by Foreign Policy and one of the 100 most creative people in business by Fast Company magazine. He won several awards, including the Jubilee Prize from the Swedish Medical Society. He was in TIME’s world’s 100 most influential people in 2012. Rosling has been a success on YouTube, with millions of views. In 2017 Rosling (and Niger) won the UN Population Award, for outstanding achievements in population and health.
With his large audiences and natural flair for explaining and displaying statistics, it is a shame that Rosling’s assumptions were wrong; he could have been a force for good. His work has made the struggles and commitments of family-planning charities harder, as his messages have been accepted by many. At a time when the world is accelerating towards self-destruction, his false reassurance that overpopulation is not a problem has been an unfortunate step in the wrong direction.
George Monbiot
The UK’s Guardian newspaper is respected for its reporting on the environment and climate breakdown. It takes both issues very seriously and reports on them far more than many news sources. One of its most prolific and passionate environmental writers is George Monbiot. It is unfortunate that Monbiot has a blind spot on population and does not see the massive benefits that access to family planning would bring the world, instead he fixes his argument solely on the rich and their overconsumption. When you are wrong, you are wrong and your misjudgements must be held to account – apologies George.
Monbiot does not acknowledge that poor, mainly African, countries have a real predicament with overpopulation. He turns the story away from these troubled countries and instead aims at the far easier target of rich white men, as if people of other races and in poor countries do not appreciate the issues. In his article ‘The Population Myth’ (Monbiot, 2009) his first attack on the ‘wealthy white men’ for raising the population issue is aimed at James Lovelock, the man who dared to suggest that there is a connection between population growth and the environment.
Monbiot’s argument against addressing population growth is the fact that places in the world where population growth is highest have the lowest CO2 emissions so therefore we should disregard their growth. It is true that poorer countries have lower per capita emissions by far than wealthier countries, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be concerned about their population growth. He makes insinuations of racism and imperialism about people who do consider population growth in developing countries, which makes the work of the charities supplying family planning in underdeveloped countries much harder. He refuses to recognise that the best way to help people out of poverty is to encourage small families, so the resources available can go further and the environment can recover.
Monbiot rightly says that the emissions of the poorest in the world are a tiny fraction of those of the rich, but he says nothing about the consequences on families with seven or eight children where resources are already stretched beyond capacity. Population increase in poor countries has a high local impact because of pressure on land and local resources; population increase in poor countries holds back raising quality of life and living standards. It is true that CO2 emissions per person are very low in developing countries, but it does not mean large family sizes should be ignored and therefore continue. The alleviation of starvation, war and environmental destruction through family planning far outweigh any idea that we should ignore them because it is rich white people causing most of the emissions.
A great article written by Monbiot is about the beneficial consequences of reintroducing apex predators to an environment. This causes a ‘trophic cascade’ leading to a better distribution of other species when any excess of say, deer, is kept in check by the re-introduction of wolves to an area. This in turn allows nature to recover from over-grazing by the deer, and other beneficial follow-on effects. His argument could be taken to the next logical step: would the world be a better place if there were an apex predator that had kept human beings in check? We keep every other animal in check, bar one. As we currently stand, we have nothing in our way and we are beginning to see the consequences as Gaia herself acts.
The Nature Conservancy
As a science-based organisation, the Nature Conservancy should take everything into consideration, but the word ‘population’ is conspicuous by its absence. The best way to conserve nature is to leave it alone. The best way to do that is to reduce our numbers.
The Nature Conservancy has five core values talking about ‘respect’, ‘diversity’ and other ‘correctness’. Their fifth core value is:
‘Develop, analyze and use the best available conservation science and a science-based rigor to set priorities, make decisions, take action, and measure results.’
Simple logic would tell them that a stable and eventually reduced human population would ensure the conservancy of the world’s nature, but the Nature Conservancy makes no mention of population. The Conservancy has been active for 60 years and works in 70 countries. Its mission is:
‘To conserve the lands and waters on which all life depends.’ Their vision ‘is a world where the diversity of life thrives, and people act to conserve nature for its own sake and its ability to fulfil our needs and enrich our lives’.
As of 2017, Mark Tercek, the president and CEO of the Nature Conservancy, had a blog. He gave the ten core principles, which are:
‘Be inclusive, Follow the science, Harness market forces, Encourage collaboration, Invest in nature’s solutions, Accelerate the transition to clean energy, Lead other nations on shared challenges, Manage the impacts of development at a landscape scale, Maintain and enhance core laws and policies, Unleash America’s creativity. ‘
The Nature Conservancy will hopefully open its eyes at some point and begin to follow more of its own reports, as with a report from long-time Conservancy employee, Kristen P. Patterson, saying that:
‘More scientists and governments have made the connection between population growth and global carbon emissions and have recognized the multiple benefits that family planning provides.’ (Patterson, 2016)
Global Footprint Network
Global Footprint Network’s Earth Overshoot Day uses an innovative way of getting the overconsumption message across to the public by calculating the date by which we have consumed a year’s worth of resources. Their website lists a number of things you can do to help reduce your footprint, with one element conspicuous by its absence:
The list appears alongside a picture of a family’s feet, consisting of two adults and three children, thus subliminally reinforcing the message that a large family is OK. Earth Overshoot Day makes no mention that the most effective way of reducing our long-term carbon footprint is through having a small family.
Earth Day Network
The Earth Day Network’s mission is to build the world’s largest environmental movement. It is the world’s largest recruiter to the environmental movement, working with more than 50,000 partners in 196 countries. Earth Day superficially mentions overpopulation, but there is no mention of the impacts of rising population, or the benefits of a smaller population. Instead emphasis is put on planting trees, climate breakdown and saving endangered species. Nowhere is family planning and smaller families mentioned – ignoring and side-lining the fundamental cause of our problems.
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has not escaped from the whitewash of overpopulation and climate denial. In February 2006, the phrase ‘to understand and protect the home planet’ was quietly removed from NASA’s official mission statement. Because agency mission statements are routinely used to justify research and funding decisions, many scientists were not only surprised to discover the change, but also concerned that the change meant more funding would be shifted away from studies of Earth, including climate breakdown research, and redirected to NASA’s planned new series of manned space missions.
UN. The Global Goals for Sustainable Development
Through its 17 Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations aims to bring all countries out of poverty.
It does not recognise that it cannot succeed while it ignores population. The goals are impossible to reach because a poorer country can’t catch up with the average high-income country without further depleting resources. Estimates say that bringing all countries out of poverty would require the resources of 3.4 Earths, an unsolvable contradiction (Hickel, 2015).
To use the language of sustainability where it is clearly not sustainable is an oxymoron masking the reality that the UN’s benevolent goals are unachievable. There is one token gesture on population, though the word 'population' itself is not used, in the Sustainable Development Goals:
3.7 ‘By 2030, ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive healthcare services, including for family planning, information and education, and the integration of reproductive health into national strategies and programs.’
Friends Of The Earth
Even organisations with the pure aim of saving the planet ignore population. In the last 100 years, population has increased about 3.5 times and consumption per head has increased about 3.5 times. The resulting consumption has increased over 12 times and yet Friends of the Earth’s policy on population does not even recognise the role population has played in the total consumption. In doing so they mislead the public into side-lining population.
The Rest
If the above environmentally concerned and aware organisations do not address overpopulation, what hope is there that the mainstream will? The BBC was founded ‘to inform, educate and entertain’, yet is failing lamentably in the first two aims when it comes to the true state of the world. Meanwhile, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, the Cambridge Conservation Initiative and most other reputable organisations ignore overpopulation, seeing it as too controversial for their cosy institutions to mention, which is an abnegation of their aims and responsibilities.
The blanket removal of population from the mainstream agenda has reached such an extent that people and organisations do not even recognise it as an issue.
The Spiral of Silence
The ‘Spiral of Silence’ theory was created by the German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. It says people have a ‘quasi-statistical organ’, a sixth sense, which allows them to know the prevailing public opinion, even without access to polls. People have a fear of isolation and know what behaviours will increase their likelihood of being socially rejected. People are reluctant to express their minority views, even if they know them to be true.
The Spiral of Silence appears when nobody speaks up. We have taken our eye off the ball for the past 25 years. In that short time, 3.5 billion more mouths have arrived needing to be fed and housed. The Spiral of Silence increases as people would rather not talk about such a difficult subject.
This results in an erroneous but self-reinforcing assertion that population isn’t an issue. It becomes a silent conspiracy. It is similar to the silence around meat-eating. We are all aware of the factory farms growing and slaughtering millions of chickens. But we like fried chicken, so we keep a guilty group silence on the subject.
There are many historical examples of the spiral of silence, from slavery and racism to sexism and homophobia. In each of these examples, it has taken time to throw off previously accepted norms as unacceptable. The situations are always changed by a strong-willed minority with the determination to change society. It is difficult and takes time, but great things can be achieved, as was the case with causes such as the abolition of slavery and winning votes for women.
