Is overpopulation a climate risk, or dangerous rhetoric?

Following US Climate Envoy John Kerry's latest remarks on overpopulation, Bertie spoke to Diana Ojeda, Associate Professor in sustainability, environment and development at the Universidad de los Andes' Interdisciplinary Center for Development Studies, about why many scholars and activists are wary of populationist narratives in climate planning.

Audio editing by Vasko Kostovski.

Further reading: 

• 'A feminist exploration of ‘populationism’: engaging contemporary forms of population control'
• 'Confronting populationism: Feminist challenges to population control in an era of climate change'
• 'Malthus’s specter and the anthropocene'
• Anne Hendrixson and Diana Ojeda's article on population for Uneven Earth 
• Betsy Hartmann’s webpage 
• PopDev’s short documents series
• 'For reproductive justice in an era of Gates and Modi – the violence of India’s population policies' by Kalpana Wilson 
• Libby Lunstrum’s work
• 'Angry Young Men, Veiled Young Women: Constructing a New Population Threat' by Anne Hendrixson 
• Jade Sasser’s work

Find all our latest investigations, features and interviews at www.landclimate.org

Transcript

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Bertie: 0:06

Hello and welcome to the Land and Climate Podcast. My name is Bertie Harrison-Broninski and today I'm talking to Diana Ojeda, Associate Professor in Sustainability, Environment and Development at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Development Studies (CIDER) at the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia. We're going be talking about the now institutionalised idea that overpopulation is a key driver of climate change and why it is that many feminists and academics and thinkers in the global south and more broadly in the humanities often object to this idea.

Diana: 0:40

These forced sterilisations, forced abortions, happen still today. That is not an ugly history that was unveiled in the 70s, or throughout history. That is very much present.

Bertie: 0:54

Today, at least in richer countries in the global north, it's now quite commonly accepted that there is a strong link between global warming and the number of people on the planet. We hear this from powerful voices ranging from Bill Gates to David Attenborough to the future King of England. Most recently, the USA's climate envoy John Kerry did an interview just this week where he talked about there being a sustainable limit to global population levels. So I began by asking Diana to address this claim head on and talk about why her research and study has given her some cause for concern about this theory.

Diana: 1:32

This argument or this critique about the idea of population growth being the major driver of climate change is not to say that we can destroy the planet. Sometimes it is heard as such. And I do believe that we need to sustain life, to be able to sustain life with dignity for all in our planet. And that of course implies that we need to put a cap on how we exploit resources, how we consume, how we destroy, how we discard many things. So it's not an argument against the idea that we need to stop what we're doing. What I would like to say is that I think that population control is a dangerous discourse. That this idea that we're just growing and growing as a whole humanity needs to be looked at in detail to see what we're saying. Because often when we say, 'oh, we're just too many, people are just growing endlessly and exponentially and this is what is destroying the planet'. There are several lies that are implied there. When we say we are too many, we don't think that Canadians, that white Canadians are too many or that Europeans are too many. We are thinking about crazy geographies of India and Africa and people in Latin America just having kids and kids. So I believe that there's a profound colonial and racist idea behind the idea of population growth. We need to consider that also that there is a lot of misogyny in that argument because it is thought that women largely reproduce themselves, like on their own. And that is something that is appalling because the idea of population growth is really about controlling bodies that are able to reproduce lives and that we think of as women and non binary and trans men, people who, again, are marginalised, who have been controlled forever. And those bodies that need to be controlled are controlled at a very high cost. And that has to do with the many scandals about reproduction rights that, for example, Betsy Hartmann has worked on. And here we can think about India and Nepal and Peru and many countries where forced abortions are still performed. And a lot of population control also goes through heavy handed interventions that require a lot of hormones that are also very tolling on these bodies in particular. We're not promoting vasectomies and the men-pill control as much as saying, 'what are we going to do with all these women and dissidents reproducing at crazy pace?'. And I think there's another part of it that is also about xenophobia. The discourse of climate refugees is about the fear of them coming from the Global South to the Global North to invade us, take our land, take our food, take our water which justifies the militarisation that we see as the first response to climate change disasters, to climate change measures. What we have been looking at is the mobilisation of fear and with the mobilisation of fear comes a lot of militarisation and a lot of discrimination, exclusion, and I think that is all very much embedded in that idea of population growth. So I wanted to start with all those problematic bits that that has first just to say that it is also not very accurate. Even if it was true, it would be problematic, but it is not accurate. What we're seeing is that emissions are not related directly to the number of people in abstract but it's about rich people. It's the 1% of the world who are causing all these emissions. A kid in Los Angeles, California is not the same as a kid in Nairobi. A good example is China, because China had this one child policy for so long that it showed how repressive it could be on certain bodies, again, bodies who can get pregnant. And the emissions are not correlated to that. And we did see the really bad consequences the lost generation of girls and all these different things that are studied.

