15: Populationism or Ecological Revolution?

If we want to save the planet earth to save life and humanity, we are obliged to end the capitalist system. The grave effects of climate change, of the energy, food and financial crises, are not a product of human beings in general, but rather of the capitalist system as it is, inhuman, with its idea of unlimited industrial development.

—Evo Morales, president of Bolivia

 

 

The environmental crisis demands rapid and decisive action, but we can’t act effectively unless we clearly understand what is causing the crisis. If we misdiagnose the illness, at best we will waste precious time on ineffective cures; at worst, we will do even more damage.

The “too many babies” argument is an important case in point. It misdiagnoses the problem, directing the attention and efforts of sincere activists to programs that will not have any substantial effect. At the same time, it weakens efforts to build an effective global movement against ecological destruction by dividing our forces, by penalizing the principal victims of the crisis for problems they did not cause.

Above all, it diverts attention from the real sources of the crisis: an irrational economic and social system that has gross waste and destruction built into its DNA. The capitalist system, not population size, is the root cause of today’s ecological crisis.

For more than two centuries, the idea that the world’s ills are caused by poor people having too many babies has been remarkably successful at preventing change by blaming the victims of the existing social order for poverty and injustice. Adding environmental destruction to the crimes of the overbreeding poor continues that process, diverting attention from the real environmental vandals.

Populationism has also long been a weapon of those who seek to provoke division among the oppressed and hatred of those who are “different.” Some of the loudest supporters of populationist policies today are anti-immigrant and racist groups for whom “too many people” is code for “too many foreigners” or “too many nonwhite people.”

But many activists who honestly want to build a better world and are appalled by the racists of the far right are also attracted to populationist arguments. In our experience, three related factors help to explain why the “too many people” explanation is attractive to some environmentalists.

1. Populationism identifies an important issue. Some writers, on both the left and the right sides of the political spectrum, have tried to refute populationism by denying that population growth poses any social, economic, or ecological problems. Such arguments ignore the fact that human beings require sustenance to live and that unlike other animals, we don’t just find our means of life, we use the earth’s resources to make them.

If nothing else changes, more food must be produced to feed more people, and that will use resources. That’s a fundamental fact of material existence, one that no society can possibly escape.

The claim made by right-wingers such as Julian Simon and Jacqueline Kasun, that a growing population poses no problems because the “free market” will magically provide whatever is needed, is refuted by the reality of twenty-first-century capitalism, which produces enough food to feed everyone, but starves the billions who can’t afford to buy it.

It is also obvious that the global hypergrowth of cities is not ecologically sustainable. Over 160 years ago, Marx and Engels called for “the abolition of the antagonism between town and country,” and the need for that is even more obvious today, when more than a billion people have been forced off the land into the mega-slums of the South. There are now twenty-three cities with more than ten million inhabitants, and there will likely be thirty-six by 2015.

Society must confront and resolve the gross imbalance that exists between resources and human needs, including the absurd distribution of population that crowds millions into cities while converting productive farmland into biofuel plantations.

Populationists are right that this is an important issue, but they are wrong to blame the imbalance on human numbers, and they are wrong about the measures needed to solve it. Populationists assume that the social and economic context won’t change; we insist that it must.

For example, the populationist argument assumes that the only way to feed more people is to grow more food. Since modern agriculture is ecologically destructive, feeding more people will cause more destruction, so the only ecologically sound approach is to stop and reverse population growth.

But as we showed in chapter 6, ecologically sound agriculture can produce more than enough food to feed the expected population growth. And even before that transformation is carried out, existing food production is more than enough to feed many more people, as studies by Vaclav Smil and others have demonstrated.

Food losses equivalent to 10–15 percent of total supply may be unavoidable, but there is no excuse for the enormous losses in affluent countries. If the rich world’s food losses could be held to 20 percent of the overall supply, the annual savings (assuming that animal foods provide about 25 percent of all food energy) would be equivalent to . . . nearly half of all cereals on the world market.¹

In other words, just by reducing the food wasted in rich countries to reasonable levels, we could feed billions more people, or we could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions by reforesting excess farmland. (The saving could be much greater than Smil’s figures suggest, because he has not included redirecting the corn now used for biofuels and industrial cattle raising to human consumption.)

Food production isn’t unique: gross excess and wastefulness are endemic to global capitalism. In that context, the impact of population growth as such is small.