Social norms can change quickly. Watching TV comedies from the 1970s can now make you squirm at the blatant sexism. Smoking used to be accepted everywhere. Even slavery was an accepted part of everyday life. All of these things changed by overcoming the spiral of silence. It is often the case that younger generations begin the transformation, with the older generation begrudgingly accepting the new norms.
Population concern has been unfairly stigmatised. The unintended consequences of politicians and charities shying away from population is that it plays into the hands of racists and the rich, who will talk about it for their own purposes. When benevolent organisations choose to ignore the issue, it is harder for population activists to speak up.
AnalogiesThere are some useful analogies to succinctly explain what is happening.
The Sinking Ship
A favourite analogy of Paul Erhlich is the sinking ship. If the ship is sinking, what do you do first? Do you man the pumps or do you pull up the gangplank? Manning the pumps, analogous to reducing consumption, to pump out the water to stop the ship from sinking is good. But pulling up the gangplank should be done first – stop more people from getting on the sinking ship in the first place. Pulling up the gangplank is analogous to encouraging people not to have more than one child. Why would you want to bring another person into a world that can’t cope as it is?
The Shared Bathroom
This is a variation on the tragedy of the commons. If you live in a house by yourself with one bathroom you can use the bathroom any time you want. As soon as there is another person living in the same house you have to share that bathroom. You have to wait your turn. The more people who live same house, the greater the burden of sharing becomes. This situation plays itself out throughout the world in countless situations, reducing the standard of living of everyone affected. A smaller population benefits everyone.
The Overflowing Bath
The bath is overflowing, so what do you do? Do you find some containers and catch the overflowing water, or do you switch off the taps? Not thinking about our increasing numbers is the same as not thinking of turning off the taps.
The Birthday Party
This is a simple analogy by Australian conservationist Bindi Irvin. She wrote an essay saying that overpopulation is like having a birthday party and inviting 15 people, but 70 turn up at your door. You only have 15 cupcakes, so what do you do? You wouldn’t think an essay like this would be controversial, but it was censored by then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Irvin stuck to her guns and said it was appalling for a country that espouses freedom of speech to censor her essay.
The Seedlings
The novice gardener opens his packet of tomato seeds and eagerly sows the whole packet of a hundred seeds onto a tray, looking forward to his crop later in the summer. But he hasn’t taken into account the number and potential size of each plant. The fifty seeds all germinate, but as they grow and he pots some of them up into larger pots, he realises the mistake he has made. He ends up throwing all but four of the plants onto the compost heap as that’s all he really needed. His scenario is of little consequence, but the novice human race has done the same, sowing our seed more widely than we should have done and only realising the mistake after the fact. The life of a human being is on a different level to that of a tomato plant, though it remains to be seen how many of us might end up on the compost heap as we struggle to find the food and water we all need.
Robert Louis Stevenson
‘You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something sometime in your life.’
Winston Churchill
The Elephant in the RoomAllowing the world population to rocket to the unsustainable levels of today is an act of criminal negligence on the grandest scale. It has happened with just a few murmurs of admonishment. The natural world has a way of telling us we’re making a tragic mistake. We know population pressures have put the planet in peril, so why aren’t we urgently implementing all of the simple, compassionate measures to help stave off the worst of the impacts facing us? We know how many of us there are now, how few there were in the past, and we have a good idea of how many there will be in the future. We have watched as our populations have expanded, with only a small number of disparate groups pointing out the dilemma we now face.
There are many reasons why virtually all discussion of population has been brushed under the carpet. There are many vested interests at play, each putting up their smokescreen of self-interest to cloud the realities of overpopulation and climate breakdown. It is in their interest that the status quo remains. It is profitable to continue with business as usual, and a growing customer base is always good. For manufacturing, construction, finance, farming, food processing and the military, a growing population is good news: there is money and profit in a growing population.
Only when we delve deeper into why we’ve allowed our numbers to boom do we realise the magnitude of the situation and how addressing it is not as simple as we might hope. If we were logical, had foresight and had used basic common sense we wouldn’t be where we are now. The world could have been a far, far better and happier place if we had taken some simple, sensible measures. There are many reasons why the dangers of population growth are ignored. Each reason has a straightforward explanation, based on social norms and accepted practices that are hard to talk about, let alone change.
The Emperor’s New Clothes
Overpopulation and its ramifications are subject to scale paralysis that no single entity has the ability to manage and direct. There is a collective powerlessness when confronted by problems whose size and complexity seem overwhelming. Being such an immense and global issue, it is easy to pass the buck. There are always more urgent issues at hand that need to be discussed. As no single entity is ultimately responsible, no one takes responsibility.
As the climate warms and changes, more unforeseen emergencies will crop up, which will push the question of family planning further and further down the agenda. For this reason, it is even more important that the subject is put in the public eye and kept there permanently.
Population is easy to understand, yet is rarely discussed by the mainstream. Even some of the scientific community become silent, disregarding population growth in statistical analysis. Suggestions for how to reduce carbon dioxide generally include any factor other than population. When you realise it is the underlying cause of virtually all the world’s problems, a veil is lifted. You ask why nothing is being done; why no one is talking about it. You see all the charities and good causes doing their great work, but realise the hard work can’t and won’t pay off, as it does not get to the root of the problem. There is a complete mainstream blackout of the impacts of personal fertility choices - the subject is brushed under the carpet.
An enlightened few are brave enough to signal that there is a serious issue that needs to be discussed. Scientific American has called population ‘the most overlooked and essential strategy for achieving long-term balance with the environment.’
Amitav Ghosh, talking about his 2016 book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, says: ‘It’s like death, no one wants to talk about it. The problem is of such a scale that we are dwarfed by it.’ He predicts a ‘politics of the armed lifeboat’, where the poor of the global south will be left to their doom while the rich go unscathed.
Karen Shragg, in her 2015 book Move Upstream: A Call to Solve Overpopulation, says the mainstream view of overpopulation is a collective blind spot that just isn’t being seen. The public and media must cure this affliction and face the facts head-on. It has to be talked about openly and without any fear of reprimand.
Ignorance is BlissA large proportion of people are unaware of or complacent about the increasing signs of the Anthropocene; it isn’t on their radar as it doesn’t affect their lives directly. People either carry on in blissful ignorance or turn a blind eye to the slowly unfolding human-managed dismantling of nature. Our minds operate on a human timescale. The changes appear very gradual to us, but on a geological scale they are happening at lightning speed.
Fundamental changes to nature are happening in our lifetimes. Only thirty years ago, a drive through the countryside in the summer would leave windscreens covered with splattered insects by the end of a journey. Today our windscreens are left almost clean. The insects just aren’t there. The buddleia was covered in butterflies on summer days. Today there are a few – the odd red admiral or tortoiseshell – but a fracton of their previous numbers. This isn’t our memory playing tricks on us: we have changed an entire ecosystem, built up over millions of years, in one generation.
As nature disappears and cities grow, we pay less attention to its gradual vanishing. We become more and more detached from the natural world and become more anthropocentric. Children used to witness the magic of nature directly today, excitement and wonder are often experienced remotely, mobile phone screen.
We see the present as normal. It's not. It’s an abnormal normal. We see getting in to our cars every day and joining the hundreds of thousands of others as normal. Almost every car is polluting, along with every other car in every town, in every country. This is a temporary extreme. 100 years ago peace and quiet reigned everywhere. 100 years from now it will be peaceful again, a world where you will still be able to travel, but without the congestion, pollution and noise.
Maligned Malthusians
If you are worried about overpopulation and chat with someone who disagrees with you, you are often labelled as being ‘Malthusian’. It is meant as an insult, but personally I now take this as a complement, and welcome the label with a smile.
Malthus is seen by some as a misguided prophet of doom because what he said didn’t happen, and is therefore proof that we don’t need to worry about overpopulation. Where their logic quickly falls apart, however, is that just because nothing happened then, doesn’t mean it won’t happen in the future. Just because population has exploded and not collapsed yet in no way precludes the possibility that population will collapse at some point.
Thomas Malthus was ahead of his time in foreseeing the way the world was heading with his Essay on the Principle of Population. His work also influenced Charles Darwin in looking into the formulation of the theory of natural selection, and inspiring Darwin to formulate On the Origin of Species.
AnthropocentricismWe are obsessed with ourselves and the obsession increases as we remove ourselves ever further from nature. The further we are removed from nature, the greater the illusion of human supremacy grows. Media bombards us with perpetual advertising, brainwashing billions of us into a false world of shopping and consumerism. We are removed from reality. Overpopulation and climate breakdown are things most people couldn’t care less about. We are fixated with ourselves as individuals, worrying about our looks, our fitness and our clothes. Increasingly, we are shallow and self-centred, not looking outwards to help others and the world, instead sinking further into narcissism. Advertising, media, magazines and shopping channels encourage this to make money through preying on people’s weaknesses in self-worth and self-perception, encouraging the belief that spending money and buying products will somehow cure us and make us happy.
