The Environmental Impact of Overpopulation: The Ethics of Procreation
We chat with environmental and procreative ethicist Dr. Trevor Hedberg about his recent book The Environmental Impact of Overpopulation: The Ethics of Procreation, and the ethical implications of bringing new life into existence, both in terms of the risk of harm to which the child is subjected, but also the environmental impact that it has on the planet. We also discuss the role that pronatalism plays in influencing procreative decision-making, and why the right to found a family must be balanced with the rights of others to not be harmed, while also rejecting antinatalism and misanthropy. We conclude by discussing the moral imperative for population reduction in order to reduce unnecessary suffering to people and other species, and Dr. Hedberg shares some of his ideas on rights-based policy strategies.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Alan Ware 2:45
And now on to today's guest. Trevor Hedberg researches and teaches about issues in moral philosophy, particularly those in the areas of environmental ethics, bioethics, procreative ethics and the intersections of these subfields. He is the author of The Environmental Impact of Overpopulation: The Ethics of Procreation. His other published work in moral philosophy includes articles and book chapters on the moral status of animals, climate change, the ethics of lab grown meat, and the ethics of marketing to vulnerable populations. He joined the University of Arizona faculty in the fall of 2022. As a faculty member of the Honors College, his teaching focuses on courses on ethics, especially those that contribute to the future earth resilience and health and human values minor degree programs. And now on to today's interview.
Nandita Bajaj 3:36
Dr. Hedberg. It is so great to have you here today with us in the studio. We are excited to explore the ideas in your recently published book, The Environmental Impact of Overpopulation: The Ethics of Procreation, where you examine the link between population growth and environmental impact and explore the implications of this connection for the ethics of procreation. As an organization whose main pillars are procreative, social, and ecological justice, your work really resonated with us, and we're really happy to have you here. Thank you for joining us.
Trevor Hedberg 4:09
Yeah, I'm happy to be here. Nandita, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me about my work. I also think your organization is doing some really cool stuff.
Nandita Bajaj 4:17
Thank you. We can start actually right at the beginning of the book. You start your book by discussing the gravity of the population problem. And, in fact, your book title includes the environmental impact of overpopulation. While most of our listeners will be familiar with the environmental impacts associated with population, could you briefly share what you found in your own research?
Trevor Hedberg 4:40
Sure. So population growth is not necessarily bad in and of itself. Where it becomes problematic is how it multiplies other things that are bad. And so if we're talking about climate change, having say a billion people who are emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is bad. Having 8 billion, which is about the number we're at right now, makes the problem worse, right? If other things are held equal, if that group has the same average per capita greenhouse gas emissions as the smaller population, the larger population obviously have a much, much greater ecological impact. And that's true in a lot of different areas when we're talking about finite resources on the planet. If we're talking about carbon sinks that's one case. If we're talking about food in a region, or perhaps thinking a little more long term globally, the more people you have, the more strain there is on your agricultural system, the more food you have to produce to feed people. If we're talking about fresh water, the more people you have drawing on your local aquifers in a given region, the more stress on the aquifer, the more likely you are to overtax that aquifer to take water out of that area faster than nature can replenish that aquifer. And that pattern is repeated in a lot of cases. I think also that population is particularly relevant to species extinctions. A lot of conservation biologists speculate that we're in the midst of the sixth big mass extinction event, and the bulk of it is human driven. And the main drivers are largely tied to habitat destruction resulting not just from people needing physical space to live, but also in clearing away land to grow food. And the other big one is climate change, because a lot of stuff's interconnected and climate change is posing a real problem for species that are sensitive to various ecological niches as the temperature changes. Not all species are able to say, climb up a mountain to get to a colder temperature, or go towards the poles to get to, you know, not all species are able to migrate fast enough to get away from the warming temperatures. And so the result is that many of them get wiped out. That's not an exhaustive list. But those are the big ones that I mentioned in near the beginning of the book.
Nandita Bajaj 6:42
Yeah, thank you. That is a nice list. And as your response depicts, population itself may not be an issue, but it's a threat multiplier. And right now, given all of the different social and ecological threats we're facing, it's only exacerbating all those social and ecological crises. So yeah, thank you for that.
Alan Ware 7:02
So you state in the book that for those who genuinely view rearing biological children as a central aspect of their life plans, it's unreasonable to demand that they remain childless. But you also view the act of procreation as enormously consequential and an act that should require some kind of justification. And we agree with both of those statements. What kind of standards do you think people should use for justifying procreation? And why do you think most people don't meet that level of justification?
Trevor Hedberg 7:32
Yeah, so I think the most minimal requirement would have to meet is I think you would have to be reflective of the ethical dimensions of the decision. So I think the vast majority of procreative decisions that people make are done as a result of, say, social pressures or expectations, or because it's the natural or normal thing to do. I think there are some people who have thought about what it would mean to them for their life, and whether or not they'd be able to support the child and, you know, financially provide and meet those needs. But there's an ethical dimension to it as well. Bringing a new life into existence means subjecting that child to risk of harm. That's part of the equation. But additionally, there's this environmental impact that you're tying yourself into, right, because you're contributing now to the number of people that exist on the planet. And I just think that, at a bare minimum, there's got to be some sensitivity to that dimension of the problem, some awareness of the role that your procreative decision making plays in this broader problem. And also, just in I would say more generally, the impact that it has on others. You know, it's not a private choice. It may be very personal, very meaningful to the people involved, but it's not, it's not a private choice. It affects the child that's born. And it affects other people who interact with the child, and it affects the broader communities in which the child participates, which insofar as it's, you know, tied into this population issue, stretches, I think, quite far beyond just parents and the child. So awareness of the problem is like the bare minimum requirement, but I think also that it has to be a genuine thing that a person could not live a flourishing life without having a biological child. So I think that would require an honest appraisal of asking questions like, Is it really having a biological child that I care about? Or is it just being a parent? And if that's the case, would adoption be something that is an option for me? Is that something that I could do, and there are certainly lots of children in need of adoption in our current circumstances. And I also think there would have to be a kind of weighing of your personal life plans against some of these broader ecological and environmental impacts and some of the other moral values that are in play. And I just think that that kind of rigorous evaluative process in thinking through the moral decision is just not that common in how people procreated in what values play a role in their procreative choices. I also want to add that the question of like, what standards one has to meet to like have that moral justification is a hard question to answer, because I don't share this desire to need a biological child to have a fulfilling life. It is not a part of my life plan. And so I'm imagining what it would be like to have that as a component of my life plan and then thinking, how would I weigh that? It's just a difficult thought experiment for me. And a lot of what I'm trying to do in thinking through that question is sort of trying to be charitable to this very common human desire that like lots of people have this desire to have biological children. And it's kind of an exercise in trying to think through how to give appropriate weight to that value. So one objection I've gotten from some people who are a little more hardline we might say on procreative restriction is they've essentially said, I can't make sense of that value. Why should we give it any moral weight at all? And I want to kind of say like, well, there has to be some epistemic humility here, where given how common this value is, and given how much literature there is about it, especially in like feminist scholarship, and so on, there's got to be some weight given to that if I'm being intellectually honest, and I don't just assume that my values are the only ones that carry moral weight. I think it is challenging to pin down for these reasons a very concrete criteria for when you've met this standard for moral justification in procreating.
