How Do We Think About Population in the Anthropocene? is a highly readable and worth-while critical discussion of one of the most widely-recognized frameworks for understanding planetary environmental crisis—and possibly the most fraught. The volume is a rewarding read because all the contributors combine thoughtfulness with expertise of the highest level in their respective fields—and because they are in profound disagreement about one of the foundational concepts of our time. The last decades have seen a reckoning with the population concept, performed by scholars and activists in what Alison Bashford calls Second-generation Anthropocenes (140). They have brought to light the various ways in which the population problem has been entangled with oppressive and often racialized politics, such as campaigns of involuntary sterilization, often with unintended consequences.
One of the volume’s central considerations is whether the population question can be redeemed from that history and brought back as a political and analytical tool. The contributors seem to agree that the question necessarily requires serious grappling with the population concept’s thorny history. But they widely disagree in their answers to the question. Another issue is to what extent population ever really disappeared. Counter to that premise, Duncan Kelly suggests that despite a generation of serious and devastating critiques, population remains a structuring element of contemporary discussions of global environmental change, population haunts us as “the underlying political theory of the Anthropocene” (191).
As the volume demonstrates, the usefulness of population can be questioned from different perspectives, given emerging global trends of fertility decline, and significant—if not total—decoupling of population growth from changes in energy use and material consumption.
From my perspective, the most interesting question that the book spurs is to what extent the population concept is useful for forging political understandings of planetary degradation. What is at stake, then, is less the issue of whether population can be an informative lens for describing Anthropocene developments. The issue becomes: does population hold any potential for organizing Anthropocene realities into mobilizable communities?
Population, as Matthias Schmeltzer points out, is not a neutral variable, but a measure tied to a particular political, historically produced perspective on environmental degradation (104). As with all concepts, the political properties of the concept of population are shaped by its history. As Alison Bashford, Duncan Kelly, and David Nally point out in the introduction, Thomas Robert Malthus first formulated his population theory in the early days of industrialization in England, a time held by some as the beginning of the Anthropocene (1). Given this, it’s useful to more precisely trace the relationship between early industrialization and Malthus’ theory.
In her 2023 book The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History, Deborah Valenze underlines that Malthus’ theory of population included a theory of agricultural production that profoundly misunderstood and discounted the diverse practices of subsistence of actual peasants. Contrary to these realities, Malthus argued that small-scale and mixed farming practices lead to scarcity, a theory that was soon elevated into a widely influential ideology and agronomic rationale that ironically produced scarcity rather than prevented it. Furthermore, this ideology underpinned the British imperial project which forced productivist and nondiverse agricultural models onto countless diverse subsistence practices around the world.
From this perspective, Malthus’ theories of population and agriculture were not just coinciding with a beginning of the Anthropocene—Malthusianism was the ideology driving it. Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway’s analysis of the Plantationocene, an alternative diagnosis for the Anthropocene, points precisely to European colonialism and its intensified agriculture (underpinned by monoculture and unfree labour) as drivers of global environmental change.
This historical link between the origins of the population issue and the violent social reordering that turned peoples of diverse commons around the world into superfluous populations on the move adds another dimension to Duncan Kelly’s suggestion that population, in some sense, is the Anthropocene. Is population really a diagnosis of the Anthropocene, or rather an expression of it? To borrow a distinction from Dominique LaCapra, when we speak of population, are we really working through the Anthropocene—or are we acting it out?
“Is population really a diagnosis of the Anthropocene, or rather an expression of it?”
Population conceives of people as an Anthropocene force, as biological cohorts “governed by fertility and mortality and constrained by finite resources”, as the editors put it in the introduction (13). In political terms, that is a fundamentally objectifying perspective: it frames people as biological stock, as biomass, as footprint. Populations are managed, not mobilized as communities. Picturing people as population is therefore antithetical to understanding people as communities of fellow political subjects. If our goal is to find a new political language that can help us make sense of and formulate political projects for the Anthropocene, I doubt that population is the way.