2. Populationism reduces complex social issues to simple numbers. In 1798, Thomas Malthus argued that the imbalance between people and food is a permanent fact of life because population increases geometrically while subsistence increases only arithmetically. He had no evidence for that claim, and history has decisively proved him wrong, but he showed that appeals to the immutable laws of mathematics can be very effective. All populationist arguments since then have been rooted in the idea that our numbers determine our fate, that demography is destiny. Hunger, poverty, and environmental destruction are presented as natural laws: surely no reasonable person can argue when science says population growth is leading us to inevitable disaster.

Among the many explanations of poverty—genetic, cultural, environmental, etc.—which depend for their credibility on a superficial and opportunistic reading of history, none ever has managed to achieve the effect of the Malthusian argument because, in presenting over-population as the root cause of most human ills, it could always threaten us with such apocalyptic scenarios that reasoned debate about alternative explanations has been consistently overwhelmed.²

Numeric explanations seem to be scientific and objective, and they seem to be easy to understand, but as we’ve seen, that’s often an illusion; statistics can mislead, and in populationist writing they often do.

But even the best population numbers can’t by themselves explain the environmental crisis, because quantitative measures can’t take the decisive qualitative issues into account. Knowing the number of people in a city or country tells us nothing about the relationships of gender, race, class, oppression, and power that define our connections with each other and our world.

Lourdes Arizpe, a founding member of the Mexican Academy of Human Rights and former assistant director general of UNESCO, poses the issue very clearly:

The concept of population as numbers of human bodies is of very limited use in understanding the future of societies in a global context. It is what these bodies do, what they extract and give back to the environment, what use they make of land, trees, and water, and what impact their commerce and industry have on their social and ecological systems that are crucial.³

3. Populationism promises easy solutions that don’t require social change. “Part of the reason that worldwide attention is increasingly focused on the population issue,” writes demographer George Martine, “stems from its painless simplicity. Attacking environmental issues from a demographic standpoint seems immensely easier than trying to deal with the causes of global environmental damage that are rooted in our very model of civilization.”⁴

Noted populationist Frederick Myerson has offered exactly that justification for fighting climate change by reducing birth rates rather than trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Just stabilizing total emissions at current levels, while keeping pace with population growth, would require reducing global per-capita emissions by 1.2 percent each year. We haven’t managed to decrease per-capita emissions by 1 percent in the last 38 years combined . . .

I think it will be easier to reduce unintended pregnancies and births, which we know how to do successfully through improved reproductive health services and education, than to reduce per-capita emissions, where our track record is poor.⁵

Myerson is more forthright than most of his co-thinkers, but there is no question that he is expressing a common populationist belief—or, more accurately, a common lack of belief in the possibility of a better world. The assumption that there is no possible alternative to the present social order is so deeply embedded in the populationist worldview that he and others who share his perspective rarely mention even the possibility of deep-going social change. If reducing emissions is impossible, then getting rid of the system that causes them is completely inconceivable.

There is an old joke about a drunk who lost his car keys on First Avenue but was searching for them on Main Street “because the light is better here.” The populationist view that we should target birth rates because that is easier than changing society makes the same mistake. Only major social and economic change can save the earth—so focusing on “easier” birth rates is as pointless as searching where the light is good instead of where the keys are.

Getting to the root

Because it separates population growth from its historical, social, and economic context, the population explanation boils down to big is bad and bigger is worse, and its solutions are just as simplistic.

Two hundred years ago, radical essayist William Hazlitt identified the fundamental flaw in Malthus’s theory: that population growth made poverty inevitable. Malthus, he wrote, viewed the specific social problems and structures of his time as laws of nature.

Mr. Malthus wishes to confound the necessary limits of the produce of the earth with the arbitrary and artificial distribution of that produce according to the institutions of society, or the caprice of individuals, the laws of God and nature with the laws of man.⁶

Modern populationists are more likely to justify the “too many people” argument by reference to the laws of thermodynamics than to the laws of God, but Hazlitt’s criticism still applies. The global economic system within which human beings live, work, consume, and reproduce is grossly inefficient, inequitable, and wasteful. It cannot create without destroying, cannot survive without mindlessly devouring ever more human and natural resources. Blaming shortages of food and overuse of resources on human numbers confuses sociology with biology: in Hazlitt’s words, it treats the “institutions of society” as “laws of God.”

Populationist responses to environmental problems search for solutions within a system that, as John Bellamy Foster writes, is inherently hostile to all such solutions.

