The Toxification of Population Discourse: How Population Became a Dirty Word
When and why did population become a dirty word? And why are so many people shamed for advocating for population reduction? Despite innumerable scientific studies showing the impact of human overpopulation and overconsumption on mounting social and ecological catastrophes, including climate change, biodiversity destruction, ocean acidification, resource scarcity, and conflict, most policymakers, journalists, and academics are too afraid to discuss population. In this episode with political theorist and feminist scholar, Dr. Diana Coole, we unpack the history of the toxification of the population discourse over the last 30 years and the dire social and ecological consequences that this silencing has unleashed.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Diana Coole 0:00
I think population shaming is still the biggest deterrent for people to discuss any issue concerning overpopulation. And although it often comes up in more scientific reports, it's noticeable that policymakers virtually never take up this aspect or try to translate it into any concrete policies or statements. And I think it's because it's become actually shameful to even mention overpopulation. People feel embarrassed and humiliated, or made to feel that way in many cases.
Alan Ware 0:35
In this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast, we talk with political theorist and philosopher Dr. Diana Coole about her historical analysis of population denial over the past few decades in academia, mainstream media and the broader culture. And we explored the many ways that this population denial has greatly hindered humanity's ability to achieve ecological and social justice.
Nandita Bajaj 1:08
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast where we tirelessly make ecological overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right-sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 1:31
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance, the first and only nonprofit organization globally that draws the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, and ecological overshoot, and offers solutions to address their combined impacts on planet, people, and animals. And now on to today's guest. Diana Coole is currently professor emerita in political and social theory at Birkbeck University of London. Diana's long career has spanned the related fields of political theory, political sociology, and political philosophy.
Her research has consistently focused on the application of critical approaches to the deeper ideas and power relations that underlie political debate, such as in her landmark books, Women in Political Theory, Negativity and Politics, and the co-edited The New Materialisms. Since around 2010, Diana has been studying demography and applying her mode of critical analysis to a long standing interest in population questions. She has explored the issue firsthand in India, Australia, the US, and the UK. And she has subsequently revisited India on many occasions. Among publications that have followed are her book, Should We Control World Population?, and numerous articles such as "Reconstructing the Elderly, A Critical Analysis of Pensions and Population Policies in an Era of Demographic Aging", "Too Many Bodies? The Return and Disavowal of the Population Question", and "The Toxification of Population Discourse: a Genealogical Study".
Nandita Bajaj 3:10
Diana, it's so great to have you with us today. We've been very inspired by your prolific writing on many matters, such as feminism, political sociology, and the population debate. But we found your analysis of the phenomena of population denial absolutely brilliant and even paradigm shifting for us. Most of our listeners are quite aware that population is considered the third rail in any discussion of sustainability, especially among our peers who are liberal and left-leaning social justice advocates and environmentalists. And we're thrilled to have an expert like you, who can help us unpack the silencing and toxification of the population factor over the last several decades, which as you and we both recognize, has greatly contributed to the unraveling of enormous social and ecological degradation. Thank you so much for joining us, Diana. Welcome to our podcast.
Diana Coole 4:12
Thank you. It's great to be here.
Nandita Bajaj 4:14
And we'll begin with your 2012 paper titled "Too Many Bodies: the Return and Disavowal of the Population Question". And in this paper, you identify five different discourses that silence discussion on population, especially within the richer, industrialized countries. Let's start with the first of these called population shaming. What do you see as the history of population shaming? And where are we now?
Diana Coole 4:48
I think population shaming is still the biggest deterrent for people to discuss any issue concerning overpopulation. And although it often comes up in scientific reports, it's noticeable that policymakers virtually never take up this aspect or try to translate it into any concrete policies or statements. And I think it's because it's become actually shameful to even mention overpopulation. People feel embarrassed and humiliated, or are made to feel that way in many cases. And for a long time, I struggled to understand why that was. Because, for me, overpopulation was something that was always widely discussed. And it was very much an issue during the radical social movements of the 1970s when it was the radical progressive left and social movements that were really pioneering overpopulation and focusing very much on developed countries, where population growth was being coupled with rising consumer behavior, and a realization that environments were suffering major harm, and there was a significant problem. I think what really happened was the shift towards different perspectives among radical groups. For example, gender and race started to displace class. All those familiar structural analyses became more individualistic. And as that focus shifted, so the focus also shifted from population growth in developed countries to what was happening in developing countries, which were undergoing very rapid population growth, in some cases, particularly in Asia.
And from then on, the whole issue got caught up in questions of neo-colonialism. Poorer countries began to resent the rich, first world telling them that their populations were too big, blaming high fertility for poverty, which developing countries blamed on world trade inequalities and the capitalist system generally. And the whole issue became increasingly toxic, and then rebounded back on places like the US where people began to associate population reduction with eugenics programs that had been practiced in places like America and Sweden, even well into the 1960s. So I think the really crucial shift was when people started to ask, well, whose fertility is going to be controlled and which populations are becoming too numerous. And then some critics started to talk about a race panic that just as fertility rates were falling in developed countries, they were rising in developing countries, and the whole thing got caught up in a global north-south divide. So I think that's really, in very, very brief terms, the itinerary of population shaming. And I think, because today I would say post-colonial critiques are even more strong than they were before. And of course, there's the influence of neoliberalism, which is very, very hostile to any idea of limits to growth, in which the limits to population growth would be included. So population shaming, if anything I would say has become stronger.
