True to its fragmented, siloed nature, the population discussion could hardly be better represented than through an incomplete, jigsaw approach: a compilation of meticulous essays by veterans of the population conversation, all of whom have earned their wounds, and therefore the right to be included in How Do We Think About Population in the Anthropocene? — a fascinating pamphlet full of insight that provides more answers than its title may suggest.
Naomi Oreskes appropriately starts us off with a tragically comedic yet accurate cautionary tale of how easily the population conversation can quickly descend into factional war, as experts’ selective filtering keeps them in ideological silos that result in dead-end, chicken-and-egg exchanges – and also how, for lack of a better argument, “experts” ultimately won’t hesitate to get personal: projecting onto others their own fear of being accused of misanthropy, simply for having had the audacity to see humanity through a different kind of lens. Oreskes has her own perspectives on the subject: all population conversation silos need to at least acknowledge human encroachment, as well as the bias of techno-optimism — what I have diagnosed in my own books as the psychosis of “technophilia”.
Demolishing such silos, Zalasiewicz and Thomas make the frighteningly accurate observation that population impact on the planet is being uncoupled from population size as we speak — one projection even shows that even a drastic population reduction may not save us. The name of this culprit? The incredibly unnatural, resource-demanding lifestyle of modern humans, incarnated into the Technosphere: an almost independent entity highly evocative of “The Thing”: my own nickname for what I call, perhaps more outspokenly, Sentient Necrocapitalism. Social equality is rightly proposed as a solution here, given that it partially emulates natural ecosystems. But it still floats precariously below the hyperobject of the technosphere which, in my opinion, would need to be attacked first – after all, the technosphere is an extractive, wasteful entity that thrives upon, and further sustains, inequality in the first place.
Continuing on the theme of silos, McNeill ponders why, over much of its existence, the discipline of environmental history has failed to acknowledge the population elephant in the room. Other objects were apparently much closer and brighter, and did something very tangible. Population, meanwhile, functions like salt on the palate — an invisible, odourless, and abstract mathematical “generalist” that enhances and multiplies the effect of every flavour it comes into contact with. To make things worse, population and its impacts co-evolved over thousands of years to the point where untangling impact from population is not as simple as attributing “cause” and “effect”. A subtle but important point.
Matthew Connelly refreshingly recounts how population projections have, quite consistently, repeatedly missed the mark, just as population policies dreadfully missed their objectives. Perhaps the big-picture learning here is that population is a beast all on its own that will always have one up on policy, culture, and intention. Do we have the maturity to at least go with the flow of our dwindling numbers, and prepare for a society where “less is a different kind of more?”
Crist introduces us to reproductive justice: “a theoretical framework and grassroots organizing movement, both of which explicitly reject efforts to control or engineer populations”. The counterpoint of course is: if we have engineered and controlled everything else on this planet, including the decimation of our predators (which contributed to human overpopulation), isn’t justice about trying to engineer our population back to what it should be? In this context, can human reproductive rights still be relevant when millions of species have been driven to extinction because of our very reproductive “rights”? Is “justice” even the right word? Because justice for one species is injustice for another. Perhaps it should be about ecosystem balance.
And while Matthias Schmelzer’s chapter rightfully alerts us to the pitfalls of treating global overshoot exclusively as a population issue rather than a capitalist accumulation one, it almost ends up replicating this pitfall with the reverse argument. What some of these authors have in common is that they spend a considerable amount of time in their essays highlighting the risks that their colleagues’ approaches pose in “diverting attention” from “what really matters”, in their opinion. This uber-cautionary, defensive stance is neither helpful nor accurate, because at the end of the day, everything matters. We are in dire need of thinkers who humbly find common threads across this complex conversation spectrum rather than exhaustively defend their turf and inadvertently force others deeper into their silo as a result. I blame institutionalised, commodified academia for this situation.
David Nally’s Carnivorous Capitalism essay is an irrefutable, scathing historical summary of how the meat-eating economy and its associated sectors became drivers for overshoot. Technophilia surfaces yet again here, as he explains the perfect storm that resulted from the collision between carnivorous capitalism and the technosphere, what he calls “mechanistic science”. He calls out our mechanised dystopia not only for accelerating us towards overshoot, but for anaesthetizing us to the speed of this acceleration as human society itself became an Animal Farm – a theme that deserves its very own compilation of essays.
Alison Bashford does something very useful: she recounts the evolution of the population debate through the ages as it tried to find a stable state, palindroming back and forth between overshoot panic and fertility rights like a subatomic particle searching for a home. Taking all the wisdom of hindsight that this juxtaposition between vicious silos brings, Bashford manages the seemingly impossible. She uncouples the highly flammable fertility conversation from gender, race, politics and the artificial human construct of “justice”, and assess it for what it is: fertility decline may simply be a biological version of naturally induced degrowth — no ifs, buts, “rights” and “justices” about it. May I add that the currently ongoing normalisation of intraspecies genocide among humans is achieving the same goal, and may not be an accident but a result of population overshoot itself. We seem to think that culture overrides biology, but sometimes, culture is a mere “revealer” of the biology underneath, as my latest book The Biology of Collapse postulates. Perhaps Malthus was neither wrong nor right. Perhaps he was simply describing natural systems.
As the Anthropocene takes hold, impacts are just as unequal as human societies are unfair. Authors such as R. Sánchez-Rivera highlight the dimension of climate apartheid and environmental racism, while Kavita Sivaramakrishnan paints a candid portrait of the ever-expanding demographic of aged humans: their consumption patterns, carbon emissions, and ecological footprint – a future that the world is not prepared for.
Duncan Kelly’s epilogue briefly returns the focus on the perhaps trite, internal academic debate on when exactly, and how, the Anthropocene started, if it really exists, and whether it is a function of population. I have my own, perhaps simplistic, take as a biologist which is that, regardless of when it actually started, its foundations were set as soon as we pursued growth-based civilisations (i.e. from the beginning of our existence, and as a direct result of evolutionary traits that selected for the Anthropocene thousands of years before it even happened). Perhaps in agreement with Kelly — and although as a Greek I like seeing Greek words — I would rather the Anthropocene terminology was reinvented to mean not “the time of humans”, but “the time of more, and different, humans”. Kelly, like Oreskes and myself, highlights the risk of siloed thinking in tackling the Anthropocene. Singular tunnels of demagogic politics and anthropocentric ethics threaten to aggravate it, after having weaponised it for profit or other agendas which constitute, with all due respect, minutiae in the context of overshoot. Like these authors, I am waiting for more thinkers who can think beyond the glass ceiling of this overflowing petri dish.
