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.
Slow the growth, save the world? Why declining birth rates need not mean an end to prosperity
The world’s population is, at this point, still growing. Nandita Bajaj, the executive director of the US non-profit Population Balance, says there’s a taboo around discussing population among those who oppose eternal growth. She told a forum this week that population and consumption (and therefore emissions) go hand in hand but there are reasons the left and the degrowth movement duck the conversation.
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.
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.
The seasons of death for wild horses
“Wild horses are scapegoated for ecological degradation of the American West with zero basis in scientific data. Meanwhile, humans and our livestock comprise 96% of mammalian biomass on Earth.” On the 250 million acres of public lands where cows graze, said Stade, there has been a slow-motion disaster. “Cows have wrought utter havoc on fragile riparian zones and are a major force behind species endangerment and biological impoverishment.”
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.
End the insanity: For nuclear disarmament and global demilitarization
No one believed Katrina would happen before Katrina happened. No one believed Fukushima would happen before Fukushima happened. Virtually no one believes a nuclear war will happen before it happens. But a nuclear war happening is not a disaster: it is a holocaust. Nuclear war must be averted, and most countries have already taken steps to opt out of nuclear madness.
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.
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.
Dismissal of “population alarmism” is rooted in pronatalist ideology
Pronatalism is a globally pervasive form of reproductive coercion, that reduces people to reproductive vessels for external agendas. In addition to being a source of reproductive injustice, it fuels population growth and has propelled the global population toward the 8 billion milestone. It’s time to confront the pernicious influence of pronatalism on population growth, human rights, and the planet.