Nandita Bajaj 8:29
That's definitely been the case in our own observations as well, where conversations have progressively become more and more reductionist, where this idea that reproductive behavior has any relationship to environmental degradation is seen as anathema, even among environmentalists.
Alan Ware 8:56
Well, the element of the shaming of western consumption often comes in among these critics, right, that don't even talk about population, look at your consumption. And even if we say, No, that's completely legitimate - of course, we wouldn't talk about overpopulation without talking about over consumption - they still assume automatically, we're not talking about consumption. So there's even people who might want to discuss this in a broader environmental context are pre-shamed. You know, there's self censure that happens very early in the process.
Diana Coole 9:31
I think that's absolutely right. I'm amazed how often I read that people who talk about population are just reductionist and they think that that's the sole cause of global environmental problems. And yet, I mean, it's incredibly rare, almost non-existent to find anybody who actually makes that claim. And I think the real crux of it is that population exacerbates consumerism, and every unsustainable act is multiplied by having more people. And although it's true that critics always say, Well, some people have bigger footprints than others, absolutely right, but even people with smaller footprints have aspirations to be wealthier. And sheer numbers are not good for biodiversity. Very few individuals, even in poor countries, don't have a huge impact on the planet and biodiversity. So I think it's really a specious argument.
Nandita Bajaj 10:31
Yeah, and I'd like to read a quote by an environmental writer and journalist, George Monbiot in the UK. In one of the articles from 2020 he writes, 'Population is where you go when you haven't thought your argument through. Population is where you go, when you don't have the guts to face the structural systemic causes of our predicament - inequality, oligarchic power, capitalism. Population is where you go when you want to kick down'. So this is a brutal statement of shaming population advocates, without really engaging at all and looking at, well, who are the people who are talking about population these days? I mean, of course, there are and there always will be people who have nefarious motives. But just guilt by association arguments are so weak and fruitless, because they are conversation stoppers. And it's interesting to me that people who are quite critical of inequality are unable to look at the history of inequality from the thousands of years of coercive ownership of girls and women and how reproduction has been seen as a means to a lot of patriarchal ends.
Diana Coole 11:57
I mean, I'm really sad about George Monbiot because he's one of the good guys in lots of other ways. And, of course, we need a critique of capitalism. But you know, I've been critiquing capitalism since I was a student, and where has it got us? All we've done is have more capitalism, less socialism, fewer alternatives. If we're going to wait to get rid of capitalism before we solve the environmental problem, I mean we're all going to be burnt to a crisp, because there is no evidence whatsoever, that making money, making profit is going to give way to more socially sustainable activities, or a different organization of the world. And we only have to look at COP28, which has just finished. You know, everybody's terribly excited, because finally they got people to say, well, we need to phase out fossil fuels now, in 2023. I mean, it seems extraordinary they could be enthusiastic about that. But also, it's just been a jamboree of petrochemical money, oligarchs, billionaires. You know, the whole thing is just a fiasco.
Nandita Bajaj 13:11
Yeah, totally agree.
Alan Ware 13:12
So the second silencing discourse of population skepticism, you mentioned in the papers, is based on the idea that population growth will level off this century and that there's basically nothing for us to worry about. And as you note, in the article, a lot of these population skeptics rely on demographic transition theory, which assumes that as countries get richer and more urbanized, they'll have smaller families. What would you say the population skeptics are getting wrong?
Diana Coole 13:39
Well, I think it's true that fertility is declining worldwide, not everywhere. I think one problem with transition theory is, although it's a brilliant theory, as a skeleton that explains what's happened to a lot of countries as their mortality rates have fallen, they've suffered from rapid population growth. And the assumption then is that fertility rates will fall correspondingly. Now, that has happened in many countries. It's true. But if we look at those places, for example, in Asia, which has seen massive tumbles, that was partly a result of very proactive public policies, which facilitated family planning and tried to reduce family size. Obviously, there's a lot of antipathy towards China's one child policy, but other countries from Iran to Thailand to Bangladesh, have not used coercion, but have used very strong public policies and cultural mechanisms as well as economic ones to persuade people to have fewer children. Now, if we give up on that, and it was in large part driven by demographic concerns, there's absolutely no guarantee that fertility rates will continue to fall.
Most population growth, which is another reason that the shaming discourse poses a lot of issues that are very important, but most population growth is going to occur in Sub-Saharan Africa. And the numbers are immense. The UN projects some countries having a five-fold increase in population numbers. And this is a very fragile part of the globe as far as climate change is concerned. So it's not in the interests of those countries to have massive population growth. But if we take our foot off the brake, I think there's a real danger that family planning will either go backwards, it won't be properly funded. And there's certainly a neoliberal argument that having large populations of workers is beneficial and to be youthful and dynamic is somehow going to put you ahead in the economic race. So I think the population skeptics are tending to actually promote forces that would undermine the claim that fertility decline is going to happen everywhere.
