Life Under Capitalism: The Myth of Overpopulation
This story is another entry in a series on the environmental degradation depicted in David Attenborough’s documentary, A Life On Our Planet.
Photo by Roland Denes on Unsplash
One of the central messages in Attenborough’s A Life On Our Planet is that the exponentially growing human population around the world is one of the leading causes of environmental destruction.
The world’s soaring population tops the ticker-timer between scenes as the numbers begin to glow ominously red, implying that humanity is reaching some dangerous upper limit. It’s a common concern, one shared by many prominent thinkers today, from Jane Goodall to Bill Gates, to Michael Moore and many others.
Just like Attenborough, they all seem to lead to similar conclusions: that there are already far too many of us for civilisation to be sustainable, and a rapid halt to population growth will be necessary to avert the ongoing disasters of climate change and environmental degradation.
At first glance, this probably seems like an uncomfortable but unavoidable conversation that needs to be had. After all, we can see people have caused such harm to the natural world, so couldn’t those harms be manageable if there were few enough people?
In reality, population control is no more than a false antidote to the current environmental crises. It’s not just an uncomfortable conversation, but an entirely wrongheaded and deeply problematic one that distracts from a much more fundamental problem. A problem that is unfortunately avoided by Attenborough and rarely gets a mention in mainstream environmentalism — the destructive economic system of capitalism.
But where does this misguided idea come from, and why is it still popular in environmentalism today?
Photo by Andrew Haimerl (andrewnef) on Unsplash
Overpopulation: From Thomas Malthus to Anti-human Environmentalism
Anti-humanism is a fairly common throwaway sentiment in mainstream environmentalism. Attenborough himself referred to humanity as a plague in a 2013 interview, and I’m sure most of us have heard slogans like “humans are a cancer”, or “we are the virus”. Evocative terms like ‘plague’ and ‘virus’ easily conjure images of ravenous hordes of insects, or microbial invaders consuming and growing their way to the total destruction of their supporting systems.
The idea that human population is the leading cause of environmental crisis is not exactly new, however, nor is it based on any robust, modern scientific environmental thinking.
It can be traced back to an article first published in 1798 by the early English economist Thomas Malthus, called An Essay on the Principle of Population. In this piece, Malthus wrote that Britain was already severely overpopulated and that population growth would inevitably bring human society to a premature and starving end.
As many have since pointed out, this idea didn’t really hold any water. It was based on false assumptions and shoddy science that reduced the complex dynamics of human population growth and resource development to a simple set of equations.
Malthus’ conclusions were strongly influenced by his commitment to capitalist economics, and he imagined that individual competition and scarcity were natural and ever-present features of human society. Not unlike some modern proponents of free-market capitalism, Malthus also naturally concluded that feeding and supporting the poor was the ultimate injustice to them, as it would only encourage more population growth, leading to more dependency, greater poverty and starvation down the road.
Photo by Nadine Redlich on Unsplash
Despite the significant flaws in Malthus’ work, his theory of population had a significant impact on scientists over the following centuries. One such impact was on Darwin’s theory of evolution, which led him to emphasise individual competition over scarce resources as a key evolutionary force. Governments have also frequently drawn on Malthusian ideas to shape social policy, a tendency that has underpinned moments of profound cruelty — from colonial dispossession to racial oppression — throughout history.
Even more recently, the fears of a Malthusian population disaster were raised by Stanford professors and environmental activists Paul and Anne Ehrlich, in their 1968 book The Population Bomb.
Much like the ominous ticker-timer in Attenborough’s documentary, the Ehrlichs’ controversial book stated that the world was already populated far over its sustainable limit. Too many mouths to feed and not enough environmental capacity to feed them meant that the world was about to experience a decade of unprecedented famines and starvation.
To the Ehrlich’s, the solution was going to be harsh, but simple. Saving the natural world and ensuring its capacity to harbour humanity would require reducing the sheer number of people.
Just like Malthus, the Ehrlichs’ predictions were spectacularly wrong. Despite the world’s population more than doubling since 1968, starvation has been steadily falling across the world, and their forewarned civilisational collapse obviously has not happened.
What’s more, this mythical ‘exponential’ population growth that Malthus, the Ehrlichs and so many others have insisted is going to doom us all, has never happened and is not at all how human population works.
Despite the foundational problems with their arguments, failed predictions and a wealth of facts that disagree, the Ehrlichs — and now Attenborough — have continued beating the anti-humanist drum of overpopulation.
Why is Overpopulation Still a Concern?
A key issue with the overpopulation narrative, and perhaps the reason it is still so widely accepted, is that it grasps a very real problem while ignoring the sometimes difficult but essential details. Human activity on Earth is unsustainable. Infinite growth is not possible. These facts can’t be denied and are ultimately the cause of the ongoing crises of climate change, land degradation and pollution.
However, the overpopulation narrative that Attenborough endorses completely fails to address which types of human activity are unsustainable and why. Instead, Attenborough’s account rolls all of humanity up into a homogenous, uncomplicated whole, claiming that the population is the key problem and that it’s up to all of us to sort it out — even though Attenborough’s western Netflix audience isn’t made up of the people typically found guilty of ‘overpopulating’.
What this simplified narrative leaves out is that people around the world have very different consumption patterns, and these differences vastly outweigh differences in population growth. For example, the average American consumes the equivalent of 35 Indians and 53 Chinese people over their lifetime. This contributes to the fact that the United States, while only accounting for around 4% of the global population, consumes about 25% of all resources, and produces 50% of all solid waste.
It’s not just America that consumes so far beyond its relative size. Just about every western industrialised nation has a vastly disproportionate impact on global CO2 emissions and agricultural land use compared to its population.