Logically, in order to be physically sustainable, an ecohistorical formation has to meet three conditions: (1) the rate of utilization of renewable resources has to be kept down to the rate of their regeneration; (2) the rate of utilization of nonrenewable resources cannot exceed the rate at which alternative sustainable resources are developed; and (3) pollution and habitat destruction cannot exceed the “assimilative capacity of the environment.” Yet to achieve these ends, according to current ecological knowledge, we must not simply slow down present economic growth trends but reverse them. Nothing in the history of capitalism suggests that this will happen.⁷

Recognition that the system is itself the problem leads to a different approach, the pursuit of an ecological revolution that will refashion the economy and society, restore and maintain the integrity of ecosystems, and improve human welfare.

Reducing population will not solve ecological problems, but replacing the system can make it possible to reduce population pressure where it does exist. As Frederick Engels argued in 1881:

There is, of course, the abstract possibility that the number of people will become so great that limits will have to be set to their increase. But if at some stage communist society finds itself obliged to regulate the production of human beings, just as it has already come to regulate the production of things, it will be precisely this society, and this society alone, which can carry this out without difficulty. It does not seem to me that it would be at all difficult in such a society to achieve by planning a result which has already been produced spontaneously, without planning, in France and Lower Austria. At any rate, it is for the people in the communist society themselves to decide whether, when, and how this is to be done, and what means they wish to employ for the purpose. I do not feel called upon to make proposals or give them advice about it. These people, in any case, will surely not be any less intelligent than we are.⁸

More recently, ecosocialist Joel Kovel made a similar point: “Human beings have ample power to regulate population so long as they have power over their social existence. To me, giving people that power is the main point, for which purpose we need a world where there are no lower classes, and where people are in control of their lives.”⁹

A movement to save the planet

There are known solutions to the ecological crisis. Many books and reports have explained in great detail how to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, how to feed the world using ecological agriculture, how to restore broken ecosystems to life, and how humans can live in harmony with the rest of nature. In book after book, report after report, the authors blame the failure to make the needed changes on “the lack of political will.”

Political will is lacking, it’s true—because the politicians themselves are part of an economic and social system that cannot abandon its pursuit of short-term growth and short-term profits, even if that leads to the destruction of civilization. The ecological tyranny of the bottom line keeps real solutions from even being considered, let alone carried out.

The biggest obstacle to the transition to an ecological society is not lack of technology or too little money, much less too many people.

Socialism, ecology, and ecosocialism

“You advocate a social ecology which you call ecosocialism. What is an ecosocialist? And how does he or she differ from a ‘plain and simple’ ecologist or socialist?

“Daniel Tanuro: An ecosocialist differs from an ecologist in that he analyzes the ‘ecological crisis’ not as a crisis of the relationship between humanity in general and nature but as a crisis of the relationship between an historically determined mode of production and its environment, and therefore in the last analysis as a manifestation of the crisis of the mode of production itself.

“In other words, for an ecosocialist, the ecological crisis is in fact a manifestation of the crisis of capitalism (not to overlook the specific crisis of the so-called ‘socialist’ societies, which aped capitalist productivism).

“A result is that, in his fight for the environment, an ecosocialist will always propose demands that make the connection with the social question, with the struggle of the exploited and oppressed for a redistribution of wealth, for employment, etc.

“However, an ecosocialist differs from the ‘pure and simple’ socialist, as you say, in that, for him, the only anticapitalism that is valid today is one that takes into account the natural limits and the operational constraints of the ecosystems. This has many implications: a break with productivism and consumerism, of course, within the perspective of a society in which, the basic needs having been satisfied, free time and social relations constitute the real wealth.”

—From an interview with Belgian ecosocialist Daniel Tanuro,
in L’écologithèque.com, September 22, 2010,
translated by Richard Fidler for climateandcapitalism.com

The barriers are political and economic—governments and big industry are blocking serious action. Indifference to the environment is not a choice that capitalists make, not a policy error, not the result of mistaken economic theories; endless pursuit of immediate gain, regardless of long-term consequences, is the way the system works.

As individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into account. As long as the individual manufacturer or merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with the usual coveted profit, he is satisfied and does not concern himself with what afterwards becomes of the commodity and its purchasers. The same thing applies to the natural effects of the same actions . . . In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result.¹⁰

The only long-term alternative to such irrationality is what Marx and Engels described as a society in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” and in which workers and farmers “govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way.”¹¹

The politics of ecological revolution are distinguished from the politics of populationism above all by a commitment to confront the powerful corporate interests that stand in the way of change and to democratically refashion human society to function in harmony with the natural world. And that requires a fundamental break with the politics and parties of corporate power and ecological destruction.

In every country, we need governments that break with the existing order, that are answerable only to working people, farmers, the poor, indigenous communities, and immigrants—in a word, to the victims of ecocidal capitalism, not its beneficiaries and representatives.