At the same time, the UN is suggesting that population will peak at around 10 and a half billion by the 2080s and continue at that rate, at least into the next century. I mean, that's around two and a half billion people more than we have today. It's another massive increase, and so if the world is struggling with 8 billion, think what it will be like with 10 and a half billion. I think the other side of population skepticism is not only a sense that, well, we don't need to worry about it anymore, because fertility rates are falling, but people on the political right who argue that, well, having more people is actually a benefit. Neoliberals always argue that well, more people will mean more inspiration, more technical skills, bigger markets, more consumers. It's good for the economy. And I think that's a really dangerous position. And we can certainly see across the world now, once fertility rates start to fall, governments are starting to promote pronatalist policies and trying to put in place regimes in which women are either pressured to have more children or certainly encouraged to do so. I mean, the way China's moved from a one to a two child policy, and then quickly, moving on, again, to encouraging people to have yet more children, it just seems crazy to me, particularly since these are in the late transition countries with big ecological per capita footprints. I actually think that we've lost the battle on trying to have population reduction policies and to talk about the virtues of having fewer people. But I do think there's an incredibly important political task ahead to challenge pronatalism and its assumptions, particularly from an environmental point of view.
Nandita Bajaj 18:02
Yeah, and what you say about the UN projections, you know that that's the medium level projection of 10 and a half billion, right. What's scary is, as you say, none of this is set in stone, even the medium level population projection. Their high level projection, which says if the total fertility rate increases by even 0.5, we can expect a population of 15 billion by the end of the century. And a point five reduction in TFR could get us down to around 6 billion. So this assumption that it's just gonna happen it seems so misdirected.
Diana Coole 18:48
Yeah and I think I mean, the UN makes the point that well, there's not much we could do anyway, with demographic policies because the people who are born, it's pretty much guaranteed that we're going to reach around nine and a half billion by the middle of the century. But then what they say which is really crucial is these are young people, and it's their fertility behavior in the second half of the century which is absolutely going to determine where population peaks and when. So, it seems to me that it's absolutely crucial that we should be targeting those young people, particularly in developing countries, which have a large youth bulge to really have access to family planning and to see the merits of having fewer children and small families. But of course, again, privatization policies under neoliberalism really work in the opposite direction. And because, as we're saying, the whole discourse seems to have changed, people are no longer thinking so much about the environmental problems of just having too many of us. And in fact, we're talking about whether we can hold the line at 10.4 billion by the end of the century. Virtually nobody's talking about the merits of having a much, much smaller population and how much more sustainable that would be.
Nandita Bajaj 20:09
Recent studies have even found this idea that economic development is needed in order to help with fertility decline has not been the case for most countries. We've seen data analysis recently from 136 developing countries that shows that falling fertility rates between 1970 to 2000, had actually little or no association with economic growth. Fertility rates fell, regardless of whether the economy grew, stagnated or declined. In fact, it was actually confronting patriarchal reproductive norms with direct norm-changing interventions, especially voluntary family planning programs, that had the greatest impact on fertility decline. So this idea has very much caught on I think, at an international level - that we need to grow and develop. And then something magical will just happen if people have cars and microwaves. They'll just have fewer kids.
Diana Coole 21:13
I think the irony is that a lot of people on the right talk about population limitation as coercive, and juxtapose that with free markets in which people make rational decisions to have fewer children. But of course, they make those decisions in many cases, because they simply can't afford to have children. It's not uncoercive. It's just that the coercion comes from the economic imperatives rather than from governments.
Nandita Bajaj 21:42
That's a great point, because it's basically tricking people into having fewer children by making child rearing, not economically feasible, right, instead of liberating them from reproductive social norms that are millennia old and don't hold any relevance today. So you describe a third silencing discourse, which is population declinism. You say it's more of a corollary to population skepticism. How would you define population declinism? And how is it different from skepticism?
Diana Coole 22:16
Right. Well, I think population declinism is very much a reflection of the demographic transition we were talking about, because in the final stage of demographic transition, once there's population aging, and it's kind of inevitable, because as the last high fertility cohort passes through the system, people get older. And there are more old people than young people and so on. And that's very much the situation, which is, I guess, testimony to the success of lower fertility regimes. As people have fewer children, obviously, there are smaller generations coming up. And as a legacy of, say, the baby boomers in the US or Europe, we find an unnaturally large proportion of people in the older age range. And this has been known about and anticipated for decades. As soon as fertility started to drop in the 1970s, it was known that there would be a large aging population. And, I have to say, I think a lot of the blame falls on governments which hadn't paid attention to their care systems and now have no way of dealing with older people. But I think it's also a problem of capitalism.
