The “population problem” has a Phoenix-like existence: it rises from the ashes at least every generation and sometimes every decade or so The prophecies are usually the same—namely, that human beings are populating the earth in “unprecedented numbers” and “devouring” its resources like a locust plague.

In 1968 and through the 1970s, populationism was defined by two books—The Population Bomb by the Ehrlichs and The Limits to Growth, sponsored by the Club of Rome.

Today there is no such source, no single article, book, or group that all or even most populationists agree with. Populationism, the social ideology that attributes social ills to the number of humans, takes many forms, and its advocates don’t necessarily agree with each other on all questions.

This poses difficulties for critics: in our experience almost any criticism of populationist thought prompts someone to reply that we have misrepresented real populationism.

The following brief profiles will provide some idea of the range of views involved.

“Let the people just starve”

As we saw in chapter 1, a key element of populationist ideology is the view that people are always harmful to the environment, so the best way to reduce environmental damage is to reduce the number of people.

Some prominent members and founders of the direct action group Earth First expressed an extreme form of that view in the mid-1980s. They adopted a philosophy known variously as biocentrism, ecocentrism, or deep ecology, holding that “all human decisions should consider Earth first, humankind second”—and they interpreted that credo in deeply reactionary terms.

In 1983, Dave Foreman, the de facto leader of Earth First, argued for denying welfare and food stamps to anyone with more than two children and stopping all immigration to the United States. Even these measures would probably be insufficient, he wrote: “What is really needed is to 1) Give every woman the right to one child. 2) Offer a $20,000 payment to anyone willing to be sterilized without producing any children. 3) Make sterilization mandatory for all women and men after they have parented one child.”²

Third world people wouldn’t be offered those options. In a 1986 interview published in the Australian magazine Simply Living, Foreman argued that “the worst thing we could do in Ethiopia is to give aid—the best thing would be to just let nature seek its own balance, to let the people just starve there.”

In the same interview he expanded on his argument for keeping immigrants out of the United States:

Letting the USA be an overflow valve for problems in Latin America is not solving a thing. It’s just putting more pressure on the resources we have in the USA. It is just causing more destruction of our wilderness, more poisoning of water and air, and it isn’t helping the problems in Latin America.³

Even more appalling, in 1987 another Earth First leader, Christopher Manes, using the very appropriate pseudonym “Miss Ann Thropy,” wrote in the group’s newsletter:

If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human population back to ecological sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS . . . As radical environmentalists, we can see AIDS not as a problem, but a necessary solution . . . To paraphrase Voltaire: if the AIDS epidemic didn’t exist, radical environmentalists would have to invent one.⁴

By the end of the 1980s, a majority of Earth First members had rejected such views, and Dave Foreman had left the organization he founded, complaining of “pressure and infiltration from the class-struggle /social-justice left” and “the abandonment of biocentrism in favor of humanism.”⁵

The views expressed by Foreman, Manes, and others in the 1980s are outside the populationist mainstream, but they illustrate its antihuman possibilities, and they show clearly that “radical environmentalists” are not necessarily progressive.

PJP: “A progressive, feminist approach”

In a very different part of the populationist spectrum is the Population Justice Project, a US group founded in 2007. The PJP’s core views are expressed in two sentences in an “advocacy guide” that it published jointly with Population Action International. “Many environmental problems will be easier to address if world population peaks at 8 billion rather than 11 billion. The good news: there is already a global consensus on how to slow population growth, with programs that improve human wellbeing at very little cost.”

We could call this populationism lite. They don’t propose reducing population, merely slowing its growth. And they don’t say this will solve problems—it will just make other problems easier to solve.

Noting that the UN estimates world population will peak after 2050 but that the size of the peak isn’t certain yet, they say:

The impact of population growth on the environment is mediated by consumption, technology, urbanization and other factors. Still, slower population growth could reduce pressure on natural systems that are already over-taxed, and research shows that a host of environmental problems—including the growth of greenhouse gases, water scarcity, and biodiversity loss—would be easier to address if world population peaks around 8 billion, rather than 11 billion.

