OPPOSING POPULATION POSITIONS (Breed Don't Breed)
Position 1: Overpopulation is the main problem for environmental reasons
Example: "Although demographic trends are moving- if too slowly- in the right direction, the list of environmental threats uncovered since 1968 is extremely alarming, all exacerbated by our species' large and growing numbers." - Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, Is the Population Bomb Finally Exploding , Free Inquiry, May 2009
Position 2: Depopulation the main problem for economic reasons
Example: "...rhetoric about overpopulation flies in the face of the depopulation dynamics that are striking fear into many politicians and economists around the world. ... as the older age cohort increases relative to a nation's population, the country's economic health can be expected to decline." —Maurice Vellacott, Saskatoon Conservative MP, National Post, Dec. 12, 2009, Financial Post Commentary.
Position 3: Implement a guaranteed livable income for all - the quickest way to take stress off the environment (ending Crapitalism), eliminate the push for population growth for economic reasons and create population equilibrium (see Part 1), while maximizing people's freedom, autonomy, creativity, innovation and health.
OVERVIEW
As stated in Part 1, population is a tangled, touchy and contradictory topic. On one side are people whose main worry is the environmental impact of a world population that is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. They say stop breeding to save the environment.
On the other side there are economists and politicians whose main worry is economic impact from falling fertility rates. They say start breeding to save people's incomes (if we assume pro-economic growth people are not idiots or monsters, and their motivation for pushing economic growth is because they think it will bring improved living conditions).
And there are two statistical arrows going in opposite directions: world population is rising each year and is expected to peak mid century; fertility rates are falling and are below replacement level in several countries. After world population peaks, it will start decreasing at an unknown rate, although Phillip Longman writes that according to UN projections, by 2050 75 percent of countries in the world will have below replacement rate fertility.
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Total world population growth. |
Population growth rates peaked in 1960s |
If people took up the cause of the first group and marched around waving signs saying: "Overpopulation coming! Stop breeding!", they would get the response: "We Have!" from all the low fertility industrialized countries. The high fertility countries have high infant mortality, and low life expectancy, so we could expect - based on history - a response of "not until living conditions improve, and more women have more autonomy." (See more on this in part 1)
If people took up the cause of the second group and marched around waving signs saying "Depopulation and Economic Collapse coming! Make babies!" they would be met with the responses "we can't afford to" and "not until the world is a better place" or simply "no" for a variety of other reasons. It also must be stated that at the edges of this second group there would be some unsettling fundamentalist, racist, and nationalist ideas that women should be forced to give birth for their country (and race) just as men have been forced to go to war. (See 4th commen here)
POSITION 1 AND POSITION 2 MOOT
Both Position 1 (stop breeding to save the environment) and Position 2 (start breeding to save the economy) become moot if we implement a minimum income for all. This is the quickest way to take stress off the environment while eliminating the push for population growth for economic reasons and it does this while also maximizing people's freedom, autonomy, creativity, innovation and health.
The goal of saving the environment has eluded environmentalists for decades because without advocating a universal income they are asking people to do the impossible under the current economic system.
The only exception to the jobs-from-consumption rule, are people who meet their needs directly from nature.
Without a guaranteed livable income (GLI) there is no easy way to end the consumption-driven jobs economy. It should go without saying that people have a instinct to survive - they need a way to 'make a living' - and today that means being part of the consumption system. Moral scolding, alarmism, and demonization of consumers does nothing because people's incomes are derived from the jobs/consumption machine.
Advocating something that goes against people's instinct to survive (stop consuming and crash the economy) is advocating for people to self-destruct. This is why anti-consumerism as a strategy to save the environment can only have very limited impact —despite honorable intentions. Wasteful consumption is not a moral issue; it does not happen because evil people have a deep desire to destroy the environment. It is structural.
And if humans in the future want to evolve into a non-monetary resource based economy, a GLI is a practical step towards this transition.
The fact that some people object to a guaranteed income has nothing to do with whether there is enough "money" or not, it is due the idea that people won't work if they get a guaranteed income. However, humans inherently seek out meaningful activities —obvious from the fact that the bulk of the world's essential work is unpaid (still mostly, but not solely, done by women). But humans also naturally avoid soul-sucking meaningless work and being under the thumb of incompetent or sadistic bosses. This is why many people end up being self-employed. The culture of bully bosses would expire since no one would work for them and they'd have to do some soul-searching of their own. Wasteful fake jobs, which make up a much larger segment of economic activity than we can imagine, would also fade away since they do not really produce anything of value, and they stifle innovation and creativity.