Billionaire Techno-Optimists
Some people are convinced there will be a silver bullet to solve all population and environmental problems. Humankind is indeed ingenious and has created technologies beyond our dreams, but in a world of finite resources trying to techno-fix our way out of an unsolvable dilemma is simply wrong.
Billionaires often arrive at their immense wealth through having a good idea while being at the right place at the right time. In an age of global marketplaces, where a business idea can be rolled out worldwide, revenues and profits multiply rapidly as often only a limited physical infrastructure is required.
The billionaire Elon Musk built his fortune through a stroke of luck with his involvement in eBay. This gave him a fortune that he has put to use in many technologically innovative ways, but with one conviction that is obviously wrong. Musk believes that there is a ‘population implosion’ happening where there won’t be enough young people to support the old. Without doubt, there will be a change in the demographic, but the problems created by the old outnumbering the young are tiny compared to those of increased overpopulation.
Another example of a techno-fixer with honourable but misguided intentions is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. He and his wife Priscilla Chan in 2016 announced that they were committing $3 billion to ‘cure, prevent or manage all disease’. The billionaire couple plan to give away nearly all their money to help solve the world’s problems. This is a noble aim, but one that is short-sighted and anthropocentric. Its main result will be to increase human longevity and thus population still further, so adding to every other overshoot and resource problem facing the world.
Current economic systems give money and power to capitalists who have no interest in the future of the planet and are only concerned about making money and expanding their business empires. Money is power, and the power is in the wrong hands. This immense wealth could easily solve the world’s problems if a fraction of it was directed towards meaningful and benevolent causes. Barring the likes of the Gates Foundation, those at the top are too far away from those at the bottom to recognise the true situation.
Stuck in a Rut
You have a job, which you enjoy, you work every day, you get paid, you pay your bills – you’re a good person, a model worker. But are you part of the problem? The Western middle class and working people around the world carry on their everyday lives without a care, assuming this is the way things are and the way things will stay. But will the status quo continue? On our present course we are heading for the iceberg that is dead ahead. We are constantly fed the lie that we have to keep going to keep the economy growing. We don’t really have a choice but to carry on. We can’t just stop; we have families to feed and bills to pay.
The list of apparently respectable professions that actually contribute to the destruction of the planet is long, and yours may be on it. The oil industry is an obvious one, but there are many others. Architects? Buildings are great for people, but bad for the environment. Then there is every profession that goes with it: builders, suppliers, salespeople, installers. We are all connected to our insane desire to build and expand in what we call improving the world. This has had incredible benefits for the health and well-being of billions of people, but we have to stop. We’ve gone too far and now our actions are more detrimental than beneficial. The question is how we escape from the very, very deep rut we’ve got ourselves into.
Shot by Both Sides
Denying that population should be addressed is like denying climate breakdown. We are far beyond our carrying capacity. Our numbers and consumption are the root cause that must both be taken into account and acted upon. However, any mention of population to many in the political arena and you may as well talk to a brick wall. The world may be crumbling in front of our eyes, but many still are in denial.
The Left – ‘Rich Racist’ Accusations
An accusation often thrown at anyone who speaks about population and is also white and middle class is: ‘You’re racist – you only want to tell Africans to stop having babies so you can carry on with your own overconsumption. Don’t you know the average Westerner consumes about 20 times as much as the average African?’
This argument is based on the assumption that blame is being passed from the rich to the poor; the poor in question generally being from Africa. The presumption here is that addressing fertility rates is just an excuse to allow rich Westerners to continue their lives of overconsumption while telling poorer people to stop reproducing. The long-held left-wing resentment of the rich telling the poor what to do ignores the fact that the aim is to help communities in poorer countries. Following this logic, you are only allowed to help poorer countries become richer through material aid and not address fertility rates. In reality, this results in populations rising still further, which perpetuates the poverty trap. There is a major error of judgment in saying that anyone with power or influence must only be acting out of self-interest, when the opposite is true.
Of course, families should be helped out of poverty, but this must be done in conjunction with the provision of family planning and an aim for smaller family sizes.
The Right – Rising Populations are Good for Business
Right-of-centre politics believes that population increase is a good thing. The more people there are, the more consumers there are to exploit. The more consumers there are, the more profits there are for companies. Governments also encourage this model: the more company profits there are, the more people are employed, the more voters are happy and the more tax revenue is collected. The vicious circle is in place.
Government Population Fatalism
Governments around the world have let themselves off the hook of looking at population by pointing to the demographic transition theory. This says that nothing else is needed – development is the best contraceptive and populations naturally level off as societies grow increasingly wealthy. Without any significant objection to this from the public, it is the easy option to take as no unpopular decisions have to be taken.
Group Failure
Another reason why overpopulation is ignored is group failure. A crowd of people stand by and watch while someone on the street is robbed. Why should you do anything? There are other people around, so why should it be you who takes the risk? If you were the only person there, you probably would help. But why should it be you? Everyone else thinks the same, so nobody acts. If you were physically present in a disaster area, you would help – you would work day and night to save people after a tsunami. But when it’s not nearby, it’s not your problem, so you do nothing. The same is true with having children. Even if you know of the collective impact of an unsustainable population, why should you personally do anything? After all, your few children won’t make a difference. Multiply this thought by a hundred million, and it does make a difference.
People would rather watch a football match than the results of crop failure and starving children. Most people switch over or switch off. It may seem cold and dispassionate not to act to help the subject who produces the most emotional response. However, the best response is not the one that makes us feel good; it is the one that makes the world a better place.
Science, Ethics, Morality and the Media
We have chosen to turn a blind eye to effectively address climate breakdown and its causes –consumption and population. The science is there, with research and evidence routinely provided, yet we carry on regardless. There is a crisis unfolding that we ignore, while we live in a collective delusion and participate in a failing system. We are fed stories 24 hours a day to remove ourselves from reality, to grab our attention with trivia and to take our money. Virtually all news says nothing about the crisis. We continue down the wrong path, believing this is how it will always be. We become shallow and without morals, caring only for our own personal wellbeing, without a care for the greater good. Governments and the media are unable or unwilling to take action, and this will continue until the threats become so vast as to be unstoppable.
Climate breakdown, overpopulation and animal extinction is happening now and the media ignore it. Television and the media are run by organisations whose only purpose is to make money. There are no ethical or moral choices to be made. If it will sell, it will be broadcast. If it is in the slightest bit controversial, a programme may not be broadcast – even if it is a well-made, multi-million pound documentary by one of the world’s most respected broadcasters, David Attenborough. In 2011, the final episode of Frozen Planet was not shown by ten of the 30 broadcasters who bought the series, because it was about climate change. The episode, On Thin Ice, was dropped by the Discovery Channel in the US because of ‘a scheduling issue’. This was an excuse to hide the truth that the episode had been censored because of climate scepticism in the US. When programmes such as this are not broadcast, is there any wonder why half of Americans do not believe climate change is real? A spokesman for Greenpeace said: ‘It’s a bit like pressing the stop button on Titanic just as the iceberg appears.’
News, by definition, needs to be new. To catch our attention, it needs to be exciting and dramatic. The news is always about conflict, the economy, terrorism and accidents. Climate and overpopulation are relegated. When climate and environmental stories appear, they are mentioned briefly and routinely before moving on to the next story. World average temperatures setting a new record is now a commonplace news story and has been repeated several times over the last 15 years. Yet this news is like no other news ever reported – it is the most dangerous, life-threatening news we could hear.
Global temperatures are rising. We know what the causes and consequences are, but we collectively shrug our shoulders and carry on regardless. Humans are programmed to respond to sudden danger, like realising we’re about to fall off a chair or a cliff. The basic animal instinct doesn’t appear for long-term issues like overpopulation and the environment. It’s even worse for overpopulation, as people increasing in number is barely news. What’s the danger there? We’re just people, doing what people have always done. We’re not hurting anyone – but put us all together and look at the results and we really are hurting something –the planet’s own life-support systems.
What is a newscaster to do when reporting another story in which yet another animal is put on the critically endangered list? Or when the ice caps retreat to their new lowest level ever recorded…again? They do as they are told, following the same script, then move on to the far more exciting news of who won the football.
As the reported effects of population-driven climate breakdown become more frequent, their individual impact becomes less and less newsworthy. The effects of climate breakdown drop further down the list of newsworthy stories. The nature of the news is that it only ever reports the symptoms, never the cause. The floods caused by the hurricane are in the news. Climate breakdown causing the hurricane is not mentioned. Overpopulation causing the climate breakdown doesn’t even register.
Complacent Journalism
One example of the complacent mainstream media portrayal of population was the 2017 UN annual population survey, which was reported in British newspaper The Guardian. With forecasts of global population rising to eight billion by 2023, The Guardian wrote that the expected drop in European population was something to worry about:
‘All European countries now languish with fertility rates below replacement level, meaning that populations will inexorably decline.’