Alan Ware 11:13
Right, as we've certainly discussed, given how consequential the decision to have a child is, to be so unconscious in the decision and to have the pronatalist norms of broader society, family, government, kind of the water we swim in, I think you strike a pretty good balance when you mentioned that the UN recognized the right to found a family and their Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But as you say, the right to do X does not entail that you ought to do X. And so there you're looking at the consequences of the act and weighing it against the consequences of not doing it. And as you say, no one dies from the failure to procreate. But the cumulative impact of a lot of people fairly unconsciously deciding to procreate can damage present and future humans and nonhumans alike.
Nandita Bajaj 12:02
Yeah, and we've had similar discussions with bioethicists about the need to uphold one right needs to be balanced with the responsibility we have to not harm or hurt other rights. So it's not kind of an unlimited right to do something. And I think that's often a discussion that gets missed also, is the implications of a non private decision and the broader implications that decision has on the planet as a whole, other people, the potential child, non human beings. But also, you know, in our work we find is it's not personal for another reason, because so much of the decision is influenced by cultural norms and narratives pronatalism that's driving us to do something that we may not have explored too deeply ourselves. So yeah, I think that's a nice balance you draw as well in your book.
Trevor Hedberg 12:56
Well, thank you. Yeah, I definitely think that one of the points of emphasis that I would have stressed more in the book if I were to rewrite it, and now with three years hindsight, is that I mean, I do bring this up the pronatalist background norms in society. But there's been some recent stuff that's been published of late that sort of highlights how most of the course of influences on procreative behavior nowadays are encouraging people to have more children than they want. And historically, the concern has always been the opposite, right? With population policy it's always been the policies in the 60s and 70s that involved forced sterilizations and abortions and doing stuff like getting informed consent from people who were illiterate to get vascetomies and just horror stories like that where all kinds of medical ethics and other ethical codes were being violated to get certain groups of people to procreate more and certain groups to procreate less. But nowadays in a lot of societies, it's sort of we know that as countries develop, and women get more opportunities, and more increased access to contraception, more educational opportunities, and so on - more opportunities, basically to define their lives in ways that are not dependent on child rearing. They may still involve child rearing, but they have a choice now. When that happens, fertility rates predictably go down. And there are lots of countries that appear to be now trying to swing that pendulum back the other way, trying to encourage pronatalist policies. That's something that I didn't put as much emphasis on in the book as I might have liked to do, you know, with again, three years of hindsight on it, because the way I framed some of my discussion was very much along the lines of trying to show that there were ways to discuss population and pursue policy that were noncoercive, but it was all like noncoercive with the aim of not falling into the population policy mistakes of the past. And I think that that also played a role in how I kind of framed the different policy options that may not have been totally accurate along like a continuum of very coercive and not coercive at all. The way I taxonomize things might be a little different. So, anyway, I appreciate you like kind of bringing up that point that a lot of these seemingly personal decisions are actually being kind of influenced in the background by all these pronatalist norms and in some cases pronatalist policies that affect people's decision-making.
Nandita Bajaj 15:08
Right. Yeah, thank you for that. But also thank you for your openness in remaining in flux in terms of the things that you've learned over the last three years since you've written the book about how your future work might be influenced.
Trevor Hedberg 15:23
I think it's impossible to do applied ethics well without being sensitive to how the empirical and social dimensions of the issues you're working on changes. It's very frustrating sometimes, because if you're being intellectually honest, you will inevitably discover ways in which, Oh, now I have to modify my position in light of new information, or in light of in some cases, like an objection that somebody publishes to your work. Like I've peer reviewed a lot of papers in the last three years that are engaging in some way with my articles or with stuff in the book. And sometimes you read one, and it's like, I realized this person wasn't writing this, but I'm gonna greenlight it for publication, because it's a good criticism. And I'd have to think about how I would respond to that maybe in the future, but it does mean that my book along with like the other books written on this topic are, you know, just a component into a very large series of scholarly literature where you're trying to push the dialogue along, but you recognize like, you're not going to have the last word on this. There's going to be more to say.
Nandita Bajaj 16:14
Right. Yeah, thank you for that. And another common narrative that we find among many people who are concerned with population is an adoption of an anti-natalist worldview - a view that procreation is unethical, something you also touch upon in the book. At Population Balance, we reject anti-natalism. We understand where it comes from. We may align with some of the views, you know about responsibility. But, largely, we reject the underlying philosophy of anti-natalism, just as we reject pronatalism, and we were pleased to see that you have provided a philosophical argument against anti-natalism. And we'd love to hear a brief overview of how you define it, and also, how you critique it.
