Foreword by Joel Kovel

In the year 2000 I sought the presidential nomination of the Green Party, principally by driving around California in my Saab and visiting party locals. From San Diego to Arcata, from San Luis Obispo to Fresno to Nevada City, I made my rounds and met with people in their homes and town halls, sounding out their needs and presenting myself as the best national candidate to advance the Green Agenda, whose central idea is the preservation, repair, and enhancement of the earth’s ecological integrity.

For those who were elsewhere that year, I finished far behind Ralph Nader in the race for the Green Party nomination, who in turn lost by a considerable margin to George W. Bush. I mostly remember my wanderings fondly, setting aside the inevitable irritations of so quixotic a venture. The people were friendly, interesting, and varied. They seemed deeply committed to the integrity of the environment and eager for fundamental change—in a word, progressive in all respects. But this was

Joel Kovel is the author of The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (Zed Books, 2007) and editor of the quarterly journal Capitalism Nature Socialism. He was a coauthor of the first Ecosocialist Manifesto and a founder of the Ecosocialist International Network.

not always satisfactory. There was a darker side to some of my meetings, present at times in those gatherings that engaged people of relative affluence and—for want of a better word—whiteness.

On such occasions the Greens revealed—circumspectly, to be sure—a current of distress and antipathy toward other people, generally speaking, those of a different hue and of the South. Needless to say, not the geographic south of, say, Southern California; rather, a South signifying the alien Other, a zone consumed and left behind by the global North of industrial-capitalist countries. Their lands devastated and their lives in ruin, many people from the South come North, driven by the needs of survival. In the Northern metropolis they are strangers and called aliens. In California their presence was felt on street corners early in the morning, where they put their day labor up for sale hoping to be gathered by the Toyota pickups. This image became notorious at this time, as was the fact that they often lived in canyons and gullies out of the sight of the citizenry.

All this made many progressives uneasy, with its implication that the North was continuing the process of exploitation and squeezing yet more surplus value from the bodies of the South. And yet they could not face up to the implications. The continuing presence of the “aliens,” indeed the very word, signified a structural rift between peoples, one that the liberals and certain sectors of the Greens could not appropriate within their worldview. Thus its significance became split off and distorted.

We have seen a good deal of racism stemming from this rift. It arises all along the various boundaries of the North-South interface. In the decade since my campaign the racist quotient has risen as the global economic and ecological crises grind on. Thus we have Arizona in the United States and the surging of the radical, anti-immigration right in England, France, Russia, Austria, and elsewhere. All this will worsen unless we rise up to overcome it.

But there is another, linked kind of reaction that appears, often among progressives, including a number of the Green progressives I saw on my travels in California. These people aren’t racist—or at least they keep their racism well hidden. Instead, they try to contend with the alienation they feel toward those on the wrong side of the North-South divide with a dispassionate scientific gloss. They worry about the invasiveness of too many strange creatures. At times such creatures become labeled as the so-called invasive species of plants and animals; but often enough as well, they are the self-same human strangers, such as those who offensively appeared on California’s street corners early in the morning. The categorization now veers away from what is wrong with the alien. Rather, it is that there are just too many of them; and too many people spells doom no matter what the particulars.

The whole argument becomes displaced to the high ground of population—displaced over and over, it may be added, because the population question provides such fertile soil for evading the truth about society and its current ecological crisis. It is really quite amazing how many tricky and complicated arguments can be mounted once one abstracts from social reality and converts the human condition into a matter of quantity. This so-called science is an intellectual toadstool that sprouts without end.

It’s a good-sized forest, and demands a guidebook equal to its complexities. And Ian Angus and Simon Butler have given us one with Too Many People?—a veritable Baedeker of the dark and occult sciences of “populationism,” by which is meant the ideological rendering of population science in the service of defending the existing order of things. I like the way Angus and Butler move on past the traditional usage of Malthusianism and its “neo-” version to identify the ideology. It’s confusing to base a category on a thinker so bizarre as the Reverend Malthus (Marx calls him a “baboon” in the Grundrisse), though we should never forget how vast has been his influence—testimony not to intellectual power but to the value of his mystification to the propertied classes. In any case, it is not Malthus himself who deserves our attention, but his staying power, that ever-recurring impulse of the bourgeois intellectual to conjure rationalizations to put away the wretched of this earth and justify what the dominant society has done to them.

This is an essential subject, and we are in Angus and Butler’s debt for treating it with such clarity and rigor. What emerges is a rich and variegated tapestry woven around two deep themes.

First, while population is by no means irrelevant, giving it conceptual pride of place not only inflates its explanatory value but also obscures the essential factors that make for ecological degradation and makes it impossible to begin the hard work of overcoming them.

And second, it is not only possible but also essential to turn the populationist argument on its head. The true question is not numbers of people but the relation of population to a worthwhile society. Declining population is not therefore an unmitigated good. In the midst of worrying about overpopulation, people tend to forget that population is in fact going to decline, and that as it recedes like the tide, it will expose a whole new set of challenges in its wake. If, for example, each woman has but one child—a populationist’s dream, however unlikely—then each generation is halved compared to the one that went before. Allowing for certain wrinkles and lags, this predicts a remarkable global drop in the next century, roughly from seven to one billion, with severe repercussions in labor shortages along the way—scarcely a utopian outcome.

Nor is a large population necessarily a bad thing. We need to bear in mind with Angus and Butler, along with the burgeoning community of ecosocialists for whom they speak, that large numbers of people who freely and collectively determine their labor can—and, I should think, will—direct their creative energy to caring for and mending a nature ravaged by capital. Thus an ecosocialist society, in which humanity lives within limits and with deep respect for nature, need not be primarily concerned with numbers of people, so long as the quality of their relation to nature, which includes, to be sure, their relation with each other, is worthy.

In all cases, the rational control of population is a direct function of the power women have over their lives. Thus a free ecosocialist society grounded in the empowerment of women will also be free from the compulsion to worry about population. Indeed, the best way to honor Too Many People? is to work collectively to put its subject matter into the proverbial dustbin of history.