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ALARM ON OVERPOPULATION ALARMISM
In Part One I outlined my four reasons for writing GLI and Population:
1) if we do not change from the goal of economic growth, there always be a required goal of population growth - ergo - the economy depends on women having babies;
2) because of this, women in countries with falling fertility rates may face coercive or repressive pro-natal policies;
3) overpopulation alarmism leads to an implied 'let them die' sentiment directed against the world's poor (easy target) because it takes attention away from the economic drivers of environmental destruction (hard target);
4) a universal Guaranteed Livable Income addresses these problems and is most likely to create population equilibrium.
Part 1 addressed all these points except the 'let them die' issue of point 3 which needs further explanation.
First, I must emphasize that the majority of people who are alarmed about population do not advocate a 'let them die' strategy, they advocate for women's rights, education and autonomy. But this usually involves promoting more jobs, not guaranteed income, and promoting jobs means promoting a consumer-based economy. (See Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, Is the Population Bomb Finally Exploding , Free Inquiry, May 2009.) Also, Alan Dregson has written how Deep Ecology does not mean misanthropy.
As described in Part 1, it is not numbers (population) that is the problem, it is activities (economics) that cause damage to the world, to people and other living creatures. Thinking about big picture economic problems can cause 'cognitive dissonance' because it is somewhat complex. Cognitive dissonance also explains why more people haven't grasped the economics of inequality and hunger the way biologist Colin Tudge has:
| "The reality is we have 1 billion people starving because we have a farming system which is designed to feed only about 5 and a half billion people. And the reason we have that kind of farming system is because it is designed to make money and not to feed people. So however small the population was, if you had an economy that demanded that farming should be designed to make money rather than feed people a proportion will always starve." —Colin Tudge, BBC interview |
In contrast, thinking of world problems being caused by 'too many people' sets up a quick jump to the presumed solution: fewer people. However there are some very, very bad ways to get 'fewer people'.
A couple anecdotal examples reveal just how common misanthropic environmentalism has influenced people's understanding of the world.
In 2007 I was told about two conversations overheard at a BC university campus. In the first instance, a professor was describing high child and infant mortality rates in Afghanistan and was asked by a student, "but isn't this a good thing because of overpopulation?" In another overheard discussion, two students were talking about how disease in poor countries is necessary in order to reduce overpopulation.
But we cannot blame young people for having such opinions.
John Livingston (1923-2006) for many years was executive producer of the popular Canadian Broadcasting Corporation TV science program, The Nature of Things and also taught environmental studies at York University. In his award-winning book Rogue Primate (1994), Livingston praises Robert Heilbroner as being "courageous" for saying that child mortality from undernourishment in the poorest countries is "a human tragedy of immense proportions, but also a demographic safety value of great importance."
David Suzuki considered Livingston a mentor, but took issue with environmental misanthropy views: "I was involved in the anti-nuclear movement and his attitude was if humans were stupid enough to develop nuclear weapons and to drop them, well, so be it, the rest of nature would be better off for it. I had a hard time with that."
