Sex, Religion, Politics and Overpopulation
The solution to the human overpopulation crisis is quite beautiful. It means less childhood poverty, parents who aren’t exhausted, and children receiving ample parental attention. Families can afford nutritious food, health care and educational opportunities - and the planet can meet our needs long into the future. In part two of our conversation with Christopher Tucker, author of A Planet of 3 Billion, we continue exploring how to make the “uncomfortable” conversation about overpopulation more comfortable. One thing is certain: We’re keeping up the conversation, because the more we discuss it, the less uncomfortable the conversations.
We also explore how the solution to human overpopulation can play out. Tucker explains that we have no choice; we absolutely must figure out how to run a prosperous global economy under continuous population decline. “If we just make the moral choice, and be bold, I have no doubt in my mind we can bend the curve early, and save our planet and our species from annihilation.”
Christopher Tucker is chairman of the American Geographical Society, and strategic advisor to the US national security community. He holds a BA, MA, and PhD from Columbia University. Chris serves on a number of boards including the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation and the Open Geospatial Consortium.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
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Chris Tucker 0:00
One thing that we were told growing up is you never talk about sex, politics, or religion in polite company. You don't do it. And weirdly, population kind of typically touches upon all three and a few more.
Dave Gardner 0:14
Sex, religion, and politics. No wonder this podcast is so exciting.
Nandita Bajaj 0:18
Those are the words of Christopher Tucker, author of A Planet of 3 Billion, Mapping Humanity's Long History of Ecological Destruction, and Finding Our Way to a Resilient Future. We'll continue our conversation with Chris next on the Overpopulation Podcast.
Dave Gardner 0:43
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast, the podcast exploring the most important decision we make in our lives, choosing a bleak or a beautiful future. I'm your co-host, Dave Gardner, Executive Director of World Population Balance.
Nandita Bajaj 0:56
And I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the Overpopulation Podcast. If you're new to this subject, or just otherwise interested in learning more, there's a wealth of information on our website, worldpopulationbalance.org. Dave, do we have anything interesting in the inbox today?
Dave Gardner 1:11
As a matter of fact, yes, we do. You know, our last episode generated the email that I'd like to share today. It's from Robert in Santa Barbara, California. And he wrote this email about that episode of the podcast, which was part one of our conversation with Chris Tucker. Just wanted to compliment you on the exquisite podcast episode fifty-seven, How Many of Us Can Earth Support? You make this depressing topic not only entertaining, but even sprinkled with hilarity, which was a pleasant surprise. Great job. Looking forward to episode fifty-eight. Oh, and more kudos to Chris on his A Planet of 3 Billion. I finished it a couple of weeks ago, and have been spewing knowledgeable factoids ever since to whoever would listen, whether they wanted to or not. Thanks again for writing it. You know, Nandita, this is another email from a, you know, a somewhat famous person. That's Robert Johnson, and he is a Hollywood screenwriter and author of an interesting novel that's sitting on my bedside table right now called The Culling, which, as a matter of fact, is about human overpopulation. So it's a little extra feather in our cap to get these complimentary words from a screenwriter, I think.
Nandita Bajaj 2:23
Oh, I'd love to get a copy of that.
Dave Gardner 2:25
I think we can probably arrange that. I'll put a link in the show notes if I can - oh, I'm going to read that on vacation because I insist on reading novels on vacation. Perfect, perfect novel treat. It is a little bit work but a little bit play. And then we'll be able to have him, once we've read the novel, we should have him as a guest on the podcast, I think.
Nandita Bajaj 2:43
Sounds great. Thanks, Robert, for writing to us. If you have any feedback or if there's a topic you would like us to address, write to us at podcast@worldpopulationbalance.org. Now, if you liked episode fifty-seven, you'll love this one. Our conversation continues with Chris Tucker, author of A Planet of 3 Billion.
Dave Gardner 3:03
Just a quick reminder, Christopher Tucker is Chairman of the American Geographical Society and a strategic adviser to the US National Security community. He holds three degrees a BA, MA, and PhD from Columbia University, and he serves on a number of boards including the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation and the Open Geospatial Consortium.
Nandita Bajaj 3:03
Wow, with a resume like that you'd think he might be a geek. But if you listen to our last episode, and you should, link in the show notes, you know Chris brings a lot of energy, knowledge, and optimism to the subject we call overpopulation. In part two of our conversation, we discuss the taboo on discussing overpopulation, or runaway population growth as Chris likes to call it. Chris and Dave also take on neoclassical economist and journalists, and we discuss his solution to the human overpopulation crisis.
Dave Gardner 3:58
Let's get to it.
Nandita Bajaj 3:59
So, what I was going back to from the previous episode, was this conversation about the choice between bad versus worse. And currently, I think you spoke to it a little bit earlier, how the bad choice here for us is the difficulty in being able to talk about overpopulation.
Chris Tucker 4:19
Right.
Nandita Bajaj 4:20
There is a lot of denial, you know, you even mentioned population policy. It's a difficult word to talk about because people automatically jump to-
Chris Tucker 4:30
One-child policy in China, yeah, exactly.
Nandita Bajaj 4:32
Exactly. Exploitative policies that have taken advantage of the most disenfranchised people.
Chris Tucker 4:39
Right.
