Professor Diana Coole of the University of London helpfully identifies what she calls
silencing discourses – arguments used by those who wish to shut
down, avoid or divert any reasoned discussion about the impacts of human
population upon the environment and, indeed, upon our own wellbeing as a
species. According to Coole (2013) there are six such silencing discourses:
Population Scepticism, Fatalism, Decomposing, Declinism, Growth, and Shaming.
As Director of Population Matters (https://populationmatters.org/) and
seeking to raise the issue with colleagues in the environment movement, I’ve
experienced all six silencers – sometimes as a volley!
The first five of Coole’s silencing discourses can be summarized as follows.
1. Population Scepticism brushes away any concerns about population: ‘Birth
rates are falling, the global population will peak at some point this (or maybe
the next...) century. The problem will take care of itself’.
2. Population Fatalism goes a step further: ‘Global population is set to hit 9,
maybe 10 billion by 2050, and there’s nothing we can do about it’.
3. Population Decomposing magics away the problem with technology: ‘It’s
true that population growth presents some challenges – but technological fixes
(like genetically modified crops, carbon capture etc.) can extend the boundaries
of our planet, easily enabling it to absorb another 3, 4 billion or even more
people’.
4. Population Declinism is the preference of nationalistic politicians,
neoliberal economists and journalists seeking alarmist headlines: ‘A
declining, ageing population means a declining, moribund, stagnant economy.
Without more new workers – another cohort of consumers – who’s going to pay
for our pensions?’
5. Population Growth presents the shiny face of that two-sided coin: ‘All
growth is good – of people, of GDP. More people equals more productivity.
Rapidly growing populations in time o/er developing countries a “demographic
dividend” rather than a strain on infrastructure or ecosystems’.
I won’t elaborate here on the counter-arguments to these five silencers (see
Maynard, 2018, for more detailed discussion). A basic understanding of the
principles of ecology and the extent of the current and increasing stresses on
biodiversity and the Earth’s ecosystems can unpick them.
Which leaves the sixth of Coole’s silencing discourses: Population Shaming –
perhaps better termed Naming. Rational, factual responses to Population
Shaming dry in the throat, as insinuation and moral condemnation are its modi
operandi, attributing underlying dark motivations and associations with the
worst manifestations of past population control (such as eugenics or ultra-
nationalist movements) to anyone who raises the issue of human
overpopulation.
We can agree that past coercive approaches (e.g. sterilization campaigns in
India in the 1970s, or China’s previous ‘one child policy’) were deplorable;
however, there are many other, more recent, progressive initiatives that have
succeeded in reducing population growth. For example, South Korea, Sri Lanka
and Thailand have all succeeded in managing down their fertility rates from 6
or more children per woman on average in the 1960s and 1970s, to below
replacement levels (2.1 children) today through non-coercive family planning
programmes (Dérer, 2019; United Nations Population Fund, 2018; O’Sullivan,
2013; Bongaarts and Sinding, 2009). Another example is Bangladesh, where
over the past 25 years, fertility rates have fallen from an average of 7 children
per woman to 2.3 today, because safe, modern family planning has been made
accessible through civil society and women-led programmes (Rizvi, 2018). Of
all of what the UN used to term ‘impoverished countries’, Bangladesh is the
only one to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (precursors to the
Sustainable Development Goals). Its progressive family planning programmes
are acknowledged to have been key to that achievement (Asadullah and Savoia,
2018; World Bank, 2005).
Population Shaming relies on triggering emotional, deeply-embedded
ideological and personal value responses. The power of this silencing discourse
is that it thereby appeals to precisely what tends to make people
environmentalists: strongly held, personal values grounded in, or informed by,
some form of ideology. I include myself in that characterization – motivated by
a passionate belief that a better, fairer, greener world is possible, and driven by
personal outrage at the stripping away of all other species bar our own or those
useful to us. Such beliefs motivate us to fight for that better world, but they also
make us vulnerable to having our thinking about population short-circuited by
insinuations that anyone who considers population an important factor is in in
some way keeping company with ‘eco-fascists’ or harking back to abhorrent
eugenicist views. This is palpably absurd, when you consider that respected
international scientific bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (2014, 2018), the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on
Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (2019), and the collective World Scientists’
Warning to Humanity (see Ripple et al., 2017) all acknowledge and highlight
population alongside and in harness with other drivers of the ecological crisis.
Refusing to think clearly about population is also, in a way, convenient, for it
allows people in the Global North to shut their eyes to the personal
responsibility and agency that, in the main, they are privileged to possess in
comparison to those in the Global South – not just in what they choose to
consume, but also in the decisions they make about parenthood. It can be hard
for us to recognize that extreme capitalism and consumerism – whilst
deservedly centre-frame – are to some degree only playing upon, and
amplifying, our own needs, addictions and desires.
Environmental writer and polemicist George Monbiot is a notable
‘Population Shamer’. He writes (Monbiot, 2020) that:
Population is where you go when you haven’t thought your argument through.
Population is where you go when you don’t have the guts to face the structural,
systemic causes of our predicament: inequality, oligarchic power, capitalism.
Population is where you go when you want to kick down.
