The Anthropocene is getting on in human years, even if some want to dispute its very birth, or at least its birthday. For now, let’s say it was born in 1950 with the Great Acceleration and baptized in 2000. This means that there have been three twenty-five-year human generations living in the Anthropocene. How have they—we—differently considered, avoided, or confronted the geopolitics and biopolitics of the reproduction of ourselves in the epoch named for us?
First-generation Anthropocenes, 1950 to 1975, considered population at the high point of demographic transition theory, fostering well-known arguments about how fertility control might raise standards of living, save the planet, and, for some, offset Cold War communist dangers. Second-generation Anthropocenes, 1975 to 2000, critiqued just that, to put it (too) simply, switching out population control for reproductive justice, and environmental impact for women’s health, at least aspirationally. The third generation, born with the term “Anthropocene” in 2000, restored ecology, environment, and the planet to the debate, but with visceral unease, precisely because of the success of the previous critique (e.g., Sasser 2018 and 2024; Hendrixson et al. 2019; Murphy 2018). The substantive global issues changed, too, from population growth to fertility decline.
As a historian, I’m experimenting with a generational approach to the Anthropocene, not only to map changes over time, but also to understand the posturing of generational differences. When I consider the first-generation responders to a known, but not yet named Great Acceleration of human population in the 1950s alongside our own third-generation attempts to mitigate the effects of accelerating change in Earth systems, I perceive a familial inheritance, more than a generation gap. And yet I do see a massive generational difference between the original Anthropocenes, so to say, and the second generation, whose critique was so successful. At the same time, and unfashionably, I find myself asking: Does this critique sometimes get us stuck, and is there a reasonable or useful postcritique?
First-Generation Anthropocenes, 1950 to 1975
In high modernity, growth of many kinds and orders was endorsed across the Global North and South, and “acceleration” was generally perceived as an economic and social good. There was one glaring exception. The acceleration of world population growth was already, in 1950, deeply problematized, already seen as a planetary crisis, already linked to energy limits, to differential economies of consumption, and to possible species extinction.
On the whole, the scholarly as well as activist position—including much of my own work—has aimed to separate out that era’s politics and to define our present sensibilities against that of the postwar generation. Increasingly, however, I consider this to be disingenuous, incurious, and (perhaps not importantly in the scheme of things) intellectually predictable. What if we look for a connection between the population planetary crisis of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and the climate-changed planetary crisis of our own time? However we politically assess the first-generation Anthropocene responses to net population growth, the family resemblances are at least sixfold.
1. The acceleration of global population growth was recognized as a planetary crisis after World War II. In high modernity, accelerating world population growth was analyzed by statisticians, early ecologists, soil scientists, and economists, who developed systemic analyses regarding energy, resources, and differential consumption across different kinds of economies.
2. Documenting uneven global geographies and a calculus of inequity was already core business. The early terms through which “one world” was conceptualized as divided—the Third World and the First World—arose from demography itself. For some, the intention was to keep it that way; for others, inequity was a problem to be addressed, aiming to close the gaps in differential maternal mortality, infant mortality, longevity, and access to fertility control and to sufficient caloric intake. How to do so—debate on just what constituted freedom, responsibility, coercion, voluntariness, and persuasion—was already a question for this highly politicized postwar generation, whether or not we agree with these various positions. Rightly or wrongly, by our own measures, the proposition that limiting human fertility correlated with accelerated economic development was held in common across many political ecosystems.
3. Even before the Great Acceleration moment, but certainly in the light of it, this planet-level crisis was understood by population control (and birth control) activists and natural science and social science scholars to be induced by humans, a crisis of possible species self-extinction. Population growth was perceived to be changing the face of the Earth. Then, the surface layer of the biosphere was foregrounded, a lithosphere rather than an atmosphere. We need to recall the emphasis on the population-food-soil matrix at the beginning of the Anthropocene, because it came to be overridden and semiforgotten by the success of the population-reproduction-women’s health matrix; there was a shift in focus from sovereignty over land to sovereignty over one’s person (Bashford 2014).
