On Terminology

Throughout this book, we use the term populationism to refer to ideologies that attribute social and ecological ills to human numbers, and populationist for people who support such ideas. We prefer those terms to the more traditional Malthusianism and Malthusian, for two reasons.

First, because in our experience few people are familiar with the ideas of Thomas Robert Malthus, so labels based on his name aren’t informative.

And second, because most modern populationists don’t actually agree with what Malthus wrote two hundred years ago. Malthus denied that there are limits to economic growth, didn’t believe that any measure could help the poor, and strongly opposed birth control—we don’t think it is useful to use his name to identify people who think the opposite.

We frequently use the word North as shorthand for the industrialized nations of Europe, Canada, the United States, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia, and South for the so-called underdeveloped countries, sometimes called the third world.

We refer to all greenhouse gases as carbon dioxide or CO₂. We know that in some cases a term such as carbon dioxide equivalent or CO₂e would be more accurate, but the distinction is not critical for this book.