When I first started looking at feminism, it became clear that as the industrial revolution occurred, there was no way really that economists could accommodate the idea that some people were not economically active, and that women, while they were performing a necessary task of having children, had no way of supporting themselves and so there was a whole idea of the social wage and, of course, women were expected to marry and become men's dependents. And it's a bit the same with older people. If they're not working and economically active, then there's a kind of grudging sense that they have to have pensions. But nevertheless, they're seen as a burden on the economy. So the whole idea of population declinism, I think, arises from the idea that in these final stages of transition with a large aging population, there's a kind of mood of decline, and often, say international relations theorists will say, Oh, well, we can't any longer compete on the military stage with useful, large and growing populations, or economically, older people, I think tend to be rather risk averse, and really not embody that kind of go-getting taking risk behavior of younger people. So I think the thing about population decline is that it does point to a genuine challenge for countries as they move into transition. And it's not just anymore in the West.
There's places like China. Lots of countries are now aging. Just what are you going to do with this large, older population. And there are lots, I think, of positive progressive answers to that. But the declinists tend to be rather gloomy and just think, well, there's going to be relative decline in those countries. And, of course, the corollary of that is that they then want to boost their labor forces and try to increase the birth rate again, either through pronatalism, or through inward migration. What we've seen in the recent last decade or two is a lot of discussion about the so- called demographic dividend, which occurs once the large big cohort of young children turns into the working age population and having an age bulge in those sort of basically 20 to 65 year old groups is said to increase GDP massively. And I think people who make that argument don't realize this isn't necessarily a transitory phase of the transition, unless you're constantly going to be trying to get more and more people to service your older people. It would take a huge number of migrants or new births actually to raise the median age significantly during late transition.
But it's also the case that us baby boomers will be dying off soon. And then more equitable balance, I think, between young and old will occur and hopefully smaller populations in which they have more resources, right across the age spectrum, and some more imaginative ideas about how older people can contribute, but also perhaps different ideas about lifestyles and what actually matters. Because I think a lot of older people, once they retire and step off the treadmill, do recognize the importance of things like volunteering, gardening, lifestyle behavior that is very different from the ideal of the demographic dividend and market forces and constant competition and so on.
Alan Ware 27:18
You know we do hear some sane voices among population economists like Vegard Skirbekk that we talked to in an earlier podcast and some others adjacent to the mainstream kind of that talk about well, this is a fact that developing countries are aging and we need to adapt to it. But there's still an enormous left to right of center pushback on that. Within the US we have a lot of liberals, Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Yglesias arguing for a billion Americans. There's the Canada's century initiative, right, arguing for 100 million Canadians by 2100, and now they're 40 some million. Big Australia. So yeah, there is so much of this population declinist, depopulation kind of panic. But as you said, the demographic dividend that Korea and China and all these countries had when they had that python of working age people that was creating that growth, we all knew that python, it would move through and become an older age, population pyramid. But if you don't go through some of the pain of that, then you're left with a Ponzi scheme of demography, trying to keep that bottom of the pyramid filled up to support the top. And it just can't go on. Not to mention, of course, the ecological overshoot that these population declinists just seem completely oblivious to.
Diana Coole 28:45
Yeah, I think it's extraordinary the way that people can advocate more growth and more people without really looking at the sustainable question and not having a conception of a finite planet. I mean, we can see the evidence all around us. It's not as if it's just a theory. And for those of us who say live in London, well, across the whole of Britain, England is one of the world's most densely populated countries, and it's palpable. And even in Australia or the States we can see the issues of congestion, housing shortages. And it's, I think it's very noticeable when you visit developing countries, just blocks and blocks and blocks of high rises being constructed. Whether it's Saigon or Addis Ababa, or Mumbai, we're just paving over the whole planet in order to accommodate more people with higher demands. And yet, as you say, it seems to get such a little looking when it comes to demographic concerns. And I think one problem with the environmental argument is it's become so focused simply on the carbon economy and limiting greenhouse gases, whereas there's so many other different aspects of our existential crisis, which are driving the planet into complete catastrophe.
Alan Ware 30:14
How would you describe the fourth of the silencing discourses that you mentioned, population decomposing?
Diana Coole 30:21
I think this is more of a methodological aspect that I put into the analytical categories to cover everything. But I think demography itself, which has always been a very statistical science, but I think it's changed a lot, and really in tandem with the rise of neoliberal individualism. So instead of putting so much weight on the census, and on numbers, there's been a real shift, talking about the complexity of populations and all sorts of different trends like urbanization, or aging or religious choice, and so on and so forth. So it's been kind of diced and sliced in ways that make it very difficult to formulate a narrative of overpopulation. And people spend more time looking at micro-economic models, at little sub-trends. So I think that demography itself has shifted in a way that makes it more difficult to talk about these big macro demographic tendencies. Yeah, I can remember when people used to get terribly excited about the census results. And there was a huge debate in Britain, even under the last Labour government, about how terrible it would be if we got to 70 million and how are we going to try to stabilize populations. And yet, now, the numbers hardly get any mention at all.
Alan Ware 31:50
Yeah, you talk about demography being in service to economics, and political decision makers often in service to economics. So all of it becomes about economics in that sense, and demography seems to have been divorced from the ecological at some point along the line.
