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Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis
Too Many People? provides a clear, well-documented, and popularly written refutation of the idea that "overpopulation" is a major cause of environmental destruction, arguing that a focus on human numbers not only misunderstands the causes of the crisis, it dangerously weakens the movement for real solutions. No other book challenges modern overpopulation theory so clearly and comprehensively, providing invaluable insights for the layperson and environmental scholars alike. Ian Angus is editor of the ecosocialist journal Climate and Capitalism , and Simon Butler is co-editor of Green Left Weekly .
280 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
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About the author
Ian Angus
58 books32 followersIan Angus is a Canadian independent Marxist writer, educator, and ecosocialist activist.
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January 1, 2022
WJT Mitchell’s ‘Seeing Through Race’, has a lovely line where he says that one of the great constants in life is that there are always too many of them, and too few of us. The population growth has been connected with environmental destruction forever, I guess. It would be hard to argue that a world with more people doesn’t put added strain on the environment, and that certainly is not what the authors are arguing here. However, they do want to get us to stop and think before we assume this is merely basic common sense or a simple question of arithmetic. A better question would consider who is doing the most damage and how we might best address that damage.
Far too often in the history of population studies the people who have been blamed have been seen as the teeming multitudes of ‘them’. That is, the ‘over-populated’ nations of the world – almost all of whom are ‘developing’ nations. And so, the developed nations have done what they can to ‘help’ these nations – most often by sterilising large sections of their populations. This has frequently been done without the informed consent of the populations being sterilised. It also has often been demanded before the poor nations can get any aid at all. Reducing the local population is seen as the surest path to helping these countries to grow economically. That view is challenged in this book. Not only are these actions presented as morally reprehensible (on the basis of sterilising people without their proper consent), but they are also reprehensible because they are likely to damage these people economically and socially at the same time.
Instead, the book asks if you wanted to stop environmental damage by changing the behaviour of people, are the world’s poor the most obvious people to start with?
The authors quote a PBS television special that says: “Even though Americans comprise only five percent of the world’s population (and by Americans, of course, PBS mean the people living in United States, rather than the people living on the two continents of North and South America), in 1996 we used nearly a third of its resources and produced almost half of its hazardous waste. The average North American consumes five times as much as an average Mexican (who, again, is clearly not from North America, despite what the maps might show), 10 times as much as an average Chinese and 30 times as much as the average person in India.”
So, if the problem is the excessive and unsustainable use of the world’s resources, the population that most obviously needs controlling is that of the rich world, rather than the dirt poor.
But, again, this book makes the point that ‘averages’ hide as much as they reveal. There basically is no such beast as the ‘average American’. And thus we are brought back to the politics of the 99% and of C. Wright Mill’s Power Elite. The people at the top of the developed world are shown to consume obscenely more of the world’s resources than everyone else. So that even though the US consumes so much of the world’s resources, it still has eye-watering levels of poverty – the US Census estimates that 12% of the US population lives in poverty. Of course, that was prior to the depression we are likely to be entering now with Covid-19 and where poverty is already skyrocketing. It seems almost inconceivable that a nation that hordes so much of the world’s resources can still have about one-in-eight of its population living in poverty – but I guess that just proves that the ‘them’ we separate ‘us’ from don’t really need to live somewhere else to be poor.
The bit of this I found most interesting was the discussion on Malthus. As the authors say, people often think that Malthus was arguing that there was a famine coming – that food production grows linearly and that populations grow geometrically and that therein lies the problem. He did argue this, but it wasn’t an argument for a coming famine, but rather for confirmation of that quote from Jesus – the poor are with you always. It was, in fact, an argument against ever dreaming of a better world, since the first step towards a better world would be to increase food production – but as soon as you increase the supply of food you get an automatic increase in population, which then depletes that supply of food so that people are again forced into poverty. This logic is the same as that of many in the environmental movement who see a key instrument in tackling climate change and environmental destruction as population control.
The problem is that populations don’t grow as Malthus predicted. In fact, the rate of population growth has slowed, despite there being today much more food available than ever before. The idea that ‘if you feed them they will breed’ simply doesn’t hold.
The authors argue that population is an all too simple explanation for environmental destruction, and that it gets brought out often because it makes intuitive sense. The problem is that even if we were successful in reducing the world’s population by say a tenth, it isn’t at all clear this would slow us on our path towards environmental crisis. A similar paradox is witnessed with people installing solar panels and using other sustainable energy sources. Yet this has done nothing to slow the growth in greenhouse gas emissions.