Nandita Bajaj 4:40
But that's not where we are now. And the worse of the choice out of the two is the predicament we'll put ourselves in if we don't talk about it now.
Chris Tucker 4:50
That's right.
Nandita Bajaj 4:50
So where am I going with this?
Chris Tucker 4:53
Well, do you mind if I throw something out there? I mean, I grew up in the American South in the seventies and eighties. Sweet tea, lots of church, everybody's polite. And one thing that we were told growing up is you never talk about sex, politics, or religion in polite company. You don't do it. And weirdly, population kind of typically touches upon all three and a few more. So the notion that like where I grew up, I mean, they're not ignoring population, they're ignoring uncomfortable conversations, you know, and, and that's just one of a long list of things they're not talking about because it's just, you don't talk about in polite company. And so, you know, I think a lot of the ignoring population isn't ignoring population, it's ignoring uncomfortable things in general. And I think part of it is how it was framed, you know, mid-century, how it was framed in the seventies. And then with kind of the, I'd call it the more progressive folks in later years are like, "Wait a minute, you know, like, I don't want to tell people on the other side of the world who I respect, you know, I respect their culture, I don't want to tell them what they must do, who am I to tell them that?" So I feel like the discomfort has actually spanned the political spectrum in weird sorts of ways. And each country, like the debate in England is different from the US, different from where it is in India, different from what it is in different East Asian countries and South America. So I'd say what's common is that there is a taboo, but the nature of the taboo is actually a little bit different in each place. So yeah, I agree, right? If we're choosing between bad and worse right now, the bad thing we have to do is engage in an uncomfortable conversation. Oh no, guess what? It's either that uncomfortable conversation or a much more uncomfortable conversation coming very soon. And so when I phrase it that way, people go, "I'll choose bad over worse anytime. Okay, let's have the conversation." And then that's, that's how I just like to frame it. And then the good news, you know, I often have this slide in my talk that is a black and white outline of Rosie the Riveter with her arm flexed. And they put that up, and immediately the tone in the room changes because I've just been telling them about how humanity is destroying the planet and I put up Rosie the Riveter. And they're like, "Wait, is there good news coming? Like what?" And and I point out, you know, then every geography where women are empowered, educated, integrated in the workforce, and have access to family planning technologies in genuine ways, you have below replacement value fertility. All the sudden, I start getting like, you know, clapping and whistling and yeehawing from, not only the women in the room, but the men also. And so, I think part of the debate is it's such a burden in so many ways and it's such a bummer, it's such a downer, and it's so impolite in historical frame that, you know, the more we front-end the discussion around empowerment of women and girls, particularly now, maybe in 2020, it wasn't, we weren't as awoken to those set of issues, but I think right now, humanity's ready for that. Ah man, it's couldn't be a second earlier or later because we'd be completely screwed. So to me, like, I like to front-end the conversation of, "I would like to avoid ecological annihilation of our planet through the empowerment of women and girls." Everybody's like, "What's the connection? Can you walk me through that?" And then you just immediately go in there. And so, increasingly, I'm finding that in my popular discussions, I may ask the question, "How many people can Earth support?" And I may, kind of, tell that, but I don't dwell on runaway population growth as much in my personal discussions, though I think the term runaway is critically important for people to understand. Instead, you know, what I'm really trying to get people to focus on is the importance of small, educated, and prosperous families. If you are able to, fortunate enough to build a small, educated family, it's more likely to be prosperous. And the more the smarter, the more educated and prosperous family are, the smaller they are, the smaller they are, the more likely you can afford education. It's just this virtuous circle. And I think there's a lot of attention being paid to this, including places like the Catholic Church that historically, you may say, that's not how they're thinking, but people appreciate that small, educated, prosperous families will be able to commit to deliberate action about the wellbeing of their community and their planet. And large families that are uneducated, that aren't prosperous, they don't have the control over their fate, they don't have the control over their ability to make deliberate decisions about what their impact will be on the planet. But that fertility norm of those large families, you know, every culture has had it. America, we used to generate eleven kids per family in Minnesota, right? And that was only two generations ago. So the notion that it's a Western thing versus an African thing, that is simply not true. Anyone who says it is unaware of their own history. It's often just an agricultural thing versus an urban thing. And we all know that the inevitable trend now is towards urbanization all across the world. By 2050, more than 75% of the world's population will be urban. And I think one of the biggest challenges we have is, whenever people urbanize, the shift in the fertility norm often lags by one generation, right? So you had Italians that moved to New York City and they had a ton of kids - for one generation. The next generation's like, "Yeah, that was crazy. I think I'll have four kids," and now they're having like one, and I'm not picking on Italians, and just picking an example from the United States, right? So when you look around the rest of the world, you have subsistence farmers that have large number of children because it's the norm. They don't have access to family planning, women do not have any bodily autonomy, but also those children are essential to the wellbeing of their agricultural economy. And with progress, there's less infant mortality, so even fewer children die. But those families, many of them are going to move to a city, and in that next generation, they're probably going to have like seven to nine kids again. And if you can short circuit that one generation shift, where you norm shift as people move into the cities, I think it is more than feasible to hit a 1.5. TFR by 2030 and completely reverse the kind of runaway, unmanageable trends that we have beyond population, carbon, ecological destruction, etc.