How is this to be achieved? PJP and PAI say the best way is to ensure that people have choices, by making contraception and reproductive health services available to all, by providing education and employment, especially for women, and by eliminating gender and economic inequities. They state firmly that they do not advocate “‘population control’ measures that could become coercive.”lay

Their program is based on what is called the Cairo Consensus—the action plan approved by 179 countries at the UN International Conference on Development and Population in Cairo in 1994. Fifteen years after that agreement, the rich countries have provided less than a quarter of the funding they promised. The Population Justice Project’s main goal is to convince politicians in Washington to cough up one billion dollars a year toward keeping the promises that the United States made in Cairo.

Family planning programs, the PAI/PJP advocacy guide says, “are relatively inexpensive, especially when compared to many environmental mitigation efforts.”⁶

PJP focuses on the world’s poorest women, the 200 million women it says don’t have access to birth control today. But if the goal is to reduce emissions by slowing population growth, wouldn’t it make more sense to reduce population in rich countries, where each avoided birth would presumably have a greater effect than dozens in the global South?

PJP founder and director Laurie Mazur poses that question herself in her book A Pivotal Moment. Her answer:

The answer lies in the future. The developing countries are where the lion’s share of population growth will occur, and they are also where development must occur for half of humanity to escape from grinding poverty. The affluent countries can reduce emissions by reducing the vast amounts of waste in our systems of production and consumption. But the developing countries are not likely to raise their standards of living without more intensive use of resources and higher emissions.⁷

The Cairo Consensus

The history of modern populationism falls into two periods: before and after the UN International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo in 1994. At that meeting, an unlikely alliance between populationists and liberal feminists, supported by the Clinton administration, won approval for a policy that they presented as the only alternative to the anti-woman policies of the Vatican and other conservative governments.

The Cairo Consensus was a significant defeat for “right to life” forces. Although little of the promised funding for women’s health programs actually materialized, the meeting gave women’s rights activists in the third world a strong and credible program that conservative governments couldn’t easily dismiss. In particular, Cairo’s resolutions have aided the fight against anti-abortion laws and for sexual rights.

But the meeting also strengthened the populationists, who came out of it with new credibility and a new way of arguing their case. In Cairo, populationists learned to say “population stabilization” or “demographic transition” instead of “population control,” and to always include a sentence opposing coercive programs—but none of those purely verbal shifts changed their underlying assumption that the world’s major problems were caused by poor women having too many babies.

See chapter 8 for more on the Cairo Consensus.

Mazur says she advocates “a progressive, feminist approach,” and she describes herself as the voice of reason in the “polarized debate” between population extremists like Paul Ehrlich on one side and left-wing feminists like Betsy Hartmann, whom she labels “population deniers,” on the other. She calls for “a new conversation about population and the environment,” with a goal of “slowing population growth” but doing so without coercion, respecting women’s need for reproductive health services and right to make their own choices.⁸

Optimum Population Trust: “Reduce the number of climate changers”

UK-based Optimum Population Trust (OPT) describes itself as “the leading environmental charity and think tank in the UK concerned with the impact of population growth on the environment.”⁹

Founded in 1991, it has an impressive list of patrons, including environmentalists James Lovelock, Paul Ehrlich, and Norman Myers, naturalists Jane Goodall and David Attenborough, former chair of the government’s Sustainability Commission Jonathon Porritt, the former UK representative on the UN Security Council, and others. Clearly, OPT is a very well-connected organization.

OPT’s view of the issues is summarized on its website:

What’s the population problem? Dangerously rapid climate change and rising food, water and fuel scarcity are already threatening human populations. And many other species, on a finite planet. Yet by 2050 world population is expected to grow by another 2.3 billion from today’s 6.8 billion—unless urgent action is taken.

What’s the population solution? GLOBALLY: reduce birth rates. NATIONALLY: reduce or keep birth rates low and/or balance migration to prevent population increase. All countries need environmentally sustainable population policies to underpin other green policies. PERSONALLY: have fewer children and work a few more years before retiring.¹⁰

OPT literature puts particular stress on environmental issues, especially climate change: “The need to curb man-made climate change is alone a compelling reason for population stabilization and reduction—to reduce climate impacts it helps to reduce the number of climate changers.”¹¹

OPT says world population growth should be limited to about 1 billion additional people by 2050, compared to the 2.3 billion forecast by the UN. “If the world’s mothers reduce the number of children they have, there could be 1.2 billion fewer climate changers in 2050 than projected.”