4. Population growth was linked causatively to desiccation, deforestation, and desertification on a global scale. And so, historically, the problematization of world population growth sits at the formation of global political ecology, of conservation, and of what turned into “environmentalism” (Robertson 2012). Some already had a kind of multispecies politics in view. It was readily understood that as human populations grew, exponentially more land was cleared for crops and for livestock, but with diminishing returns, both for humans and for other species.
5. The development and application of systems and feedback loops have carried forward from that time. One line of theorization on stationary economies and possible circular economies lies here, whether or not we assess various ideas as correct, applicable, politically dubious, or dangerous. While now, carbon cycles are familiar enough, then, a relatively new awareness of nitrogen cycles pressed the urgency of human-induced change to the biosphere. Energy limits and systems were being rethought on a planetary scale.
6. Finally, when we talk now of “forecasting,” “stabilization,” “offsetting,” and “future costs,” of thresholds passed, limits exceeded, and reductions targeted, this is all borrowed talk from that earlier moment of planetary catastrophe.
It is important for my argument here to note that we don’t have to agree with that generation’s work for it nonetheless to be part of an intergenerational Anthropocene history that is worth exploring and explaining, not (just) critiquing. In so many cases, those who perceived the problems of the Great Acceleration of the 1950s in the 1950s are rather more like predecessors, intellectual and political antecedents. This is so, even if some were mildly to moderately flawed and others were unreconstructed bigots.
Second-Generation Anthropocenes, Critique, 1975 to 2000
All manner of gendered, racialized, and colonizing politics shaped each of the points above. This is plain (now) because of the work of generation II, who reassessed not just what first-generation Anthropocenes with power said, but what they did with regard to fertility control. I’m increasingly interested in historicizing this critique, which ranged widely across the political spectrum: Marxist critique that any discussion of population deflects from the possibility and desirability of distributing resources equally; postcolonial feminist critique that highlighted a history of race-based impositions and women’s particular role, contribution, and cost in anything to do with reproduction; New Left “science studies” writing the history of eugenics; Reaganite New Right and neoliberal critique arguing that state policies designed to reduce fertility rates were inherently coercive and not “free”; theological and social-conservative critique, especially from the Roman Catholic Church, followed up by Anglophone evangelical conservatism, especially in the United States. That two of the most coercive manifestations of state-led population control unfolded early in this era—India’s sterilization program in the late 1970s “Emergency” and China’s new one-child policy—bedded down each of these highly distinct critical positions.
This all takes some disentangling, and in my view, political scientist Diana Coole has done thebest job of setting out the complexities of this second-generation Anthropocene/population matrix (Coole2013 and 2021). In scholarly circles and arguably in policy circles, the feminist postcolonial and latterly decolonial critique, combined with a newly critical science studies that foregrounded histories of biology and of eugenics, were phenomenally successful. A history of twentieth-century wrongdoing was launched, now somewhere nearly orthodox: a connection drawn between Malthus, sometimes Darwin, colonial genocide, the Holocaust, demographic transition-endorsed population control, eugenics, Indian sterilization in the Emergency, and China’s one-child policy. As a result, by the 1980s, funders of various population programs were increasingly wary, and old demographic transition arguments began to be sidelined in favor of women’s health and even reproductive rights arguments. The problems didn’t therefore stop, but this generalized critique of “population control” ended up being one of the most successful social science interventions of all time.
After and in the light of, not against (and certainly not in ignorance of) this second-generation critique (including my own contributions), I increasingly wonder whether or how there might be a reasonable or useful postcritique, energized more by curiosity than by judgment. I recognize Sedgwick’s (2003) problems with “exposure,” the limits and perhaps predictability of exposé-styled scholarship. It’s harder to hold to this in a Trump era. Still, as a historian, I think we’re past the point where exposé alone can pass as a novel argument, precisely because so much important work has already done just that.