Dave Gardner 11:09
Hey, Nandita, I think he can hear us talking about him but I'm going to talk about him anyway. I'm sitting here thinking that as a sustainable population activist, I studied under Bill Maher and George Carlin, and I think Chris Tucker took the Dale Carnegie course. Chris, Chris, know you're really making good sense and saying it very well. So thank you for that.
Chris Tucker 11:35
Okay, I'll take all that as a compliment. I'm not sure what to do with it. But, you know, look. People often ask me, they go, "Are you an optimist or are you a pessimist?" And I say, "I'm neither, I'm a complete and utter opportunist." And it doesn't matter what part of my life it is, in my business life or, you know, some nonprofit - every day is filled with opportunities, and it's my job to aggressively go after and seize those opportunities to advantage my family, my business, you know, whatever it is. Every single day, all of us have an opportunity that we can all individually seize that would bend the global population curve immediately and save our planet from annihilation. Every single day! But we treat these things as these inexorable, exogenous forces. Demographers always do that, they go, "I don't know, population is gonna go kind of like this? It's just gonna keep on going to eleven million." Like, why are you treating it like it's an external force handed to you when it's just people making choices. And I believe that so many of the intellectual disciplines that have grappled with this issue have abdicated their moral responsibility to impress upon us our moral opportunity to deal with the biggest issues facing our planet and our species. It's an opportunity every day for every one to actually solve this. Small changes to a complex system have profound impacts, right? Major changes can come from, instead of, on average choosing two to three kids, choosing one to two. We will be below 2.1 fertility rate which is break-even fertility. And we're already at 2.45. It's not like we're at twelve and we've got to get to negative twelve. We've got to go from 2.45 to below 2.1. And I would argue if we went to 1.5, right, less than a one point change, we would be able to bring that curve down so quickly, that we would really have a chance to work down that ecological debt, rewild, do all the things we have to do to give our planet - our planet wants to bounce back, right? When you pull humans out of the equation, the planet does a remarkable job of bouncing back. But we have to give it a shot and be really thoughtful, strategic, and deliberate about it.
Dave Gardner 13:45
Too true.
Nandita Bajaj 13:46
Yeah, and the one thing I would add is, overpopulation is obviously a problem. But as you already mentioned in the previous episode, it's not just about the numbers, it's also about how we're consuming.
Chris Tucker 13:57
Oh totally.
Nandita Bajaj 13:57
So as you know, a lot of the work that we do here with World Population Balance is trying to raise awareness about our footprint here in industrialized countries.
Chris Tucker 14:07
Absolutely.
Nandita Bajaj 14:08
And that the overpopulation issue is not just something that's in developing countries, it's something that we're suffering from here in the US and Canada.
Chris Tucker 14:17
Yeah.
Nandita Bajaj 14:18
That's where I am. And we're also trying to raise awareness about having smaller families here because of the disproportionately large footprint of a child born here versus a child born in a developing country.
Chris Tucker 14:30
That's right.
Nandita Bajaj 14:31
And I wonder if the P3B, the Planet 3 Billion campaign, talks about that, you know, the work of overpopulation activists in both developing and industrialized countries.
Chris Tucker 14:44
Yeah, for sure. And I will never, ever diminish the problem of consumption. Certainly developed world's consumption patterns are ridiculous, and I resemble that remark. I mean, we do our best around this household and I look around everyday like, "How can one family generate that much garbage?" And we compost, we do everything. And it's still utterly ridiculous. But it's baked into the very fabric of our landscape and how we've designed our society. So you can either escape your entire society somehow, or you're somehow complicit in the consumption and waste model of your society. So it's tough, right? But I will say, I mean, the reason I focus, when people say, "It's population and consumption," to which I say, "You're absolutely right," but then there's a set of people that say, "But we don't want to talk about population because that'll take the focus off consumption." And I'm like, "Okay. So does a family of nine in your country consume more or less than a family of two in your country?" To which they go, "Got it, sorry." It's so easy to, and again, what is it in the developed world, you know, as an individual, like my carbon footprint's like ten times worse than somebody in the developing world, I get it and it's horrible, and we need to be taking strategic, thoughtful action on that. But to silence the population debate means that in every country, they could end up having five times worse, if you have a family of six instead of family of two kids, right? That's three times bigger footprint, even though it's at your national scale. So we all have something to contribute on that. The other thing I like to point out is, in the developing world, if you look at the trends between now and 2030, the billions of people that are moving into the global middle class, which is a great thing, right? We've invested, were doing our best through trade and economic development, and all these things, education, that's going to happen. What are their footprints going to look like? They're gonna look increasingly like ours. As Kishore Mahbubani said, you know, in one of his books, and he's like, you know, he grew up watching Americans on TV, he wanted everything they had on TV. So when he grew up in India, he's like, and then he just started buying everything he saw on TV. So like, we have to think about that next generation in the developing world that's going to join the global middle class and their consumption model. But guess what? We can also have fewer people every year, if we just bent the fertility curve, and reduce our consumption at the same time. And what I always like to point out is, even if the day we have one fewer person on the on the planet, it won't solve our problem because of the amount of ecological debt that we've produced, and the surplus debt that we accumulate every year. So we actually have to be below three billion in order to work down that ecological debt. So we've got decades before we can even really get in front of ecological destruction that we as, as a society have created. Not sure if I answered your question, I just went on a rant there.