‘Eastern Europe is likely to be particularly badly affected by population trends, with numbers likely to fall more than 15%.’
This kind of reporting further embeds the false notion that a reducing population is bad. The opposite is true: a declining human population is good in every way imaginable for wildlife, the environment and humans themselves.
Misanthropy, Sex, Human Nature and Human Rights
We are genetically programmed to have children, the human race is just like any other species and our minds tell us to carry on as our genetic markers tell us to. We can't help it on an individual level and consequently a social and ultimately global level. We like sex. We love love. It makes us happy and is as natural as breathing. Our levels of serotonin and oxytocin rise; we are content with love and sex. It has to be this way in the natural world, otherwise we wouldn’t last long as a species. What we have to realise is that it has an end result too. The good news is that we have freely available contraception, so you can enjoy unlimited sex all your life without the worry of falling pregnant. We’ve never had it so good.
We are socially expected to have children. Bringing a new person into the world is a profound part of your life, with all the responsibilities that come with it. It is natural, beautiful and brings joy and meaning to your life.
However, in an overpopulated world, it is also the most damaging thing you can do for the planet, adding the impact of an entire new lifetime of human consumption. What are the implications of those rights on the rest of society and the non-human world? What has priority, the right to give birth or the rights of the planet? We give ourselves rights, but the natural world has no lawyers or anyone to speak up for it. If nature could speak and had control over the world, human overpopulation would be a crime and would not be permitted. Despite the facts and logic and science telling us where we are heading we carry on following our basic instinct.
Are there moral and legal rights to have children? Should you have the freedom to procreate ad infinitum? What right do you have to criticise someone with a large family? It’s their choice. By shying away from talking about population, people will continue to breed without considering the consequences of their actions both on the child itself and on the wider world.
Politics and EconomicsEconomics and politics are manmade constructs. Science is based on pure research and facts. Evolution is a theory that has been proved beyond reasonable doubt, though it is never an absolute fact. Overpopulation is also a fact, and it ramifications can be predicted, not with absolute certainty, but with a very high degree of probability. The scientists and statisticians can inform the politicians, though the decisions are entirely in the hands of the politicians. To put economics and politics above science and facts, is where our system fundamentally fails.
The Quiet Crisis: Dave Brower [executive director of the Sierra Club] expressed the consensus of the environmental movement on the subject in 1966 when he said:
‘We feel you don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.’
The consensus of economists is to support the never-ending Ponzi scheme of eternal growth, with arguments saying we need a growing population to take care of the elderly and to pay for pension schemes. It is an outdated and fundamentally illogical economic theory.
The machine begins to fall apart under the stress of overproduction while we delude ourselves and carry on regardless. The economic system is simplistic and growth-oriented, with no reference to the real world of ecosystems and finite resources. Economists are treated with respect purely because they have the key to making money, with no consideration for anything else. An example of the mind-set imposed on us is describing the economy as ‘stagnating’ if it isn’t growing, implying that it is unhealthy or diseased in some way. In reality, it may be becoming ‘sustainable’, without the need to grow. The words seep into the media and the general mind-set, making us think we have to constantly strive for never-ending growth.
No real change will happen without a seismic event being the cause, so the majority carry on regardless. Saving the world shouldn’t be about politics. But changing the way we live is ingrained so deeply in law and policies that it is unavoidable. Politics is a messy, rancorous world of vested interests, money and power. The environment and things that are actually beneficial for the planet as a whole are put aside. Business and oil and concrete and plastic can make you rich. Money is power, and power is influence in the political sphere. So what chance do a few environmentalists have of being heard in the maelstrom of the capitalist system? Why save the newt when you can make lots of money, drink lots of wine, buy a big house and show off to your friends?
Politics and economics are two sides of the same coin. They both want to keep our shaky system afloat and will do anything they can to do so. Science and politics are not easy bedfellows, but science should win as science is based on fact. Politics and economics are theories. Overpopulation is a fact. Resource depletion is a fact. War and killing are facts. Environmentalism is apolitical and should be the bedrock of law. There are many examples of outrageous and unnecessary governmental expenditure, with US arms expenditure being the pinnacle. The US is the prime global funder and supplier of arms and equipment, with over $500 billion dollars of annual military expenditure. It spends less than a tenth of that figure on aid. $500 billion spent on environmental causes would bring unprecedented benefits for the well-being of the world.
The world has been built on capitalism, the exploitation of anything and everything that can be exploited, in the pursuit of profit. There are rules and regulations to try to keep some semblance of order, but politicians are beholden to companies making as much profit as they can, so they can take some taxes to keep the rest of the infrastructure working. The rich do very well and the rest of the general population scrapes by and makes ends meet.
Economists measure GDP, the product of the entire country. The higher this is, the better the economy is doing. In purely financial terms, this is the measure of success. In almost every other measure, this figure is meaningless. GDP does not take into account a person’s well-being; how many trees there are; how clean the streets are; the health of the population, or anything to do with the functioning of our life-support system, the planet itself. A country could cut down all its forests and deplete all its fisheries, and this would show only as a positive gain to GDP.
‘Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist.’
Kenneth E. Boulding
GDP as a measure of success is invalid. GDP is the measure of a country’s performance economically, not a per-person measure, which is a flaw in itself. Why does the news not report GDP per person? If the population of a country increases by 10 per cent, its economy will undoubtedly grow too. It may grow by 5 per cent. A 5 per cent increase in GDP would be great news, according to politicians and economists. But this 5 per cent increase also equates to a decrease per person if the population size increase is taken into account, which is never mentioned. Also, adding 10 per cent to population has many negative impacts, on housing costs, traffic levels, pollution, etc. Even an increase in GDP per person still implies that an increase in GDP is a good thing, whereas in reality it is still the cancer of unsustainable perpetual growth.
So should we continue with our obsession about economic growth, or leave that to the insular world of the economist and move on to a better measure of personal well-being? You can easily be rich, but also unwell and unhappy. Politicians deal with many issues: tax, social security, crime, pensioners, wars, healthcare. With so many things to think about, they never look up from their work and consider the bigger picture. They don’t think about the long term. They are too busy thinking about problems immediately in front of them. They are constantly fire-fighting, worrying about keeping people happy and thinking of themselves and their party staying in power at the next election. They are not concerned about the future of the planet.
There is a flaw in democratic politics. Should there be a rethink of the entire political system to have a long-term policy to make the world a better place? Or is it more important to worry whether a tax should be raised from 20 per cent to 21 per cent? Politicians will do all they can to avoid talk about population, which leads to sensitive topics such as sexual behaviour, human rights, culture and religion. They believe that population concern isn’t a vote winner, so why even talk about it? The subject is too big, too controversial, so it isn’t brought up.
Politics and economics are too short-sighted and narrow-minded to deal with the looming crisis. In the UK, for example, the Conservative government has agreed funding for the Hinkley Point nuclear power plant at a cost of £50 billion, while dismissing innovative and green tidal lagoon schemes. The reason given is the increase in price for customers’ electricity that would result from the lagoon schemes. After the nuclear disasters seen across the globe, how can a dangerous, massively expensive scheme be given the go-ahead when it will last for only 25–40 years and then sit for thousands of years as a radioactive waste danger area?
Compare this to the simple technology of the tidal lagoon scheme and the answer should be obvious. The tide generates electricity created from the power of moving water – the same free and inexhaustible power we have been harnessing for hundreds of years to grind wheat into flour in millhouses. The lagoon systems would be used to generate vast quantities of perpetual, clean and free electricity. The lifespan of the tidal power schemes is expected to be 50–100 years. In reality, it could be hundreds of years if maintained effectively – a green legacy for our children, producing virtually free electricity. So why are we not jumping at the chance?
Housing Supply and Demand
As the population grows, so does the demand for housing. Any news story mentioning the lack of housing always frames the story as a ‘housing crisis’, never a ‘population crisis’. The reality is that demand has outstripped supply due to the ever-increasing rise in population, putting pressure on councils to build more properties, often to the chagrin of local communities who feel squeezed, alienated and pressured by the ever-present encroachment of construction. Areas in London delude themselves that they live in ‘villages’, although the historic village itself was swamped by the megacity a century before.
The increase in house-building has knock-on effects on all civic infrastructure, increasing pressure on roads, schools, and healthcare and adding to the taxes required to fund these. While there is pressure on housing, the rich get richer as their house prices increase, while the poor get poorer with increased rents and smaller houses. The other winners are the house-builders, reaping huge profits by squeezing as many properties as they can onto the smallest amount of land, leaving barely a patch of grass, euphemistically called a ‘garden’ by the estate agents. The overall loser as more properties get built is nature and the environment, squeezed out and forgotten as human need and greed takes precedence over wildlife, with birdsong drowned out and replaced by the omnipresent drone of engines stuck in traffic.
