Prickly Paradigm Press is excited to announce the publication of How Do We Think About Population in the Anthropocene? Dive into the text on our site via the link below.
Human population growth has long been treated as one of the defining drivers of humanity’s growing impact on the Earth. But population is also a deeply contested category, entangled with histories of colonialism, reproductive control, racialization, inequality, and political power. How Do We Think About Population in the Anthropocene?, edited by Alison Bashford, Duncan Kelly, and David Nally, brings together twelve historians, geographers, demographers, political theorists, geologists, and other scholars to reconsider the question.
The pamphlet’s contributors approach the problem from strikingly different directions:
Naomi Oreskes revisits her own reluctance to treat population growth as a primary environmental variable, asking what changes when we consider habitat destruction and biodiversity loss alongside climate change—and pointing to women’s education and empowerment as important forces in slowing population growth and species extinction.
Jan Zalasiewicz and Julia Adeney Thomas focus on the technosphere: the enormous material world produced by human beings, whose mass now rivals or exceeds that of living matter and whose growth has profound consequences for Earth systems.
J. R. McNeill explains why environmental historians have generally been wary of giving population much explanatory weight, pointing to both the inadequacy of long-term demographic data and the extraordinary complexity of the category “environment.”
Matthew Connelly examines the historical amnesia surrounding population politics, arguing that falling fertility and population decline do not necessarily produce less environmental harm. Consumption, inequality, and social organization matter as much as demographic arithmetic.
Meehan Crist asks whether reproductive justice and environmental justice can genuinely be reconciled. She examines how seemingly benign efforts to reduce fertility and emissions can place disproportionate pressure on women in the Global South.
Matthias Schmelzer places population within the larger political economy of economic growth, arguing that planetary destabilization cannot be separated from a capitalist system organized around perpetual expansion. He calls instead for democratic autonomy and an emancipatory approach to social and biological reproduction.
David Nally shifts attention from human populations to livestock, asking what it means to live in a world in which the animals raised for human consumption vastly outnumber human beings. The alternative to carnivorous capitalism, he argues, lies not in population control but in regenerative and collectively organized food systems.
Alison Bashford traces three generations of Anthropocene thinking about population, from the era of the “population bomb,” through the critique of population control, to our present planetary moment—and asks whether it is now possible to develop a useful postcritique of population.
R. Sánchez-Rivera turns to Puerto Rico to examine the colonial history of population control and its implications for contemporary environmental reproductive justice, arguing that the colonial dimensions of the Anthropocene cannot be separated from its demographic history.
Kavita Sivaramakrishnan examines another major demographic transformation: global ageing. Focusing on Asian experts and policymakers, she asks how older populations have been represented in climate policy and whether assumptions about ageing, consumption, and adaptability withstand scrutiny.
Duncan Kelly considers whether population has become not merely a toxic political category but the basic framework through which states imagine politics itself in the Anthropocene—returning to the question of whether “population” can be disentangled from the way modern states govern.
Together, these essays challenge the idea that humanity can be treated as a single, undifferentiated force. The ecological consequences of human life are shaped by how people live, what they consume, the infrastructures they inhabit, the political and economic systems in which they participate, and the unequal distribution of responsibility and vulnerability.
Also, stay tuned for further commentary at the How Do We Think About Population in the Anthropocene Book Forum. We’ve invited a select group of academics and thought leaders to weigh in on the latest PPP pamphlet, exclusively on our website and Substack.