Nandita Bajaj 32:08
And your point about the delegitimization of numbers from demography really shows up in the more recent narrative from the United Nations Population Fund, which of course has been involved in silencing the discourse for about 30 years. But it's most recent report from this year, it celebrates the milestone of reaching 8 billion representing historic advances for humanity in medicine, science, health, agriculture and education and comes out and says population sizes are neither good nor bad. They're just neutral. And it's really bizarre the turn that the UN has taken and, I mean, it's bought completely into this market fundamentalist belief that development and economic growth is what's needed. And they not only ignored but they actually mockingly dismissed a lot of scientific literature showing what population growth is causing in terms of species decline and extinction, catastrophic climate change, resource scarcity, social degradation in many ways. And it was bizarre to see this kind of a turn coming from the one organization within the UN that is tasked with looking at population, I mean, they should just change their name.
Diana Coole 33:40
Somthing that I've never written about, because I think it's contentious and I've got no evidence, but I have a sense that as population discourse moves towards more religious cultures, I was thinking particularly about Catholic cultures, I mean I certainly don't think many of the feminists who were so critical of the population establishment in the 80s and 90s, I don't think they were Catholic, and they were very critical of the Vatican. But I think, having spent more time in Catholic countries, there is a kind of prolife, unspoken culture that people tend to buy into. I feel that's quite contrary perhaps, to the cultures that some of the people now who are involved with the UN and come from, but it's just a kind of vague, intuitive sense that there's a different value put on human life, which isn't just about human rights, but actually is more celebratory about having more people. And of course, it's very difficult to see how that combines with being concerned with people's wellbeing in a planet undergoing such degradation.
Nandita Bajaj 34:51
I think that's what's contradictory about that celebratory tone, is because so much of the population growth that has happened, and that is in the pipeline, is a result of really outdated patriarchal and religious norms. There are practices of child marriage in a lot of the same countries that are seeing the largest rates of population growth. There's also the highest rates of extreme child poverty and child labor exploitation in the same countries. So it's this inability to make the connection between being alive and living well. And that is the most disappointing aspect of that turn of aligning itself with kind of a prolife agenda, but not really caring about the life that is born, soon afterwards born.
Diana Coole 35:55
Yeah, exactly. I mean, it just seems to me that the very idea of every child a wanted child, if we could get rid of the 40% of unplanned conceptions, if we did have such brilliant contraception, that as Bill Clinton said, abortion should be rare. No woman wants to have an abortion. It's a failure of either contraception or the fact that she's not had access to it at all. This is a very easy way that the conflict between pro and anti-abortionists in the US could be resolved, just by having really wonderful sex education and family planning regimes. But I don't think that the Right really wants that. And again, I do begin to suspect that somewhere there's a link between population declinism and entering the last stage of transition, and trying to put more coercive pressure on women to have more children so that the workforce will grow, And I think your point is really important. Why is it that feminists have been so hostile to reducing populations when pronatalism historically has just been so much more powerful and indeed continues to be so?
Nandita Bajaj 37:12
I think along those same lines, you talk about the silencing tactic of population fatalism, that it's just a given, that it's just going to happen. And I think, definitely the feminists that we're speaking about, and the UN buys into that very much, too. Can you elaborate on that last tactic?
Diana Coole 37:36
I mean, it was interesting to me, because I think there have been a lot of more scientific empirical studies in the last few years, which are aware of how challenging rising world population, particularly in terms of food production. So they have been citing UN projections saying, Look, this presents us with enormous challenges, this isn't a good thing. And yet, they also have tried to find technological solutions, rather than actually saying, well, perhaps we need fewer people. So I think, for example, that when it comes to food production, there's been a lot of discussion about a second green revolution. Now, the problem with the first Green Revolution was, it was always seen by its founders as a stop gap, while population level was brought under control. But now we can see decades later, the terrible environmental side effects of that revolution in terms of falling groundwater, polluted soils, over-reliance on fertilizers, and so on. So the idea we can keep ratcheting up the technology and somehow keep getting more and more food out of the resources that we have I think is just a delusion.
Nandita Bajaj 38:52
Yeah, I mean, to your point, the IPCC's climate mitigation report of 2022, identified several times repeatedly that population growth and growth in economic activity were the largest contributors to climate change over the last decade. Yet, when it came time to solutions and the report that they published for policymakers, which is an abridged version, there was absolutely no mention of family planning solutions, or even the word population actually. They went to a lot of these cornucopian technological innovations as the response to climate mitigation. So you can see, even at top level scientific organizations, there is this self censorship happening. I know one of our previous guests, Dr. Camilo Mora, he talked about a lot of people within academia who are aware and willing to acknowledge that population is an issue, absolutely refuse to co-author papers because of career implications for them to be aligned with the population reduction agenda. So it's, it's a really sad state of affairs.