This all seems like very important context when discussing humanity’s overall unsustainable impacts on the planet, right? Not to Attenborough and other proponents of the overpopulation narrative.
Instead, their focus is predominantly on the people and places in the poorest parts of the world like Africa, which, despite its 1.2 billion people and typically much higher birth rates, contributes almost nothing to global CO2 emissions.
The people that suffer the most from environmental crises typically contribute the least to causing them.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
In reality, it’s not just people that are destroying the planet. Instead, it’s a small number of very affluent people living in the heart of the capitalist system who are responsible for the majority of pollution and resource consumption.
And herein lies another reason for the popularity of the overpopulation argument: It’s so easy.
It doesn’t demand any action, reflection or critical thinking from the western audiences who are most familiar with it. Instead of blaming the overproducing, rapacious system of capitalism for our environmental woes, Attenborough takes the much easier and much more popular road of blaming something outside of that. Something that he knows his audience can’t control.
At best, Attenborough’s concerns about overpopulation are misplaced. They are based on unjustified, pseudoscientific nonsense and distract from the real problems at hand.
At worst, this all-too-common argument encourages thoughtful and compassionate people — most often unknowingly — to fall into an insidiously racist and inhuman line of thinking. This perspective not only denies the reality of our incredibly privileged position here in the western world, but also completely ignores how foreign peoples are exploited in order to fuel our destructive system and line the pockets of wealthy capitalists.
How is the Overpopulation Narrative Racist?
A strong example of the subtle, creeping racism of overpopulation can be seen in Attenborough’s blithe remarks about famine in Ethiopia, in a 2013 interview about population control. In this interview, Attenborough claimed that the Ethiopian famines were simply the result of “too many people for too little land”, and that it would be “barmy” for the developed world to ignore this while it continues to send food aid.
First of all, these callous, off-hand statements were demonstrably wrong. Despite a few devastating crises, famines and hunger have steadily declined worldwide over the last few decades, including in high-growth countries like Ethiopia. In fact, research into famine shows that social and political factors, like food distribution, underdevelopment, inequality and conflict contribute much more to the occurrence and severity of famines than raw population numbers.
So, blaming Ethiopian famine simply on overpopulation and high birth rates is not only inaccurate. It’s also deeply racist and echoes an old colonial tendency to paint famine victims as passive and ignorant. An unsurprising sentiment considering that, in current times, these people are almost always non-white. The picture it evokes is a population so completely unaware of their capacity to support themselves, to the point that they’re simply breeding themselves into starvation.
This story only makes sense if we think of these people as not much more aware than unthinking, instinctive animals. Not incidentally, this is exactly what Winston Churchill did when he blamed the 1943 famine in Bengal on the Indian people because they were, in his eyes, “breeding like rabbits”.
Of course, Attenborough is not Churchill, and he doesn’t express the same kind of overt colonial racism. It’s probably safe to say the same about most of Attenborough’s audience as well.
But these victim-blaming sentiments appear throughout his recent work, and most notably in A Life On Our Planet. What’s more, Attenborough’s claims of the ongoing overpopulation crisis are his most talked-about messages online.
What’s important to note, is that racist and inhuman beliefs don’t just reside in the most overt white supremacist, colonial or neo-nazi talking points. They also reside in some of our most basic assumptions and everyday patterns of thought. The kinds of ‘common sense’ that we seem to automatically learn — often without realising — and that underpin our everyday lives and social structures.
When it comes to topics like overpopulation today, the racism is often subtle and implicit. It is embedded in the faulty assumptions and biases that underline the way we in the privileged West — and especially colonial society — understand the world and our place in it.
This is not just about individual feelings and ideas. For centuries, fears of overpopulation, in hand with the ideologies of eugenics, have been invoked to justify classist and racist state violence. In the United States and Canada, this has meant the coerced sterilisation of thousands of African Americans and Indigenous people, a practice once so popular it literally inspired the Nazis and still continues today.
Around the world, the western global order led by the United States has also paid, pressured and threatened developing countries like India into enacting brutal mass sterilisation programmes for the same purpose of curtailing overpopulation. Of course, these programmes also targeted poor, underserved and desperate people for sterilisation, with the idea that getting rid of poor families would reduce the welfare burden on the Indian government.
As stated before, to believe in this overpopulation narrative we need to assume that the mostly poor, non-white people responsible for it simply don’t know any better than to reproduce too much. At the same time, our biases lead us to believe that this is a leading cause of famine, ecological crisis, climate change and all the rest.
In turn, our biases allow us to downplay and even ignore the roles that our systems have in these global environmental crises. Mass deforestation of Borneo and the Amazon, driven by international agribusiness. The endless manufacture of textiles for western markets. Or the insatiable extraction of fossil fuels that still forms the foundation of the global economy.
The capitalist system needs to outsource its most extractive and environmentally destructive factors of production to the poorest parts of the world in order to increase profits and ensure its ongoing regime of accumulation.
We cannot let anyone, even respected public figures like David Attenborough, get away with propagating racist, scientifically and morally bankrupt solutions to our problems, especially when those solutions just distract from the inhumanity of the broader political-economic system.
If we truly want to fight to save our environment and make a better life for all on the planet, we need to understand the factors of production within capitalism and recognise how they connect to every environmental crisis the world is facing. It’s critically important that we’re not taken in by easy, racist, unscientific narratives like the overpopulation crisis. All they do is distract us from the real, immediate threats to the environment and let the capitalist system and its wealthiest beneficiaries off the hook for all the harm they cause.
But perhaps more importantly, these narratives undercut and destroy our chances for global solidarity. They encourage us to blame the people most victimised by and least responsible for the capitalist environmental crises. Instead, we must be clear-eyed and refuse to see poor, foreign people as problems to be managed, but rather as essential allies in our collective struggle against a system that can only ever put profits before people.
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