The Overpopulation Myth
Anoushka Tripathi Joshi, BSc Environment and Development
Image: World Bank Photo Collection / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
World renowned conservationist Sir David Attenborough cites overpopulation as a major environmental problem, arguing population growth must “come to an end”. Countless questions arise from this statement: How will this population growth come to an end? Where will this be policed? Whose bodies are subject to control and restriction? The notion that overpopulation is a driving cause of climate catastrophe, positioning population control as the solution is not only lacking scientific basis, but it is also steeped in racist and sexist rhetoric. Attenborough’s belief in population control can also be termed as eco-fascism or neo-Malthusianism, and it essentially blames women of colour (WOC) for having too many children, often calling for the policing of the womb. While overpopulation is an extremely flawed concept, it has been adopted by the media, academia, and policy/development institutions. This article seeks to disprove the notion of overpopulation, contextualize and historicize this narrative, and make clear its racialized and gendered nature.
First, let’s disrupt this supposed connection between population growth and environmental catastrophe. According to Vox, population increase is “the least influential part of the climate change calculation”. Global growth of the human population is actually decreasing and is set to stabilize by the next century. At present, our planet’s most wealthy 1% emit the same amount of greenhouse gases as the poorest 66%. This highlights how the issue is not the quantity of people, but is in fact the distribution of resource consumption - a symptom of the underlying capitalist system. It is evident that the fights for social justice and environmental justice are intertwined and inseparable.
Now, it is important we unravel the relationship between WOC and nature to highlight how not only is this rhetoric gendered and racialized, but it is nothing new. Simpson and Cheever claim eco-fascism and dehumanization has always been central to the Global North’s capitalist modernity. This is rooted in the colonial construction of a division between society and nature, producing the binaries and hierarchies of man/woman, civilised/savage, human/non-human. The colonial mechanism of thingification renders people as objects, and constructs a proximity of women to nature. This not only dehumanizes women, but also underpins the feminization, commodification, and exploitation of nature that is central to capitalist extraction. This rampant extraction – not WOC having children – is causing the climate crisis.
The very imposition of gender itself is a colonial concept, as Lugones’ framework of the coloniality of gender explains. The colonial project separated people by gender and race, with differentiated categories for the colonizers and the colonized. The constructed proximity of WOC to nature denied them of a human gender, as they were reduced to only sex. These racialized and gendered divisions were necessary for the expansion of extractive, exploitative (racial) capitalism that positions women (of colour) as devalued surplus populations relegated to the private sphere and divorced from their bodies, knowledge, and power. These histories of the separation and gendering of society and nature, as well as the objectification of women’s bodies provides important insights into contemporary eco-fascism and the womb as a site of control. We can see this in the historical dehumanization of WOC that directly enables their scapegoating in environmental crisis conversations, and their bodies being positioned as a mechanism for the false solution of population control.
We cannot discuss the overpopulation myth without discussing Malthusianism, which has greatly shaped this narrative.Malthus, in 1798, claimed population grows disproportionately to food, resulting in overpopulation. His rhetoric has not only consistently been proven false, but it places the blame on poor women for reproducing. Darwin, and later, Galton (the father of eugenics),took inspiration from Malthus in promoting the scientifically unfounded notion that the ‘European’ race was superior.
Eugenicists like Galton called for differentiated policies supporting the reproduction of ‘superior’ races, and the denial of welfare to ‘inferior’ races. One could draw parallels with racist eugenicist thinking and contemporary population control.
Eugenics and conservation became intertwined in the context of the early 20th century US, as President Roosevelt championed a ‘new nationalism’ for exclusively white Protestant Americans working on their land. The responsibility to carry out the dual projects of eugenics and conservation fell on the shoulders of white women, who were made to ‘strengthen’ the race (mirroring Nazi Germany). The separation of nature and society is once again relevant, as this conservation violently displaced Indigenous populations from their lands in the name of preserving a pristine, empty land from the ‘threats’ of native people and immigrants. This history underscores the connection between eco-fascism, racism, and gendered embodied environmental responsibility.
Malthusianism remains alive today in the notions of carrying capacity and planetary boundaries. These arbitrary limits erase complex social, political, and environmental processes, rendering them technical. Most famously, neo-Malthusian Hardin theorised ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, which details a circumstance in which individual actors act in their own interest and deplete public resources, provides a clear example of these limits. While his theory has been highly influential, Hardin’s scholarship pushed for using the bodies of women as a tool for population control, making reproduction a controlled and public affair, as opposed to a private, intimate act.
Furthermore, these discourses, which label overpopulation as a threat to the environment and development, persist today in international development and policy. Actors in this sphere produce what Jade Sasser has termed the ‘sexual steward’, a construction of an idealized woman who operates within the neoliberal logics of rational, private, and individual decision-making, embracing embodied environmental responsibility. The sexual steward is an important figure in family planning and contraceptive use, and whilst access to these services and tools is, of course, important, they are a kind of techno-fix. Furthermore, these narratives are alarming, as WOC bodies are portrayed as static, vulnerable, and in close proximity to nature, producing a problematic depiction of a homogenous, hypersexualised ‘third world woman’ lacking agency.
This policing of the womb transcends the discursive sphere and has resulted in painfulforced and coerced sterilizations. For example, in 1962 Pakistan and India, the US-based Population Council inserted IUDs forcefully when people resisted their contraceptive distribution. Questions aroundnecropolitics (or who must live/die) arise when interrogating where, why, and how these anti-natal policies are implemented.
Why should this rhetoric concern us? In addition to the lack of scientific basis, and its sexist and racist foundations and implications, it obfuscates the true culprit of our environmental crisis – our colonial capitalist system. By positioning the wombs of WOC as sites of control, it places the environmental blame and responsibility onto the Global South and its women, who are already at disproportionate risk of ecological harm. This shifts focus away from the higher historical emissions of richer countries like the US and the UK. We must not allow the overpopulation myth to distract us from the pursuit of climate justice.