According to a recent UN report, the world population of human beings reached eight billion people on approximately November 15, 2022.
Eight billion humans? Good! I love humans.
Unfortunately, this major milestone in human history has triggered another wave of population control discourse on social and traditional media. All of the discourse I’ve reviewed so far is coming from either a climate perspective or broader environmental perspective.
As an advocate for environmental justice and climate justice, I feel compelled to say a few words about why this population control discourse is a problem and what we can do about it.
Population Control History
Population control has a long and troubled history.
Population control movements have historical and contemporary ties to eugenics movements, and more recently ecofascist movements. Advocates of population control have supported and conducted forced and incentivized sterilization programs that target specific populations deemed “unfit” to procreate on the basis of race, class, gender, and disability. They justify such horrific and often genocidal programs by blaming various social, economic, political, and ecological problems on the target populations. Once blame is assigned, they claim that the problem can only be solved by reducing how many of these people exist, or at least how many have children.
Population control then becomes a weapon with which to blame and attack these populations. The rich blame the poor for eating food and using electricity. Men blame women for having too many children. People in the Global North blame the Global South for having higher population growth rates. Once a target population has been blamed, population control advocates use some combination of involuntary sterilization and economic coercion (“incentives”) to reduce the birth rates of that population.
Population Control Today
Some modern-day advocates of population control quietly avoid acknowledging the worst ideologies and practices of past and present population control movements. Others vocally disavow the most blatantly oppressive ideologies and practices from the past, critiquing the racism, ableism, classism, colonialism, and involuntary nature of previous population control efforts. They claim, seemingly quite sincerely, that they’re just trying to avoid the dire consequences of economic and ecological crises, and have no intention of singling out specific populations for reduction or elimination.
For example, many people on social media are sharing an op-ed on the subject of population control by John Vidal, former environment editor for the Guardian. This op-ed — which I will not link to — argues that policymakers are overemphasizing the need to reduce consumption, and that they should instead be focusing more on reducing population growth. Vidal pays lip service to the fact that violent governments have forced sterilization on vulnerable people, and far-right extremists have embraced their own takes on population control discourse. He clearly intends to reject and condemn those more overtly authoritarian approaches to population control.
However, regardless of stated intent, the actual outcomes of population control efforts are still racist, classist, ableist, and colonial in nature.
Population control is primarily a campaign of the Global North, conducted primarily against the people of the Global South, in order to reduce the size and growth of their populations. It is also mutually compatible — and perhaps mutually reinforcing — with the anti-immigrant stances of ecofascist movements and Great Replacement Theory adherents. Once “respected” thought leaders have identified the ecological impacts of certain populations as a problem, it becomes that much easier for ecofascists and Great Replacement Theory adherents to advocate for the exclusion, reduction, or wholesale elimination of those populations.
To state this problem more simply: rich white people in the Global North are saying that poor people of color in the Global South are supposedly having too many babies and using up too many resources. And far-right populists in the Global North are seizing on this stated concern and using it to advance various forms of ecofascism and far-right demagoguery.
When stated this way, the inherent racism, classism, ableism, and colonialism of the population control movement becomes obvious.
This is not to say that everyone who engages is population control discourse is consciously choosing to be personally racist, classist, ableist, and colonialist. Most of the people I see espousing such views have no intent of becoming ecofascists or far-right sympathizers. However, they are at risk of becoming ecofascists in spite of themselves. They are also, whether they realize it or not, encouraging ecofascism in others. “Respected” figures embracing population control discourse makes it that much easier for the far right to use population-based arguments as a recruiting tool.
Consequently, anyone who embraces population control discourse should seriously consider the inescapable and profoundly harmful intersections between such discourse and the perpetuation and worsening of systemic oppression.
This is also not to say that there’s no theoretical limit to the human population that the Earth is physically capable of sustaining. Physical systems have physical limits.
However, most projections indicate that human population is expected to peak below 10 billion. So we likely won’t come anywhere near any theoretical limit on a sustainable human population. If some or all human societies do become genuinely unable to provide for the needs of their members, it will be due to systemic inequities — and systemically-induced ecological and climate disruptions — not population alone.
Population & Climate
From a climate justice perspective, population control discourse is an example of a proposed climate solution that is both ineffective at reducing emissions and unjust regardless of its actual impact on emissions.
