At this current juncture there could hardly be a more urgent question than how to think about population in the Anthropocene. The epoch is named after the Anthropos, and when Crutzen and Stoermer first proposed it, population growth was the first example they gave of the “astounding” expansion of human impact. And it was also one of the primary socioeconomic drivers behind the Great Acceleration. Yet population is an abstraction, turning very different lives, classes and places into a single aggregate. That aggregate can be both an agent and an object of power: it can be treated as a cause, or it can be governed, counted and disciplined without ever being asked. This is why population remains a disquieting subject for the social sciences and humanities. More than once, it has been the basis for coercive, racialised and gendered policies whose burden fell, above all, on the bodies of women in the Global South. How Do We Think About Population in the Anthropocene?, edited by Alison Bashford, Duncan Kelly and David Nally, is among the first books to take this unease seriously, stepping back to rethink the relationship between the Anthropocene and population, a relationship which arguably verges on the tautological.
Faced with the multiple crises of capitalism, we are now at a turning point, perhaps even a tipping point. The Great Acceleration, with its triumph of industrialisation, of rationality and of a technosphere that once promised liberation or redemption, now confronts us with an existential crisis. Populations are still growing and living longer, and, as Dipesh Chakrabarty observes, longevity—a term with far more positive connotations than ageing—has emerged “across strong ideological differences as a silent and nonnegotiable value, even a right.” At the same time, it is now undeniable that we cannot keep accelerating at the rate that brought us to this juncture, and the limits we face are at once ecological and fiscal.
In China, life expectancy has roughly doubled since the middle of the last century, and the country is now ageing faster than its pension and care systems can absorb. It is growing old, as the saying goes, before growing rich. Yet longer life has also become the terrain of longevity capitalism, a frontier of accumulation in its own right. Longevity, once framed as a collective risk—a fiscal concern about the cost of people living “too long”––is now financialized and traded as an asset. Meanwhile, investors and technology elites are wagering on extending life itself through a booming longevity industry, using their capital and power to secure longer lives and privileged, differentiated access to the future. This is where longer life, held as a non-negotiable value, starts to feed into the dynamics of accumulation that have pushed the planet to its limits.
“Investors and technology elites are wagering on extending life itself through a booming longevity industry, using their capital and power to secure longer lives and privileged, differentiated access to the future.”
Longer lives are also becoming more unequally distributed. In the United Kingdom, gains in life expectancy have stalled since 2011, and the gap in healthy life expectancy between the most and least deprived areas of England and Wales now stands at eighteen years. In the United States, life expectancy lags behind that of other wealthy countries, with the richest living about fifteen years longer than the poorest. The resource consumption of this population is unsustainable, and the Anthropos is becoming a destructive and, ultimately, self-destructive being. Are we then forced to choose between people and the planet?
Yet the dilemma does not dissipate once a population stops growing. Importantly, even where a shrinking and ageing population is envisioned as a way of keeping within limits, Matthew Connelly notes that the same shrinking and ageing societies do not necessarily consume less. In fact, they may well consume more. Relatedly, Kavita Sivaramakrishnan shows how in Asia the elderly are recast as carbon-intensive and poorly adaptable consumers, even if markets court them as a booming silver economy of more than a billion potential consumers. A population, it turns out, need not be young to count as a resource: an ageing one will do.
The plurality of perspectives across the volume’s eleven essays is its main strength. Matthias Schmelzer insists that population “cannot be meaningfully addressed in the Anthropocene without situating it within the political economy of growth, inequality, and ecological degradation” (121). Alison Bashford reconstructs how the question itself has changed across three generations of Anthropocene thinking, with the focus shifting “from population growth to fertility decline” (140). Declining fertility, in her reading, is not simply a new demographic problem replacing an old one; it can already be understood as a constitutive response to the need to live within the limits to growth. Closing the volume, Duncan Kelly suggests that population politics has become the political theory of the Anthropocene. The result is a broken “mirror for princes,” a guide for policymakers that treats population as the decisive issue in climate change and reduces it to binary choices, despite feminist critics having shown just how much more complex reproduction is. While Donna Haraway’s kin making provocation importantly points to a much more complex issue, we still lack “a conventional language for theorizing population entanglements” (198). Drawing on Jonathan Lear, Kelly calls for a politics that can “grieve for an old-world politics of ‘population’ already lost” and find new languages in one “still waiting to be born” (200). He also asks whether we should keep the terms “population” and “Anthropocene” at all (193), which invites further reflection on the “-cene” itself, as Haraway’s Chthulucene already suggests. It is an indispensable reflection.
Rather than following existing frameworks, the volume calls for further work on rethinking the politics of the planet and the politics of life and death, and the relations between them. That work is now urgently needed.
References
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. (2026) ‘Questions Concerning Longevity’, Critical Inquiry 52(4): 579–601. doi:10.1086/741139.
Dal Maso, Giulia. (2025) ‘Welcome to the Age of Longevity Capitalism’, Finance and Society. doi:10.1017/fas.2025.10027.