Ingrained Policies
Countries have laws and policies that are designed to help families with children. Superficially, this is a good thing. Free education for all is also a good thing, as is free healthcare for all. There are tax benefits for working parents and all kinds of benefits to ease the burden of bringing up a family. All of the provisions made for families are well-meaning, but these same policies can have unforeseen consequences. The system is open to abuse and manipulation, with children seen as a means to gain an income and free housing – not the best incentive for introducing a new life to the world. Is it fair that a taxpayer funds all of the above when they have no children? Why should a child-free person pay for the healthcare and education of someone else’s child?
Immigration Politics
Overpopulation, immigration’s big brother, is hiding under the stairs. Immigration is a tricky subject, but it is directly related to population and should be discussed openly.
Migration is often a result of overpopulation, and overpopulation causes food and resources shortages, which leads to conflict. Historically, in times of war, refugees were welcomed. Today, with social pressures resulting from overpopulation, refugees are often denied the right to flee conflict. The political vacuum created in Libya after the fall of Colonel Gaddafi in 2011, for example, saw tens of thousands of people wanting to escape North Africa for a potentially better life in Europe. People were faced with the stark choice of staying in a dangerous, war-torn political vacuum created by the West, or risking their lives crossing the Mediterranean.
Talk of immigration inevitably flags up possible racism. It can be perceived to be racist to talk about immigration because it suggests that you don’t like foreigners. This may be true for a minority of people. However, if immigration causes population to rise, then it is a legitimate subject to talk about in terms of harm to the environment caused by an increased population. This is one factor that causes many environmentalists to shy away from any talk about population growth.
These accusations have further removed population from the agenda, which has contributed to allowing human population to increase unabated for the past decades, causing immense environmental damage. The door is then left open for the subject to be latched on to by the hard right, who are not afraid to talk about it.
Accusations often come from the left, whose egalitarian principles promote a free movement of people, but without any thought for the damage these principles have in the real world. In a perfect world, free movement is to be applauded and is a benevolent aim, but the world is far from perfect and we are far from being able to return to an open-door policy.
Brexit and Trump
Immigration was one of the factors influencing both Brexit and Donald Trump’s election victory. Both countries have liberal immigration policies that are resented by some of the population. The UK public voted to leave the EU despite warnings from all political parties, economists, banks and institutions. The subject of immigration was brought back into the daylight and discussed openly.
The UK is a great country, with London, its beautiful capital city, a multicultural oasis of tolerance, culture, innovation and openness. It is the envy of much of the world and a destination of choice for many. In an ideal world, borders would be open, and the European urban young would enjoy freedom of movement. They rightly see Brexit as a freedom removed, and one day that freedom may be restored. But while immigration and overpopulation remain, it is likely that Brexit and border controls will remain too.
Donald Trump’s election was also partly a result of a section of the country feeling disenfranchised and ignored. These voters believe their way of life has been eroded by globalisation and competition from abroad. Many people, often rural and less financially secure, have seen their livelihoods diminish as jobs have been taken by immigrants coming from poorer countries and willing to work harder for less pay. Trump’s promise to ‘build a wall’ was a vote winner. Again, the underlying cause of immigration is the large and growing populations of other countries, from people looking for a better life in the United States.
It is likely that neither Trump nor Brexit would have happened if the world had addressed the global population crisis.
ReligionReligion should be a force for good, with altruistic intentions of treating your fellow man with respect. But religious groups can be the trickiest to talk to about population. The older and more fundamentalist the religion, the harder it is to change. Religions are also subject to the vagaries of man and can be manipulated for nefarious and personal purposes, which makes population and family planning even harder to discuss. Religions have had significant effects on family size and therefore population size, as there are teachings directly related to access to contraceptives and their use.
Islam has no doctrine on population. There is nothing in the Koran that forbids family planning; it explicitly says you should only have as many children as you can afford.
Religion is part of human nature. Many people like to have something to believe in. We feel happier when we know there is something or someone else in charge, a higher force that will make sure everything is OK. We crave this reassurance. The stability and tradition of hundreds of years of religious belief is passed on from one generation to the next. The belief of billions of people continues despite science and technology explaining the world around us. We often think we know everything, and with Google and science we can find the answer to almost anything. But we are also easily manipulated and fall for obvious fabrications. The fallacies of religion are all around us, adorned in costumes to keep the believers believing. With the most powerful country in the world still having the phrase ‘In God We Trust’ written on its currency, what chance do we have of amending some of the fundamental elements of religion?
Science Vs Religion
In many cultures, religion is deeply ingrained, making acceptance of new facts a real challenge. They close their doors to any mention of science and logic and are unable to change. Religion has always had a hard time explaining science, as it boldly, logically and straightforwardly demolishes centuries of innocent but naïve belief. In most cases, the two can coexist reasonably well and differences are explained away, accepted or ignored, though there are examples where science has been considered blasphemy, as with Copernicus proclaiming that the Earth orbits the Sun.
A more recent clash came in the 19th century, when Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution directly contradicted teachings from the church and resulted in a huge upset for the church. But there were no consequences for the real world; merely arguments between science and religion. Scientific theories and religious teachings usually only affect what we believe in superficial ways. However, with contraception and the effects of religious practice on population size, the consequences are on a different scale in that they have fundamental impact on both an individual and a global level.
The Catholic Church
The Catholic Church puts its historical doctrines on the sins of contraception above the future of the planet. It has chosen to save face rather than change to help everyone’s future. So-called ‘Papal Infallibility’ means that a Pope cannot err in his teachings, so once something has been said, it must remain so. This is a double-edged sword as if a later Pope were to contradict an earlier Pope, one of them must be wrong. How could that be…if both were infallible?
According to the Catholic Church, contraception is wrong because it violates the design God built into the human race where the only purpose of sex is procreation. The pleasure that sexual intercourse provides is an additional blessing from God. But sexual pleasure within marriage becomes unnatural, even harmful, when it is used in a way that deliberately excludes the basic purpose of sex, which is procreation. So sex is only for making babies, while sex for pleasure is a sin. This view still persists today.
1963 saw the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control, whereby the Catholic Church’s decision on birth control was made by an interdisciplinary commission of experts: 72 participants from all over the world ruled that contraception would not be sanctioned. Four out of the 72 made the case that:
‘If it should be declared that contraception is not evil in itself, then we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches in 1930…. this would mean that the leaders of the Church, acting with extreme imprudence, had condemned thousands of innocent human acts, forbidding, under pain of eternal damnation, a practice which would now be sanctioned…’ (Morris, 2016)
In 1968, Pope Paul VI issued his landmark encyclical letter Humanae Vitae (Latin for ‘Human Life’), which re-emphasised the Church’s teaching that it is intrinsically wrong to use contraception to prevent new human beings from coming into existence. This includes sterilisation, condoms, spermicides, coitus interruptus and the pill.
Or, as Monty Python put it, ‘Every sperm is sacred’.
The Pope signed the Humanae Vitae and, in doing so, acted against his own convictions. This has resulted in the world’s biggest religion being told that birth control is a sin. Saying contraception is a sin is the real sin.
Another result of the ban of contraception is the resulting increase in abortions, which happens because of a lack of access to contraception. Abortions are still carried out, illegally and often unsafely, putting immense feelings of shame and stress on the women. This is totally unnecessary and could be changed by a stroke of a pen.
In March 2017 the Vatican held a Biological Extinction Seminar, which included guests from different scientific fields, including Paul Ehrlich, author of 1968’s influential Population Bomb. The Vatican’s own summary was fact-based, accurately saying that the world’s population is ‘shooting upward to the 7.4 billion of today’; ‘Since 1950, world GDP has grown 15 times while the world population has tripled’ and ‘that the current rate of loss of species is approximately 1,000 times the historical rate’, which are putting ‘huge strains on the earth’s capacity to function sustainably.’
The Vatican acknowledged that the current rate of loss of species is approximately 1,000 times the historical rate, with perhaps a quarter of all species in danger of extinction. It also recognised that per capita income of the richest 1.4 billion people averages $41,000; in contrast, the poorest one billion people, in Sub-Saharan Africa, have an average income of $3,500. The Vatican’s response was that we need positive human action for the sustainable development of biodiversity.
The Church did not recognise its historical error of judgement and only said that the answer for ‘Ending extreme poverty’ was ‘wealth redistribution’ accomplished with the help of an ‘intensive agricultural system’ and financial fixes. None of these proposals actually help to reduce consumption or address population growth.
The Catholic Church wants to be taken seriously as an authority that cares about and is seen to be addressing an issue, but ultimately it ignores the cause of the problem, which it exacerbates through its own policy of banning contraception. If the Church truly cared for the future of the planet it would change its policies and support the organisations desperately trying to help in these areas.
The Catholic Churches own doctrines are not observed by the country surrounding the micro-state of the Vatican, Italy, which has a TFR of 1.4 births per women, comfortably below replacement level. This is not the case for many African countries that take the word of the Church more seriously and where family planning is not widely available.