Bertie: 5:53

But the Chinese government has actually recently touted that their one child policy has reduced their emissions, relying on this kind of hypothetical that they would have had much larger emissions without it. That's despite the truth of what you're saying. I mean this statistic I see from organisations like Oxfam is that the richest 1% of the world's population emits, I think more than twice as much as the bottom 50% of the world's population.

Diana: 6:18

It's true. And then the counterfactual analysis, that 'where will we be if it would have been different?' is really problematic. Also the idea that population is just growing endlessly; in Colombia for each woman (and we are counting just women in our national statistical data) we have 1.7 children. So that is even below the zero population growth. So I think it is more like a scare, like a narrative of apocalypse that is very useful because it allows for, again, mobilisation of fear, militarisation, a lot of racism, of white supremacist ideas that are already in place for this idea that they're coming to take over, I don't know, a Mad Max kind of universe that t. hey usually bring to the fore. Another thing that is really interesting is that many of these interventions in the name of population control are not put just in terms of population control, they're always legitimised on a larger 'save the planet, save humanity' kind of imperative that you cannot question. That's why it's so powerful. A lot of it is done in the name of empowering women. And I think that the double discourse is very problematic because what we are seeing is again really dangerous ways of controlling women's bodies. So as reproductive rights are being put in danger in many places, it is used at the same time as a way for saying 'oh no, we are going to save the planet through empowering women, through programs that are about controlling their bodies'.

Bertie: 7:53

Just to go back to what you said a minute ago about fears around migration crises, I think that's actually quite an interesting example of how this kind of sense of apocalyptic threat around population shifts over time with different zeitgeists. Right. Because we're beginning to prioritize adaptation and the discourse around population is already moving with it, right?

Diana: 8:15

Absolutely. Also reducing the discussion of climate change to mitigation and adaptation and moving away from mitigation to an adaptation. I think is very problematic. Adaptation is blaming the victim in a way and putting on their shoulders their responsibility for not just surviving this climate catastrophe that was not definitely produced by them, but also is their responsibility to tell us how to solve it. And I agree that then there is this very easy click with the idea of climate refugees, of these waves of immigrants coming. And each country has its own fears. Of course, in the US the big issue is with people coming from Mexico and Central America and other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean pushing the border down to Mexico. So now what we are facing in Latin America is that it is really difficult to travel to Mexico because a lot of the containment, if you wish, that used to happen at the US, it's already happening a little bit more in Mexico. But if you see, the different narratives for different countries are clear of how we have colonial maps of this fear of population growth and population control. And then it also depoliticises how are these immigrants coming to the different countries. For example, the Sudan crisis that we are going through precisely at this moment. Sudan is thought as a case of climate migration. When we see what is happening, i. It's this profound political crisis very much infused by these geopolitical powers and this colonial history as well. But it is easier to say, 'oh no, they're just moving away because of climate, because they destroyed their environment and they're taking ours'. And we could go through different examples but I think that is part of the problem with these narratives. That is part of also a larger problem that is this flattened out geography of power. Like when we say 'we're all together in this, our planet is in crisis, our home is burning', then we do not speak about power. And that idea of planetary conscience that is so easily mobilised these days forgets that we're not in the same boat, that we're not suffering the same, that we're not having to struggle in the same way. I like the idea that also Betsy Hartmann has developed in her work and is that we cannot speak about an abstract nature and an abstract people. It's not an abstract humanity. And we need to think about the processes that brought us here in terms of how we're producing scarcity. So it's not that I'm saying that land is endless, that water is endless, but the way in which we distribute land and water make for some people to be able to waste their food and for other people not to get a plate of food a day. So we need to talk about power when we talk about these things and that is what is often missing from the conversation, I think.