Trevor Hedberg 17:02
Sure, so in the text, I distinguish between kind of two types of anti-natalism, a sort of thoroughgoing, or hardline anti- natalism, which just the default moral value of procreation is that it's wrong period, full stop. That's it, the proper amount of children to have for everybody is zero - that's more or less the position. And then the other version of anti-natalism I considered was what I called contingent anti-natalism, which is something like, under current circumstances or a certain set of circumstances, it's inappropriate to have children. And I think that the sort of more hardline anti-natal ism I find much less plausible. I've actually engaged with a fair amount of folks who hold that thoroughgoing view. And I would say that my main reasons for rejecting that kind of position is; one, it tends to be motivated by a very pessimistic view, I think of the quality of human life that I don't share. So a lot of those folks think that human life is much worse than I do. And also, there might be a disagreement also about how we understand the value of human life. Some of them are thinking like, well, if you add up all the happiness, and a life and all the badness, all the discomfort, all the pain, it'll be a negative value overall. So life is not worth living. The way I approach a well lived life is not like that. It's more complex. It's not just the sort of hedonistic pleasures and pains calculation, because there are lots of things I've done in my life that I think were certainly a net loss on the pleasure pain calculation, like doing my doctoral dissertation was surely like that, for example. But it was a meaningful project. It was something I wanted to do. It was part of a life goal, part of a life plan. And so it has a value that's not easily captured in just thinking about my pleasurable mental states, right, that are tied in to that work. So I think that human life is better for the most part than a lot of anti-natalists think. A lot of them also tend to think that subjecting a child to the risk of harm is just wrong, because you can't get their consent. I think that kind of philosophy is just too risk averse. And I think that's kind of the consensus response in the bioethics literature. Like how most people would respond to this, they just say like, look, there are lots of contexts where parents are justified in making decisions on behalf of their kids welfare, based on available information, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with it. As far as contingent anti-natalism goes, I think that there are lots of context-specific cases where it might indeed be wrong to have children, at least under our current ecological circumstances. I think that people who procreate just because it's safe, socially expected, especially if they live in a country with a high per capita, you know, ecological footprint that that may indeed be may be wrong, if they don't have good reasons to procreate. It might indeed wind up being morally wrong. I don't think that it is particularly productive to like go after people about this sort of thing, but they can be beneficial to make people think about these questions and so on. I would not define myself as an anti-natalist, but I would say that a lot of the considerations that they bring up are relevant to this conversation and they do need to be taken seriously, which is why the anti-natalism chapter in the book is actually the longest chapter. There are tons of different versions and arguments for anti-natalism. I'm just kind of giving a broad gloss here, because there's too many arguments in that chapter to summarize them all here.
Nandita Bajaj 20:11
And that's where I think we agree with your analysis that you just described of the small overlap that we do share with the concerns that some of these conditional anti-natallists have is the cautionary message that we do share with young people regarding reproductive responsibility, especially during this delicate time, especially in countries where reproductive autonomy is available. And you do have the ability to make relatively free and responsible decisions. But it's the core philosophy of anti-natalism that we simply don't agree with, which is also you said, a much more life-averse, risk-averse philosophy that just to be alive is to suffer. And that to impose that value on other people we truly believe you know, a relationship to life has to come from within. It can be a very sacred relationship that people have with the mystery of the universe. One of the concerns we also find is we meet with a lot of young people, and it saddens me as an educator to see really bright young minds being led down a path of kind of nihilism, and depression, rather than being allowed to cultivate a relationship to life that comes from a place of wonder and reverence and responsibility. So it was refreshing to see some of the more philosophical arguments that equipped us to talk about it a little more thoughtfully.
Alan Ware 21:37
So you discussed in your population reduction argument that we have a moral duty to reduce our current population. And your argument lays out a set of premises and claims that follow from those premises. Your first premise is that we morally ought to avoid causing massive and unnecessary harm to presently existing people. And we completely agree. How would you explain the logic of that premise?
Trevor Hedberg 22:00
I think pretty much any ethical, plausible theory is going to generate some kind of duty not to cause unnecessary harm. Insofar as there are such thing as foundational moral principles, this is about as close as you'll get to one. So my hope in putting that forward as like the start of the argument was to basically start on a sure and ethical footing as one could get - just we should not cause substantial, unnecessary harm to other people. Where can we go from here? So whatever your theoretical approach is, whether you think that it's wrong to do that because it disrespects people or violates their autonomy or their rational agency; whether you think it's bad because it sets back their welfare; whether you think it's bad because it hurts your own character, there's lots of reasons you could give. But virtually every moral theory converges pretty strongly on that idea.
Alan Ware 22:44
Right. And it's interesting that later in the book, you give consideration to the harm done to nonhumans. Because this is assuming initially, just humans, and as I think you've well noted, the further we extend moral standing into the natural world, the worse our circumstances look, and the worse our circumstances appear to be, the more urgent the need to reduce our population size. And that's something we certainly believe - with a greater egocentric consciousness that we have to assume and look at harm done to nonhumans and entire ecosystems and all the creatures within those ecosystems. So that just really raises the bar, right, on this justification for procreation?
Trevor Hedberg 23:23
Yeah. So, in the text, I do have this short chapter where I kind of consider this point of extension, but most of the book would be considered, you know, an anthropocentric perspective, right? Just making the argument trying to appeal to the harm done to humans. I tried to be clear in a couple of places in the book, and then also like an article published after the book was written that I am not an anthropocentrist. I certainly think that there are a wide range of nonhuman animals that have direct moral standing, and I don't know if I would go as far as ecocentrism. But, certainly, I want to go well beyond the human species. The reason that I put forward essentially an anthropocentric argument in the book is that I wanted to take on board as few controversial ethical assumptions as possible. So as soon as you introduced non human species as part of the moral equation, you've got to explain what species count to what extent. I thought it was possible to make a very strong case that we should reduce global population by just looking at the effects on human values and interests and how it would affect future people and present people and also deplete natural resources on which human societies subsist in some sense, like things that we need, if we're to not just survive, but also flourish in the future. And so a big reason why I presented the book that way was mostly methodological, just trying to, you know, have the argument have the widest reach possible, like even if you are a hardline, anthropocentrist, you're still in my audience for the argument. But I did try to gesture towards the end of the book that, like if you're willing as I am to take on some nonhuman animals into the equation, or maybe you're a biocentrist, maybe it's all living things, maybe it goes further to like ecological holes and so on. However far you extend it, the further you extend the moral community, the worse the population problem looks, and the more urgent it is to do something about it. I still think that just on the argument of the book that I made, the problem is still pretty big. But it's much larger if you're willing to extend the moral community a bit.
Alan Ware 25:15
Yeah. We're seeing some movement to give moral standing to rivers, and to watersheds, to complete biomes. And that does ratchet up the moral equation significantly. So I can understand why you're keeping it simple. And as you mentioned, later on, you do look at animal welfare in more specificity.
Nandita Bajaj 25:34
The only thing I would say is I also understand your sticking with the more human-centric worldview and trying to make a much stronger argument given that people do have a harder time believing in the population argument when you do bring ecological concerns into the picture because of the fear of competing rights of, you know, humans versus ecological rights, which is unfortunate, given that the ecology is the lifeblood of our existence.