This problem comes back to a central way that we are confounded in our attempts to impact change. As soon as we start to believe that something needs to be done, a central tenet of our society is wheeled out by those in power, ‘individual responsibility’. A perfect example is the Keep America Beautiful campaign, something that was started by companies that had the most to lose if complaints about single use packaging had been successful. Instead, these companies helped set up Keep America Beautiful and thus shifted the blame from the people producing the pollution towards the people forced to buy the packaging. It was now up to the consumers to dispose of the packaging responsibly, rather than up to the producers to make more responsible packaging. Similarly, households are asked to be responsible in their use of energy and so on – all of which is great – but at the same time those who are the main users of energy – the largest corporations and the US military – are virtually ignored due to the atomisation of the problem. Those who have the least ability to affect change are made responsible, while those making the largest contributions to the problem are ignored. It would make a great comedy, if we weren’t all quite so likely to die, laughing or not.
This book really did get me to think again about the problem of population. There are a number of times in this when the sheer racism behind ‘population control’ becomes too much to handle. Some far right groups, who don’t even believe in climate change, have set up as environmental groups because it provides a forum for them to espouse their racist views. Be warned, parts of this book are almost certainly going to make you very upset.
Far too often in the history of population studies the people who have been blamed have been seen as the teeming multitudes of ‘them’. That is, the ‘over-populated’ nations of the world – almost all of whom are ‘developing’ nations. And so, the developed nations have done what they can to ‘help’ these nations – most often by sterilising large sections of their populations. This has frequently been done without the informed consent of the populations being sterilised. It also has often been demanded before the poor nations can get any aid at all. Reducing the local population is seen as the surest path to helping these countries to grow economically. That view is challenged in this book. Not only are these actions presented as morally reprehensible (on the basis of sterilising people without their proper consent), but they are also reprehensible because they are likely to damage these people economically and socially at the same time.
Instead, the book asks if you wanted to stop environmental damage by changing the behaviour of people, are the world’s poor the most obvious people to start with?
The authors quote a PBS television special that says: “Even though Americans comprise only five percent of the world’s population (and by Americans, of course, PBS mean the people living in United States, rather than the people living on the two continents of North and South America), in 1996 we used nearly a third of its resources and produced almost half of its hazardous waste. The average North American consumes five times as much as an average Mexican (who, again, is clearly not from North America, despite what the maps might show), 10 times as much as an average Chinese and 30 times as much as the average person in India.”
So, if the problem is the excessive and unsustainable use of the world’s resources, the population that most obviously needs controlling is that of the rich world, rather than the dirt poor.
But, again, this book makes the point that ‘averages’ hide as much as they reveal. There basically is no such beast as the ‘average American’. And thus we are brought back to the politics of the 99% and of C. Wright Mill’s Power Elite. The people at the top of the developed world are shown to consume obscenely more of the world’s resources than everyone else. So that even though the US consumes so much of the world’s resources, it still has eye-watering levels of poverty – the US Census estimates that 12% of the US population lives in poverty. Of course, that was prior to the depression we are likely to be entering now with Covid-19 and where poverty is already skyrocketing. It seems almost inconceivable that a nation that hordes so much of the world’s resources can still have about one-in-eight of its population living in poverty – but I guess that just proves that the ‘them’ we separate ‘us’ from don’t really need to live somewhere else to be poor.
The bit of this I found most interesting was the discussion on Malthus. As the authors say, people often think that Malthus was arguing that there was a famine coming – that food production grows linearly and that populations grow geometrically and that therein lies the problem. He did argue this, but it wasn’t an argument for a coming famine, but rather for confirmation of that quote from Jesus – the poor are with you always. It was, in fact, an argument against ever dreaming of a better world, since the first step towards a better world would be to increase food production – but as soon as you increase the supply of food you get an automatic increase in population, which then depletes that supply of food so that people are again forced into poverty. This logic is the same as that of many in the environmental movement who see a key instrument in tackling climate change and environmental destruction as population control.
The problem is that populations don’t grow as Malthus predicted. In fact, the rate of population growth has slowed, despite there being today much more food available than ever before. The idea that ‘if you feed them they will breed’ simply doesn’t hold.
The authors argue that population is an all too simple explanation for environmental destruction, and that it gets brought out often because it makes intuitive sense. The problem is that even if we were successful in reducing the world’s population by say a tenth, it isn’t at all clear this would slow us on our path towards environmental crisis. A similar paradox is witnessed with people installing solar panels and using other sustainable energy sources. Yet this has done nothing to slow the growth in greenhouse gas emissions.
This problem comes back to a central way that we are confounded in our attempts to impact change. As soon as we start to believe that something needs to be done, a central tenet of our society is wheeled out by those in power, ‘individual responsibility’. A perfect example is the Keep America Beautiful campaign, something that was started by companies that had the most to lose if complaints about single use packaging had been successful. Instead, these companies helped set up Keep America Beautiful and thus shifted the blame from the people producing the pollution towards the people forced to buy the packaging. It was now up to the consumers to dispose of the packaging responsibly, rather than up to the producers to make more responsible packaging. Similarly, households are asked to be responsible in their use of energy and so on – all of which is great – but at the same time those who are the main users of energy – the largest corporations and the US military – are virtually ignored due to the atomisation of the problem. Those who have the least ability to affect change are made responsible, while those making the largest contributions to the problem are ignored. It would make a great comedy, if we weren’t all quite so likely to die, laughing or not.
