“We are at the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth,” noted climate activist and Time the magazine’s personality of the year Greta Thunberg in front of the United Nations in the summer of 2019. “How dare you!”
Some rented Thunberg’s performance as a scathing rebuke to the rich and powerful for not placing the survival of the planet above their own needs. Others saw the exploitation of a young woman with emotional problems for propaganda purposes.
There is no doubt that Thunberg’s style of environmentalism – strident, urgent and critical of global capitalism – has taken a strong hold in contemporary politics.
A 2019 paper of the magazine Biosciences, co-signed by more than 11,000 scientists, asserted that the Earth’s population “must be stabilized and, ideally, gradually reduced”. And some politicians have interrogates the morality of having children.
Fears of overpopulation and ecological disaster are also beginning to manifest themselves on the far right, mixed with anti-immigrant animosity. This logic was expressed in its most dramatic and twisted form in the 2019 “ecofascist“mass shooter manifestos in New Zealand and Texas.
Whether contemporary proponents of these ideas know it or not, they are all intellectual heirs to the misguided 18th century thinker Robert Thomas Malthus, who believed that when the human population increased, famine and environmental destruction would follow.
Raisonscience correspondent for Ron Bailey, who authored the 2015 book The End of Destiny: Environmental Renewal in the 21st Century, says that Malthus failed to see that as the human population increased, the populations of livestock and crops would also increase with the help of ever-improving agricultural technology, which is why food availability is constant increase over the past two centuries, outpacing population growth.
“Fundamentally, the Malthusian prescription turns out to be completely wrong,” says Bailey.
In the contemporary world, Malthusianism has been most expressed through the work of ecologist Paul Ehrlich, particularly in his 1968 book, The population bomb which predicted that during the 1970s and 1980s “hundreds of millions of people were starving to death”.
Ehrlich, who still holds an endowed professorship at Stanford, did not respond to our interview request. But his proposed solutions at the time included taxation diapers, subsidize vasectomies and even food doping helping and supplying water with sterilizing drugs, then organizing a lottery for access to the antidote.
Ehrlich compared humanity to cancer, writing, “We need to shift our efforts from treating symptoms to eliminating cancer.”
Similarly, environmentalist Garrett Hardin in 1968 compared humanity to the overproduction of livestock, in writing, “The freedom to reproduce is intolerable.”
Ehrlich turned out to be as misguided as Malthus. In the half-century since Ehrlich’s dire prediction, available calories per capita have steadily increased in about each region of the world thanks in large part to improved agricultural techniques and technologies.
“Humans aren’t just consumers, we’re also producers,” says Bailey. “We are able to create new things to use resources better and better over time.”
And yet, world hunger has not yet been eradicated, with the United Nations reports that about 10 percent of the world’s population is undernourished. And maybe it’s true that past trends don’t predict the future.
Karen Pitts, who is a member of the Sierra Club and led a Northern California subcommittee on population growth, fears the world may not be able to accommodate a population that is expected to peak at 11 billion by 2100 She became interested in the subject after a trip to China in 1996.
“As you flew over the country, every space was occupied by housing,” says Pitts. “Whether or not they produce enough food is a big question and we really can’t risk being wrong.”
Is it really possible that the world is running out of food?
While the International Food Policy Research Institute projects that farmers will need to produce 70% more food over the next 30 years to feed everyone on the planet, the technology already exists to achieve this goal. Agronomist Paul Wagoner calculated that if all farmers became as efficient as today’s American corn farmers, the world today could feed 10 billion people on half the land.
As humanity keep on going By settling in cities, the efficiency of food production will also increase and new opportunities for ecological protection will arise as this will allow the restoration of forests and other ecosystems on the lands that migrants leave behind, Bailey points out.
Today’s Malthusians are most concerned about the disruptive effects of climate change. Citing global warming and habitat destruction, documentary filmmaker David Attenborough describe humanity as a “scourge on the Earth”.
