Can We Talk About the Population?

Nandita Bajaj of Population Balance challenges assumptions about the controversial role of population in the larger climate conversation.

Dear friends,

Population growth is a third rail in most contemporary climate conversations. And for good reason—eugenics,  sexism and racism in the form of restrictive policies and forced and coerced sterilization have all poisoned the population waters so thoroughly, that most—nearly all—environmentalists opt to distance themselves from the topic entirely.

That’s why I was particularly interested to learn about the work of Nandita Bajaj, executive director of Population Balance and host of the Overpopulation Podcast. As I mentioned in my last newsletter, the size of the earth’s population is integrally linked to ecological overshoot, which happens when the demands made on the planet exceed its regenerative capacity. Earth’s population surpassed 8 billion people in late 2022, a little over a decade after it had hit 7 billion, and we’re on pace to continue growing rapidly. This growth can be chalked up in part to pronatalism—an ideology that promotes the reproduction of human life and frames women’s primary role as bearing children in order to boost a country’s population.

I talked to Bajaj last week about the pronatalism waters in which we are all swimming, the politics of population denial and how we can redefine family in the era of the climate crisis. Here’s an edited excerpt of our conversation:

What drew you to start thinking about and working on population growth as an issue, and how has your work evolved?

I grew up in India, in a very patriarchal country and culture. I had seen very few women who were not married or didn't have children. And when I did see that, the women were outcasts: they were totally marginalized from the family because they couldn't do the one thing that mattered most. I moved to Canada when I was 17, and I thought of myself as a nontraditional person. I was almost 30 when I met my partner, a white Canadian. We started dating and he asked me what I thought about having kids. My response was, "What do you mean—don't we have to have kids?" And he said, "We can do whatever we want." That was a watershed moment, and I started exploring why I had grown up believing that I was meant to be a mother. I had assumed that was part of my destiny and I’d just work around it to do the other things that interested me. So I began exploring pronatalism and trying to understand to what degree this phenomena, this ideology, influences people's decisions around who they marry, how many kids they have, when they have kids and if they have them at all.

When I decided to switch careers, which was about six years ago, it was in the interest of looking at pronatalism, population and human supremacy—and how the three things come together to create this larger psychological and systematic ideology that says we exist to dominate and exploit others. I studied all of this [while pursuing] a graduate degree at Antioch University, where I focused on global issues through a lens called humane education, which compels us to look at the interconnection of human rights, animal protection and environmental sustainability.

I started teaching a graduate course I created on pronatalism, and I also began working as the executive director of Population Balance. The organization has existed for a long time, but when I took over, I [expanded the scope] to make it about planet, people and animals. Because if you just talk about population without looking at power hierarchies and social divisions, then you run the risk of getting mislabeled and the solutions that you come up with are very narrow.

How do you respond to those who say that most climate change is driven by the wealthiest 5–10% of the population, and that the size of our population isn’t a big factor because many people in the most populous places have a small per capita impact?

If we look at the problem of ecological overshoot, everything falls within that umbrella: biodiversity destruction, water scarcity, food scarcity, climate change, resource conflict, ocean acidification, etc. And population and consumption are the strongest drivers; they simply cannot be separated because people are the ones consuming. The global minority has caused a disproportionate amount of the existing greenhouse gas emissions and the climate change damage so far. But that’s all changing fast. By 2030, we're projected to add another billion people to the middle class— people who live like Americans and Canadians, who have cars, take flights, consume meat, and engage in activities that are creating the climate crisis.

And 90 percent of those new middle class consumers—so approximately 900 million—will be from India and China (the population of the United States is 350 million for comparison). People all around the world, for the most part, aspire to live like middle class consumers. And it's not that we're born hardwired to live that way. Part of it is marketing and advertising and the proliferation of an extractivist mindset. There has been a global brainwashing; we’re convinced that we need to live like that in order to feel fulfilled.