Trevor Hedberg 26:04
Yeah, I think related to that another perception is that a lot of arguments for population stabilization and reduction are misanthropic - that they involve some kind of loathing of the human species or something like that. So I thought that trying to make an argument that was appealing centrally to human welfare is not you know, misanthropic. Clearly, if the focus is the welfare of present and future people, it would be weird to say, well, the only reason you're making that argument is because you just hate people, or you hate the human species. It's like, well, the whole point of the argument is supposed to be that we're trying to promote the long-term sustainable welfare of human civilization. And so that was one additional consideration in how it kind of framed the argument the way it did.
Nandita Bajaj 26:44
That's a great point actually. We do appreciate that distinction. And, in the second premise of your population reduction argument, you state that our moral duties of non harm are just as stringent toward future people as they are toward present people. That's a very important premise, and its long term orientation runs counter to both how most nations operate and, what some might argue, is the human bias toward prioritizing the short term and more immediate rewards over long term planning. What are the arguments for the second premise?
Trevor Hedberg 27:17
I suppose in a nutshell, the main argument I put forward in the text is trying to get the reader to acknowledge that the time in which a person is born seems morally irrelevant. So I think that a person born in 1900 has the same basic needs, interests, and rights as a person born in 2000. I think a person born in 2100 will have the same basic needs, rights, and interests as I do and as most people currently living do. So I don't think that the time at which someone is born is a morally relevant consideration to appraising like how we should assess how their interests in the future might be affected by what we do. So I think that if there are a bunch of people who suffer and die from climate change, say next year in 2024, that's bad. I think if the same number of people suffered and died in 2100, as a result of climate change, that would also be bad. There is a well known issue here in philosophy called the nonidentity problem, where people question whether you can really harm folks who are born in the far future, because their identities are dependent on actions playing out as they do. Like, in a world where we did an intense climate mitigation, enough stuff would change socially - different people would meet, parents who would have children at different times, a totally different set of people would be born. So those people who are harmed by climate change in 2100 weren't really harmed, right, because they wouldn't exist in the non climate affected world. Frankly, a lot of policymakers don't care at all about this objection, denying that any problem is mostly just a philosophical interest. I reject that account of harm in the book on which that argument is based. And I have a detailed appendix explaining what's wrong with the nonidentity problem. So I'm aware of that issue. For any philosophers listening, I'm aware of that issue. There is a long chapter and appendix in the book that deals with this line of argument. But the basic gist of why I think we extend this duty of nonharm to future people is that I just don't think, at the end of the day, that when a person is born is a morally relevant consideration, at least not if they have the same capacities, interests, and rights as people who presently exist. And we have every reason to believe that people existing in the next, I don't know, several 100 years are going to fit that description.
Alan Ware 29:33
And the implication of this future orientation would be huge for things like, at least US government policy orientation with the discount rate - something they use, which is about three to 7% per year, devaluing annually of the future. And as you mentioned, 10 people dying in a year, is not 5% less bad than 10 people dying right now. Or you give another great example of the school bomber setting a timer for 15 years in the future. Are those lives worth that much less than lives now? And I think you make a good argument that both, they're assuming what that future with that discount rate, that's heavily embodied in so many policies throughout government, that future bad events might not happen, which partly folds into the myth of progress, that we've had enjoyed a couple of 100 years of fairly consistent social and economic progress and Western and then global civilization, or that future people will be so much better off that they'll be able to just buy their way out of any of these problems. And those are two significant forces in devaluing the future, that I think your premise rightly puts valueing the future front and center.
Trevor Hedberg 29:45
Yeah, the social discount rate that you're alluding to, it makes sense in certain economic contexts when you're trying to evaluate, like your business, and you're trying to evaluate, say, where to invest your money, or what to do long term in an economic transaction. But when we start to shadow price human lives and human welfare, by trying to give them an economic evaluations, and then discount it in some way, the further we get into the future that gets you some really wonky and ludicrous results. So it is an implication of the second premise of the argument that I'm rejecting a social discount rate, at least as it applies to human lives and human welfare. Those things I think, to me are just as morally salient one year in the future, 10 years in the future, 50 years in the future, as they are now. I don't think that the temporal gap here makes any difference to how we should morally evaluate the outcomes.
Nandita Bajaj 31:31
And, in recent years, we've seen that some self-described long termists in the effective altruism community have taken the long term view to an extreme and seem to argue that all future lives, which they believe the number to be in trillions should be considered. But they also fully believe that future people will be better off, kind of like what just Alan was alluding to. What do you think of how we should balance present and future lives?
Trevor Hedberg 31:58
I will say one thing, just about the kind of longtermist stuff. I would not describe myself as a longtermist in that sense, because those folks are operating under such extraordinarily high levels of empirical uncertainty about what the path of human evolution will be, how long our species will be around, how many people there will be. There's just so much uncertainty there. The directions they're going, I wouldn't go. But as far as the question you've asked, like balancing present and future lives, I guess, I would say, in principle, you'd want to weigh all human lives equally to have an equal standing. And that is like by the letter of the premise kind of what, by the exact wording, that is the general idea. So at least for the foreseeable future, you know, we have some projections of how many people there will be in the future. And we can run some studies on how many annual casualties there will be as a result of climate change. The World Health Organization has been doing this for a while along certain metrics, like climate change effects, how mosquitoes and other disease carrying insects, how their ranges change. And so there's stuff you can do to figure out like how many people got disease as a result of climate change affecting the insects, livable range, and so on. But the general idea is that you can try to get estimates of how to quantify you know how many people are going to die of climate change, say over a long range of time, or how many species are going to go extinct over a certain amount of time, so on. Ideally, you want to weigh those impacts the same as if they were occurring today and do what's necessary to prevent them. There are obviously some logistical challenges the further we go out into the future, because there's more uncertainty about how our situation might change over time. And some of these problems are also dependent on what we do now. So if we go hardcore into climate mitigation in the next 20 or 30 years, then the problems will be easier to solve, right, we'll have to invest less in them to do it. Whereas if we don't do a whole lot of climate mitigation, there's going to be more adaptation we have to do, there's going to be more vulnerable populations that are due compensation. So there are still empirical complexities and practical uncertainties that arise the further we go out into the future. But if we're just thinking about how should we morally assess what to do, like I would say preventing a bad outcome in the future carries just as much weight as preventing a bad outcome in the present.
Nandita Bajaj 34:11
That makes a lot of sense. And we agree with you that there's a lot of mental gymnastics that's going on with the longtermist view of trying to use the argument of technology to buy their way out of acting responsibly now, or to continue to engage in making a lot of money now so that they can invest in the future generation. Do you have any thoughts on how you would respond to these techno-optimists who imagine that we'll be able to innovate our way out of the environmental degradation?