The most effective personal climate change strategy is limiting the number of children one has. The most effective national and global climate change strategy is limiting the size of the population. Population limitation should therefore be seen as the most cost-effective carbon offsetting strategy available to individuals and nations—a strategy that applies with even more force to developed nations such as the UK because of their higher consumption levels.¹²

Substantial changes in birth rates in the third world would be achieved by “education and women’s empowerment in the area of reproductive and sexual health and the removal of all obstacles to birth control,” with special emphasis on developing and delivering “long-acting methods such as injections, intrauterine devices and implants.”¹³

Within the UK, OPT wants better birth control education, but its main proposal for reducing population growth is severe immigration restrictions. “As the main force driving current population growth, immigration feeds through into rising greenhouse gas emissions; more crowding, congestion, development; increased pressure on water and energy supplies, farmland and green space.”¹⁴

An article in the Optimum Population Trust Journal, cowritten by the journal’s editor, argues that all industrialized countries need to reduce immigration. Citing a table that shows immigration as the main cause of rising population in the UK, Italy, the United States, Canada, and Australia, the authors write:

The degree to which net immigration is preventing the developed nations from achieving a much needed reduction in population is apparent from the table. In all cases, the chief cause is net immigration . . . The need to have balanced immigration can hardly be exaggerated, because few of the less developed nations are showing any inclination to achieve population levels that will be sustainable when fossil fuels become scarce, yet several developed nations have success within their grasp . . . provided only they do not allow their efforts to be overwhelmed by net immigration.¹⁵

OPT wants the UK government to impose a “zero net migration” policy, under which the number of immigrants permitted to enter each year would be no more than the number of people who emigrate.

Lovelock: “Defend climate oases”

James Lovelock is a patron of Optimum Population Trust, so one might assume that he agrees with its analysis and solutions—but in his books he puts forward a far more extreme position. Lovelock says that we are past the point of no return, that a climate and population catastrophe is inevitable in this century, so our focus should be on preserving islands of civilization in a ruined world, using military force to fend off climate refugees.

Lovelock, who worked with NASA in the 1960s and has made many important contributions to earth science, is best-known for the Gaia hypothesis, which speculates that life regulates conditions on earth to keep the physical environment suitable for life to continue. At times Lovelock describes Gaia in ways that imply that earth is a living or even intelligent being.

In Lovelock’s view, Gaia now faces a “plague of people,” and “we are all the demons.” Environmentalists must abandon their concern for people—they should “think again and see that their primary obligation is to the living Earth. Humankind comes second.”¹⁶

With that perspective, it isn’t surprising that he can calmly suggest that “we would be wise to aim at a stabilized population of about half to one billion,”¹⁷ a goal that would require the elimination of between 85 and 92 percent of the people in the world today.

Lovelock favors nuclear power, geoengineering, and carbon capture as ways to delay the inevitable catastrophe, but “our greatest efforts should go into adaptation, to preparing those parts of the Earth least likely to be affected by adverse climate change as the safe haven for a civilized humanity.”¹⁸

One such haven—surprise!—will be Lovelock’s home country. He calls on UK politicians to “make decisions based on our national interest . . . We should not wait for international agreement or instruction. In our small country we have to act now as if we were about to be attacked by a powerful enemy. We have first to make sure our defenses against climate change are in place before the attack begins.”¹⁹

And not just defenses against climate change—he urges more spending on armed forces, especially the navy, to keep desperate people from sharing Britain’s wealth.

Soon we face the appalling question of whom we can let aboard the lifeboats. And whom must we reject? There will be no ducking this question for before long there will be a great clamor from climate refugees seeking a safe haven in those few parts where the climate is tolerable and food is available. Make no mistake, the lifeboat simile is apt; the same problem has faced the shipwrecked: a lifeboat will sink or become impossible to sail if too laden. The old rules I grew up with were women and children first and the captain goes down with his ship. We will need a set of rules for climate oases.²⁰

Jeffrey Sachs: “High fertility rates are deleterious to development”

As we saw above in the discussion of PJP, many populationists claim that slowing population in poor countries will reduce future greenhouse gas emissions, even though those countries have very low emission rates today. The argument is that the economies in those countries will inevitably grow, causing their per capita emissions to grow—so if there are fewer people, total emissions will be lower.