Given such pronouncements from The Guardian’s ‘green guru’, it is
unsurprising that few in the environmental movement dare to raise population
as a factor, alongside and in harness with others. Monbiot has an honourable
record in standing up against global injustice and ecocide, but with a platform
a3ording him considerable reach, he is also an influencer of ‘norms’ in
discourse about environmental matters – in this case, population matters. The
great irony and moral flaw in Monbiot’s ideological stance is that, in particular
for people living in high-consuming countries like the UK, the most impactful
eco-action they can take is to choose to have a smaller family (as researchers at
Lund University, Sweden, have shown – see Wynes and Nicholas, 2017;
Carrington, 2017).
For the poorest people living in the Global South, addressing population is
primarily about enabling choice, and empowering those over 270 million
women and girls that the World Health Organization (2020) estimates have an
unmet need for safe, modern contraception, and so lack the capacity to exercise
their right to manage their own fertility. The additional benefit arising from
addressing that unmet need and enabling that fundamental human right, is to
cut a greater quantity of carbon emissions than from almost any other
available solution. Project Drawdown, the global research project set up to
identify the top 100 available, most e3ective solutions to the climate crisis,
ranked the synergistic solutions of universal education for girls and access to
family planning as the number one solution, saving more CO2 over the next
30 years than all o3shore and onshore wind-power combined. Its 2019 revision
demotes that solution to number two, although still avoiding 85.4 gigatons of
CO2 by 2050, marginally below the top ranked solution of ending all food waste
globally at 87.5 gigatons (https://drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions).
Fittingly, Project Drawdown founder Paul Hawken described that
combination of girls’ education and family planning as a ‘No Regrets’ solution.
His comments are worth quoting at length (Hawken, 2017: 81–2):
An intrinsic right, education lays a foundation for vibrant lives for girls and
women, their families, and their communities. It is the most powerful lever
available for breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty, while mitigating
emissions by curbing population growth. A 2010 economic study shows that
investment in educating girls is “highly cost-competitive with almost all of the
existing options for carbon emissions abatement” – perhaps just $10 per ton of
carbon dioxide.
Education also shores up resilience in terms of climate change impacts –
something the world needs as warming mounts. Across low-income countries,
there is a strong link between women and the natural systems at the heart of
family and community life. Women often and increasingly play roles as stewards
and managers of food, soil, trees, and water. As educated girls become educated
women, they can fuse inherited traditional knowledge with new information
accessed through the written word.
Monbiot and his acolytes appear ignorant of – or choose perversely to ignore
– the inconvenient facts of the considerable human rights, climate and
biodiversity benefits of addressing the human population factor. A perverse
position, as it is those oligarchs, capitalists and free market economists whom
he rightly rails against, who gain most from the denial of population growth as
an issue of concern. They have a vested interest in a growing population, seeing
expanding markets for their goods and services, boosting consumerism
globally (3.5 billion high-level consumers globally currently, set to rise to
5 billion by 2050 – Kharas, 2017), and seeding exaggerated fears in the public’s
and politicians’ minds that without fresh cohorts of young people as labour,
social services and pension funds will collapse.
Population Matters, the organization I work for, partners with groups and
individuals across the world, supporting grassroots and community
organizations from Kenya, Poland, to the UK Midlands through our crowd-
funding programme, Empower to Plan (https://is.gd/bAoFne). We do not
impose our views or presence upon people anywhere, but operate and engage
only where we are welcomed. An example was the invitation we received from
the Nigerian Conservation Foundation (NCF) to co-host a seminar in 2019 in
Lagos marking UN World Population Day (https://www.ncfnigeria.org/). I
assume Monbiot would not accuse NCF’s director, Dr Muhtari Aminu-Kanu, of
‘kicking down’, ‘poor blaming’, being ‘far-right’ or ‘racist’ in posing the
rhetorical question in his opening address, “We will be making big progress if
at first we acknowledge we have a population problem. If we don’t discuss it,
who will?”.
For Nigeria, where the average number of children per woman stands at over
5, and with the country’s population projected to double from 200 million to
400 million by 2050, the problem and challenges are clear – and were openly
acknowledged by Nigeria’s State Minister for the Environment who also spoke
at the seminar. Infrastructure is overstretched, and there is burgeoning social
unrest. Unemployment stands at over 30% and with over 40% of the
population made up of young men between the ages of 15 and 40, insurgency
groups are gaining recruits – especially in northeast Nigeria, where climate
breakdown further undermines livelihoods (Olurounbi, 2021).
In the Global South, population is primarily a human development, social
and welfare issue, exacerbating environmental impacts. For those of us living
in wealthy countries, population is an issue of personal responsibility, morality
and justice. Alongside doing what we can to empower disadvantaged
communities, we must make responsible choices, including regarding our
family size, to secure a better future for all human beings and for the Earth as a
whole.
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Citation: Maynard R (2021) Overpopulation denial syndrome. The Ecological Citizen, Vol 5 No 1 2021: epub-043.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robin Maynard is an environmental communicator, campaigner and strategist (for more information see http://robinmaynard.com/). He is also Director of the organization Population Matters (https://populationmatters.org/).
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