Diana Coole 40:12
It is. And I guess that brings us full circle to the population shaming, because I think it is quite dangerous to, in a political context, to advocate any of these measures, whereas I think scientists to some extent can get away with at least citing the problem, but there's lots of really good studies about how various crucial systems are collapsing. And they have no hesitancy in pointing to population as one of the issues. And I do think an honorable mention is deserved by the Royal Society's "People and the Planet", which is much more aligned actually, with limits to growth. And I think, again, we saw right back in the early 70s, the forces aligned against the Limits to Growth whose data is actually spot on, you know. The model has been tested by real data. It's clear that what they projected is actually very close to what happened, but there were so many forces aligned against the way they problematized both consumption and population and talked about a finite planet. So I do think ultimately a lot of this comes back to politics and the discursive weight of different actors which rise and fall within these policymaking regimes.
Alan Ware 41:34
Yeah, you wrote another excellent article titled, "Detoxification of Population Discourse: A Genealogical Study" that looked at how that global conversation at the highest level became increasingly taboo over the decades of the 70s 80s and 90s, when there were three major Population and Development conferences in Bucharest, 1974, Mexico City in 1984, and Cairo in 1994. And as you've noted, discussion and understanding of that history is critical to better understanding where we've come to today on the whole discussion. So maybe we could do a quick overview of those three conferences, and we could weave in some of these silencing discourses which will pop up right throughout the 30 year history.
Diana Coole 42:23
Those three conferences are a real landmark in terms of what they represented in terms of real paradigm changes. So in 1974, it was the West that was concerned about population growth and the environment. And they were really on board with family planning. And this was where I don't think at that stage there seemed to have been much discussion about racism, and so on. But there was a lot of concern in the developing world, particularly in India, that they were somehow having population policies foisted on them by the West. So I think although India itself was concerned about its population growth, it did not want Americans going and telling them how they should run their affairs. And also that the Johnson administration used food aid as leverage to try to persuade the Indians to have more radical family planning programs. And I think a lot of their democracy was involved and genuinely very concerned about famine and hardship being caused by population growth in India. There was a perception that the West was simply using that as a quick fix, rather than deal with the inequalities of the world trade system. And so I think there was a much stronger Marxian tradition in the developing countries at that time, and a sense of structural inequalities, anti-capitalism, and those were the issues that those countries wanted to talk about, instead of which they felt that the West was blaming their large families for their own poverty. Obviously, it didn't go down well at all, and they rebelled against it.
But then, in 1984, famously, there was the whole volte face by the Americans, because Reagan was in the White House, and had developed a whole new discourse of the life of the unborn, and was obviously closer to evangelical Christians and making overtures towards the Vatican, which has always opposed contraception. And famously, the Americans now argued that on the one hand, as we were saying earlier, the enduring idea that population growth is neutral, that it can actually be beneficial for economic growth. And whereas demographers had argued that rapid population growth is detrimental to development, now they argued that No, it's not population growth that's the problem. It's socialist economies, and that if we just release free markets and individual initiative, countries will develop and grow. And the most famous aspect, of course, and its biggest legacy in 1984, was that the so-called gagging order meant that the Reagan White House removed funding from any institution which even supported abortion on principle, so many countries lost all the funding that they'd had, which had been quite significant from the Americans. And it completely changed the whole agenda, because now many of the developing countries had policies to reduce their numbers.
But the Americans were going off in a completely different direction, partly, I think, because of Cold War concerns. They thought, or they had thought earlier, that rapid population growth can destabilize the country and may drive it towards communism. But as the Cold War attenuated, the concern was much more on free markets and have people making rational choices in that context. So the Americans believed that population would fall because markets would exert pressure on people to have fewer children, because they were all rational choice calculators who would reason that it was too expensive to have big families. So, that was 1984. And I think that was really quite a shock, because people hadn't expected that about turn by the Americans. And it had real policy implications. And we've seen ever since, every time a Republican comes into the White House, they replace this taboo on supporting regimes that allow abortion. And every time a Democrat gets into the White House, they rescind it. And that's right up to Trump and Biden.
But meanwhile, in 1994, things changed again. And I think, to a large extent, because now NGOs were admitted into the conference. And so lots of new actors had a voice, and demands of the International Women's Movement become much more powerful. And as we've discussed before, many women within that movement were extremely hostile to what they called the population establishment, seeing it as coercing women, being responsible for compulsory sterilization and abortion. I think, again, a lot of it was part of a backlash against what had happened in India and during the state of emergency in the 70s. And so there was a huge constituency of people who were saying, Well, they're no better than the Vatican. These people who want to say they want to liberate women by family planning, they're actually meddling in women's reproductive rights and choices just as much as pronatalists. So there was a huge hostility towards anybody who even wanted to talk about population. The whole language was, in 1994, was about reproductive health, human rights, personal choices, people's right to have as many children as they wanted, people's right to have fertility treatments if they had fertility problems as much as having a right to limit their fertility. And I think that's where we've remained because there weren't any other big international population conferences after that. The so-called Cairo consensus has merely been reaffirmed every decade.
Alan Ware 48:35
And you've mentioned the need for a reappraisal of Cairo. What do you think that should look like, a reappraisal?