Garrett Hardin, known for his writing on the Tragedy of the Commons, equated deaths from famine as being similar to pruning fruit trees in his 1999 book The Ostrich Factor. Hardin devoted one chapter to the ideas of 3rd century theologian Tertullian:
| "Growing things and getting rid of superfluous living material for the sake of a better harvest was once a familiar practice to many... [Tertullian] realized that whenever a community consists of too many people for the resources available to it, heavy mortality can then actually improve the conditions of life for the lucky survivors." (Garrett Hardin, The Ostrich Factor) |
And on a 2008 BBC panel, scientist Susan Blackmore expressed a conflicted view of population, showing how much impact the spectre of 'too many people' has, even for people who are compassionate and would rather have positive solutions:
| Sue Blackmore: Like others here, I expected something more Daniel-like. The real unsaid thing, the real free-thinking thing that needs to be said is that the fundamental problem is that there are too many people. John Gray: I did say that. Sue Blackmore: Yes, you did, but you didn't grasp the nettle and nobody can because what it means and I find myself in the situation is thinking is 'for the planet's sake I hope we have bird flu or some other thing that will reduce the population because otherwise we're doomed. As a humanitarian person I want to have cures and to have people not die. I don't know what to do about this problem." |
POPULATION CONTROL
Sometimes Too Many People translates into Let Them Die which sometimes turns into Population Control policies and actions. Population control has a brutal past and takes many forms. There are ample historical examples of one group of people trying to control the fertility of another group. Population control can be pro-natalist - getting certain women to have babies; it can be anti-natalist - stopping certain women from having babies; it can mean passive policies of withholding resources; it can mean policies of imperialism to take resources (e.g. U.S. General Sheridan in the 1870s ordering the wholesale slaughter of buffalo as a military strategy); it can mean targeting women with violence; it can mean structural adjustment where countries are forced to cut social programs which has the outcome of reducing people's health and life expectancy. It can also mean eugenics. "People with disabilities often were targeted by the state for eugenic intervention. Such policies and practices continue to impact the lives of people with disabilities." (Canadian Disability Studies Association 2011)
PRO-NATAL EXAMPLES.
"Nationalism is a thing which has always encouraged a high birth rate, from Sparta to Nazi Germany and beyond." —Janet Radcliffe Richards, The Skeptical Feminist, 1982 |
An infamous example of pro-natalist policies and propaganda occurred in Nazi Germany where women deemed "Aryan" were encouraged to have as many babies as possible.
"In 1938 [in Germany], childlessness was restored in law as grounds for divorce. Abortion and contraceptives were also banned." —Jack Holland, Misogyny, 2006
"Mothers, your cradles are like a slumbering army, ever ready for victory, they will never be empty." (Nazi poem, quoted in Misogyny) |
At the same time eugenics courts ordered the sterilization of all "defectives". According to Claudia Koonz in her 1987 book, Mothers in the Fatherland, sterilization policies "marked an important step towards the exclusion of 'racially' inadequate people from 'Aryan' society." This, Koonz writes, set the stage for the Jewish holocaust.
And another example of pro-natalism, this time for economic reasons, is how slave owners reacted in the 1800's when new laws began to impact the slave trade:
"As the threats to end the slave trade became apparent, West Indian planters sought to conserve the slave population they already had and to enhance it through reproduction. The attitude of the West Indian plantocracy changed from the premise 'better to buy than to breed', to the encouragement of natural increase in the colonies."
—Nicole Phillip, Producers, Reproducers, and Rebels:Grenadian Slave Women 1783-1833
"Accordingly, the price of the woman slave was based not only on her value as a field hand or a household slave, but also on the possible value of her children of the future." —Marian Lowe and Ruth Hubbard, (editors), Woman's Nature: Rationalizations of Inequality, 1986 |
In the face of these circumstances, women resisted:
IMPERIALISM
Another form of population control is when imperial powers remove or attempt to remove peoples and original inhabitants who occupy coveted land and resources.
"...the federal government and, it seems fair to say, most Americans endorsed or acquiesced in the practice of Indian extermination and removal... Later generations along the moving western frontier maintained the proposition laid down by these early Americans--savages would have to go, treaties or no treaties." —Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy,1987
"...there were two primary objectives of my work. First, I was to justify huge international loans that would funnel money back to MAIN and other U.S. companies... through massive engineering and construction projects. Second, I would work to bankrupt the countries that received those loans (after they had paid MAIN and other U.S. contractors, of course) so that they would be forever beholded to their creditors, and so they would present easy targets when we needed favors, including military bases, UN votes, or access to oil and other national resources." —John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, 2004 |
See also the important documentary LIFE AND DEBT
Taken to its broadest definition, population control can also mean imposition of structural adjustment programs.
Even in British Columbia, Canada (described by the provincial government as being "the best place on earth") there were 6065 welfare recipients who died in the first 18 months of BC provincial welfare cuts that started in July 2002. (Andrew MacLeod, Monday Magazine, Aug. 2005)
What else could you call the gap between public health research showing the income/health/life expectancy connection and enacting punitive non-livable welfare policies but population control?