Trevor Hedberg 34:40
Well, one question and one thought. The first question I would ask is, how many people will suffer and die before that happens, which we have no idea that like, the lot of problems we're facing now are not totally new. We've seen them on the horizon for a while. They've been building up over time. There's been a clear need for solutions to these problems. There have been lots of people working on them. We aren't there. And it doesn't look like we're gonna be there for a while even like, say carbon dioxide removal geoengineering technology. It exists, but as far as I can tell, there's really no prospect for scaling it up to the extent that it could remotely serve as a solution to our climate problem. So that's one question like, well, how long do we wait on the techno fix? Right? How many people suffer and die? How much environmental degradation is there before we get to that point? But the second, maybe more straightforward response, would just be to say, like, I'm not sure I believe you. There are a lot of folks who kind of point out, I think rightly, that what got us into the problem in the first place was an over reliance on certain kinds of technology, particularly fossil fuel emitting technologies. And it's kind of weird to think that the solution is just going to be some other technology that magically comes into existence. I mean I understand the argument for it. And this is a common argument by economists. They'll say things like, well, when you've got a problem, and there's a demand to solve the problem, that creates an economic incentive to come up with solutions. And if you have enough people working on the problem, inevitably, a solution is found. And then we're all better off as a result. But the problem is, if we're talking about biodiversity losses, they are a problem that we want to solve that is rapidly escalating out of control. And I don't see a technological solution for it. I mean, I suppose there's the de-extinction technology, the attempt to resurrect extinct species using genetic engineering. That looks like a very costly and imperfect solution at best, and the timescale for recovering from a mass extinction event is millions of years. So, some of these environmental problems, it just seems like the time to find a solution is fairly limited. The next, I don't know, 20, 30, 50 years, something like that, certainly no longer than the remainder of the century for climate change, biodiversity loss, and some of our other pending resource shortages. I see no reason to think that there is a technofix that is going to come for us in that time. There are some technologies that might assist us. Lab-cultured meat, for example, might help us make some revisions and updates to our industrialized animal agriculture process, which is one of the most incredibly wasteful and damaging processes globally, whether we're talking about the animal suffering or the ecological consequences or the effects on human health, it's all just bad news. But these are things that might assist a broader response. These are not things that are substitutes for an actual solution.
Alan Ware 37:23
It seems like these technological optimists assume that the economic growth will remain really the cultural imperative, so all technology will be in service to economic growth. And as long as that's the case there, as we seen, there's no real decoupling - economic growth means more resource consumption and more pollution. So unless you could change that economic growth imperative, which I haven't heard the techno-optimists talk about, then it seems like the whole machine, just more technology just means more consumption and pollution, and more externalizing of the cost to the environment or other people.
Trevor Hedberg 37:59
I don't see a reason to be optimistic. I don't want to say that we should be pessimistic either. But I don't think that we should be like delusionally optimistic about some magical technology coming to fix all of these problems that have been building up and progressing for half a century, pushing us toward these kinds of ecological, calling of them challenges is a huge understatement. But you know, this massive undertaking, like solving things like climate change. That's probably like the biggest moral challenge of this century for humanity. Because we've known about the problem for a while. Now we've got all these agreements in place to do stuff, nobody's meeting their climate targets around the world. And frankly, like it from an individual point of view, like a lot of us don't want to give up our fossil fuel based technologies, because they provide a lot of modern conveniences that we've grown accustomed to, and then in some cases are tied up with our well-being and our professions. So, that and responding to biodiversity loss, those two things, that's going to be a huge undertaking to adequately respond to that. And just kind of putting your head in the sand and pretending like the nerds in Silicon Valley, they'll figure it out, we'll be okay in the end, just seems not only intellectually dishonest, but just morally reprehensible.
Alan Ware 39:11
So from those premises of preventing harm to current and future people, you state that we morally ought to reduce our current levels of environmental degradation. And you make the argument the amount of total environmental degradation is a product of both the number of people and what you term the average environmental degradation per person, and that reducing only one of them is insufficient in reducing overall environmental degradation. How would you make the argument to someone who believes environmental degradation is all about individuals' amount of consumption and that population numbers have little or nothing to do with it?
Trevor Hedberg 39:42
Well, what typically motivates folks who make that argument is that they're looking at the incredible disparity in environmental consumption between the wealthiest nations in the world and the poorest nations in the world. And so nations like my home nation, the United States has the highest, you know, per capita greenhouse gas emissions, probably the highest per capita ecological footprint, although I haven't looked at that data recently. And they say, okay, you've got an ecological impact that say, 10 times more than some of these other countries. It seems like that's the problem, right? It's not the number of people that exist in the world. And there's a sense to which they're right about one thing. There's no question that reducing the level of environmentally damaging consumption will be critical to responding to these problems. There's no doubt that that is true. But simultaneously, the number of people that you have engaging in these behaviors is clearly a component. So, the fact that there are over 300 million people in the United States, things would be very different if there were, say, 150 million people in the United States, and how different would they be? Well, they'd be half as bad, right. But in terms of quantifying these impacts, the United States as a whole would have half the greenhouse gas emissions. So there's a part of me which just wants to say like, well, the mathematics don't support the idea that the numbers don't matter. They matter to some degree. Now, how much they matter does depend a little bit on the context. I think that the other avenue I might go in, in responding to a person who put this argument forward would be to appeal to some of the scientific literature, like the IPCC acknowledges that population growth is one of the main drivers of climate change. And they say that in their reports. They don't seem to say anything substantive about like what we should do about that, or like population policy, but they do acknowledge that it's a driver, right? There are lots of other contexts where you can point that out. There are lots of cases where habitat destruction that contributes to biodiversity loss, for example, is motivated by essentially there just being too many people in certain areas. And we need to, we need to build more homes. And when it's a question of like wilderness versus human interests, human interests virtually always win. And so the more people you have, who need physical space to live in, that results in less wilderness, more habitat destruction and fragmentation, which inevitably, you know, makes it harder for nonhuman species to survive in their environments. So there are lots of individual ways that we can connect human numbers to some of the environmental impacts that we're seeing. Fundamentally, I would stand by the equation that I put forward in the book, like for a given population, the amount of environmental impact is going to be determined by the rate of impact per person, and the number of people. So if you're going to respond to the problem, you got two avenues - reduce the impact per person, or reduce the number of people and I, you know, argue in the book, we should be trying to make progress on both those fronts.