Bertie: 11:14

Yeah, I think conversations about scarcity and how you define that are really interesting. The statistic I always remember and quote to people is that we already produce enough food to feed 10 billion people, which is where global population is likely to peak at most, but nearly a third of that is wasted. But I wonder now if we should rewind a little bit and think about the kind of history of these ideas. Your article suggests there's a cycle, really, where this kind of thinking generates a lot of traction, gets institutional support and then is debunked, and then reframed and the whole thing is repeated. Could you give us a bit of a beginner's guide to, I mean, the two names in Anglophone writing that you see a lot are the 18th century economist Thomas Malthus and then the contemporary biologist Paul Ehrlich. What would you say we mean by Malthusianism and neo-Malthusianism in the 20th century and how did that develop?

Diana: 12:08

Absolutely. And if something is wrong about this discourse, it's also that is very ahistorical that it erases all these power relations and then it erases the processes of how we got here. And part of it has been how we have understood Malthus ideas that were not necessarily about the idea that we're just too many. But the main concern that Malthus has was about if we could not produce food at the same rate as the population growth. That was a very localised argument as well. But these ideas travelled really fast and I think got a lot of traction in the 1970s, so many years after Neo-Malthusianism was invoked as part of this idea of the population bomb. Paul Ehrlich's ideas were really powerful in the '70s I think also, with a Cold War setting and this planetary view that came very much from the race to get to space and those images of the planet and the blue planet. And with that planetary consciousness of the '70s, Neo-Malthusianism started to gain a lot of attention. And I say the Cold War, because that is key. A very important part of this was the idea that peasants around the world were the internal enemy, that they were communists. And even if they weren't, they were potential communists. So a lot of the Green Revolution tactics and a lot of the interventions in places like Latin America that I keep thinking from, come from that relationship, from that imperial hegemon that the US becomes in that context. And I think it's very much connected because the idea was first we need to produce food no matter at what cost. So the Green Revolution had all these packages of agrotoxics and modified seeds and the technification of the rural areas in the global south. At the same time this complicated history of military intervention and militarisation and wars in different places that we know well about. But the Green Revolution is very much entangled with these because it was the idea that we need to produce food. Behind was this fear of communism just taking over the world. And then this idea of food security brought us to the point that now monocrops and plantations all over the world and not all over the world, it's not a planet that we share equally. It's not a flat geography of a planet. But monocrops and plantations are growing in the Global South, while the area that we have in the Global North for forests and other sorts of land uses is growing. So we are really having this idea of food security being pushed through in very problematic ways, from social arrangements, from military interventions, from corporate takeovers, to the environmental consequences of this way of producing food. The second part of Neo-Malthusianism is 'what do we do with all these people reproducing themselves?'. And again, it's not 'all these people'. It's impoverished, marginalised, racialised people. And then again, it's about women and the problem that women just keep reproducing themselves. So 'we need to teach them, we need to show them' in very problematic ways. And I think climate change fits perfectly with all these, while we keep doing the things that brought us to the problem, brought us to this crazy moment of crisis. We keep pushing monocrops, we keep believing that a technological fix will save us and that what we need is military responses to environmental issues.

Bertie: 15:53

Do you think that the '70s revival of Malthusianism or Neo-Malthusianism was a kind of sudden change. of course or... I mean, y. You've already talked about how population control inevitably targets politically disenfranchised or oppressed communities. Do you think it grew out of the eugenics movement of the early 20th century or... what is the relationship with eugenics and Malthusianism?

Diana: 16:17

I think it has a long history that connects them, a history of white supremacy. So definitely there's a lot of racist strategies and initiatives that already believe that population needed to be controlled. And this sounds very Mussolini, very much the different Nazi ideas and these different forms of eugenics that we see in different places. They are connected to discourses that are profoundly colonial as well, that have imperial narratives embedded as well. And I do think that the '70s marks an important moment for this because of the backlash that in different places of the world, different social and liberation movements were facing. So the '70s comes as a way of containing all of the different critiques and organisations and political movements coming in the '70s. So I do believe that this is very clear, for example, in the history of geographical thought. In geography, we have these amazing critical voices coming in the '60s, '70s, and at the same time, the same - like a backlash of going back to right wing military imperial geography in the discipline.