Nandita Bajaj 17:35
No, no, I think we're in agreement with each other. I was, I wasn't saying that we need to silence the debate on population to bring more emphasis on consumption. I'm saying we need to bring the debate on, not the debate, we don't actually need to have a debate, we need to bring the emphasis on population and consumption here and everywhere.
Chris Tucker 17:55
You know, I think, I don't know if you saw it back in November of 2019, the Global Scientists Warning on Climate Change article in Bioscience. And that was first time I've seen, you may have seen it before, but they picked six things that humanity needs to do in order to avert climate catastrophe. And number six, for the first time, was stabilize world population and have it decrease in an orderly, ethical, you know, kind of way. And that was the first time I had really seen in the mainstream climate debates that it wasn't just about consumption. And they had consumption in there, right? Because you cannot get rid of consumption. But you put the two together. And so that gave me a lot of hope that I think now fourteen thousand scientists have signed on to that article. And so I'm waiting for kind of mainstream climate action community to say, "Hey, they're right. 110% right on consumption and they're 110% right on population." And when the debate shifts in the climate action community around that, I think it'll be great. It's already shifted in the conservation community. The IUCN passed a motion in the fall for rights-based family planning. The international conservation organization did that. So I feel the momentum. But I think everybody has to keep the steady drumbeat to keep it going.
Dave Gardner 19:12
Yeah, we've still got some work to do because there's still a strong effort to cancel the conversation.
Chris Tucker 19:17
Yeah, yeah. There will be.
Dave Gardner 19:19
So you mentioned in the book that neoclassical economists are going to be one of the biggest roadblocks. Why is that?
Chris Tucker 19:26
So my dissertation advisor, one of them, was an economist. But he was, I guess you'd call him a heterodox economist, he was about the evolutionary economics and economics of technical change. And what I experienced with neoclassical economics, and I think it's well established, right, is so many of their concepts, particularly in macroeconomics, they are just baked-in assumptions about population, right? You go, "Well, why do you have that accelerator?" "Yeah, well, you know because like, things just keep growing, right? Just put a population thing in there." I'm like, "Well, but isn't that malleable?" They go, "Nope, nope, just put whatever." I remember, it used to be like in the nineties, "Just put 3% in there." I'm like, "That's crazy. Like, why would we do that? Shouldn't, isn't there a data table of actual population-" "Nope, just put in 3%, you're fine." And, but the entire thing was premised upon continuous annual growth. And they recognize that population and technical change are two of the biggest things driving growth. And so when I really started grappling with this in the book, I felt the need to write a chapter on what I called Reimagining Economics for an Era of Degrowth. And a lot of people call for degrowth, and I took a different approach. What I said was, "You're going to have degrowth, whether it's in 2064 when we peak at 9.7 billion, or whether we bend the curve in 2030 the way I'm advocating, every year after that, there will be fewer people on the planet." The same way every year, for many years, there's been fewer people in Japan. And Japan stopped really talking about GDP growth, which neoclassical economist, "It's got to be about GDP growth," they gave that up, and they talk a lot more about per capita GDP growth, right? And it turns out, Japan's doing great. I mean, you can have your criticism of Japan's economy or whatever. But compared to most of the world, Japan's doing great. And every year, they're losing people from their population. So when people say, "It can't be." You know, Steven Chu, the former Secretary of Energy, actually called capitalism a Ponzi scheme. He quickly like, stopped talking about that. But it's like, look, if you predicate your economic model on continuous growth of human population, you're going to be sadly disappointed in 2064, or whenever, when population peaks and starts declining. So you know, we have to start thinking now - we need a few decades to actually figure out how to run a prosperous global economy under continuous population decline. And the reason I say that is it actually took us, humanity, economists, economic policy people, decades to understand how to grow economies reliably. It did. I mean, in the face of communism, post-World War II, the capitalists, you know, the economists who were trying to figure out how do I run a capitalist system that reliably delivers growth to developing economies around the world, if we can't do that we'll fail in the face of communism. The cultural project was to achieve economic growth, never really understanding that there's only so much natural capital, and once you chew through your natural capital, you're screwed. That was not part of the debate. So my kind of strawman of what I think that reimagined economics looks like, and there's major key assumptions in neoclassical economics that just have to be jettisoned, fundamentally jettisoned. And I'm willing to go to the mat. I'll arm wrestle any of those guys over that any day.
Dave Gardner 22:31
Well, and we're already seeing rising amounts of alarmism and what I'm calling depopulation panic.
Chris Tucker 22:37
Yeah.
Dave Gardner 22:37
From those growth-addicted economists.
Chris Tucker 22:40
Yeah, but hold on. You know, where I'm going to say is, I feel like it's, I'll blame the journalists and their editors who took like one macroeconomic class in college and became a journalist. And all your assumptions are based on that. And the, you know, so I would encourage journalists that are on the ecology beat and the climate beats and the developing world beats to jettison everything they learned and undergraduate macroeconomic class. There's some useful things in there, there's a conceptual toolbox, it is useful to take the class. But they use that as the premise of their article. I remember that breathless article in The New York Times about Japan's population declining and he was breathless. He was like, "Oh my god." I'm like, "Dude, have you been to Japan? Have you been to Japan? Like, why are you so breathless?"