The Church’s challenge is whether it can admit to the serious mistake it has made and change its mind after such a long period of time insisting that contraception is a sin. The Pope is stuck between a rock and a hard place, but with over a billion Catholics in the world, a change would make so many people’s lives better.
US Right-wing Anti-abortion Christians
In the US, religious right-wing politics is powerful and influential. They have managed to dismantle the political consensus of the International Conference on Population and Development that had set out to give reproductive freedoms and access to family planning across the world, which would have prevented hundreds of thousands of unwanted pregnancies.
Since abortion was legalised in the United States in 1973, there has been an ongoing battle between the two ends of the spectrum. Most people outside the US are unaware of the raging conflict between the liberal left/Democrat and the religious right/Republican sides. The religious right is staunchly anti-abortion and aims to discredit the science behind the effect of population on the environment.
Pro-Life Vs Planned Parenthood
There is an ongoing battle between the two sides that directly affects families’ lives in the US. Pro-life are the anti-abortion side that says that ‘all life is sacred’, that any child conceived must be born, no matter what, as it is God’s will. Pro-choice argue that contraception – and, when necessary, abortion – are important freedoms and that all parenthood should be wanted.
Both sides use political framing to justify their arguments. One side promotes the ‘right to life’ of every unborn child; the other promotes the ‘right to choose’. Pro-choice constantly fights against religious and mainly Republican political bodies who want to ban abortion completely. Women and girls attending clinics are subject to humiliation and stress by banner-wielding protestors outside. Having an abortion can be a difficult decision to make and is harder when you are confronted by anti-abortion protestors.
‘Your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed…. That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth.’
Sister Joan Chittister
The Global Gag Rule
The United States switches from helping to hindering international aid for family planning with every switch from Republican to Democrat. One of President Trump’s first acts was to reintroduce the ‘Global Gag Rule’ that was previously rescinded by Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and reinstated by past Republicans, including George Bush.
It’s a short sighted irony that Trump opposes immigration but also has withdrawn vital American funding for family planning programmes in developing countries, because of a connection with abortion or just to please religious fundamentalists. There’s a total lack of holistic thinking, since without funding family planning, to stabilise and reverse huge population growth in these countries he is virtually ensuring that mass immigration will continue as an unstoppable force.
The rule is one of the most spiteful pieces of US legislation, based on religious prejudice that sees abortion as a sin, and it removes funding from any aid organisation that has connections with the practice. The effect of the rule is to slow or stop the flow of aid to developing countries, eviscerating health care and severely undermining family planning efforts in at least 26 developing nations, primarily in Africa. The UN estimates that at its height in 2005, the unmet demand for contraceptives and family planning drove up fertility rates between 15 and 35 per cent in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Arab states, Asia and Africa.
‘Overpopulation is a Myth’
One fringe denialist group is ‘Overpopulation is a Myth’, worth a mention here only as an example of the extremes some people will go to when trying to debunk the facts about overpopulation. This group promotes growing the population, insisting that overpopulation is a ‘myth’. Behind the group is the bogus US-based ‘Population Research Institute’, which promotes everything anti-abortion. Delve a little deeper and you discover that The Population Research Institute was founded by Father Paul Marx, the 15th of 17 children born to his devout Catholic parents.
Catholic.org says:
‘He knew the mortal harm that birth control would cause everywhere, including its effect on the loss of faith of Catholics and on the Catholic Church itself. And he organized a worldwide movement to meet these threats to life and family head on and defeat them.’
Marx devoted his life to the ‘pro-life’ world, travelling to 90 countries and promoting his 13 books, including The Death Peddlers, about a supposed coming push for euthanasia, which sold over a million copies.
The Overpopulation is a Myth website and other similar groups have arisen to counter any concern that there might be too many people on the planet. They have produced a set of videos to explain why population isn’t an issue. The first talks about the Reverend Thomas Malthus and claims that he ‘recommended killing off the have-nots of society’. In reality, Malthus was concerned that government welfare policies paying bonuses for additional children would result in starvation among the poor.
Responsible Blind SpotsIt is hard enough trying to talk about population when religions, corporations and climate change deniers do everything they can to silence you. It is even harder when people and groups who should be on your side are conspicuous in their silence, or even agree with the deniers.
There are many guilty parties who avoid any talk of population. The main line of reasoning taken by the deniers is that they are doing everything they can to tackle climate breakdown and environmental problems by encouraging reduced consumption of all types: food, energy, and resources. Population is simply not on the agenda. Some may recognise population as a cause and an issue, but treat it as an unchangeable fact. It is only mentioned as a cause, with no mention of any action to slow population growth. This is a mathematical half-formula, ignoring one of the two multiples that impact the environment: population.
All of the good work done by reducing consumption and becoming efficient in resource use is cancelled out by an increasing population size. Addressing population has pure and direct effects on improving the environment. One birth less is a full human lifetime’s worth of consumption saved (plus that of their offspring, ad infinitum).
The UK’s Green Party
The Green Party of the UK was founded in 1972 after Lesley Whitaker and her friends read an article in Playboy magazine by Paul Ehrlich about the dire potential consequences of overpopulation. Since that time, the Greens have gradually but fundamentally betrayed their original aims of pure environmental principles. Today many in the party have moved away from their principle-led origins and reject their own population policies.
Originally called the People Party and later the Ecology Party, the population policies caught on at a time when population was discussed openly as an issue that needed to be addressed. The party gained momentum and credibility under the chairmanship of Jonathon Porritt, but he later despaired at the party’s later reluctance to confront the truth about overpopulation. The Green Party still has the environment as a core principle but its original aims have gone after being hijacked by the hard left, which meant side-lining difficult issues such as population. It is now a party more associated with political motives rather than those based on true environmental values. Its populist policies are designed to win votes rather than address the original aims of protecting the environment. One of its policies is for large-scale house-building, which is one of the most environmentally damaging policies possible, no matter how ‘green’ the buildings themselves are.
One of the People Party’s original proposals was for the UK to have a population target of 20–30 million, a figure based on the carrying capacity of the country. This attracted vitriolic criticism from some corners of the press, which portrayed the party as anti-human and anti-immigration. Having similar policies on immigration to parties such as UKIP do today led to internal conflict, and the Greens had to distance themselves from groups at the opposite end of the political spectrum. The easiest, but unprincipled, option was to abandon any talk of overpopulation and talk instead only about consumption. It did not stand firm in its beliefs and explain the logic and truth behind its policies to a public which would have listened if arguments were made well. Unfortunately, the Green Party backed down, leaving the population question only in the hands of the least respected of all of the UK parties, UKIP, which gives the topic of population an unjustifiably bad name.
Looking at the Green Party’s population policy (The Green Party, 2003) , which was last revised in 2003, it addresses population practically and thoughtfully. The policies on population are still there, but they are never mentioned. The following excerpts of Green Party population policy lay out the aims and benefits of addressing population size and should be promoted as fundamental elements of Green Party policy:
- PP103 There is a need to explicitly consider population since, if it is ignored indefinitely, the risk of over-consumption of natural resources will increase, leading to conflict and ultimately a reduction in carrying capacity.
- PP108 The Green Party notes that the population of the UK currently supports its way of life by consuming more resources than can be sustainably supplied from within the UK and more than its fair share of global resources - often to the detriment of the people and the environment in producing areas.
- PP110 These policies…..will promote socially and environmentally sustainable population levels.
Medium-term
- PP120 To promote debate on sustainable population levels for the UK - to include consideration of levels of consumption and material comfort. The aim is to increase awareness of the issues - not to set specific population targets.
Long-term
- PP117 To achieve a level of consumption and, through education and the free provision of family planning services, a birth rate consistent with the goal of long term sustainability.
- PP118 To achieve consumption and population levels that are globally sustainable and respect carrying capacity.
The Green Party also has a vocal minority of ‘Bright Greens’, who are even more militant in their condemnation of any mention of population than the party proper. Anyone who dares mention the subject is harassed, shouted down and accused of being racist, which further reduces the party's chances of being an honest and progressive environmental force in British politics.
World Wildlife Fund
The WWF is a great charitable organisation doing fantastic work raising awareness and acting to save wildlife throughout the world. It is a global brand whose mission is to save wildlife, but it is trying to fix a problem without ever mentioning the root cause: human overpopulation. While it is in denial and not addressing or acknowledging the fundamental cause, it is fighting a battle it cannot win.
Taking this position is like protecting all the furniture in a house that has a hole in the roof by covering each piece with a plastic sheet, while not fixing the hole in the roof itself. A real example of this position is the tiger in India. Today, there are fewer than 1,800 tigers in India according to the Wildlife Protection Society of India. This is a critically low number. Meanwhile, the number of humans in India is 1.25 billion, and growing by over 40,000 per day. That is half a million people for every one tiger. Switch the figures around and look again. Would the human be considered endangered if there were 1,800 humans and over a billion tigers in India? What can be done to save the wild tigers when a growing and dense human population takes the land required for the tigers’ habitat? The tigers become ever more fenced in and surrounded and don’t stand a chance, no matter how hard the conservationists try. The local population will naturally protect their families from the predatory penned-in tiger that is looking for food for its own cubs. Unfortunately, the tiger will inevitably lose.