Such governments would move immediately to transform the most destructive features of capitalism:

• rapidly phasing out fossil fuels and biofuels, replacing them with clean energy sources such as wind, geothermal, wave, and, above all, solar power

• actively supporting farmers to convert to ecological agriculture; defending local food production and distribution; working actively to restore soil fertility while eliminating factory farms and polluting agribusinesses

• introducing free and efficient public transport networks, and implementing urban planning policies that radically reduce the need for private trucks and cars

• restructuring existing extraction, production, and distribution systems to eliminate waste, planned obsolescence, pollution, and manipulative advertising, placing industries under public control when necessary, and providing full retraining to all affected workers and communities

• retrofitting existing homes and buildings for energy efficiency, and establishing strict guidelines for green architecture in all new structures

• ceasing all military operations at home and elsewhere; transforming the armed forces into voluntary teams charged with restoring ecosystems and assisting the victims of floods, rising oceans, and other environmental disasters

• ensuring universal availability of high-quality health services, including birth control and abortion

• launching extensive reforestation and biodiversity programs

An ecological revolution—we would also call it an ecosocialist revolution—is the only way to permanently resolve the environmental crisis. But we can’t just wait until such governments can be established: the crisis is pressing down on us, and action is needed now. The most important immediate task facing all serious environmentalists is the building of strong, broad, and inclusive movements for ecological defense, to slow capitalism’s ecocidal drive as much as possible and to reverse it where we can, to win every possible victory over the forces of destruction.

As the 2009 Copenhagen Klimaforum argued, building a movement to fight for immediate changes is an essential part of the long-term fight for a comprehensive ecological revolution.

There is an urgent need to build a global movement of movements dedicated to the long-term task of promoting a sustainable transition of our societies. Contrary to the prevailing power structures, this movement must grow from the bottom and up. What is needed is a broad alliance of environmental movements, social movements, trade unions, farmers, and other aligned parties that can work together in everyday political struggle on the local as well as national and international level.¹²

In April 2010, some thirty-five thousand activists, many of them indigenous leaders, gathered in Cochabamba, Bolivia, for the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. The “People’s Agreement” they adopted places responsibility for the climate crisis on the capitalist system and on the rich countries that “have a carbon footprint five times larger than the planet can bear.” Its key demands include the following:

• cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% by 2017

• protect the rights of indigenous peoples and of people who are forced to migrate due to climate change

• create an International Climate Justice Tribunal to penalize nations and corporations that flout international law

• oppose all procapitalist, promarket “solutions” such as carbon trading and markets for the forest homes of indigenous people

• repay the massive ecological debt that rich countries owe poor nations

The Cochabamba People’s Agreement established a powerful basis for organizing the global movement that is so desperately needed, a movement that resists ecological destruction in every possible way today, while mobilizing the forces that will make permanent solutions possible tomorrow. The full text is online at http://pwccc.wordpress.com/support.

Most liberal-minded populationists genuinely want to find solutions to the planetary crisis, but despite their good intentions, the policies they support would turn the environmental justice movement in the North in the wrong direction, both by focusing our attention on the wrong targets, and by preventing us from uniting with the radical movements in the South that are leading the global struggle. Populationist arguments aren’t just wrong, they are harmful, because they identify our most important allies as a major part of the problem.

The animating spirit of the ecological revolution is human solidarity. Its overriding goal is sustainable human development. It aims, in Vandana Shiva’s words, to “power down energy and resource consumption [and] power up creative, productive human energy and collective democratic energy to make the necessary transition.”¹³

It recognizes, in the words of the Cochabamba People’s Agreement, that “in order for there to be balance with nature, there must first be balance among human beings.”¹⁴ Sustainable environmental development is possible only if we open the road to sustainable human development as well.

Raising living standards globally, eradicating hunger and poverty, improving health care, providing access to education, and achieving full equality for women: all are necessary if we are to win a safe climate and global environmental justice. The scale of the crisis itself limits our options.

With the increasing scale of the world economy, the human-generated rifts in the earth’s metabolism inevitably become more severe and more multifarious . . . There is nothing in the nature of the current system, moreover, that will allow it to pull back before it is too late. To do that, other forces from the bottom of society are required. ¹⁵

The path of ecological revolution will not be easy, and there is no guarantee that it will be successful. But it has the great advantage that, unlike populationism, it addresses the real causes of ecological destruction. We live in a time of extreme consequences, so it’s crucial to fight for changes that can actually make a difference.

The ecological revolution aims to transform the way humans interact with nature. Populationism aims to reduce the number of humans who interact with nature in the same, unsustainable way. The choice should be easy to make.