Dave Gardner 23:25
Well, let's definitely lump the journalists in there with the neoclassical economists. But the journalists have been programmed from birth to believe in the universal goodness of everlasting growth.
Chris Tucker 23:34
Well, you know, I don't know. You think all those journalists took undergraduate macroeconomics and I think their editors work for corporations. Ah man, there's probably some truth in that, right? But honestly, I think there's a lot of people that are doing intellectually honest work in journalism, around ecology, around climate change, whatever. They just don't know that the assumptions they were handed aren't helping them communicate the magnitude and the nature of the threat to our species and our planet, even though that's what they're personally committed to.
Dave Gardner 24:06
Well, we are all for your 2030 plan. I mean, that is, thank you for articulating that. I'm just anticipating that that's going to be one of the big hurdles in the trying to retard us from making that progress is that all of these growth-addicted people, whether it's just from all of the social conditioning that they've gotten from the prior generations of journalists or the Economics 101 that they took in college.
Chris Tucker 24:31
Yeah.
Dave Gardner 24:32
You know, we've just got to deprogram all of them.
Chris Tucker 24:34
Yeah. No, you know, I think the inspiration is going to come from unlikely places. My favorite quote recently, and I am going to paraphrase it was from Malala. The Malala Fund recently received some funding from the Apple Climate Initiative. And I was like, "Okay, wait a minute, like that can't be." But the Apple Climate Initiative recognized that the empowerment of women and girls, their education, will reduce total fertility, and fewer people means lower carbon footprint. And I was reading the article like, "This can't be." And then middle of the article was a quote from Malala that said that flat out, so maybe I don't need, you know, climate activists. Maybe I'm just gonna listen to Malala from now on, because it turns out like she's dialed in on the heart of the issue. And places as prominent as Apple, right? Apple's Climate Initiative are investing in it. So again, back to reprogramming kind of the foundations and how they think about this stuff, I think that they can and should go back to pairing discussions about responsible population dynamics with centering the health and wellbeing of women and girls in their programs, recognizing that it's a new day and a new debate from what the foundation's funded forty, fifty years ago, right? And following the lead of Apple Climate Initiative, follow what Malala tells you and invest your money that way. And if only that guy would call me back with the number of how much money needs to be invested in women and girls to empower them to bend the global population group. And again, you know, the empowerment of women and girls is a good in and of itself, it's a moral good in and of itself. It just also happens to be the thing that's actually in keep us from annihilating our planet, which is good, also. But if we had that number, I actually have no doubt that Apple and its fair bank account offshore has enough money to do this. That's how simple this could be. But we still have some homework to do, we still have some math to put in front of people.
Nandita Bajaj 26:28
The last piece that I'd say is part of the homework that we also need to do is to maybe pull back from some of the population policies that are in place in our own governments that are doing more harm in, you know, funding baby bonuses and then, you know, sounding the alarm bells about depopulation. It's not just benign information that journalists are passing along. It's also governments are actively participating in in increasing our population, which, you know, is actually causing way more damage than some of the population control policies that have, you know, occurred in the past. But yeah, I completely agree with you with, you know, in terms of the empowerment messaging.
Chris Tucker 27:11
You know, I'm with you. I think there's a lot of benign, unintentional policy, as you say, kind of pronatalist, but they are not even doing it for that reason. It's like, "Of course, I'm gonna support people's kids, right?" And then there's kind of non-benign stuff. There are authoritarian regimes that are treating women and children badly for the purpose of population control focused on an ethnicity, focused on a political region. And we have to take that stuff seriously. So to wave it off, right, but to say that the only way to bend the global population curve is to embrace embrace the authoritarian or to, you know, have some sort of weird controls, I think, is an idea of the past that we have ample evidence that we don't need to embrace and there are very attractive alternatives sitting at our fingertips that if we just make the moral choice and be bold, I have no doubt in my mind we could bend the curve early and save our planet and our species from annihilation.
Dave Gardner 28:10
Well, Chris, I was going to gripe at you a little bit. But boy, you haven't given me anything to gripe about in the last these last two episodes.
Chris Tucker 28:16
Well, there you go.
Dave Gardner 28:17
Very well said, I think this is a good place to stop. I hope you might come back for a part three sometime this year, because I know-
Chris Tucker 28:24
Let's do it.
Dave Gardner 28:25
I know we talk about-
Chris Tucker 28:26
Let's do it, you send me the invite and I'm here for you. Any day.
Dave Gardner 28:29
Alright. Thanks so much.
Nandita Bajaj 28:30
Great to meet you.
Nandita Bajaj 28:32
What a fantastic conversation. I love the energy that Chris brought to this subject and the optimism as well.
Dave Gardner 28:40
Yeah, and I think he's a good ambassador for sustainable population advocacy. And that's so important, because I think that's a big part of the purpose of this podcast is to, hopefully we model for activists out there some good ways to talk about the subject. But for the most part, that's what we're all doing. We're all trying to figure out, we're trying to make sure that we're knowledgeable about it, and that we can speak well about it. And of course, also make sure that couples around the world get this information so they can make informed family sized decisions. I really liked the part of the conversation about the population taboo, the fact that Chris, you know, labeled it an uncomfortable conversation but that he would, when confronted with that by someone he was speaking to that he would say, "Well, yeah, it is an uncomfortable conversation. But which would you rather have? Would you rather have this slightly uncomfortable conversation?" We could call it, I would say, editorializing here, we could call it another Inconvenient Truth. "Or we could have a really uncomfortable conversation," which I assume he means about the end of human civilization.