Alan Ware 42:32
And do you see many students and colleagues who have a real problem with the basics of that? It seems very common sensical to us. But it's surprising how few people will admit the role of population.
Trevor Hedberg 42:43
I haven't run into a lot of pushback on that with my students. I have had some people, at say conferences, or when I've presented work. The most sophisticated version of the argument I remember receiving was essentially a person asking how that equation could capture like the impact of say, a global multinational corporation. I think their example was Coca Cola or something like that. And that's the kind of thing that's a difficult case. If you're trying to get an exact estimate of a multinational corporation, that kind of has an impact that transcends just the number of people that work in it, because of the way it functions - that's the kind of case that it may be hard to accurately capture the impact of that organization through just a formula. I mean, you could still theoretically do it. It's just a question of whether that would be the best way to do it. And I'm somewhat sympathetic that in that kind of context, where maybe it doesn't apply like as concretely, but it's just a general way of understanding whether we're thinking globally or whether we're thinking regionally or nationally, how we quantify environmental impact, I think the equation still works pretty well.
Alan Ware 43:42
Well, that's heartening to hear that you don't get a lot of pushback.
Nandita Bajaj 43:45
Yeah. And like if you actually apply that same equation, to instead of looking at it by just the income group of the countries, if you look at it by region, you look at the other side of the picture where Asia that is home to 60% of the population emits half of all the emissions, right 49%. So the other aspect of that is the middle class is the largest growing population globally. So right now it's 4 billion. In the next seven years, it's supposed to reach 5 billion. So more and more people, as their economies are growing, are aspiring to, unfortunately, the North American ideal. So that's where the argument, you know, that one matters more than the other falls apart because consumption trends have inevitably been just going up, including, you know, even in the last three decades, population growth has canceled out most of the climate gains that we've made from renewables and energy efficiency. So it's just great to hear you know more people like you validating that argument, because that other message is unfortunately rampant and prevents people and policymakers from addressing these issues more seriously.
Trevor Hedberg 45:03
Yeah, there has been some related work done at the intersection of say climate justice and economic justice, that kind of speaks to the point you've been talking about, where there are some countries in the world where in order for them to essentially lift their people out of poverty, they will have to be allowed to economically develop, which inevitably means more emissions of fossil fuel. But there's a sort of global justice aspect to this, where are you really going to say, we have to let make those people continue to live in poverty, because they're not allowed to increase their incredibly tiny carbon footprints, when historically, they've also contributed almost nothing to the problem. That doesn't morally compute, right? They have to be allowed to develop. But that means if they're going to be allowed to develop, foreseeably, their ecological impact is going to go up per person, their ecological impact is going to go up. So if they're also allowed to increase their population a bunch while that's going on, then some of the countries that currently do contribute very little to our environmental problems, that will not be the case in the future. So I like that you point that out. This is the kind of thing where there's been some acknowledgment of these connections in the literature, but the explicit conclusion to reach like, oh, well, maybe thinking about procreative ethics in this context is irrelevant. Often that further connection is not made.
Nandita Bajaj 46:18
Exactly. And part of that lack of connection is this idea that procreation is a purely personal and private decision, and that people are making that decision in a vacuum rather than understanding the coercive and often patriarchal pressures that are at play in not affording people the kind of reproductive autonomy that more low fertility countries do have. You know, and that brings me also to the next question on this very topic, is that you've argued that procreative choices are more than just a private decision as it affects other people and the planet. And you outline three broad categories of actions or policies that our society can undertake that can impact people's reproductive autonomy. Let's start with the first category of autonomy enhancing measures. Could you give us an overview of what kinds of actions or policies might fit within this category?
Trevor Hedberg 47:12
Sure. So autonomy is generally just the ability to make your own rational decisions or your own independent rational decisions. So to be able to make decisions free from coercion and operating on accurate information. So the general way that you enhance someone's autonomy in the case of procreation is doing things like giving people more reproductive health options, increased access to contraception and family planning services say, and the other way is to give people more accurate information. So do things like say improve sex education. So here in the United States, we have still have a lot of money invested in abstinence-only sex education, which is, the empirical data suggests, extremely ineffective, basically worthless. As far as actually doing things like lowering rates of teen pregnancy, or like lowering the rate of STI transmission, there are no gains for abstinence-only sex education on that. But comprehensive sex education, which teaches people about contraceptive methods, how to use them effectively, and other aspects of family planning does show gains in those areas. So giving people more information and more medically accurate information seem one way to enhance their autonomy. And I would also say in this context, giving people some environmental education about the connection between their procreative choices and broader environmental conditions is also a way of enhancing their autonomy, because you're giving them information about a dimension to the issue that they may not consider. If they're not given that information by someone else, they may not come to research that or explore that on their own.
Nandita Bajaj 48:37
Right. And you also argue that it's naive to believe that improvements in access to family planning, sex education, and gender justice would be sufficient by themselves to solve the population growth problem. And you've touched on that briefly just now. Can you expand on that?
Trevor Hedberg 48:53
The basic issue here is that I think that the amount of work that we have to do to reduce human numbers for long-term environmental sustainability is so significant, that even under the idealized scenario, where we were able to get contraception and reproductive services to all the people who had an unmet need for them instantly, like by snapping my fingers today, and doing so I still don't think that that would stabilize and reduce population quickly enough, given the timescale that we're operating on. And given the fact that there's always a lag in when you see the effects of a population policy, because it takes a while for the people who are most affected by the policy, to reach reproductive age and make decisions about how many children they're going to have and so on. But the other element of this also is it won't be the ideal case, because there will be political and cultural opposition to trying to expand access to these services. And so I would say we also want to be exploring other options because that opposition is foreseeable and won't be, you know, a seamless instant improvement with respect to these various autonomy-enhancing measures.
Nandita Bajaj 49:57
So, in the second broad category, which you call semi-coercive measures, you include preference adjustment and incentivization. As you describe this as trying to lower fertility rates by changing cultural norms or individual desires, what would be some examples of those actions or measures that fall within this preference adjustment?