During this time, the Biosciences a paper signed by 11,000 scientists projects a total collapse of society if the population is not managed properly.
“I think there’s kind of a catastrophic, apocalyptic undercurrent,” says Ted Nordhaus, founder of the revolutionary institute, which advocates technological solutions to environmental problems. He thinks the environmental movement has long been hobbled by its anti-growth paradigm.
“Conventional environmental ideology posits human development and environmental protection, in opposite ways, and I have exactly the opposite view,” he says.
Nordhaus says the most effective way to deal with climate change is to promote policies that accelerate economic growth.
Most environmentalists today do not openly defend the draconian population control measures imposed by Ehrlich and other Malthusians in the 1970s.
Karen Pitts says she just wants more sex education and better access to birth control in the developing world, citing a project she took part in with local people in Tanzania where the introduction of contraception has dramatically reduced unwanted pregnancies.
“And it was very easy to do, surprisingly easy,” she says. “These women wanted family planning.”
Funding for better access to birth control and education for women in developing countries was also a recommendation of the Biosciences paper. It is also a political program of the UN and many leading NGOs like the Bill and Melina Gates Foundation.
Nordhaus says such measures can help at the margin but ultimately miss the big picture, which is that as wealth increases, fertility rates naturally to fall because families invest more resources in fewer children.
“The real drivers of long-term fertility decline and population stabilization around the world are just some kind of varied economic development, which many of the same people who sign these documents actually say is the problem, not the solution,” says Nordhaus.
the Biosciences The document argues that economic growth leads to overconsumption of resources and states that “our goals must shift from GDP growth and the pursuit of wealth to the preservation of ecosystems.”
“I don’t think we’re keeping up with population growth and increased consumption,” Pitts says. “As soon as we find new ways to do it, our consumption increases. That is the problem.
Pitts is correct that people in wealthier societies tend to consume resources and generate greenhouse gases at rates that are orders of magnitude higher than those in the Third World.
But Nordhaus points out that when poor societies get richer, there are more people able to help solve environmental problems in the only way that really works: with new technologies.
“Wealthier and more developed societies are both better placed to adapt to problems, to issues such as climate change and climate impacts,” Nordhaus says. “They are also better placed to develop and deploy new technologies.”
That’s why Nordhaus advocates a greater reliance on clean, abundant energy like nuclear power to power advanced economies with a view to eventually innovating even lower-impact alternatives. But the Third World may still need to rely on traditional fossil fuels on its way to prosperity and population stabilization.
“When you get to the bottom of it, it’s ultimately about how fast Africa is developing economically,” says Nordhaus.
Malthus wasn’t completely wrong about humans’ tendency to deplete resources, says Bailey. But Malthus failed to see that new ways of organizing society would improve the problem.
“The world has understood the role of property rights, the rule of law,” says Bailey. “And that dramatically changed the incentive structures that people had before that.”
Bailey says environmentalists like Naomi Klein, who Argue that capitalism and the health of the planet are at war, have the formula upside down.
“[Klein] wants to replace it with a kind of communal socialism. I would tell you it would bring back exactly the Malthusian conditions we were living in,” Bailey says.
Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by John Osterhoudt, James Lee Marsh and Meredith Bragg.
Music credit: ‘Lighting’ by Kai Engel.
Photo Credits: Greta Thunberg at the train station, Hansson Krister/ZUMA Press/Newscom; David Attenborough at conference, David Perry/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Greta Thunberg and others on stage at the UN, Jacques Witt/SIPA/Newscom; Greta Thunberg speaking at the UN, JEMAL COUNTESS/UPI/Newscom; Greta Thunberg smiling and listening at the UN, Abaca Press/Roses Nicolas/Abaca/Sipa USA/Newscom; Hungry baby, Nie Yunpeng Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; Hands of hungry children, Nie Yunpeng Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; Greta Thunberg speaking to the crowd, Eric Demers/Polaris/Newscom.