The Population Bomb is Back – with a Global Warming Twist
Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation and violent conflict are just some ills that the elites have blamed on the poor since the days of 18th century social scientist Thomas Malthus. Now the list includes climate change.
Population pundits and advocacy groups claim that overpopulation is the main cause of global warming, that only massive investments in family planning will save the planet. This argument threatens to derail climate negotiations and turn back the clock on reproductive rights and health. It is time for women’s movements to defuse the population bomb – again.
When Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb in the late 1960s, he argued that a population “explosion” would wreak havoc on the environment and cause hundreds of millions to star ve to death by the 1980s. His predictions did not come true. Instead world food production outpaced population growth. Birth rates started to fall for a variety of reasons, including declines in infant mortality, increases in women’s education and employment, and the shift from rural to urban livelihoods. Yet his kind of dire forecast ser ved as justification for the implementation of coercive population control programmes that brutally sacrificed women’s health and human rights.
When feminists won reforms of population policy at the 1994 United Nations (UN) population conference in Cairo, Egypt, many thought family planning had finally been freed from the shackles of population control. The more immediate threat seemed to be fundamentalist forces opposing reproductive and sexual rights. But population control never went away. Mounting concern about climate change has provided a new opportunity for the population control lobby to blame the poor and target women’s fertility.
Within the United States (US) population lobby, the influential Population Action International organisation has taken the lead in linking population growth and climate change.1 Paul Ehrlich is back on the circuit and popular media is spreading fear and alarm.2 For example, a June 2009 ABC prime time television documentary on climate change, Earth 2100 scared viewers with scenes of a future apocalypse in which half the world population dies of a new plague. And in the end, humans can get back into balance with nature again.
Unfortunately, even some feminists have jumped on board this fear-factor bandwagon. Although their message tends to be softer – they believe investments in voluntary family planning will meet women’s unmet need for contraception and reduce global warming at the same time.3 They assume we live in a win-win world where there is no fundamental power imbalance between the rich and the poor or contradiction between placing disproportionate blame for the world’s problems on poor women’s fertility and advocating for reproductive rights and health.
The reasoning behind these views is fundamentally flawed. Industrialised countries, with only 20 per cent of the world’s population, are responsible for 80 per cent of the accumulated carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The US is the worst offender. Overconsumption by the rich has far more to do with global warming than the population growth of the poor. The few countries in the world where population growth rates remain high, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa, have among the lowest carbon emissions per capita on the planet.4
Moreover, the recent resurgence in overpopulation rhetoric flies in the face of demographic realities. In the last few decades population growth rates have come down all over the world so that the average number of children per woman in the Global South is now 2.75 and predicted to drop to 2.05 by 2050. The so-called population “explosion” is over, though the momentum built into our present numbers means that world population will grow to about nine billion in 2050, after which point it will start to stabilise.
The real challenge is to plan for the additional three billion people in ways that minimise negative environmental impact. For example, investments in public transport rather than private cars, cluster housing rather than suburbia, green energy rather than fossil fuels and nuclear, would do a lot to help a more populated planet.
Serious environmental scholars have taken the population and climate change connection to task, 5 but unfortunately a misogynist pseudo-science has been developed to bolster overpopulation claims. Widely cited in the press, a study by two researchers at Oregon State University blames women’s childbearing for creating a long-term “carbon legacy.”6
Not only is the individual woman responsible for her own children’s emissions, but for her genetic offspring’s emissions far into the future! Missing from the equation is any notion that people are capable of effecting positive social and environmental change, and that the next generation could make the transition out of fossil fuels. It also places the onus on the individual, obscuring the role of capitalist systems of production, distribution and consumption in causing global warming.
A second study to hit the press is by a population control outfit in the United Kingdom (UK), Optimum Population Trust (OPT), whose agenda includes immigration restriction. OPT sponsored a graduate student at the London School of Economics (LSE) to undertake a simplistic cost/benefit analysis that purports to show that it is cheaper to reduce carbon emissions by investing in family planning than in alternative technologies.7 Although the student’s summer project was not supervised by an official faculty member, the press has billed it as a study by the prestigious LSE, lending it false legitimacy. Writing on the popular blog RHRealityCheck, Karen Hardee and Kathleen Mogelgaard of Population Action International endorse the report’s findings without even a blink of a critical eye.8
Clearly, it is time for feminists to keep their critical eyes wide open to these developments. We also need to develop alternative frames and politics to address reproductive rights and climate change. We not only have to criticise the wrong links, but make the right ones.
Right Links: Reproductive Justice/Environmental Justice/ Climate Justice
Developed and advanced by women of color activists in the US, the concept of reproductive justice strongly condemns population control, noting its long history of targeting the fertility of oppressed communities. At the same time it includes support for full access to safe, voluntary birth control, abortion and reproductive health services. But reproductive justice goes far beyond the need for adequate services. According to Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice (ACRJ), reproductive justice “will be achieved when women and girls have the economic, social and political power and resources to make healthy decisions about our bodies, sexuality and reproduction for ourselves, our families and our communities in all areas of our lives.”9 Reproductive justice refers not only to biological reproduction but to social reproduction.
Feminist scholar Giovanna Di Chiro argues that the concept of social reproduction is crucial to understanding the possibilities for linking struggles for women’s rights with environmental justice. Social reproduction includes the conditions necessary for reproducing everyday life (access to food, water, shelter, and health care) as well as the ability to sustain human cultures and communities.10 Whether or not individuals and communities can fulfill their basic needs and sustain themselves depends critically on the extent of race, class and gender inequalities in access to resources and power.
Unlike the population framework with its focus on numbers, social reproduction focuses on social, economic and political systems. It helps us to look more deeply at the underlying power dynamics that determine who lives and who dies, who is healthy and who is sick, whose environment is polluted and whose is clean, who is responsible for global warming and who suffers most from its consequences.
Looking through this lens leads to a much more liberatory understanding of the convergences of reproductive and climate politics. It encourages us to consider:
Connections between the Local and the Global. Some of the same powerful forces that drive environmental injustice at the local level contribute to climate change on the global level. While marginalised communities all over the world experience environmental injustices at the hands of powerful corporate and political actors, their experiences and concerns are diverse. Local battles against environmental injustice include coal mining towns in rural Appalachia, indigenous communities of the Arctic and Subarctic, the oil fields of Nigeria and the oil refineries of the Gulf Coast. The task of confronting global climate change challenges us to build alliances, coalitions, and
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Isis Resource Center holds one of the largest feminist collections of materials in the Global South. With 40 years of publication experience, Isis holds a vast collection.