Diana Coole 48:41
Well, I think it's been quite a lot of discussion about that, and it's very difficult to challenge the so-called consensus. I mean, ironically, one of the things that was said to be a real path breaker at Cairo, was that there was more attention to the environment. But in fact, there was very little attention to the environment, not least because environmental conferences and population conferences had been split off in the 70s. And so every time something came up with the environment, the population conferences, kind of said, Oh, well, we'll let the environmentalists deal with that. And vice versa. So they were never talked about in conjunction. I mean, I looked very carefully at the action plan that came out of Cairo, and it's a lot more diverse than a so-called consensus would have one believe, because like all these big UN statements, they tend to take along older parts and voices of different constituencies which get carried along.
So for example, this one section, and it makes no sense unless one puts it in an Indian context where there's a huge attack on having demographic targets for reducing numbers. And yet, target setting has been absolutely central to policymaking in recent years across the world. So it's a kind of bizarre contextual thing that came about, because of a certain history. Again, the UN has never given up on its claim that rapid population growth is detrimental to development, because it harms people's ability to have good health and education and so on. And we see that even in the 2022 World Population Prospects. It's simply that it's been kind of downgraded and hidden.
But I think there are lots of resources in Cairo that one could focus on. And I think even in the context of Cairo, there were women who were very critical of the population establishment, but also recognized that neoliberalism was also very detrimental to women, that it was limiting their choices, that it was seeing them in much more instrumental ways. So I would like to think it would be possible to rebuild a different discourse among feminists, a more balanced one, because the issue of population control and coercion I mean, it's an old issue really. It's going back decades. And I think there's a lot of scope, particularly, I think by recognizing that women are also part of the environmental problem, that they suffer the consequences and their children often more than other people do. So this idea that seemed to get a hold among people like Betsy Hartman, but and many other critics, that talking about the environment was somehow a subterfuge to oppress women.
I think there are few people today that would not recognize that the environment is incredibly important, and it's incredibly important for women and their children. So I think there is much more scope there for a kind of rapprochement within feminist circles. And it would be nice to think that the abortion issue in the US was actually galvanizing a lot of women to realize just how important their rights to reproductive freedom, abortion, contraception are, and that they can't be taken for granted, and that the real threat comes from pronatalists on the Right.
Nandita Bajaj 52:12
Yeah, we're totally with you on on all of that. And you brought up the plan of action from 1994. And a core aspect of that, a statement that gets invoked a lot by the UNFPA is, you know, all couples and individuals have the basic right to decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing of the children and to have the information, education, and means to do so. That's a really great statement. But unfortunately, the word 'responsibly' absolutely does not get the kind of weight that it should be getting within that statement. It's simply become just 'freely'. But even the word 'freely' is misunderstood. Because how free are people's reproductive choices when you are not confronting the patriarchal norms within which they are being rehearsed? And responsibility toward the environment has been completely left out of the debate, as if a livable planet was not the premise upon which rights are exercised? You know, there are no human rights without an ecologically sustainable biosphere. So it seems really bizarre to separate the idea of rights from responsibility from the environment.
Diana Coole 53:43
Yeah, I totally agree. And again, one of the philosophers I really like is John Stuart Mill. And I think when he defined reproduction as an other-regarding act, that was exactly what was challenged by Reagan and his successors. Suddenly, reproduction became a self-regarding act. And when we look at people's children, you know, they're either an asset or a burden in society, but they certainly have a huge impact on society and the planet. So the idea that this is somehow a private choice, that doesn't affect other people, it doesn't bear any scrutiny whatsoever.
Nandita Bajaj 54:22
You know, while so many of the feminists and environmentalists have been busy silencing the population factor, the religious and market fundamentalists who are obsessed with growth, as you've so deeply spoken about, they've swooped in to fill that silence with a new kind of panic, the depopulation panic. We'd love to hear your thoughts on the resurgence of pronatalism, in response to this, and also, how has this also changed how the elderly are being viewed?
Diana Coole 54:53
Well, if we look at the history of capitalism, having more workers so you can generate more surplus value. I mean, that's an idea that goes back to Marx. And we can see how different populations have been drawn into that. First, it was able bodied men and children, and then we have a focus on women in the 70s coming. I think an argument could be made, although as a feminist I'd be reluctant to make it, but there's a lot of the reason that women were so successful in getting into the workforce in the 60s and 70s was that their labor was needed for postwar reconstruction. And I think, you know, we see the same thing with migrants that countries can no longer service their own needs. So they want to import migrants, which are much better really than having new people because they're already trained and somebody else has picked up the tab. And it's completely immoral, but that's the view.
But now we see older people, you know, the the raising of the pension age, more people being pushed into work at much later ages. So I think on the one hand, there's a kind of discourse that says we should value older people because they volunteer a lot. Many women, including many women I know, are doing a huge service looking after grandchildren so that their sons and daughters can go to work. So the elderly are being kind of brought in to supplement the workforce either directly or indirectly. But at the same time, there is a sense that, Well these old people, you know, they're such a drain on GDP in the context of more youthful countries where populations are growing. So I think there are different ways in which older people are being considered, none of them particularly beneficial for older people.