This scenario is played out throughout the world in many situations affecting thousands of species. The tiger receives more coverage than the toad, but the toad is suffering just the same. In all cases, it is the growth in human numbers, and their consumption of resources, which has caused the problem. The WWF, as the pre-eminent worldwide environmental charity, must acknowledge that we have the duty to look after the planet by considering how many people the world can hold. It must recognise that any increase in the human population directly, and negatively, affects all endangered species.
Marco Lambertini, WWF director general, said: ‘A strong natural environment is the key to defeating poverty, improving health and developing a just and prosperous future. We have proven that we know what it takes to build a resilient planet for future generations, we just need to act on that knowledge.’ But he ignores the fact that a strong natural environment will never be achieved while the human population continues to grow and so poverty will not be defeated.
Putting the spotlight and emphasis in the wrong place is a deception – it results in the wrong issues being tackled, so priorities are muddled, which produces disastrous results. The WWF’s own Living Planet Report 2016 estimated that, by 2020, human activity will have destroyed two-thirds of the world’s vertebrate populations relative to 1970, a mere 50 years ago. A first step to reduce these pressures would be to promote awareness of the benefits of smaller families, which the WWF isn’t doing.
The WWF’s 180-page Living Planet Report from 2014 says:
‘With another 2.4 billion people to be added to the human population by 2050, the challenge of providing everyone with the food, water and energy they need is already a daunting prospect. Unless we take significant steps to reduce the pressures we are placing on the planet’s climate and natural processes, it could prove impossible.’
WWF Founder Sir Peter Scott said:
‘You know, when we started the World Wildlife Fund its objective was to save endangered species from extinction, and I am now near the end of my career and we have failed completely. We haven't saved a single endangered species. And if we'd put all that money we had collected into condoms, we might have done some good.’
WWF Ambassador and Population Matters patron, Sir David Attenborough, said:
‘All environmental problems become harder – and ultimately impossible –
to solve with ever more people.’
Given the above statements and the obvious connections, why isn’t the WWF talking about human numbers?? Would it rather keep away from adverse publicity and let the natural world suffer as a consequence? If the WWF doesn’t recognise that overpopulation is an issue, what hope is there that anyone else will?
Hans Rosling
Hans Rosling was a charismatic Swedish statistician and presenter who did more to falsely allay fears of overpopulation than anyone else in recent history. With his over-optimistic presentations and confidence in his own numbers, he duped audiences into believing that population isn’t a problem.
Rosling’s main argument was that bringing people out of poverty helps to reduce population growth, but this is only half right. It is smaller families that lift people out of poverty – access to education together with affordable family planning has helped to decrease extreme poverty.
Rosling’s fixed projections for population growth are misleading, as they do not take into account the huge potential reductions in future population sizes that are possible when countries introduce proactive family planning policies – and the increases when they don’t. He assumed that ‘demography is destiny’, implying that family planning services are not necessary. His mistake was to believe that just because there has been a ‘demographic transition’ in the West that the same thing will happen in the developing world. This simply isn’t the case, as in many countries a large family is an achievement; the larger the family the better. The argument that increasing wealth in these, mainly African, countries will lower birth rates is false; it can have the opposite effect. Omitting any mention of influencing the future trajectories of his graphs leaves audiences without the knowledge of the benefits family planning can give. This false optimism and omission of such an important part of the story misled the public.
Rosling’s argument saying that bringing people out of poverty will lower birth rates is also wrong for a second reason. In countries where poverty is common, men and women do not have children because of their poverty. A man without money and pay will not have a wife and children as he cannot afford it. Bringing these people out of poverty therefore increases childbirth rather than decreasing it.
Rosling’s third error, of not considering climate breakdown, is the most serious. He made no mention of the fact that by bringing families out of poverty to lower birth rates, you are, by default, simultaneously increasing consumption and per capita carbon emissions. If the assumption that bringing families out of poverty to reduce birth rates turns out to be false, and birth rates stay the same, then the net effects are far worse than if no action had been taken. All that has happened is that wealth, and therefore consumption, and therefore carbon emissions have increased.
Giving families free access to family planning, together with education, is a far better route. Simply bringing families out of poverty can lead to debt and being sucked into the capitalist system of overconsumption. The better option is for families to live within their means and with sustainable family sizes, which will naturally lead to gradually accumulated increases in environmental stability and overall well-being.
Without a full knowledge of the facts, audiences left Rosling’s shows feeling that his facts and figures had explained that we have nothing to worry about, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Rosling’s trick was to cherry-pick facts to show that everything will be ok, while ignoring other equally true figures showing how dangerously close to collapse the world is.
‘...the only way to achieve [not growing to nine billion] is by killing.’
Hans Rosling (joking)
Rosling agreed that there are too many people on the planet, but said that we will be OK because as families get wealthier they naturally have smaller families. Therefore, we have nothing to worry about. All we have to do is work hard to encourage developing nations to create more wealth. He ignored the fact that while it is true that increasing wealth and education slows our population growth, the fastest way to use resources and destroy the environment is also by increasing wealth. He did not take consumption into account. Total human impact on the planet depends on per capita consumption and the number of people. The problem isn’t solved if the consumption per person has to increase in order to stabilise the population. Smaller families from education and family planning result in more wealth. He appeared on TV with studio audiences explaining his theories accompanied by entrancing graphics and statistics for population and wealth, whilst omitting any talk about the consequences of the inevitable resource depletion resulting from the increased wealth. He didn’t say how the increased population was going to manage as resources and food supplies struggle to keep up with demand.
Such was the reach of Rosling’s work that he was named one of the 100 leading global thinkers by Foreign Policy and one of the 100 most creative people in business by Fast Company magazine. He won several awards, including the Jubilee Prize from the Swedish Medical Society. He was in TIME’s world’s 100 most influential people in 2012. Rosling has been a success on YouTube, with millions of views. In 2017 Rosling (and Niger) won the UN Population Award, for outstanding achievements in population and health.
With his large audiences and natural flair for explaining and displaying statistics, it is a shame that Rosling’s assumptions were wrong; he could have been a force for good. His work has made the struggles and commitments of family-planning charities harder, as his messages have been accepted by many. At a time when the world is accelerating towards self-destruction, his false reassurance that overpopulation is not a problem has been an unfortunate step in the wrong direction.
George Monbiot
The UK’s Guardian newspaper is respected for its reporting on the environment and climate breakdown. It takes both issues very seriously and reports on them far more than many news sources. One of its most prolific and passionate environmental writers is George Monbiot. It is unfortunate that Monbiot has a blind spot on population and does not see the massive benefits that access to family planning would bring the world, instead he fixes his argument solely on the rich and their overconsumption. When you are wrong, you are wrong and your misjudgements must be held to account – apologies George.
Monbiot does not acknowledge that poor, mainly African, countries have a real predicament with overpopulation. He turns the story away from these troubled countries and instead aims at the far easier target of rich white men, as if people of other races and in poor countries do not appreciate the issues. In his article ‘The Population Myth’ (Monbiot, 2009) his first attack on the ‘wealthy white men’ for raising the population issue is aimed at James Lovelock, the man who dared to suggest that there is a connection between population growth and the environment.
Monbiot’s argument against addressing population growth is the fact that places in the world where population growth is highest have the lowest CO2 emissions so therefore we should disregard their growth. It is true that poorer countries have lower per capita emissions by far than wealthier countries, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be concerned about their population growth. He makes insinuations of racism and imperialism about people who do consider population growth in developing countries, which makes the work of the charities supplying family planning in underdeveloped countries much harder. He refuses to recognise that the best way to help people out of poverty is to encourage small families, so the resources available can go further and the environment can recover.
Monbiot rightly says that the emissions of the poorest in the world are a tiny fraction of those of the rich, but he says nothing about the consequences on families with seven or eight children where resources are already stretched beyond capacity. Population increase in poor countries has a high local impact because of pressure on land and local resources; population increase in poor countries holds back raising quality of life and living standards. It is true that CO2 emissions per person are very low in developing countries, but it does not mean large family sizes should be ignored and therefore continue. The alleviation of starvation, war and environmental destruction through family planning far outweigh any idea that we should ignore them because it is rich white people causing most of the emissions.
A great article written by Monbiot is about the beneficial consequences of reintroducing apex predators to an environment. This causes a ‘trophic cascade’ leading to a better distribution of other species when any excess of say, deer, is kept in check by the re-introduction of wolves to an area. This in turn allows nature to recover from over-grazing by the deer, and other beneficial follow-on effects. His argument could be taken to the next logical step: would the world be a better place if there were an apex predator that had kept human beings in check? We keep every other animal in check, bar one. As we currently stand, we have nothing in our way and we are beginning to see the consequences as Gaia herself acts.