This book really did get me to think again about the problem of population. There are a number of times in this when the sheer racism behind ‘population control’ becomes too much to handle. Some far right groups, who don’t even believe in climate change, have set up as environmental groups because it provides a forum for them to espouse their racist views. Be warned, parts of this book are almost certainly going to make you very upset.
June 20, 2023
How Liberals fail at Environmentalism and succeed at Imperialism…
Preamble:
--In our paradigm of liberal capitalism, imperialism is the silent shadow cast by our prestigious, technocratic institutions. I’ve reviewed plenty of examples in economics:
i) The banal: Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism
ii) The silent: The New Economics: A Manifesto
iii) The brilliant:
-intro: The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry
-dive: Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
--Next up, environmentalism. This (brilliant) book targets the banal, the silent, and much worse! (lecture: https://youtu.be/L6c-NDoulZo)
Highlights:
1) Elitist roots:
--Let’s start with distinguishing Thomas Robert Malthus from his “overpopulation” legacy. Malthus was not a pioneering “environmentalist” concerned with an “overpopulation” crisis:
--Prior to Malthus, the British ruling class turned to conservative Edmund Burke’s reactionary “change = bad” moralism (see: The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump).
---Malthus thus pioneered a naturalization of capitalism (seeking “natural laws”, like today’s technocracy hiding power). Conveniently, such laws dictated that poverty was inevitable as the poor are ignorant, so welfare and birth control are useless.
--Neo-Malthusians (now supporting birth control) came later in the 1820s. Both variations declined because, well, the real world intervened: Europe’s reforms improving living standards (i.e. watered-down socialism: public sanitation/health, education, women's rights, worker's safety, pensions, etc.) succeeded in driving down poverty for the masses, creating a “demographic transition” where birth rates also fell. This happened prior to modern birth control availability/legality.
2) Imperialist Assumptions:
--So, we arrive at the modern populationist obsession with “overpopulation”. The book traces this to Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb, shortly after:
i) 1962 Silent Spring (warning against pesticides)
ii) the modern Western environmental movement during the Cold War’s nuclear arms race (which sadly disappeared despite modern risks: The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner), and
iii) post-WWII’s “Great Acceleration” of human disturbance on the Earth Systems (i.e. “Anthropocene”: see the author's next book Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System).
--I’m disappointed this book didn’t emphasize the other context: the height of decolonization (The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World), when the Global South masses challenged global capitalism’smarket colonial prices and division-of-labour (for big picture dive, see Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present). How convenient for Western scientists (mostly liberal technocrats) to respond with “overpopulation”!
--The tragedy: (liberal) science’s pathetic attempts to apply their physical scientific findings to the social world, given their undiagnosed liberalism obscures capitalist social structures of power/finance/production/distribution/ideology.
--The farce: thus, sciences’ fixation on “population” in the abstract, from the famine scares of the 1960’s to today’s environmental degradation debates. If we let the real world intrude, it turns out population growth is negatively correlated with emissions. The G20 rich nations dominate emissions while having birth control and low birth rates. “In short, if your computer model assumes that population growth causes emissions growth, then it will tell you that fewer people will produce fewer emissions. Malthus in, Malthus out.”
--Within rich nations is also great inequality. Furthermore, this “too many (Western) consumers” argument (ex. Clive Hamilton, Jared Diamond who wrote the dismal Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed) is convenient for liberals who assume capitalism is driven by consumer demand (basically consumer democracy). This erases the actual structures of capitalist power: finance + production + distribution is driven by profit (private surplus) and competition:
i) Economic growth (endless private accumulation) = capitalism's economic health, i.e. the purpose of investments, rather than targeting social needs; thus GDP is not a driving “idea gone bad” but a reflection of capitalism’s needs: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
ii) Environment is a free gift, thus the necessity to exploit and pollute in order to survive competition: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power=
iii) Given the need for constant consumer demand to match economic growth, demand must be manufactured with the sprawling advertising industry + planned obsolescence. The vast majority of waste/pollution is hidden in the production process, well-hidden from individual consumers. Capitalism is “efficient” in private accumulation; meanwhile, garbage is profitable: Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage
--“Too many consumers” confuses 2 types of consumption by:
i) obscuring the capitalist structural consumption (production + distribution), and attributing all this to...
ii) the surface-level individual/household consumer consumption of goods/services. End consumers have little visibility or say over what is beneath the tip of the iceberg:
--Thus, we have this appalling situation where the psychopathic pro-capitalists are using “merchants of doubt” tactics to spread denialism for their short-term gains (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming), while the “enlightened” ivory-tower pro-or-default-capitalist science community chase their tails in social application with abysmal modeling assumptions.