Nandita Bajaj 56:39
Yeah, I really liked that reframing of individuals at all age groups, but also, as you said, reframing them away from their productive value. I know you said that very quickly in passing, but I want to just address the depth of the point you made about women in the workforce and as a feminist, why - as much as that is a very positive value that's happened, that there is more gender equality in terms of women participating in the workforce - it's important to recognize the roots of that push. Even I hear that narrative so much in Japan and South Korea right now, is they both have declining populations, and the only way to fix the problem is more gender equality, not because gender equality is a good thing in and of itself, but because it can help women participate in the labor force more and increases the value of the economy. And so, as you said, it goes from exploitation of men for so long to now exploitation of women in an equal and equitable way, rather than just freeing people from the grip of economic indebtedness.
Diana Coole 58:01
But it's worse for women because they still have the main burden of domestic labor. They're raising children, many of them are looking after older parents at the same time. And so there's a huge burden for women. I definitely think that being able to work and have a career is very liberating. But it also, for many people, comes at a high price when they're supposed to fulfill all these roles.
Nandita Bajaj 58:26
Exactly. And how many people are really being allowed to pursue a career, right, rather than just working in meaningless jobs which is the reality for most people, and which is how I think it's being framed as labor force participation, right? It's just increasing the productivity by getting more people working. It doesn't matter if it brings them fulfillment. You know, I feel the same way as I'd rather not be doing anything but this career. I don't know how many people have that privilege. I think a lot of women, like you said, are experiencing the double burden of having to work just to meet survival needs for them and their families. And that's not a great feminist achievement I don't think.
Diana Coole 59:15
There are so many problems. I mean, it's hard to see how we can fix them all. And I have to say, I've become more pessimistic as times gone by, because I think the projections for environmental decay have just got very much worse. I mean, they're terrible. And yet so little real attention is paid to them. They're reported in the news one day and forgotten the next. But if we're really serious about seeing what's happening to our planet, then I think the future looks extremely bleak. So do you think there's still scope ready to get some traction on the population issue and make a difference?
Nandita Bajaj 59:51
I mean, we wouldn't be doing the work we're doing if we didn't think that was possible. Our target audience really is the feminists and people on the left and environmentalists who are already justice oriented, and to just help them see the sheer insanity of the silencing of this discourse. I mean, we get so many listeners who write to us who quietly acknowledge to us that we're equipping them with tools on how to talk about this subject to their colleagues and peers and friends in a way that doesn't automatically shut the conversation down. I think there are so many more people who believe this is an issue than they are given credit for, because they, they're not allowed to voice it publicly. And the loudest voices are the ones that are discrediting this. So we really do see our role as empowering the majority of the people who already see this as an issue to be able to speak up confidently about this and to change the narrative?
Diana Coole 1:01:04
Yeah, I think you're right.
Alan Ware 1:01:06
And just as I've been with Population Balance since 2008, I've seen the population declinist argument really increase, depopulation panic increase. So the pronatalism has really gone forward a lot in the last 15 years. So there'll be a lot of women who are in the US with the abortion ban who are very ready to push back against that pronatalism. But I think a lot of neoliberal centerists will be still pushing, probably increasingly, pronatalism. So I think we'll still have a bull market in pushing back against that. But I think the reality of the ecological situation will sink in, combined with a lot of women saying, Yeah, I'm not going to be your baby factory.
Diana Coole 1:01:55
Yeah, I hope so. I think one worry is that there's so many countries coming up behind now, which I came back from India, six months ago I was in West Bengal, and the speed at which roads are being built and airports and the pace of development. And I think it's a real tragedy that the West wasn't actually able to say don't follow our pathway to development through the industrial era, which countries say we've got a right to have our period of using fossil fuels, but couldn't have helped them to leap from that into a very different model of development. So yeah, I think it's been a real failure of imagination, and will, and perhaps political leadership that we haven't been able to help developing countries develop along different pathways.
Nandita Bajaj 1:02:58
Yeah, you're right. I think at this point, what you said at the beginning of the conversation, I think we've lost the fight, in terms of trying to avert a catastrophe. We're in the middle of a catastrophe. The last 30 years were decidedly the years of incredible population growth, a lot of decline in funding for population, family planning initiatives, and the acceleration of our catastrophic ecological and social crises. So I think now the work we're doing is looking at it from the perspective of minimizing further suffering, and preventing all of what you identified as unwanted, unplanned pregnancies, but also empowering people to see through the pronatalism. And to be able to reimagine life from a more liberated and responsible position reproductively and consumptively.
Well, this was an absolutely incredible conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us, but also investing so much time and doing what has been, as you described, a very controversial pathway, career-wise for you. You gave so many people within the movement, incredible tools to think through this in a really analytical and methodical way, to whatever degree, correct that path. Thank you so much. It was a wonderful conversation.
Alan Ware 1:04:26
Thank you.
Diana Coole 1:04:26
Thank you, it's been a real pleasure to talk to you.
Alan Ware 1:04:29
That's all for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit population balance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site, or by emailing us at podcast at populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and hope that you will consider a one time or recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj 1:04:59
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for your efforts in helping us all shrink toward abundance.