Many of the world’s top scientists, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has identified both population and consumption as two of the largest drivers of climate change. So, it's not just some ideological group of people who are stuck in the past. I think the ideology today is among people who are denying that population plays a role [in ecological overshoot], and it’s important to consider who benefits from spreading population denial.

Can you say more about that?

Humans have been around for 250,000 to 300,000 years. And for 99 percent of that time, the entire global population remained below 1 million people.

We just interviewed BBC journalist, Angela Saini, who wrote this book The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality. Ten thousand years ago, we started engaging in the domestication of animals, which is what is often called the agricultural revolution. But her research shows that it was thousands of years later, with the rise of states and empires, where this idea of counting people—and therefore encouraging that number to grow—took root. I was stunned to know that before that, for the most part, communities were living in gender-blind ways. Men and women were doing similar things, and even their body sizes were quite similar, her research shows. The shift came when we started creating states, and we wanted to have the most powerful state, and that power came from strength in numbers and numbers come through reproduction. So both pronatalism and population control—I like to flip that term on its head and use it to mean the opposite of how it is often used—have been around for 5,000 years.

The legitimization of nuclear families and women staying at home having lots of children has been going on for a very, very long time. But it skyrocketed and became a much larger issue when we discovered fossil fuels. During the Industrial Revolution, 200 years ago, we took all of the worst ideologies that we were practicing for a few thousand years and we poured fossil fuel all over them. Suddenly humans could create big machines to cut down forests, to extract oil, to travel, to open trade, to build large ships and trains and basically start exploiting and appropriating resources from other countries after they colonized them.

Then, with the dawn of modern technology, we had better sanitation and medicine that allowed for infant mortality rates to go down. Women were still living, for the most part, under extremely patriarchal societies and they were still having a lot of children, but now more of them started to survive. As a result, the fertility rate suddenly went up. By 1800, we were at 1 billion people. And then in just 200 years, we grew to 8 billion. We've never seen anything like this in our history. And that growth has wreaked havoc on the planet.

Images courtesy of Nandita Bajaj.

With the rise of the New Left movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the feminist movement and the environmentalist movement in the 1960s and 70s, there was a lot more awareness brought to the fact that we were harming the planet. And we were also harming one another—all the power hierarchies started to get questioned. And so a lot of great things came out of that time as nations were confronting the colonial power they had been under and really challenging the motivations of European colonizers. And many in power started to talk about population growth. The United Nations was formed after the Second World War, and population growth was one of the first big points of focus for the UN.

By the 1980s, population growth was very much front and center. In environmental discussions, feminists understood that the reason population was an issue was because women did not have autonomy to decide if or when to have children or how many to have. And then there were a few things that happened: one was the rise of the New Right, which was ushered in with the Reagan administration. Fundamentalist Christians started to have a louder voice and contraception and abortion were demonized. Reagan also believed in market fundamentalism, and he brought about a lot of the silencing of the population discourse.

In recent decades, people on the liberal left have drawn a connection between population discourse and racism, ecofascism, Malthusianism, etc. But if you look at who's perpetuating and selling that connection, it's a lot of well-funded libertarian market fundamentalists and think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute and the Foundation for Economic Education.

We recently interviewed Naomi Oreskes [Harvard Professor and the author of “The Big Myth,” “Merchants of Doubt”and other books] about her essay, “Eight Billion People in the World Is a Crisis, Not an Achievement.” She has exposed a lot of climate denialism and population denialism.

Who does population denialism benefit? People who rely on there being a lot of people to offer cheap labor to create constant economic growth. And they don't want any government interference, even if that means governments are confronting patriarchal norms to liberate women and men from harmful norms.

Let’s talk about the one-child policy that China implemented from 1980 to 2016. I think there’s this idea that if policy addresses population growth, it will enter that territory.