Bertie: 17:30

I remember reading that I think Indigenous Americans and Mexican Americans were sterilised in very large programmes in the '70s. Do you see that as part of a backlash to the civil rights movements of the '60s? Is that kind of part of what you're saying?

Diana: 17:45

I think so, and I think that it is a key moment of conjuncture in different places of the world differently. But of course, I think it has to do again with the specific forms that the Green Revolution took. For example, a lot of the use of pesticides, all these connected to, again, just pushing forward a specific kind of agriculture that had in mind containing the communist force. It is connected with the Vietnam War and at the same time the planetary consciousness and all these worries about the environment that start growing, that lead to the '92 Rio Declaration and the new language of sustainable development. The thing is that now we have the language of climate change, but in a sense it does feel like it is old, recycled. There are recycled forms of thinking about these issues I believe. The '70s as a turning point is important in terms of these Neo-Malthusian ideas. These forced sterilisations, forced abortions happen still today. That is not an ugly history that was unveiled in the '70s, or throughout history, but that is very much present today. Issues of reproductive rights, of sexual rights, are serious issues that need to be taken into consideration now. And we can think of Black communities in the US or we can think about Indigenous communities in Peru, but it's still going on as a very powerful mechanism of social control.

Bertie: 19:22

In modern cases of this happening, do you see an existing connection with climate planning and some of the discourses around ecological limits to human populations? Or has the step from climate discourse to real world impacts not quite happened yet?

Diana: 19:38

The connection maybe is not that straightforward, but a lot of development interventions in countries like my own, like in Colombia, even when they're done by these foundations and they're done with the idea that they're empowering women and saving the planet at the same time, they are problematically rooted into the impossibility of many people about deciding over their own bodies. They are not able to decide about their own bodies, and they become the targets of these different interventions. So it may not be as straightforward as 'we're saving the planet, so we're sterilising you'. But there have been many scandals about how some humanitarian aid is conditioned to, for example, hysterectomies and unreversible ways of family planning. Jade Sasser, for example, has worked on this and she has some very interesting studies about different foundations and multilateral organisations and how they call for teaching women about (they usually target women). family planning, empowering them, and that becoming like a shortcut to saving the planet. But when you look a little bit closer, there is the problematic assumptions that are, in a way recycled and mobilised in powerful ways.

Bertie: 21:01

Just to pick up on something you mentioned, you talk in some of your articles about the next kind of reframing of this discourse after the '70s, which was in the early '90s, around sustainable development or family planning, as opposed to being more explicit about population control. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?

Diana: 21:20

The idea of sustainable development is greening of the development project, which has also a very complicated and violent history for many different countries. Dressed as green, it brought like a new air to the development project, saying 'what we're really doing is good for the planet, and it can be done in a way that is sustainable'. There are a lot of ideas that are put forward, including the zero population growth, this simple formula of 'you can only have two kids and that's it. We keep it low and we keep it safe in a way for the different resources of the planet' while leaving untouched big questions about redistribution, about capitalist growth, about poisoning specific people in specific places. This disperse is very malleable. It can be mobilised in very powerful ways. So you find it in different things, like in basic conservation narratives that have this idea of the carrying capacity. So you cannot go to a natural national park if you already exceeded the carrying capacity. But the carrying capacity is also problematic because a tourist coming to a national park in Colombia or in Costa Rica coming from the US is not the same as the people who are neighbours of that park and come to do their cookouts and they have a tradition of coming to the park, and the ones who are being excluded are locals. The ones being excluded are not usually tourists. And of course, this has also been studied. Libby Lunstrum has a very interesting work on militarisation and conservation and how these narratives apply to parks in Africa.