Trevor Hedberg 50:17
Maybe the best example would be, if you ran, say, a media campaign where you were promoting values associated with small families, or maybe even just like correcting misconceptions about small families like showing that, hey, just because you have an only child doesn't mean they'll be socially maladjusted from not having a sibling or something like that. They've also seen some instances of doing it kind of more subtlely. So there's some research that suggests that doing things like for instance, portraying families in say telenovelas, or sitcoms that are small families, as opposed to like Brady Bunch style families with tons of kids, when people finish watching a season of that show, or you're listening to the telenovela on the radio, they'll have more positive perceptions of small families as a result. So in a sense, their values are in a sense being shifted by having these kinds of experiences where adjusted, right, as the literature goes, but I mean, it can be broader than this. But the main idea is you're doing something that makes, in this context that would make, people's preferences about procreation, potentially shift a little bit from what they were before. Now, it will still be their choice as to what they decide to do or not, so we're not doing anything like threatening them, or otherwise compelling them to do something, or like hypnotizing them or brainwash them or anything, but something is being done that kind of shifts their thoughts about a subject.
Nandita Bajaj 51:35
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. We interviewed the head of an organization called Population Media Center. And that's the main work that they do, is running soap operas and telenovelas across countries to try and shift cultural norms often toward, you know, kind of human rights centered norms based in the ethics of increasing self efficacy. You know, our own research has shown that for a lot of communities, including within our own countries, there are currently a lot of patriarchal, religious and even militaristic forces that are promoting large families for the sake of population growth. And so we would even see that this kind of preference adjustment category could be seen as a form of enhancing autonomy by challenging a form of coercion or a course of pronatalism. And we just wondered if, you know, after a few years of writing this book, you would still consider these measures semi-coercive - seeing that they are actually opposing certain forms of coercion.
Trevor Hedberg 52:45
This is one of the areas I think, in response to a much earlier question I said, like the taxonomy of how I appraise their options, I might change because the original thought behind labeling these as semi-coercive was we are doing something that does affect people's preferences, and values, and so on. But it's no different than lots of other preference-adjusting things that we regularly accept, like advertising, you know, is everywhere, and it clearly has an impact. There's why there's so much money invested in it - on what people choose to buy, and what communities they participate in, what they put their money toward regularly, except that at least some of that is okay. And so my thought was, there's a sense in which advertising is coercive, but it's not objectionably coercive. That was the sort of underlying intuition behind this taxonomy, but understood in the context of, well there's all these social forces at work that are actually pushing pronatalist values, in that context, having a preference adjustment that gets people closer to back to neutral, right, like where they would be in the absence of these more cultural and social pressures and so on. That does seem like it's more closer to being autonomy enhancing than it is to being coercive. I have no idea what I would have labeled this middle category, this kind of ambiguous category of preference adjustment and incentivization if I were to rewrite the book. But I do think semi-coercive is maybe not the appropriate term for it.
Nandita Bajaj 54:05
Right. Thank you for that. You have the third category, which you call using incentives. What kind of policies would fall within the category of incentives? And what are your concerns with incentivization efforts?
Trevor Hedberg 54:19
Sure. So in the US, there's, here's an example of a pronatalist incentive - the more children you have, the more tax exemptions you can get. Number of dependents correlates with you having to pay fewer taxes to the government. So it would be very weird if a parent reasons like, Oh, I gotta have another kid so I can get, you know, pay for your taxes - that nobody reasons that way. But it does make it easier for people to have children right, financially speaking. So there is a sense in which it's a financial incentive. It may have some residual effect on people's behavior. You could imagine a different financial incentive where you start out with, say, four deductions and every child you have you lose one of your deductions. Now suddenly we have a clear incentive. I'm not advocating this policy, right? I'm just, this is a way you could obviously implement an economic incentive that goes a different direction. So incentivization schemes generally involve giving someone some kind of compensation as a means of doing something in a way that might influence their behavior. It's usually been monetary, historically. So maybe you attend, say, a sponsored family planning seminar or something for two hours, and you get, I don't know , a $50 Amazon gift card or something like that, like something small. Incentivization schemes can also be punitive. So it could be, we're going to impose a two child policy in our society. And if you have more than two children, you're going to be penalized $15,000 per child over the limit or something like that. So that would be a sort of negative incentive to have children above two. So I think the family planning example that I gave, that doesn't strike me as obviously objectionable or unduly coercive or anything, the punitive one that I mentioned, where you're giving people a hefty fine if they don't comply with certain kinds of policy is in a way an incentivization scheme, but it seems quite coercive. It just depends on how big the benefits or penalties are, is going to determine whether or not the incentivization scheme gets into that realm of being morally questionable or outright objectionable.
Nandita Bajaj 56:18
Yeah, that makes sense. And the family planning one that you mentioned, too, I think it's been tried in a number of countries with a lot of good results, because it ends up enhancing autonomy. It's actually giving people lots of knowledge on what to expect when you are going to become a parent, kind of like training for entering the workforce. Or if you have, you know, you take driving lessons, you get an insurance break. And so that one does seem like it would offer potential parents information that would be helpful for them to decide whether or not and when and how many children to have. But we also agree with you about the punitive ones, because they also end up actually exacerbating social inequities, because it again, marginalizes socio- economically marginalized people even more, because wealthier people could maybe more easily get out of those fines.
Trevor Hedberg 57:11
Yeah, I'll also add it doesn't necessarily have to be punitive to have that effect you're talking about. So giving people $5,000, if they get a vasectomy, the people who are going to be more likely to do that are people who are economically disadvantaged. And so a foreseeable result of that kind of policy is that people of lower socioeconomic classes are going to wind up having fewer kids. And there are some obvious concerns about that, because it seems to have the same effect of it's like, oh, like having a large family now seems to become kind of a product of being wealthy.
Nandita Bajaj 57:39
Exactly.
Alan Ware 57:40
So throughout human history, and the present to some extent, we've seen all kinds of reproductive rights violations as a means to limit population. And some of those practices have done a lot of damage to our work to try to create sustainable human population through greater autonomy and smaller families. As some of these efforts were driven by lack of understanding of pronatalism as a driver of population growth, while others are driven by a combination of racism, classism, ableism, you've rightfully argued in the book against these, this category of severely coercive policies, which is where most people who are sensitive about population often go in there thinking, and they try to blame you with a guilt by association with that kind of history, if you even talk about population. So what are your arguments against the severely coercive policies?
