“Now that people are gone, nature is returning!”
“We are the virus.”
These are just two of the tweets that have been circulating online since the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic. What do they have in common? They are both examples of the belief that climate change is primarily driven by the growing human population.
Even more insidious is the fact that this is nothing new. In fact, the belief has long been championed by the most renowned environmentalists we know – those whose voices we grew up revering in documentaries and speeches. David Attenborough once noted in an interview that “in the long run, population growth has to come to an end” and implied that food aid for famines in Ethiopia was pointless. Primatologist Jane Goodall once remarked that environmental issues “wouldn’t be a problem if there was the size of population that there was 500 years ago.” Both are patrons of the pro-population control charity Population Matters.
While Attenborough and Goodall's perspectives undoubtedly carry a lot of weight, it’s still essential that we consider the other side of the argument. In this case, we – and many environmental groups including Greenpeace and Sierra Club – would argue that blaming climate change on population size alone...only obscures the true driver of the climate crisis. Here’s why.
What is the overpopulation myth?
In Greenpeace USA’s words, the myth is that “our global population is increasing to a point that the environment simply cannot support, and overpopulation is the main cause of resource depletion and climate chaos. Therefore, we need population control to curb climate change.”
18th-century English scholar Thomas Malthus is often cited as the father of the myth. He argued that “the world population grows exponentially while food production grows arithmetically”, with the inevitable outcome being that the planet is unable to provide enough food for all of us and we starve. Malthus believed in wars and disease as essential tools of population control. He was against poverty alleviation, stating that it would only serve to extend the lives of the poor and “remove the natural limits imposed on “population growth".
Malthus’ ideas endured, most prominently taking the form of the 1968 book ‘The Population Bomb’. In it, author Paul Ehrlich argues that many of the era’s most alarming events had a single cause: too many people. Unless we cut back on our numbers, we would face “mass starvation on a dying planet.” Ehrlich proceeded to describe a cab ride he took through the streets of Delhi, India. He saw “people eating, people washing, people sleeping. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People, people, people, people...Since that night, I’ve known the feel of overpopulation.”
The overpopulation myth has had real, frighteningly destructive repercussions that go far beyond a few tweets. Following Ehrlich’s book, methods of population control involving forced sterilization were incorporated into governance (Smithsonian Magazine). “Some population-control programs pressured women to use only certain officially mandated contraceptives. In Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Korea and Taiwan, health workers’ salaries were, in a system that invited abuse, dictated by the number of IUDs they inserted into women. In the Philippines, birth-control pills were literally pitched out of helicopters hovering over remote villages. Millions of people were sterilized, often coercively, sometimes illegally, frequently in unsafe conditions, in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia and Bangladesh.”
In reality…
What Paul Ehrlich strategically neglected to mention was that at the time, Delhi was home to less than three million people. In comparison, Paris had over eight million. Which city was really the overcrowded one? As Smithsonian Magazine writes, “the crowding that gave Ehrlich ‘the feel of overpopulation’ had little to do with a population increase” and everything to do with, well, his racialised perception of India. If Ehrlich had dug a little deeper, he would have discovered that rising births wasn’t even the reason for Delhi’s overcrowdedness at the time. According to the Centre for Science and Environment, the reason was an influx of migrants from rural areas into the city – a phenomenon that the Delhi government had deliberately encouraged.
Ehrlich’s choice to focus on an Indian city as the epitome of overpopulation was simply representative of a broader trend – the Global North pinning blame on the Global South and passing judgment on the South’s style of governance. As this example demonstrates, the overpopulation myth is often used as a pretext for racism, plain and simple.
Let’s do some more debunking. Proponents of overpopulation claim that the planet is being depleted of its resources because there are “too many mouths to feed”. We concede that humans need resources in order to survive. But consider these statistics: 5% of people occupy 90% of all land. A third of the food we produce annually is wasted. People are not starving because there are too many of us to sustain – after all, we’re currently producing enough food to sustain 10 billion people. They’re starving because food is not being distributed equitably.