Bertie: 23:03

I'm interested to ask you how you navigate these conversations in terms of public communication as a feminist scholar, because they are quite nuanced. For example, in one of your papers, you mentioned or kind of criticised Planned Parenthood for pushing ideas around slowing population growth. And it did make me think about how Republican politicians in America make arguments about Planned Parenthood that are obviously different to yours, but they weaponise the organization's, eugenicist roots to push antiabortionist beliefs and things like that too. How do you ensure that you're not helping people whose views are in reality the opposite of yours?

Diana: 23:45

That is a very important point. The way in which these discourses are mobilised. They, in a way, copped many critical voices. Well, it hasn't happened to me in a very catastrophic, clear way, but a lot of critical people do tell me also 'you don't believe that there are limits. You believe that we need to destroy the planet and we can destroy the planet and we should destroy the planet'. And that is not the argument. It's also not an argument against family planning, against contraception. Actually, I've been part of the abortion movement in Colombia for many years, and part of it is that I see the connections. Definitely, if we are talking about reproductive rights, if we are talking about sexual and reproductive justice, this is what it is about as well. That article is a little bit old already in that sense because of course, I think we couldn't have foreseen the things that are happening now in the US. It's a tragedy. It is something that I didn't expect, so I think I wasn't able to foresee what was going on. But yes, I think that we need to be careful because I think it's very problematic. But I don't think it is an argument against empowering women. It is an argument that is definitely for reproductive justice, for sexual and reproductive rights, and how that argument cannot be separated from climate justice.

Bertie: 25:07

IPCC reports tend to push this kind of populationist narrative. I don't like to generalise about what the IPCC says because they don't have a single narrative about anything and they're a literature review. But the major reports do provide a lot of lines that people can use to push this kind of idea. And I was interested to ask you about both that specifically and more broadly, how it's become so institutionalised. I mean, do you think it's a result of the kind of modelling that's being done, or just the actors and stakeholders involved in producing these reports, or maybe a tendency to prioritise the sciences over the humanities?

Diana: 25:45

Yes, I think it is a bit of everything that you mentioned. So definitely the discourses, the people who are in power within the institution, the stakeholders, because even when they call for 'oh, let's wait and see what small island states have to say, let's wait and see what Indigenous peoples have to say, let's invite women', there is still a very limited way of understanding what is going on. And that is sharply in contrast with what is happening in places like Latin America and the Caribbean, where there is a very strong political movement from the left, from feminist traditions, who are also about the defence of territory, the environment and life. That's why you see all these different important figures coming from Latin America, like Marielle Franco, Berta Cácares, Alberta Cariño, Francia Márquez. They share an argument of putting life at the centre of sustaining life. Very critical, super critical, of how patriarchy and capitalism have aligned in different ways to create this mess, and how the way out of this mess is already here, has already been invented, is already in place. It's already in place.

Bertie: 26:59

I always say it's the hardest question to last on these podcasts, and that's how do we actually implement some of this change? I mean, what are the actionable things that we can do? So if I were to imagine a more utopian future 30 years away, rather than a climate apocalypse or an authoritarian world with population control, how would we have got to that future?

Diana: 27:24

Yes, I think that we first need to defend utopias. I think that we have a lot of catastrophic narratives, because, of course, the reality is a catastrophe, I'm not denying it. But if we keep fuelling these post-apocalyptic narratives, what we are fuelling at the end is more racism, more misogyny, more militarisation, and that's what we need to stop in different ways. So first the defence of utopia. And then understanding that utopia is already happening here, that we do not need to wait for something different or new or to discover the next thing, because a lot of feminised subjects, so mainly women, dissidents, children, are sustaining life when it seems impossible to sustain it. So in the midst of the long neoliberal night, in the midst of this assault to social reproduction, in the midst of this horrible environmental catastrophe, we have incredible ways in which life is sustained, in which the communitarian spaces, links, ways of being, are being promoted and pushed forward when everything is against them.

Bertie: 28:45

My thanks to Diana for coming on the show. If you found some of what we talked about today interesting, then Diana has provided a number of links to further reading, which I will attach along with some of Diana's own papers to the podcast blurb below. Do also remember that you can find more podcasts and articles at www.landclimate.org. We really appreciate it if you subscribe to or follow this podcast on whatever podcast platform you use, and we'll be back again in two weeks with another interview. Until then, thanks for listening.