Nandita Bajaj 29:45
Yeah. And I appreciated the emphasis he brought, you know, on strategy, like you spoke Dave. It's important to understand the cultural context we're working within, who we're speaking to about this, and what approach to bring to make the conversation accessible. Like he said, it's uncomfortable for so many different reasons. He spoke about sex, politics, and religion surrounding this very topic. And you can see, for many different cultures, the spectrum on discomfort lies somewhere in between, anywhere from the left to the right. So, you know, I've noticed even in my own conversations, for example, I'm very interested in animal advocacy, and when I'm speaking to the animal advocacy groups, I bring the conversation of overpopulation from the perspective of how it's impacting animals.
Dave Gardner 30:40
Sure, yeah, that makes perfect sense. You know, it was kind of neat how he talked about people kind of start to get depressed, he's talking about potentially destroying the planet. But then he shares with them the good news, he says, he mentioned Rosie the Riveter and that changes the tone of the room. And he goes into women's empowerment and access to family planning technologies. And he always gets a pretty positive reception to that. But that made me think, oh is he another one of these people who's going to advise us, "Don't talk about overpopulation because people don't want to talk about it. Just talk about women's empowerment, you know, the end is the same. So avoid the uncomfortable subject and we'll get there by beating around the bush." And as you probably know, if you've listened to more than, you know, ten minutes of any episode of the Overpopulation Podcast, I hate beating around the bush. I think this is Adult Swim. I think we need to confront the issue. But we do need to find good ways to approach the subject with other people. So I really liked his answer, which was, this isn't a code word and a way to beat around the bush, that we do need to include in the conversation the subject of, as he calls it, runaway population growth.
Nandita Bajaj 31:53
Yeah, I really appreciated that too. And the fact that not talking about overpopulation in this context, is actually getting in the way of real empowerment. And it can, you know, in itself be a violation of rights. Because when we start hiding behind words, then, you know, like we spoke about in the podcast, what happened with the Cairo Conference, a lot of aid gets redirected to a different cause rather than addressing family planning and addressing overpopulation.
Dave Gardner 32:27
You know, this isn't the first time you've mentioned that. I think this is really an interesting perspective you're bringing to the table. So I'm really looking forward to hearing more of your thoughts on that in future episodes. Thanks for bringing that up. Well, let's talk about the word overpopulation. Because I had heard Chris say on another podcast that he really doesn't like the word, you know, avoid the word. And so I confronted him on that in this conversation, and I liked his answer too. What did you think of his answer?
Nandita Bajaj 32:55
Very specific to his context, I liked that, you know, for different people, different words make sense. And he doesn't shy away from talking about population. He uses the word runaway population growth. But I think in essence, he is talking about the same thing. And if he is having better luck with his message landing with the audience he's working with, then great.
Dave Gardner 33:21
But that raises an interesting subject that I think is worth diving in a little bit to hear, and that is, well, do we take a lesson from that? Does that mean that we should reevaluate how we talk about the subject here? World population balance made a conscious decision several years ago, more than six years ago, I know that, to start using the word overpopulation. It wasn't used very much. And our sense is, it's really important to use that word because there was so much conversation about population growth and stopping population growth. And even today, Nandita, I know you hear it, see it, read it all the time about stabilizing human population. And when we are overpopulated, we are so far into overshoot that globally, we're almost at two planet living today. Stopping population growth doesn't solve the problem.
Nandita Bajaj 34:13
That's right.
Dave Gardner 34:13
You know, we need people to recognize that we went too far.
Nandita Bajaj 34:17
Yeah.
Dave Gardner 34:17
That we need to contract the population. And so overpopulation does the trick there, I think.
Nandita Bajaj 34:24
I like the word. It defines what it really is. We are overpopulation and even as his book defines it, if he's recommending three billion to be the optimal population, and we're at, you know, 7.8, we are grossly overpopulated. And I don't have an issue using that word.
Dave Gardner 34:44
So maybe when he speaks in front of a group, people are going to rush him at the end and ask for his autograph and give him hugs and kisses. And when you or I do that, we might not get that because we're going to use that word. Darn.
Nandita Bajaj 34:59
Maybe if we use the word in a really nice way.
Dave Gardner 35:03
I'm going to challenge you to - that's your assignment. Show us the way. Now one of one of my biggest pet peeves we got into also, which is people trying to silence the population debate because they say, "Well, that takes the focus off of overconsumption." And I was really glad that he latched on to that quickly. He knew exactly what the issue was and has a, has an issue with it just like we do.
Nandita Bajaj 35:28
No, I completely agree. I appreciate it. He's not posing it as a debate. It's not overconsumption versus overpopulation. We have spoken about this at length, if you missed an episode, we did a deep dive in podcast fifty-four on this.
Dave Gardner 35:44
Thanks for the reminder. Seems like we talk about it time and time again.
Nandita Bajaj 35:48
But yeah, I completely agree. Especially the point, you know, about the growing middle class in all of the developing countries, it's not really a matter of competing for attention.