I see now that I was already moving toward something like a postcritique position when finalizing Global Population (2014), more than a decade ago. I named myself then as “agnostic,” convinced that we hardly needed yet another book to substantiate what was even then a well-established critique of population control. Might I learn more new things if I approached the material differently, counterintuitively suspending the critique on which I was raised and to which I had contributed? Here’s an example that I stand by. When Indian anticolonial economist and eugenicist Radhakamal Mukerjee made offensive statements that his fellow Indians were “breeding like field rats, rabbits, and fruit flies,” I could have followed through with a pretty obvious denunciation. Instead—agnostic—I actively wondered (that is, researched) his comprehension of breeding and so learned how important Charles Elton’s early population ecology on Arctic lemmings was to Mukerjee’s human/animal thought zone. The ecology-economy nexus suddenly clicked, the key to my twentieth-century history of geopolitics, biopolitics, ecopolitics and cosmopolitics.
I now feel more strongly about this approach, at least for my own research agenda. It’s not fashionable to search for it, but there is in fact a history of antiracism, anticolonialism, and anticapitalism to be found (and fairly easily) in the history of population control. Was it dominant? No. Does it accord with our own benchmarks? Hardly. But that is the point: antiracism and anticolonialism have a history, too.
The first director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization, for example, was first-generation Anthropocene, John Boyd Orr. He was situated fully on the left, seeking to address the problem of who was and who wasn’t hungry in the world. For this bald inequity to be evened up, he consistently argued that “white countries” (his term) needed to give up power. This was his thesis in the coauthored White Man’s Dilemma (Orr and Lubbock 1953). The only way to secure global equity of resources was for white men to give up their capacity to wield power in an economically unequal world. Now there’s a plan. It turns out that the idea of the White (M)anthropocene (Di Chiro 2017) was conjured by one of the actors at the heart of the population/food establishment.
Engagement with what I’m calling here second-generation Anthropocene critique of population is an essential good for political and policy actors unaware of this difficult history. It is equally essential for scholars who stubbornly refuse or are just lazily disinclined to read decolonial and feminist critique. Postcritique is earned. And yet, for those already reasonably well schooled, critique can also sometimes keep us stuck in uniform accounts of the past.
Third-Generation Anthropocenes, 2000 to 2025: Fertility Decline
In the midst of the second-generation debates about population, one of the greatest changes in human world history was already underway: fertility decline. In fact, fertility rates had peaked in 1968, but even as the term “Anthropocene” was invented in 2000, it was still population growth that remained a foundational problem (Crutzen 2002). Of course, net population growth and fertility decline can and do coexist, but demographers and ecological economists were already aware that the latter was the new story for the new century. Ecological economist Joel Cohen (1995, 2010), for example, had long been modeling what the climate change implications and impact were of total fertility rates falling from an average of 5 births/woman in 1950 to 2.6 (as he wrote in 2010). Working with the then-minimal UN projection, he concluded that there would likely be a contribution to a stabilization of the atmosphere; a substantial, though not a dominant mitigation. The possibility of managing this variable might sensibly sit alongside a suite of others, a conclusion reached (as we would expect) through detailed knowledge of regional and intranational differences in fertility and mortality and in agreement with the critique of coerced population management.
We know that what some historians and economists have called a demographic revolution was in fact demographic collapse for many Indigenous and colonized societies and that sterilization of subaltern women and men continued over the first and second Anthropocene generations. Yet considered globally, the convergence is spectacular, perhaps a signal embodiment of modernity. In 1950, the global average was 5. Now the highest fertility rate (Chad) is 5.94. The average fertility rate for the world now sits at 2.2, projected to be below the replacement threshold of 2.1 by 2050 and moving toward 1.93 by the end of this century.