Trevor Hedberg 58:33
So I would say I make two different arguments. The first one is a is, I think, the standard response that most people make. It's a moral argument, which is essentially just appealing to the historical track record. We have seen what happens when we attempt to implement severely coercive population policies, and the results have not been good. There have been lots of human rights violations. In some societies where there are sexist background cultural values, there's been a clear valuing of male children over female children, which has exacerbated various kinds of gender inequities. And also, a lot of the population policies of the past have inevitably become infected with kind of, as you alluded to, like racist or ableist, agendas, or in some cases, classist agendas, where there are specific groups that are targeted for you know, this is the group we don't want to reproduce as much, right? We want there to be more of this group in our society and less of this other group. And given current social and cultural conditions, I see no reason to think that that wouldn't happen again, in certain countries if we if we put these policies into play. So that's the moral argument is kind of just an appeal of the historical track record, like just look at what's happened historically. It doesn't look like it's been good. It doesn't look like these policies can be implemented in just ways. But the other argument that I make is practical, which is simply that the whole history of the discourse on population has been dramatically set back by the course of policies of the 60s, 70s, and to an extent the 80s. And continuing on from there like China's one child policy was probably the main exemplar for a while. The historical discourse on this, the reason why there was so much silence surrounding population for several decades was because of pushback from these policies and their implementation. And so I think that now that we've just finally kind of gotten to a point, culturally and in academics, where we're talking about this, again, advocating for these severe coercive population policies, is counterproductive, because it's just going to encourage people who are skeptical about this stuff to just table the discussion again, and just, you know, tabling the discussion didn't do us any favors. It just meant that for 20 something years population just kept growing at 80 million people a year, and nobody really did anything about it. So the practical argument against it here is like look, even in the ideal case, where somehow this stuff could be implemented in ways that was equitable, and didn't result in these human rights violations, all that other stuff, this is still not an efficacious thing to be advocating for. It's going to do more harm than good to the cause.
Alan Ware 1:01:05
Right. I think it's the backlash effect within any political movement or program, especially in a democratic society, which you talk about, the backlash can be quite severe. And you can be tainted with that history for decades beyond when it's really relevant. But you can charge the rhetoric and the language borrowing from those past violations. And the group that's using that backlash can have a long memory and weaponize it.
Nandita Bajaj 1:01:35
Right, sometimes to the exclusion of the other kind of coercion that has been more rampant recently, especially in the lot of industrialized countries with declining fertility rates. We're seeing, you know, a lot of pronatalist coercion in the form of abortion bans and sanctions on reproductive health care services, in order to force people to have kids to increase the population. It makes a lot of sense, of course, and we completely agree with you there. And so just to close things up for this interview, you've argued that based on the severity of the environmental crises that we face as humanity, we can't accept just doing nothing. And you've noted acting as soon as possible is the path to making things better. Delaying action will make things worse. And for those of us who are trying to make positive social change, we're faced with the opposing poles of nihilism on the one hand, and blind faith and thoughtless hope on the other. And both of these poles of thought encourage inaction. Have you also encountered these extreme poles of optimism and pessimism in the classroom or amongst your colleagues?
Trevor Hedberg 1:02:45
I think certainly, the feeling of hopelessness or perhaps more accurately, powerlessness, is somewhat common. I worry about this significantly with my students, because they're the people that I interact with that are going to be the most affected by what happens in the next 75 years on the planet. They're the ones who will experience it the most, and the ones who will have to think about it the most, when they think about their own, you know, procreative decisions, and how they construct their lifestyles more broadly, with respect to how much meat they consume, what kinds of lifestyles they adopt, with respect to their carbon emissions, and so on. My general kind of advice to them is that you do not want to fall into the false dilemma of basically, we're either going to solve these problems in the next 15, 20 years, or we're all screwed, because almost all of these problems operate on some kind of continuum. So thinking about the climate case, because that's the dominant problem. Like let's say that climate change, we stabilize global climate at 2.5 degrees celsius above pre-industrial levels. That is significantly worse than the current targets. But it is also significantly better than runaway climate change scenarios of like 3.5 degrees celsius, four degrees celsius, etc. And the effects of climate change correlate extremely strongly with just how much carbon winds up in the atmosphere. So like solving the problem sooner is obviously better. But if we don't solve the problem super quickly, solving it sooner will still be better than solving it later. Right? It just keeps getting worse, the longer you take to solve the problem. So the better way to think about climate change is we should try to solve the problem as soon as possible, whatever that happens to be, which means that whatever state we're in with respect to the climate, we will still be able to create a better outcome for ourselves and for the nonhuman world by acting sooner than later. Whether your position to be an actor in this situation is now, or 10 years from now, or 20 years now, whatever the situation is, it will always be the case that you can do something that makes the outcome better, right, or that we as a collective can do something that makes the outcome better. And I think that's also true with respect to biodiversity loss, like we're already committed to a significant amount of biodiversity loss, but the difference between say, losing 20% of species globally is much different than losing 30%, or 40%, or 50%, or whatever the number is, right? So it's tough to have this outlook, I'll admit when you know that losses are coming, right, and are happening now. But I think that it's important to recognize that one, there are things that we can do that make the outcomes better. And two, in the grand scheme of things, life is incredibly resilient. And humanity has proven incredibly resilient. So things can get better after some of these problems are dealt with. I mean, one of the facts about mass extinction events worth noting - every single mass extinction event, life has come back, more abundant, more bio-diverse than it was before. Now that takes millions of years to happen. So we won't see it. But you know, if you're feeling hopeless, for like the long term continuity of life on Earth, life's pretty resilient. There is every reason to believe that no matter how much humanity screws up, life will eventually bounce back, even if it's on a timescale where we're no longer around when that happens,
Nandita Bajaj 1:05:55
Well said. And given that this mass extinction event is human caused, it puts even more of an onus on us to take responsibility and try to reverse the trajectory of it to whatever degree possible without, as you said, fall in the trap of complete nihilism. That's a great place to end this conversation. Thank you so much, Trevor, for joining us today and offering so many of your excellent philosophical and moral arguments for why all of these things matter and why our actions matter, including our consumptive and procreative decisions and why we ought to bring population back on the table both for social justice but also for ecological justice. Thank you so much.
Trevor Hedberg 1:06:40
Thanks. Thanks to you, Alan and Nandita for having me on the podcast and giving me an opportunity to talk about my research and revisit some of the ideas in my book I it was a great conversation.
Alan Ware 1:06:49
That's all for this edition of the overpopulation podcast. Visit populationbalance.org. to learn more. And 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. And 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 we hope that you'll consider a one time or recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj 1:07:20
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for your efforts and helping us all shrink toward abundance.