Dave Gardner 36:00
Yeah. When you think about it, you got a population of India approaching one and a half billion, population of China about one and a half billion - there's three billion people right there who are in the midst of improving their lifestyles and I don't think anybody wants to tell them, "No, you need to remain poor." And the simple fact is that you can't take those three billion people and convert them into North American-style-
Nandita Bajaj 36:25
Yeah.
Dave Gardner 36:25
Overconsumers. Planet isn't going to accept that for, you can't have twenty-four hours of that I don't think.
Nandita Bajaj 36:31
Exactly.
Dave Gardner 36:32
Yeah, and most scientists would agree, I think. But Chris gave us a really great, I think this is a great tool to put in our toolbox. And this is something you can say to somebody who challenges you about that overconsumption. What he said was, he will just ask the person, "Does a family of nine in your country consume more or less than a family of two?"
Nandita Bajaj 36:51
A good reminder.
Dave Gardner 36:52
There you go. There you go. Glad to see that his assessment of the progress that we're making in this crusade to overcome, to diminish the population taboo, he sees signs of progress, as do I. So I was glad to get some validation of that.
Nandita Bajaj 37:08
Yeah, I agree. I really just, I enjoyed his optimism overall, around the whole subject.
Dave Gardner 37:13
Yeah, that I'm frequently not that optimistic. Like, I have a bone to pick with some optimists. But I think he's got the right kind of optimism. Oh, also good words when he described what happens if and when we do hit nine billion. You know, we're at 7.8 billion today and it's almost a fait accompli that we're going to hit nine billion. It's not totally baked into the cake, but with each day that we wait, we're getting closer to that being unavoidable. And his description will be in such ecological debt, that size, frequency, and probability of very bad things that kill lots and lots of people will go up. But that was well put.
Nandita Bajaj 37:53
Yeah. And, you know, to that point, it's not something that will happen. It's something that has already happened. It's something that is happening now in terms of irreversible damage to our ecology, to all of the hundreds of thousands of species that, you know, are gone forever. There is huge resource scarcity already happening in so many of the countries. You you look at the water crisis in, you know, Africa and Asia and Southeast Asia. Those are all signs of the very climate catastrophe that he's talking about.
Dave Gardner 38:28
Well, darn, that's a downer.
Nandita Bajaj 38:30
Sorry.
Dave Gardner 38:33
But that's where we're, that is, we're in the middle of heading there, that's for darn sure. Might want to take your foot off the accelerator pedal, huh? So I liked the fact that he, I think he devoted a chapter of the book to economists. And maybe neoclassical economists in particular. So I was looking forward to, at least the two of us, and probably the three of us, joining in hoisting neoclassical economists up on their petards. But it was interesting, he sort of, for some reason, wanted to maybe deflect a little bit of the blame to journalists. And I thought that was interesting, because I don't hear too many people sharing my consternation over the way these issues are reported in the media.
Nandita Bajaj 39:14
Yeah. And you rightfully mentioned the growth-addicted philosophy that everyone has grown up with. And that's the premise of most of their conversations and their articles. But also, it's not, I think we talked about it. It's not just benign stuff. This stuff has consequences in culture. It informs how people think, informs how governments think, and I think journalists are also very much picking up on conversations happening behind closed doors, or not closed doors, in, you know, policymaker's conversations around economic growth.
Dave Gardner 39:51
You know, and I just thought of this. I think this episode's going to come out just in time. I actually, I'm going to put a link in the show notes to the Intermountain Sustainability Summit because I am doing a presentation there on this journalism topic on March 18th. So look, if you're listening to this episode as soon as it gets published, it's not March 18th yet, or it's in the early in the morning, then look in the show notes, get a link and register for the day. It's really quite inexpensive, and you'll get to hear my presentation about what I think it is that keeps this growth imperative entrenched in our culture. And it's really all about the journalism, the stories that we're telling around the campfire.
Nandita Bajaj 40:32
Oh, that's great. I look forward to attending that.
Dave Gardner 40:35
Great.
Nandita Bajaj 40:36
Yes. And I also wanted to add a previous podcast, Jane O'Sullivan, when we had her, I think it was podcast fifty-five. She does a really good job taking on this depopulation, panic propaganda, and the, you know, eternal obsession with GDP growth. And, you know, she uses the analogy of increasing the size of the pie for GDP growth. And by bringing in more people or having more people, like by using population growth, and also looking at what that's doing to the individual size of the pie, the size is reducing, too. So the per capita GDP is not really going up, the quality of lives of people are not increasing by adding more people to the planet. It's quite the opposite you can argue, too, because it's increasing the external costs of, you know, increasing the population size.
Dave Gardner 41:35
Yeah. And there's probably, there's not going to be enough ice cream to have your pie à la mode.
Nandita Bajaj 41:39
Exactly.
Dave Gardner 41:42
I just felt a need to throw that in because apparently, we have some hilarity in this podcast. So I'm not sure there's enough hilarity this time. I don't think I did the trick there with that either.
Nandita Bajaj 41:56
I think you bring more of that than I do.
Dave Gardner 41:58
We need better writers. But you know, I think close to last on my list is I think really kind of the headline, which is his 2030 plan. I think this could be something we'll be talking about a lot in the future. What did you think about that?