Yes, I'm glad you brought that up, because that’s the other thing that popularized population denialism: there were a few policies that were executed absolutely horribly. In India in the 1970s there was a mass-sterilization campaign that targeted mainly poor men and women. And in China, women were grabbed, thrown in vans and forced to have abortions, and many people had to abandon their second children, because they were so afraid of the law. So those were the kinds of large-scale campaigns done in response to fears about population growth.

But the majority of population policies have been executed from an ethics-based perspective. They are making sure that women and girls go to school, have access to contraceptives and understand their choices. In Thailand, Iran, Costa Rica, and Indonesia, among several other countries with highly successful family planning programs, there were a lot of promotional campaigns aimed at empowering people to make choices that were better for them. There are also effective family planning policies executed by governments, with the help of citizen engagement. They have worked so well that fertility rates declined from five or six children per woman on average, to less than two in only a matter of a decade or two. And in none of those cases was coercion or bribery used. 

But, of course, it’s the forced and coerced sterilization and the one-child policy that people remember. If you are living within a patriarchal society, then all the solutions you come up with will be patriarchal, right? But in the last 50 years, in every place where women have had opportunity to engage in any kind of autonomy, you see that fertility rates decline. Now some governments are panicking about the fact that women are too empowered and are not producing enough babies for their economies. But once you have autonomy, it's very, very difficult to reverse it, unless it's done by authoritarian means.

Can you speak to the contemporary conversation among women who are factoring the climate crisis into their decision about whether to have children? It's a charged conversation and a very personal one, and I wonder if you have thoughts about the way you see it playing out in contemporary culture?

A lot of people, even within liberal societies, do not realize just how much socialization plays a part in our decision making. If we're socialized to act certain ways, to follow certain career paths, to live in certain neighborhoods, we're going to do whatever we need to do to belong. And pronatalism has become so deeply internalized within our contemporary culture. It's like the most successful project of patriarchy that we have completely identified who we are with our ability to have children.

To me, having children or not is a neutral decision. I'm so glad that the conversation has entered our narrative around climate change. And I completely disagree with antinatalism, where people are shamed or scorned for having children. To me that's as harmful an ideology as pronatalism is— it removes our autonomy! If you are going to make such a big life decision, it should be made with deliberate thought, love and compassion both for yourself and for the child that you're bringing into this world. Will they have access to all of the material and emotional support that they need? And what kind of an environment might they inherit? We know from several recent projections that children are going to experience two to seven times more climate extremes than we or any previous generations have. So I think that needs to be kept in mind, both for the sake of the child who's not here and the sake of the children who are—and many of them need homes and would so love to be cared for in a family-type situation. We're really trying to change the conversation around what family means to us. Family is about kinship. It's about relationships, and it doesn't have to be biologically formed, it doesn't even have to be within our own species. Like many people, my partner and I have a companion animal; she's our family. So I would ask people: is biology really the only way we find connection and love?

Climate news you may have missed

Will Biden’s “pause” actually slow natural gas exports?

When President Biden announced that it would pause new approvals of Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) export terminals — like the Calcasieu Pass 2, the big one being built in the Gulf coast of Louisiana — some climate advocates were quick to declare it a victory. And I can see why. The idea that world leaders are listening to climate advocates at all is, well, a bit of a rush. And the fact that the administration plans to re-evaluate the science and economics behind its decision to pause what has been a mad rush to start exporting LNG at a massive scale is noteworthy.  What’s more, the way the administration is talking about it seems designed to appeal to the same voters who were appalled by Biden’s decision to go ahead with the Willow oil drilling project last year. “This pause on new LNG approvals sees the climate crisis for what it is: the existential threat of our time,” reads the White House press release.

But that may just be the sound of a savvy media team telling its audience what they think we want to hear.  As oil and gas trade publications report, the administration is also working hard to assuage the industry’s concerns. And, as Kate Aranoff points out in The New Republic, a great deal of the decision making behind the LNG rush has essentially already happened. “The U.S. will remain the world’s largest gas exporter and is due for a significant expansion over the coming years,” she writes. “Earlier this week, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, or BNEF, found that the U.S. is on course to more than double its gas liquefaction capacity over the next five years. Four major projects — which on their own are slated to expand export capacity by more than 80 percent if completed by 2027 — have already been approved and reached final investment decision.” 