Ironically, another group of populationists, liberal specialists in global economic development, argue the opposite, that reducing population growth will cause faster and more extensive economic growth. If that’s true, then slowing population growth could actually increase total emissions.

A case in point is Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and, according to Time magazine, one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World.” In his best-selling 2008 book Common Wealth : Economics for a Crowded Planet, Sachs argues: “High fertility rates are deleterious to long-term development.”²¹ He cites a 2004 study that found a strong correlation between total fertility rate (TFR—the average number of children born to each woman) and economic growth:

The TFR is shown to have a strong, statistically significant negative effect on economic growth. Consider two countries that are identical in all respects except that one has a fertility rate of 6 and the other a fertility rate of 2 . . . The high-fertility country will have per capita income growth that is 1.3 percentage points per year lower than the growth of the low-fertility country. That’s a whopping negative effect of high fertility.²²

Since “the rapid growth of populations in the poorest countries hinders economic development,”

the world should embrace a set of policies to help stabilize the global population, through voluntary choices, at a population of roughly eight billion people, rather than the current trajectory, which is likely to take us to nine billion or more by 2050. This may seem like a modest difference, but the consequences would be large, especially since the population control would come mainly in the world’s poorest places.²³

That is, of course, the same goal recommended by PJP and OPT—but they expect very different results to follow.

In 2008, the United Nations projected that in 2050 there could be as many as 10.46 billion people or as few as 7.96 billion. PJP and OPT assumed that per capita emissions would be the same in either case, so the lower figure would mean less global warming. But if Sachs is correct, a smaller population would mean more economic growth and thus (according to populationist logic) higher per capita emissions.

Both sides may be wrong about the relationship between population growth and economic growth, but it’s hard to see how they can both be right.

SPA: “Reduce population or face chaos”

Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) was founded in 1988 by people who believed that “the major environmental groups were failing to address the issue of population numbers.” Although SPA says it is “primarily an environmental organization,” five of the six objectives set out in its constitution involve lowering population.²⁴

In 2007, in “Global Population Reduction: A 21st Century Strategy to Avoid Human Suffering and Environmental Devastation,” ²⁵ SPA warned: “Without a planned humane contraction, this century will see social chaos and human suffering on an unprecedented scale.” If population reduction schemes are not implemented, population reduction will be imposed on us: “So the world faces a stark choice: either act now to reduce population or do nothing and allow this population reduction to be inflicted upon us either directly through famine or indirectly through disease or civil and regional wars motivated by resource scarcity.”

SPA supports the introduction of renewable energy and increased foreign aid and has argued that wasteful consumption in the industrialized countries must be reduced. But it insists any gains from such measures will be wiped out if population isn’t reduced. Here they support that position by referring the often-used IPAT formula (Impact equals Population times Affluence times Technology), which we will discuss in chapter 3.

Savings made by implementing renewable technologies (lowering T) and reducing unnecessary affluence (lowering A) would soon be offset by consumption growth due to the rate at which the population (P) continues to expand. The most enduring way to lower total human environmental impact (I) is therefore to lower the value of the population size.

SPA advocates “policies that will initially lead to stabilization of Australia’s population by encouraging near replacement fertility rates and low immigration rates.”²⁶ Since Australia’s fertility rate of 1.78 is already well below replacement level, SPA focuses on immigration, which it says is responsible for 48 percent of the country’s annual population growth. “Ultimately,” the SPA Population Policy says, “our immigration program should be no larger than emigration.”²⁷ SPA has also proposed a one-child policy for Australian families, backed by financial penalties.²⁸

SPA isn’t the only Australian environmental group that supports the “too many people” argument. The Australian Conservation Foundation has said Australia’s population growth is a key threat to biodiversity. It calls for Australia’s population to be stabilized at no more than 27 million to 30 million people by 2050 (up from about 22 million today).²⁹ It urges the Australian government “to reduce net migration to a level that is consistent with a goal of environmental sustainability.”³⁰

As these examples show, populationists hold widely varying views on how serious the overpopulation problem is and on what should be done to solve it. Some believe that a global population catastrophe is inevitable, while others view a modest reduction in birth rates as a way to ease the path to social progress. They all agree, however, that “too many people” is a primary cause of environmental destruction and that reducing human numbers will make things better. As we’ll see, that judgment fails on many counts.