Both the ineffectiveness and the injustice of population control as a climate solution can be illustrated with a simple formula and a few basic facts.
First, here’s the formula:
Population Size (P) × Emissions Per Capita (E) = Total Emissions of a Population (T)
I like phrasing it this way because it produces a memorable acronym: P-E-T.
Population control advocates propose reducing total emissions (T) by reducing population (P). If P goes down, then T goes down. Seems simple enough, right?
As it turns out, there are some major problems with this approach.
The first and most obvious problem is that population control is a wildly ineffective emissions reduction strategy when compared with other mitigation options.
Population control projects almost exclusively target people in the Global South whose emissions per capita (E) are already very low. Decreasing the number of births in the Global South does far less to mitigate emissions than reducing the outrageously high per capita emissions (E) in the Global North.
In 2015, Oxfam published a report on extreme climate inequality that included a graph that illustrates this point visually:
This is one of my all-time favorite climate infographics.
As you can see, the poorest 50% of the world’s population (largely in the Global South) are responsible for only around 10% of total lifestyle consumption emissions. On the flip side, the richest 10% (largely in the Global North) are responsible for almost half of total lifestyle consumption emissions.
Trying to mitigate emissions by reducing the number of people in the bottom half of this chart, rather than reducing the per capita consumption and emissions of the people in the top half of this chart, makes absolutely no sense.
More importantly, focusing on population control rather than consumption control is profoundly unfair and unjust. It places the burden of reducing humanity’s total emissions (T) on poor populations in the Global South who have done the least to cause the climate crisis and are suffering its worst impacts, while rich populations in the Global North are allowed to continue their historically-unprecedented CO2 emissions without interruption.
Basically, policymakers in the richer Global North are asking people in the poorer Global South to stop having babies in the hopes that it will allow the Global North to sustain their dramatically-higher emissions a bit longer.
When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound like a good or fair idea, does it?
Population Control Alternatives
If population control is so problematic, what are the alternatives? If we want to reduce the negative ecological and climate impacts of human societies without pushing population control on the poor and the Global South, what do we do instead?
This brings me back to the formula I mentioned earlier.
Population Size (P) × Emissions Per Capita (E) = Total Emissions of a Population (T)
If we’re not reducing the population size, we must reduce the emissions per capita. And to do this most effectively and fairly, we must begin with the extravagant emissions of the rich and the Global North.
The emissions of the richest 10% of the population are so high that they can be reduced dramatically without any appreciable impact on anyone’s quality of life. Even just reducing their emissions to match that of the next-lowest decile — who are still well-off even by Global North standards — would create rapid and significant emissions reductions in humanity’s total emissions.
Beyond that, the nuts and bolts of climate mitigation are beyond the scope of this post. For more information, I suggest checking out my climate resource center to find information related to your specific climate interests. I also recommend reading up on the following topics:
Reproductive Justice
On a final note, I want to mention one point that well-meaning population control advocates and opponents of population control discourse should all be able to agree on: the importance of reproductive justice.
Reproductive justice focuses on personal bodily autonomy and access to reproductive health care as a basic human right. Contraception, abortion, education, economic opportunity, and eliminating systemic coercion to have or not have children are all important parts of working for reproductive justice.
I support reproductive justice for its own sake. This is one reason why I oppose population control as a framework and movement. Population control projects generally involve privileged people and institutions pressuring or forcing historically-oppressed people to have fewer children. Reproductive justice, on the other hand, empowers people to choose what they do with their bodies, including but not limited to how many children they choose to have, if any.
In this context, it’s worth pointing out that improving access to contraception and reproductive health care will generally decrease birth rates in many contexts. This isn’t a specific goal of reproductive justice, but it’s often a natural consequence of giving people who can give birth more choices and opportunities.
Therefore, people who are concerned about population, but eager to reject the oppressive history and current tendencies of the population control movement, would do well to educate themselves about the many benefits that the reproductive justice movement has to offer. Empowering people to make their own reproductive choices is far more just than pressuring or forcing them to have fewer children.
My name is Treesong. I’m a father, author, talk radio host, and Real Life Superhero. Follow me on Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, and Ko-fi for my latest climate fiction releases and superhero adventures. Sign up for my newsletter to receive free climate fiction in your inbox. Check out my bookshop for climate change books, including reading lists for climate fiction, climate nonfiction, and climate poetry!