The Nature Conservancy
As a science-based organisation, the Nature Conservancy should take everything into consideration, but the word ‘population’ is conspicuous by its absence. The best way to conserve nature is to leave it alone. The best way to do that is to reduce our numbers.
The Nature Conservancy has five core values talking about ‘respect’, ‘diversity’ and other ‘correctness’. Their fifth core value is:
‘Develop, analyze and use the best available conservation science and a science-based rigor to set priorities, make decisions, take action, and measure results.’
Simple logic would tell them that a stable and eventually reduced human population would ensure the conservancy of the world’s nature, but the Nature Conservancy makes no mention of population. The Conservancy has been active for 60 years and works in 70 countries. Its mission is:
‘To conserve the lands and waters on which all life depends.’ Their vision ‘is a world where the diversity of life thrives, and people act to conserve nature for its own sake and its ability to fulfil our needs and enrich our lives’.
As of 2017, Mark Tercek, the president and CEO of the Nature Conservancy, had a blog. He gave the ten core principles, which are:
‘Be inclusive, Follow the science, Harness market forces, Encourage collaboration, Invest in nature’s solutions, Accelerate the transition to clean energy, Lead other nations on shared challenges, Manage the impacts of development at a landscape scale, Maintain and enhance core laws and policies, Unleash America’s creativity. ‘
The Nature Conservancy will hopefully open its eyes at some point and begin to follow more of its own reports, as with a report from long-time Conservancy employee, Kristen P. Patterson, saying that:
‘More scientists and governments have made the connection between population growth and global carbon emissions and have recognized the multiple benefits that family planning provides.’ (Patterson, 2016)
Global Footprint Network
Global Footprint Network’s Earth Overshoot Day uses an innovative way of getting the overconsumption message across to the public by calculating the date by which we have consumed a year’s worth of resources. Their website lists a number of things you can do to help reduce your footprint, with one element conspicuous by its absence:
- Host a vegetarian dinner party.
- Lower your household energy consumption.
- Pick a day to telecommute or take alternative transportation.
- Illustrate your commitment to tread lightly on the Earth.
- Reduce your paper waste.
The list appears alongside a picture of a family’s feet, consisting of two adults and three children, thus subliminally reinforcing the message that a large family is OK. Earth Overshoot Day makes no mention that the most effective way of reducing our long-term carbon footprint is through having a small family.
Earth Day Network
The Earth Day Network’s mission is to build the world’s largest environmental movement. It is the world’s largest recruiter to the environmental movement, working with more than 50,000 partners in 196 countries. Earth Day superficially mentions overpopulation, but there is no mention of the impacts of rising population, or the benefits of a smaller population. Instead emphasis is put on planting trees, climate breakdown and saving endangered species. Nowhere is family planning and smaller families mentioned – ignoring and side-lining the fundamental cause of our problems.
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has not escaped from the whitewash of overpopulation and climate denial. In February 2006, the phrase ‘to understand and protect the home planet’ was quietly removed from NASA’s official mission statement. Because agency mission statements are routinely used to justify research and funding decisions, many scientists were not only surprised to discover the change, but also concerned that the change meant more funding would be shifted away from studies of Earth, including climate breakdown research, and redirected to NASA’s planned new series of manned space missions.
UN. The Global Goals for Sustainable Development
Through its 17 Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations aims to bring all countries out of poverty.
It does not recognise that it cannot succeed while it ignores population. The goals are impossible to reach because a poorer country can’t catch up with the average high-income country without further depleting resources. Estimates say that bringing all countries out of poverty would require the resources of 3.4 Earths, an unsolvable contradiction (Hickel, 2015).
To use the language of sustainability where it is clearly not sustainable is an oxymoron masking the reality that the UN’s benevolent goals are unachievable. There is one token gesture on population, though the word 'population' itself is not used, in the Sustainable Development Goals:
3.7 ‘By 2030, ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive healthcare services, including for family planning, information and education, and the integration of reproductive health into national strategies and programs.’
Friends Of The Earth
Even organisations with the pure aim of saving the planet ignore population. In the last 100 years, population has increased about 3.5 times and consumption per head has increased about 3.5 times. The resulting consumption has increased over 12 times and yet Friends of the Earth’s policy on population does not even recognise the role population has played in the total consumption. In doing so they mislead the public into side-lining population.
The Rest
If the above environmentally concerned and aware organisations do not address overpopulation, what hope is there that the mainstream will? The BBC was founded ‘to inform, educate and entertain’, yet is failing lamentably in the first two aims when it comes to the true state of the world. Meanwhile, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, the Cambridge Conservation Initiative and most other reputable organisations ignore overpopulation, seeing it as too controversial for their cosy institutions to mention, which is an abnegation of their aims and responsibilities.
The blanket removal of population from the mainstream agenda has reached such an extent that people and organisations do not even recognise it as an issue.
The Spiral of Silence
The ‘Spiral of Silence’ theory was created by the German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. It says people have a ‘quasi-statistical organ’, a sixth sense, which allows them to know the prevailing public opinion, even without access to polls. People have a fear of isolation and know what behaviours will increase their likelihood of being socially rejected. People are reluctant to express their minority views, even if they know them to be true.
The Spiral of Silence appears when nobody speaks up. We have taken our eye off the ball for the past 25 years. In that short time, 3.5 billion more mouths have arrived needing to be fed and housed. The Spiral of Silence increases as people would rather not talk about such a difficult subject.
This results in an erroneous but self-reinforcing assertion that population isn’t an issue. It becomes a silent conspiracy. It is similar to the silence around meat-eating. We are all aware of the factory farms growing and slaughtering millions of chickens. But we like fried chicken, so we keep a guilty group silence on the subject.
There are many historical examples of the spiral of silence, from slavery and racism to sexism and homophobia. In each of these examples, it has taken time to throw off previously accepted norms as unacceptable. The situations are always changed by a strong-willed minority with the determination to change society. It is difficult and takes time, but great things can be achieved, as was the case with causes such as the abolition of slavery and winning votes for women.
Social norms can change quickly. Watching TV comedies from the 1970s can now make you squirm at the blatant sexism. Smoking used to be accepted everywhere. Even slavery was an accepted part of everyday life. All of these things changed by overcoming the spiral of silence. It is often the case that younger generations begin the transformation, with the older generation begrudgingly accepting the new norms.
Population concern has been unfairly stigmatised. The unintended consequences of politicians and charities shying away from population is that it plays into the hands of racists and the rich, who will talk about it for their own purposes. When benevolent organisations choose to ignore the issue, it is harder for population activists to speak up.
AnalogiesThere are some useful analogies to succinctly explain what is happening.
The Sinking Ship
A favourite analogy of Paul Erhlich is the sinking ship. If the ship is sinking, what do you do first? Do you man the pumps or do you pull up the gangplank? Manning the pumps, analogous to reducing consumption, to pump out the water to stop the ship from sinking is good. But pulling up the gangplank should be done first – stop more people from getting on the sinking ship in the first place. Pulling up the gangplank is analogous to encouraging people not to have more than one child. Why would you want to bring another person into a world that can’t cope as it is?
The Shared Bathroom
This is a variation on the tragedy of the commons. If you live in a house by yourself with one bathroom you can use the bathroom any time you want. As soon as there is another person living in the same house you have to share that bathroom. You have to wait your turn. The more people who live same house, the greater the burden of sharing becomes. This situation plays itself out throughout the world in countless situations, reducing the standard of living of everyone affected. A smaller population benefits everyone.
The Overflowing Bath
The bath is overflowing, so what do you do? Do you find some containers and catch the overflowing water, or do you switch off the taps? Not thinking about our increasing numbers is the same as not thinking of turning off the taps.
The Birthday Party
This is a simple analogy by Australian conservationist Bindi Irvin. She wrote an essay saying that overpopulation is like having a birthday party and inviting 15 people, but 70 turn up at your door. You only have 15 cupcakes, so what do you do? You wouldn’t think an essay like this would be controversial, but it was censored by then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Irvin stuck to her guns and said it was appalling for a country that espouses freedom of speech to censor her essay.
The Seedlings
The novice gardener opens his packet of tomato seeds and eagerly sows the whole packet of a hundred seeds onto a tray, looking forward to his crop later in the summer. But he hasn’t taken into account the number and potential size of each plant. The fifty seeds all germinate, but as they grow and he pots some of them up into larger pots, he realises the mistake he has made. He ends up throwing all but four of the plants onto the compost heap as that’s all he really needed. His scenario is of little consequence, but the novice human race has done the same, sowing our seed more widely than we should have done and only realising the mistake after the fact. The life of a human being is on a different level to that of a tomato plant, though it remains to be seen how many of us might end up on the compost heap as we struggle to find the food and water we all need.