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The Overpopulation Podcast
The Overpopulation Podcast (here’s why we use the term “overpopulation”) features enlightening conversations between executive director Nandita Bajaj, researcher Alan Ware, and expert guests to discuss the often misunderstood impacts of our expanding human footprint on human rights, animal protection, and ecological preservation, as well as individual and collective solutions. We are proud to be the first and only nonprofit organization globally that draws the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, social inequalities, and ecological overshoot. Ranking in the top 1.5% of all podcasts globally, we draw over 20,000 listeners from across 80 countries.
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New to our podcast?
There are over 60 episodes of The Overpopulation Podcast. If you are new to the podcast and are looking for a good place to start, we recommend you listen to these episodes first.
Latest Episodes
The Poverty of Growth
Obsession with growth is enriching elites and killing the planet. That’s the message of this week’s guest, Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights and author of The Poverty of Growth.
Challenging Growthism | Reclaiming our Humanity from the Destructive Grip of Mainstream Economics
Ecological economist Dr. Joshua Farley discusses the urgent need to realign our economic systems with ecological and social justice imperatives by reclaiming our humanity from the destructive grip of mainstream economics.
Rising from the Ashes of “Development” | Stories of Radical Ecological Democracy from India and Beyond
In this episode, we explore with environmentalist and author Ashish Kothari how entrenched “development” ideologies have led to both ecological and social destruction in India and globally, and how Ashish works to elevate and connect movements of radical community-led alternatives around the world that harmonize human activities with the planet's needs.
Social Ecological Economics | Radical Transformation towards Social and Ecological Justice
In this episode we speak with Dr. Clive Spash, an economist who is fundamentally challenging conventional economic paradigms through his development of social ecological economics. His work addresses the intersections of human behavior, environmental values, and economic systems - advocating for a radical transformation towards a more socially and ecologically just world.
Confronting the Population Taboo: Moving from Dominator to Partnership Societies
In this episode we speak with Riane Eisler, a social systems scientist, futurist, cultural historian, attorney, consultant, speaker, and author of many books, including The Chalice and the Blade and The Real Wealth of Nations, about how to construct a more equitable, sustainable and less violent world based on partnership rather than domination.
Navigating the Great Unraveling with Resilience
In this episode, we chat with Asher Miller and Rob Dietz of the Post Carbon Institute about their latest report "Welcome to the Great Unraveling", which explores ways to navigate the environmental and social breakdown resulting from multiple intersecting crises.
Phoenix Rising: Pathways toward Animal and Human Liberation
Dr. Hope Ferdowsian, president of Phoenix Zones Initiative and a public health physician, discusses how she and her colleagues are working to dismantle the roots of oppression, exploitation, and domination harming humans and non-humans, and how we can cultivate the strength and resilience needed to facilitate that “phoenix effect” transformation for ourselves and for those in need.
Confronting Overshoot: Changing the Story of Human Exceptionalism
We chat with population ecologist, originator of “ecological footprint”, and one of the world’s best big-picture ecological thinkers, Dr. Bill Rees. Bill explains how our blind faith in human exceptionalism, technological optimism, and neoliberal economics fooled us into disregarding ecological limits and brought us into a state of extreme overshoot. How can we confront this reality, in which we are degrading the biophysical basis of existence, to prepare for a post-industrial world?
Population Growth, Modern Slavery, and Ecocide
Dr. Kevin Bales, world-renowned expert on contemporary global slavery, shines a light on the human rights violations and ecocidal impacts of modern day slavery, and the role that population growth, patriarchal pronatalism, religion, political regimes, global and local economies, and conflict play in perpetuating it.
Wellbeing Economy: An Economy in Service of Life
What happens when we stop treating people and the planet like they're here to serve the economy and start treating the economy like it's here to serve us? Amanda Janoo, Economics and Policy Lead at the Wellbeing Economy Alliance unpacks the fundamentals behind the Wellbeing Economy.
How Free-Market Fundamentalism Fuels Population Denialism & Undermines Democracy
Naomi Oreskes, a world-renowned earth scientist, historian and public speaker explains how free-market fundamentalism has had a long history of undermining democracy and exploiting marginalized communities to benefit a small minority of elites.
Patriarchy, Motherhood, and the Search for Meaning
Dr. Amrita Nandy, India-based feminist scholar addresses the questions: If autonomy is a basic human right, why do many women have little or no choice when it comes to motherhood? Do women know they have a choice? And how might we reimagine the widest sense of family-making and spiritual kinship that includes our love for all humans and more-than-humans?
An OB-GYN Unpacks the “Biological Clock,” Abortion, & Medical Pronatalism
OB-GYN Dr. Kristyn Brandi unpacks the “biological clock”, medical pronatalism, & the state of abortion care in post-Roe America. We also discuss the history of reproductive control & why understanding Critical Race Theory (CRT), Reproductive Justice (RJ), & pronatalism, is essential to justice & sustainability.
The Social and Ecological Costs of Population Denialism | In memory of Haydn Washington
Dr. Helen Kopnina pays tribute to late Dr. Hadyn Washington and his uncompromising commitment to sustainability and justice. She also discusses her personal introduction to an eco-centric worldview through nature’s healing power, as well as the social and ecological costs of population denialism.
Accounting for Nature: The Economics of Biodiversity
Sir Partha Dasgupta takes us on a journey on how the current growth-based economic models came to be, and why their Nature-destructive policies have turned our planet into a house of cards. We unpack his most recent publication UK government-commissioned publication, The Economics of Biodiversity.
Embracing Limits With Ecospheric Grace
Author Robert Jensen discusses his latest book An Inconvenient Apocalypse that he co-authored with The Land Institute’s co-founder Wes Jackson, about the need to grapple with difficult questions and to consciously embrace limits, as a pathway to a more graceful and meaningful co-existence with Nature.
Soap Operas For Social Justice
Bill Ryerson, founder of one of the most effective sustainable population organizations in the world—Population Media Center, discusses the educational entertainment that his organization has used to promote important social and cultural changes that have helped 500 million people in over 50 countries.
A Profound Vision For An Ecological Civilization
Dr. Eileen Crist—a deep, profound, and compassionate systems thinker—shines a light on the worldview of human supremacy that foregrounds our relationship of dominion towards non-human animals and all of nature, and offers a vision for cultivating a more indigenous-inspired identity as Earthlings.
Cops, Cabbages, and Thailand’s Mr. Condom
Affectionately known in Thailand as “Mr. Condom,” multiple award-winning health advocate Mechai Viravaidya discusses how, by using creativity and humor, he championed the most successful family-planning, AIDS prevention, and poverty reduction programs ever known.
The Unique Challenges of Being Black and Childfree
Dr. Kimya Nuru Dennis discusses her research on the Black childfree diaspora in countries around the world. We also touch upon the role that patriarchy and male domination plays in the relative powerlessness of women to take control over their reproduction, especially in BIPOC and LGBTQIA communities.