Even if we were to slow population growth…
This alone wouldn’t resolve the climate crisis. Climate change is not solely a matter of numbers. Instead, it’s a function of several things.
Firstly, historical responsibility. When we examine a country’s carbon emissions, we must consider not only its current rate of emissions but its cumulative emissions – i.e. its total emissions over time. Cumulative emissions are a thing because while most atmospheric carbon is absorbed by the ocean and plants, 20% of it sticks around for millennia. This means that much of the carbon emitted during the Industrial Revolution is still warming our planet today.
Source: Young FOEE
In the cumulative sense of the word, then, the Global North accounts for most of the world’s carbon emissions. The trend began with the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, when fossil fuels first came into use. The Revolution disproportionately took effect in Britain. The advent of oil and gas was dominated by the US. We come to understand how it is that 80% of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere today was originally emitted by wealthy countries (Young FOEE). There are centuries of fossil fuel burning that can be attributed to the West. See this animation and the tweet below for visual proof.
Secondly, climate change is a function of national versus per capita emissions. China and India may be the world’s largest emitters in national terms. However, when you examine per capita emissions instead, the story is quite different. In 2017, the average American produced 16.16 tonnes of CO2. The number was only 6.86 tonnes for China and 1.84 tonnes for India.
Source: Our World in Data
Try painting the picture in slightly different terms, as a dichotomy between the rich and poor, and you get similar results. If you were to eliminate the poorest half of the world’s population, as the overpopulation myth advocates for, global emissions would fall by a ridiculously small 10%. Someone in the world’s richest 1% emits a volume of carbon equivalent to 175 of the poorest people. The overpopulation myth imagines that “everyone consumes the same and creates the same emissions. But that just isn’t the world we live in". (Global Justice)
Thirdly, climate change is a function of hidden emissions. As a result of globalization, many Global North countries outsource production to their Global South counterparts – China isn’t dubbed the ‘world’s factory’ for nothing. When a country’s carbon emissions are calculated, however, only carbon emitted within that country is considered. Think about all the products you’ve seen with ‘Made in China’ stamped on them. The emissions involved in those products’ creation would have been counted as China’s responsibility. Thus, a lot of China’s emissions can actually be attributed to the Global North’s demand for consumer goods.
Source: Our World in Data
Taken together, these three factors tell us that contribution to the climate crisis is not correlated with population size. Instead, it’s correlated with unchecked economic growth, wealth inequality, lifestyles of excessive consumerism, and fundamentally a system that pursues profit over ecological wellbeing. As Smithsonian Magazine writes, “the sheer, arbitrary count of people matters much less than what people do”. The way to save the planet lies less in reducing the number of inhabitants...than in rethinking the systems and structures we live by.
In shaming the marginalized, the overpopulation myth allows us to focus on individual action and disregard larger systems change. At worst, the myth acts as a justification for “the belief that marginalised people’s lives are less valuable than the majority’s convenience” (recall the Delhi example). Under the pretext of its being an acceptable price to pay for saving the planet, the deaths of the marginalized can be painted as “not only necessary but desirable, framing [these people] as parasitic, wasteful and inhuman”.
So what’s the solution?
The key to addressing the climate crisis is to pressure the corporations and countries that are its root cause. Promote the just and equitable distribution of resources. Call out climate solutions that involve “excluding people or pushing people out, or more military, or more policing, or more surveillance...or closing borders and denying people the ability to flee to safety.” (Teen Vogue). Champion solutions that are inclusive of all communities, such as the Green New Deal and Red Deal. Be wary: not every environmentalist you’ll meet cares for both people and the planet.
Prospect Magazine sums the situation up well: “Ehrlich’s so-called ‘population bomb’ is being defused around the world. But the consumption bomb is still primed and ever more dangerous.”