IN THE MEDIA
Media Coverage
Our team works hard to stay active in our media advocacy efforts to shift the mainstream cultural narrative to inspire behavioral and system change towards substantially downscaling human impact to enable natural ecosystems, nonhuman animals, and humanity to flourish together.
Media inquiries for our executive director Nandita Bajaj can be sent to media@populationbalance.org.
Confronting Pronatalism is Essential for Reproductive Justice and Ecological Sustainability
Pronatalism, the push for women to have more children, has elbowed its way into prominence in public discourse. In the United States, cultural and institutional pressures on women to bear children are articulated in various ways, from negative portrayals of women who don’t consider having a child a viable choice for themselves, to a burgeoning Silicon Valley subculture that advocates having “tons of kids” to save the world, to policy proposals that would further restrict reproductive choice or limit the voting power of the childless.
COP29 Delegates Ignored the Ultimate Cause of Global Warming
After weeks of discussion, COP29 ended up producing a tepid agreement that offered developing countries less than a fifth of the money they would need to deal with climate change, which was widely panned. Some delegates called it "outrageous," and "a joke." Increasingly, even those who participate in them say that the UN climate and biodiversity processes are broken and need fundamental reform.
Why Naidu and Stalin are wrong — and how their ideas on reproduction turn the clock back
With their proposed solution, Naidu and Stalin would be rolling back hard-won reproductive rights in the southern states for the self-serving motive of obtaining a “fairer” representation. The admirable alternative to fairer funding allocation would be to champion the rights of North Indian women to reproductive autonomy and the protection of girls from child marriage—policies that would lead to declining fertility there as in the south.
Social Security is a Ponzi scheme high birthrates won't fix
Our media outlets have a strange obsession with declining birth rates. While the world's population clocks in at 8.2 billion and adds another 70 million per year—and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that population growth is a major contributor—we read near-daily headlines about the "crisis" of declining birth rates.
The unbearable anthropocentrism of Our World in Data
Crist would have us ask whether human supremacism constitutes the most ignorant prejudice of all, as it operates under the demonstrably false belief that the only measure of progress is that of Homo sapiens’ well-being. Subordinate to human ends, the living planet is reduced to a resource for the aggrandizement of the one chosen species.
“Worrying” population declines are actually a hopeful sign
Human population is in the news, but not for the reasons we are used to. At one time, our growing population was seen as central to wildlife extinctions, resource depletion, pollution and environmental destruction. But today, we are more likely to hear that there are too few of us, not too many. As women across the world have gained greater reproductive choice, birth rates have declined.
How patriarchal pronatalism dominates the conversation about the human future
While scientists warn that human numbers are a key driver of ecological and social crises, the subject of overpopulation gets short shrift by policymakers, think tanks, and even environmental groups. We are told that numbers don’t matter; what matters is solely the level of per capita consumption.
Too much? Too little? Too late?
In a panel discussion spanning the worlds of math, physics and chemistry, investigative journalist Christopher Ketcham chats with Dr. Bill Rees, Prof. Emeritus at the University of British Columbia, Rex Weyler, Co-founder of Greenpeace International, and Nandita Bajaj, Executive Director of Population Balance to discuss where humanity is heading in an overcrowded, over-consuming world.
Technology won't save us from global warming, but this just might
After the hottest Northern Hemisphere summer on record, with record high temperatures around the world, Pope Francis recently exhorted the developed world to act faster on climate change. An overhaul of wealthy lifestyles is in order, he said, and technological fixes are not the answer.
Pronatalism on the rise to counter growing push for gender equality
There’s an insidious new tactic emerging for selling right-wing ideology to wider audiences, evident in last month’s Budapest Demographic Summit for “family-friendly thinkers and decision-makers,” the upcoming pro-birth Natal conference in Austin, Texas, and the recent film “Birthgap.”
"It's not science" – Organisations with links to Musk accused of "pro-growth" skew
Questions have been raised concerning Our World in Data (OWID) and its pro-economic and population growth bias after it emerged the organisation has taken donations from tech billionaire Musk since at least 2021.
Feminism is the greatest threat to mankind
Women without children, whether by choice or circumstance, face enormous stigma in most cultures, which often includes domestic abuse, divorce, and social ostracisation. There is also a lack of reckoning with the great unraveling of our ecological and social crises, which will likely bring unimaginably dire consequences for humanity and other species over the next several decades.
A Minnesota nonprofit's solutions to human overpopulation
The world’s population is set to grow to 9.8 billion by 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100, according to the United Nations. A nonprofit based in Saint Paul shares its solutions to combat human overpopulation and overconsumption.
Saying out loud what others won't even whisper about climate change
U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry raised eyebrows recently when he said continued high birth rates in some parts of the world and a global population of 10 billion would be unsustainable. The problem with his remarks isn't their accuracy.
‘Isn’t journalism about finding new stories?’: The climate news the media ignores
“It is difficult to compete for air time in a landscape so dominated by well-funded neoliberal institutions,” Bajaj explained, saying the organization produces op-eds, letters and press releases to counter “pro-growth propaganda”, which editors refuse to publish.
Population growth is not good for people or the planet
India’s population has just reached 1.4 billion people, surpassing China as the world’s most populous nation four years earlier than projected. Spurring this growth is a traditional patriarchal culture in which women’s identity is constrained by the social expectation they bear children.
The elite are panic-breeding white babies
Last week I interviewed Nandita Bajaj, executive director of Population Balance, about the dangers of pronatalism, and how coercive policies and cultures which emphasise the importance of having children fulfil our obsession with growth, supplying our economies, religions and political parties with more bodies every year. Towards the end of the episode we discuss Effective Altruism, and its fringe pronatalist movement, a dangerous philosophy supported by the likes of Elon Musk.
Coercive pro-birth policies have devastating impacts on people and the planet
In the end, alarmism about population decline is a distraction from the real crisis demanding attention: the human enterprise in overshoot, overwhelming the natural systems that enable life on Earth. Norms need to shift so that having fewer or no children is understood as a legitimate, positive choice and lower fertility is recognized as a path to a positive future.
The new push for more babies: How tech elites think it will save the planet
“Globally, we’re still adding about 80 million people every year to the planet. That growth stems from pronatalism, which is all of the cultural and institutional pressure that promotes or even coerces childbearing. Climate change, biodiversity loss, growing scarcities of freshwater are all bigger problems than “the bizarre claim that we’re not producing enough babies,” Bajaj said.
Quirks and Quarks with Bob McDonald
In this 17-minute segment, executive director Nandita Bajaj, along with Dr. Céline Delacroix and PB Advisor Dr. William Rees, was asked to comment on what the 8 billion milestone actually means in terms of social, reproductive, and ecological justice.