Smoke and heat = a dangerous combination

Most of the ways that the climate crisis is impacting public health have been studied in a vacuum — which is absurd because that’s obviously not how we’re experiencing them. A study released last week bucked the trend, however, by looking at the combined effect of wildfire smoke and extreme heat in California. Both are dangerous, but they’re far more harmful when experienced together, it turns out.

Tracey Woodruff, who directs the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at UC San Francisco, described the synergistic effects of heat and smoke for Inside Climate News: “You’re responding to high heat, you’re sweating more, you’re probably breathing harder because you’re trying to cool down, and then your blood vessels dilate … All those things increase susceptibility to particulate matter exposure, because as the heart beats faster it distributes whatever toxic chemicals are present in the bloodstream.”

People in under-resourced communities — which tend to have fewer trees and more asphalt — are especially likely to experience extreme heat and smoke at the same time. And the state’s farmworkers are often on the frontlines of these overlapping crises.

Snow days no more

Fewer inches of snow are falling in the US, and the snow that does fall has begun to melt much faster. It makes sense then, that several generations of us are lamenting the loss of the particular joy associated with snow days. As Caitlin Gibson wrote for The Washington Post, “there is an added layer of melancholy for parents who came of age in a time and place where winter meant snow, who realize that their formative childhood experiences might not be shared by the next generation. Snow days aren’t what they once were: Many parents are now expected to work remotely, and more school districts across the country have introduced virtual learning as an alternative to a day off. The climate is changing, and so is our culture.”

While many of today’s kids won’t necessarily know what they’re missing, or not really, snow is just one of many experiences today’s parents probably won’t get to share with their kids. I think a lot about it when I’m at home in Hawaii and take my kid snorkeling amongst the bleached coral. The grief that comes up is entirely my own experience because the baseline shifted long before they entered the picture.

On a related note, I found this sneak peek at a guide for educators interested in addressing kids’ emotions about the climate crisis from Gen Dread helpful. “Let’s recognize common emotions associated with the climate crisis—fear, dread, anger, sadness, despair— and let’s treat them as an understandable human response to our home being threatened, rather than a problem, a sign of mental illness, or a reaction to tamp down and tame,” it advised. I think that’s advice that many adults might want to heed themselves.

On the brighter side

1.  Greenpeace and a Norwegian NGO sued the Norwegian government for issuing what they charged were illegal permits to three large oil drilling projects. The court agreed and ruled the licenses invalid due to the lack of consideration for so-called downstream emissions. Some legal experts say the case could set an important global precedent.

2.  In Vermont, lawmakers have proposed a bill — The Climate Superfund Act — that would hold big oil companies financially accountable for the climate-fueled storms that have been hitting the state. Similar bills have also been proposed in Maryland, New York and Massachusetts.

3.  A massive, 4,600-acre timber project near Eugene, Oregon has been paused, as the Bureau of Land Management has withdrawn the permit. Environmental groups contend that the project, which could still move forward at some future time — would result in the loss of key wildlife habitat as well as a number of carbon-storing mature and old growth trees.

4.  A group of European protesters who had been arrested in October for blocking the entrance to a London hotel during a large oil and gas industry conference were acquitted this week. Greta Thunberg, now 21, was among the group and received most of the media attention. A spokesperson for the city’s police department commented on the way London has seen an inordinate percentage of the public outcry on climate, i.e. “repeated serious disruption at the hands of campaigners who block roads and prevent people going about their normal business.” And yet his statement prompts me to ask: How much longer will that “normal business” even be possible as the climate continues to change?

The Visual

Do wind turbines kill birds? Yes, but much fewer than cats and buildings do. Read more in Hannah Ritchie’s excellent newsletter Sustainability by the Numbers.

Take good care,
Twilight