As always, there is a geopolitics here, though one that confounds a traditional Global North and South. Fertility decline has been slowest in sub-Saharan Africa and fastest in Japan. India’s fertility has declined to ~2.0 children per woman, less than half the 1950s level. Across the world, ultralow fertility has driven a massive IVF industry, routinized on a spectacular scale in China, for example, because so many couples delay reproduction and (post One Child Policy) continue to reproduce once only. This is a household economy decision linked to commodity consumption, education, and other activities and aspirations. Most of this world change exceeds the history of coercion and has unfolded in some matrix of local, personal decisions, technological and pharmaceutical possibilities, persuasion, expectations, incentivization, educational opportunities (for women), and labor demands (on women). It is evident that millions of individuals, couples, and households are in some way choosing to limit natural human fertility, a power of freedom in the Rose (1999) sense. This is a long history, then, less about coercion and more about (but not only about) self-limitation.
Given a choice, women just don’t want to have (and simply aren’t having) twelve, thirteen, or fourteen infants born from their worn-out bodies. Some want to have none. Most, it is turning out, want to have one or two and increasingly need IVF choices for just that. It is indeed a remarkable, spectacular, global convergence that should not be normalized, or taken for granted, or avoided through overcaution about discussing population.
How, then, do we consider deceleration in fertility rates over three generations of a great acceleration? For some, fertility decline is a new crisis, a complete turnaround from the 1950s beginning of the Anthropocene. Shelves once filled with Crowded Planet/Standing Room Only books are beginning to be filled with Empty Planet books (full/empty of humans, specifically, being the presumed rubric). For others, fertility decline is part of a solution and even a reason to put population talk away completely. And—quite the reverse—there is also an interest in foregrounding population, precisely to think through fertility decline as the great slowdown (Dorling 2020).
What if fertility decline is a form of degrowth? Conventionally wary of thinking with, about, or through population, degrowth scholars inherit the decolonial work of the second-generation Anthropocene critics. Schmelzer (this volume) sees population as a slow lever of change. Yet world fertility has more than halved over the three generations of the Great Acceleration. What if fertility decline is the single most demonstrable sociobiological human slowing of the Anthropocene so far? More than that, I wonder whether widespread fertility control is just the kind of collective and voluntary “self-limitation” that degrowth scholars both applaud and seek, but are deflected from because of the imperative of critique. Typically, they imagine or instantiate self-limitation in the sustainable practices of alternative communities, premodern communities, Indigenous communities, or as a future utopian steady-state prospect. Yet if we know that global fertility decline has been a practice of self-limitation, overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, then we might also say that many, if not most humans, already practice degrowth routinely in one part of their lives.
I have a third reflection on degrowth. If a foundational proposition is that it is possible to “live well beyond growth,” does this not take for granted an already ubiquitous degrowth that is fertility control? When degrowth scholars set out instances of successful degrowth, they proclaim optimistically that “in households and communities around the world, people are voluntarily acting to reduce the harmful impacts of their lifestyles on vulnerable human and ecological systems” (Kallis et al., 2018, 303). We know that some people do so by choosing not to reproduce themselves. But far more importantly, it is highly likely that such communities and individuals are already controlling their own fertility and that this is just taken for granted by analysts.
In his own imagining of a steady/stationary state in which neither population nor capital stock would grow, John Stuart Mill (1848) imagined an economy in which production rates were equal to depreciation rates and birth rates equal to death rates. There were (and are) a suite of options to realize such a stationary biostate: more death, earlier death, abortion, infanticide, sterilization, no reproductive sex, less reproductive sex, later marriage, and/or contraception. A Malthusian, Mill voted for the latter two, but how this was to be achieved biologically, behaviorally, legally, and (perhaps most important for Mill) liberally, was future-utopian in his mid-nineteenth century. Since then, Mill’s vision (and in fact that of every Malthusian before and since, including degrowth’s favored Emma Goldman) has come to pass.
This now-normalized matter of fertility control really is extraordinary in world history terms. One profound condition for “living without growth” has already happened. And so, it is ironic that when degrowth scholars ask: “What could a collective self-limitation look like?” it could look like (in my view already does look like) the neo-Malthusian now. As third-generation Anthropocenes, we are living in a Malthusian world of our own making and even of our own liking.
