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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
June 2021 57
By George Monbiot
Population growth is overwhelmingly concentrated
among the world’s poorest people, who have
scarcely any A or T by which to multiply their P
Birthrates of the poor are used by the rich to absolve their blame
Eco-footprint
=
Population
X
Affluence
X
Technology
The formula for calculating people’s environmen-
tal footprint is simple, but widely misunderstood:
Impact = Population x Auence x Technology (I =
PAT). The global rate of consumption growth, before
the pandemic, was 3% a year. Population growth is
1%. Some people assume this means that the rise in
population bears one third of the responsibility for
increased consumption. But population growth is
overwhelmingly concentrated among the world’s
poorest people, who have scarcely any A or T to mul-
tiply their P. By George Monbiot, published in the
Guardian 26th August 2020
Yet it is widely used as a blanket explanation of
environmental breakdown. Panic about population
growth enables the people most responsible for the
impacts of rising consumption (the auent) to blame
those who are least responsible.
At this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, the
primatologist Dame Jane Goodall, who is a patron of
the charity Population Matters, told the assembled
pollutocrats, some of whom have ecological foot-
prints thousands of times greater than the global
average, “All these things we talk about wouldn’t be
a problem if there was the size of population that
there was 500 years ago”. I doubt that any of those
who nodded and clapped were thinking, “yes, I
urgently need to disappear”.
In 2019, she appeared in an advertisement for Brit-
ish Airways, whose customers produce more
greenhouse gas emissions on one flight than many
of the world’s people generate in a year. If we had
L
AST YEAR a major study showed that the
global population is likely to peak then
crash much sooner than most scientists had
assumed. I naïvely imagined that people in
rich nations would at last stop blaming all
the world’s environmental problems on population
growth. I was wrong. If anything, it appears to have
got worse.
The BirthStrike movement – founded by women
who, by announcing their decision not to have chil-
dren, seek to focus our minds on the horror of
environmental collapse – has recently dissolved, as
its cause has been hijacked so virulently and persis-
tently by population obsessives. The founders
explain that they had “underestimated the power of
‘overpopulation’ as a growing form of climate break-
down denial”.
It is true that, in some parts of the world, popula
-
tion growth is a major driver of particular kinds of
ecological damage, such as the expansion of small-
scale agriculture into rainforests, the bushmeat
trade and local pressure on water and land for hous-
ing. But its global impact is much smaller than many
people claim.
OPINION
58 June 2021
the global population of 500 years ago (around 500
million), and if it were composed of average UK plane
passengers, our environmental impact would prob-
ably be greater than that of the 7.8 billion alive today.
She proposed no mechanism by which her dream
might come true. This could be the attraction. The
very impotence of her call is reassuring to those who
don’t want change. If the answer to environmental
crisis is to wish other people away, we might as well
give up and carry on consuming.
The excessive emphasis on population growth has
a grim history. Since the clergymen Joseph Townsend
and Thomas Malthus wrote their tracts in the 18th
Century, poverty and hunger have been blamed not
on starvation wages, war, misrule and wealth extrac-
tion by the rich, but on the reproduction rates of the
poor. Winston Churchill blamed the Bengal Famine
of 1943, that he helped to cause through the mass
export of India’s rice, on the Indians “breeding like
rabbits”. In 2013 Sir David Attenborough, also a
patron of Population Matters,wrongly blamed fam-
ines in Ethiopia on “too many people for too little
land”, and suggested that sending food aid was
counter-productive.
Another of the charity’s patrons, Paul Ehrlich,
whose incorrect predictions about mass famine
helped to provoke the current population panic, once
argued that the US should “coerce” India into “steri-
lising all Indian males with three or more children”,
by making food aid conditional on this policy. This
proposal was similar to the brutal programme that
Indira Gandhi later introduced, with financial support
from the UN and the World Bank.
Foreign aid from the UK was funding crude and
dangerous sterilisation in India as recently as 2011,
on the grounds that this policy was helping to “fight
climate change”. Some of the victims of this pro-
gramme allege that they were forced to participate.
At the same time, the UK government was pouring
billions of pounds of aid into developing coal, gas
and oil plants, in India and other nations. It blamed
the poor for the crisis it was helping to cause.
Malthusiasm slides easily into racism. The great
majority of the world’s population growth is happen-
ing in the poorest countries, where most people are
black or brown. The colonial powers justified their
atrocities by fomenting a moral panic about “bar-
baric”, “degenerate” people “outbreeding” the
“superior races”. These claims have been revived
today by the far right, promoting conspiracy theories
about “white replacement” and “white genocide”.
When auent white people wrongly transfer blame
for their environmental impacts to the birthrate of
much poorer brown and black people, their finger-
pointing reinforces these narratives. It is inherently
racist.
The far right now uses the population argument to
contest immigration into the US and the UK. This too
has a grisly heritage: the pioneering conservationist
Madison Grant promoted, alongside his environmen-
tal work, the idea that the “Nordic master race” was
being “overtaken” in the US by “worthless race
types.” As president of the Immigration Restriction
League, he helped to engineer the vicious 1924
Immigration Act.
But, as there are some genuine ecological impacts
of population growth, how do we distinguish propor-
tionate concerns about these harms from deflection
and racism? Well, we know that the strongest deter
-
minant of falling birth rates is female emancipation
and education. The major obstacle to female empow
-
erment is extreme poverty, whose eect is felt
disproportionately by women.
So a good way of deciding whether someone’s
population concerns are genuine is to look at their
record of campaigning against structural poverty.
Have they contested the impossible debts poor
nations are required to pay? Have they argued
against corporate tax avoidance, or extractive indus-
tries that drain wealth from poorer countries, leaving
almost nothing behind, or our own financial sector’s
processing of money stolen abroad? Or have they
simply sat and watched as people remain locked in
poverty, then complained about their fertility?
Before long, this reproductive panic will disap-
pear. Nations will soon be fighting over immigrants:
not to exclude them, but to attract them, as the
demographic transition leaves their ageing popula-
tions with a shrinking tax base and a dearth of key
workers. Until then, we should resist attempts by the
rich to demonise the poor.
www.monbiot.com. This article was first published in
the Guardian.
Before long, this reproductive
panic will disappear. Nations
will soon be fighting over
immigrants: not to exclude
them, but to attract them