Nandita Bajaj 42:10
Yeah, I mean, he made it sound quite simple, and achievable, which was a breath of fresh air. You know, he talks about lowering the curve or bending the curve from a fertility of 2.45 to an average fertility of 1.5, globally. And his plan is to have that achieved by 2030, which I think sounds incredible if we can do it.
Dave Gardner 42:36
Yeah. And you know, we're kind of getting used to having these, you know, shorter-term goals, you know, the conversations around climate change are frequently now about where do we need to be by 2025, or 2030, or 2050. So I think that's really taking advantage of just the mindset that we're in today. And as you know, the solution to overpopulation is voluntary, we just need really good information around the world, and maybe a little bit of inspiration. So I think a global campaign, or at least a global conversation, some global goals, you know, would help us to go far. And I think the, kind of the 2030 plan could be a good approach to that. You know, his his goal is getting fertility down to one and a half, which is more realistic than what we've been talking about a lot lately is one planet, one child, is that if we could get down to one child per family average that, you know, in less than a hundred years, we'd be back to the three billion that he talks about in that book. Take a little bit longer at one and a half, but I liked the way that he called it, instead of on average, choosing two to three kids, choosing one to two. Doesn't sound that hard.
Dave Gardner 42:59
Wouldn't it be incredible if we do start seeing goals like that put into like UN Millennium Goals or SDGs?
Dave Gardner 43:51
Dream on.
Nandita Bajaj 43:52
Just say, you know, 1.5 is our goal for 2030. And imagine how that would normalize the conversation around family planning. I think not talking about it simply perpetuates the taboo, which it's not supposed to be.
Dave Gardner 44:07
Yeah, we've been running away from it for three decades. And I mean, that is, you know, I hate to label it a pipedream, it's, it's hard to imagine the UN, you know, overcoming this huge inertia of really over-political correctness. You know, and really telling it like it is.
Nandita Bajaj 44:24
Yeah.
Dave Gardner 44:24
Saying, "You know what? We're done beating around the bush." It's amazing what we could accomplish.
Nandita Bajaj 44:28
Yeah. And also to his point of, instead of choosing two to three, choosing one to two, I would also add, you know, the responsibility on those of us who actually have authentic choice to make that choice. You know, in a lot of countries, for a lot of people, that choice does not exist.
Dave Gardner 44:44
Yeah.
Nandita Bajaj 44:44
He spoke to that, you know, with religion and patriarchy. The reproductive agency simply isn't there and that's where the work in empowering women is going to help bring that liberation towards the movement, but then, for those of us who have that choice here, I feel it's a responsibility to take that choice very seriously.
Dave Gardner 45:07
It is. Iit gets such short shrift, is this just not really discussed, except by us, the need to have women in the overdeveloped world, women and men, you know, fully informed about the human overpopulation crisis when they're making their family size decisions. And I can tell you that I, I live in a fairly affluent neighborhood in my community. I married into it, and I cannot tell you how many young people I am running into in this part of town who are, they're definitely educated, they're definitely empowered, and they're definitely having three, four, five, six kids - today. And I don't think they would be making those decisions if they were armed with all the facts about the future of those children.
Nandita Bajaj 45:56
I agree. Yeah, we really need to move the conversation away from overpopulation is a problem out there somewhere and not here. It very much as a problem here. You know, so I agree with you. We need to be addressing that issue, both of overconsumption and overpopulation everywhere.
Dave Gardner 46:16
Yeah, and what better way to end this episode?
Nandita Bajaj 46:18
That's it for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Thanks Dave, for your partnership on this episode, and for caring about the future wellbeing of all life on Earth.
Dave Gardner 46:28
Well, you're welcome and right back atcha. Visit worldpopulationbalance.org to learn more about how we can end world overpopulation. At the website, you can sign the Sustainable Population Pledge, listen to all our podcasts, get on our email list. You can become a supporting member - make a donation to support our vital work.
Nandita Bajaj 46:47
And you can also find us on Facebook and Twitter. Please write to us. We love hearing from you and we often share your thoughts on the podcast. You can write to us at podcast@worldpopulationbalance.org.
Dave Gardner 47:02
You can also recommend this episode or the whole podcast to friends, family, colleagues, journalists, economists, and elected representatives. And click subscribe or follow in your podcast app so you don't miss an episode. I'm on a roll still. I've got a quote to close this episode with. The goals we pursue are the seeds from which our future grows. This came from Mike Nickerson, a gentleman who I just have a lot of esteem for and he's a fellow Canadian, Nandita, lives in Ontario. He's not far, not far from you. His name is Mike Nickerson. He wrote a great book called Life, Money, and Illusion, and he's a big proponent of the More Fun, Less Stuff meme and Founder of the Seventh Generation Initiative. I'll include a link or two in the show notes so you can get better acquainted with Mike and his work.
Nandita Bajaj 47:52
I couldn't agree with that, the quote more fun, less stuff. I am very much a minimalist. We live a very minimalist lifestyle. And I cannot tell you how liberating it is to not have too many things and to not be driven by having more things. It truly is more fun.
Dave Gardner 48:13
Yep, well, you know what, I hear the cat here in my studio and I hear the dog and yours. It's definitely time to wrap this up, don't you think?
Nandita Bajaj 48:20
Our little guys need us.
Dave Gardner 48:22
I guess so. So until next time, we're Nandita Bajaj and Dave Gardner, reminding you that we know how to end overpopulation. Let's get on with it.