TARGETING INDIGENOUS WOMEN
"During the 1970s many Native women went into the hospital to have children and came out with tubal ligations or hysterectomies." —Kim Anderson, Strong Women Stories: Native Vision and Community Survival, 2003 anthology
"As of 1982, fifteen percent of white women had been sterilized, compared with twenty-four percent of African-American women, thirty-five percent of Puerto Rican women, and forty-two percent of Native American women. (28) In the early 1970's, an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 low-income individuals were annually subjected to sterilization under federally funded programs." —Michael Sullivan DeFine, A History of Governmentally Coerced Sterilization: The Plight of the Native American Woman, University of Maine School of Law, 1997
"In some cases [in Brazil], women are asked to present certification of tubal ligation as a prerequisite to employment." —Bill Hinchberger, Corporate Sterilization, Multinational Monitor, November, 1991
"Human rights groups cite evidence that unilingual Indians are being targeted by government sterilization brigades in several [Mexican] states..." — Linda Diebel, Toronto Star, Latin America Bureau, March 26, 2000 |
In Canada, Aboriginal peoples have also had another kind of population control used against them. Starting in the 1800's Aboriginal children were forcibly taken from their families and placed in residential schools. This continued in another form in the 1960s.
| "It was 1961, the beginning of what became known as the 'Sixties' Scoop'. For the first time in Canada, provincial social workers were exercising the jurisdiction given to them by the federal government to go into Indian homes on and off reserve and make judgements about what constituted proper care, according to non-native, middle-class values. ...Poverty was the only reason many children were apprehended from otherwise caring aboriginal homes." —Suzanne Fournier and Ernie Crey, Stolen From Our Embrace; The Abduction of First Nations Children and the Restoration of Aboriginal Communities, 1997 |
This trend continues:
| "Aboriginal people account for less than 5% of the entire population in BC. The report tells me that on January 31, 2007 there were 9269 children in care; and of those 4712 or 51% is Aboriginal. ... The numbers of Aboriginal children entering the child welfare system is increasing while the numbers of non- Aboriginal children in care is continuing to decrease. " —Shelly Johnson, Surrounded by Cedar Child and Family Services Newsletter (Victoria, BC, Ca), referring to the BC Ministry of Children and Families 2007 quarterly report. |
Policies of elimination and/or subjugation of indigenous peoples around the world is well documented for anyone who cares to look. The group Sisters in Spirit have created a data base of the 580 missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada. This funding was cut by the federal government in 2010.
Similarly, there are also an estimated 500 murdered and missing women in Juarez, Mexico.
WOMEN'S AUTONOMY
Overpopulation alarmism creates a perception that human population growth is an uncontrollable tidal wave of humanity bursting forth from monstrous baby-making machines with no off switch. However, women around the world have long had the knowledge and desire to control their own fertility.
"Birth control in the form of traditional medicines was also in use prior to interference from the dominant Euro-Western culture."
—Kim Anderson, Strong Women Stories: Native Vision and Community Survival, anthology, 2003
"peasants [in Europe] too regularly practiced family planning... in rural households, herbal medicines, post-partum taboos and extended nursing allowed women to space births..." —Maria Sophia Quine, Population Politics in twentieth Century Europe, 1996
"Lederer leaves out of his absurd picture [women as fertility mad reproducers] a few realistic details, such as the fact that women have always waged a fierce struggle against unwanted pregnancies."
—Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology, 1978 |
Historically women were the ones with the knowledge and insight to gauge whether there was enough 'nurture' in themselves, their family, their society, and their environment sufficient for a new human being to reach physical, emotional, intellectual, creative and spiritual health and maturity.
BLOODY VS. BORING
Overpopulation alarmism and misanthropic dreams of human annihilations are very dramatic. They also play into how easy it is to convince people that "hell is other people" since we all struggle with that sentiment at times. But before we go for the bloody drama and apocalyptic endings, why not try the easy ideas first? Implementing a simple solution like a universal guaranteed income is boring. However, boring economics is better than bloody economics, and boring economics paradoxically creates maximum opportunity for fun, full and healthy lives and a livable world, while doing away with the need for harmful levels of consumption, just to keep the jobs system going.
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LINKS
PART 1 GLI AND POPULATION
The Atlantic - Depopulation demographics article
CIA World Factbook for stats on world population by country (drop down menu -"People")
Fred Pearce - Population Crash (2010 book)
The Local Planet - Misanthropic Environmentalism
The hazards of misanthropic environmentalism
Euthanasia Rollercoaster
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