...A core example is IPAT: Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology. The appendix includes a 1995 article by the most progressive of the “Limits to Growth” (original report in 1972) systems scientists, Donella H. Meadows, where she concedes that directly applying IPAT’s abstraction erases real-world power relations. Meadows concludes with the off-the-cuff idea of Impact = Military + Large Business + Small Business + Gov + Luxury Consumption + Subsistence Consumption, each with its own P/A/T variables, before retreating to say this is very complex. This was in 1995; I’m reading the 2004 The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update and I’ve yet to see much improvement.
3) Imperialist Consequences:
--The abstract farce gets uglier in the real world: Western environmentalism is sickened with:
a) Immigration control:
--Once you apply the fallacious “too many people” + “too many consumers”, you eventually end up with the repulsive “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor” and the “deep ecology” of “Defend climate oases”. The problem with blaming people is the hate gets turned on visible minorities/vulnerable rather than on the actual structural causes; yes, liberalism/imperialism breeds fascism (Discourse on Colonialism), in this case “eco-fascism”.
...Much of this book catalogs the range within Western environmentalism, from Garrett Hardin’s (popularized the “Tragedy of the Commons” myth: https://youtu.be/xcwXME-PNuE) compulsory population reduction to the more subtle immigration controls (linked to a disturbing list of prominent Western environmentalists, ex. David Attenborough, Jane Goodall, James E. Lovelock).
b) Birth control (in the Global South):
--Even at its best (ex. Michelle Goldberg using “populationist” fallacies to get liberal aid for women’s reproductive rights), this entire “Western aid” mirage perpetuates imperialism: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions. Need to read Reproductive Rights and Wrongs (Revised Edition): The Global Politics of Population Control. And as reviewed, “too many people” is a distraction for environmentalism.
--This ecosocialist book is a great start for critical Western audiences, inspired by the best from the West (Eugene V. Debs, Barry Commoner). The next step is to move beyond listing Global South movements to considering theories from the anti-imperialist Global South: Vijay Prashad, Utsa Patnaik:
-Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism
-The Veins of the South Are Still Open: Debates Around the Imperialism of Our Time.
Preamble:
--In our paradigm of liberal capitalism, imperialism is the silent shadow cast by our prestigious, technocratic institutions. I’ve reviewed plenty of examples in economics:
i) The banal: Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism
ii) The silent: The New Economics: A Manifesto
iii) The brilliant:
-intro: The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry
-dive: Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
--Next up, environmentalism. This (brilliant) book targets the banal, the silent, and much worse! (lecture: https://youtu.be/L6c-NDoulZo)
Highlights:
1) Elitist roots:
--Let’s start with distinguishing Thomas Robert Malthus from his “overpopulation” legacy. Malthus was not a pioneering “environmentalist” concerned with an “overpopulation” crisis:
His goal was very different: to prove that most people will always be poor and that no social or political change could ever alter that. Nearly two hundred years before Margaret Thatcher declared that there is no alternative to capitalism, Malthus won the British ruling class to that very idea.--This was the time of the US/French revolutions and class struggle/reforms, where Malthus directly attacked reformists William Godwin, Nicolas de Condorcet, and later Thomas Paine and Robert Owen. We should take a step further to note the forgotten “indigenous critique” (ex. Kondiaronk, see The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity) that stirred European Enlightenment debates, and the Haitian Revolution.
--Prior to Malthus, the British ruling class turned to conservative Edmund Burke’s reactionary “change = bad” moralism (see: The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump).
---Malthus thus pioneered a naturalization of capitalism (seeking “natural laws”, like today’s technocracy hiding power). Conveniently, such laws dictated that poverty was inevitable as the poor are ignorant, so welfare and birth control are useless.
--Neo-Malthusians (now supporting birth control) came later in the 1820s. Both variations declined because, well, the real world intervened: Europe’s reforms improving living standards (i.e. watered-down socialism: public sanitation/health, education, women's rights, worker's safety, pensions, etc.) succeeded in driving down poverty for the masses, creating a “demographic transition” where birth rates also fell. This happened prior to modern birth control availability/legality.
2) Imperialist Assumptions:
--So, we arrive at the modern populationist obsession with “overpopulation”. The book traces this to Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb, shortly after:
i) 1962 Silent Spring (warning against pesticides)
ii) the modern Western environmental movement during the Cold War’s nuclear arms race (which sadly disappeared despite modern risks: The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner), and
iii) post-WWII’s “Great Acceleration” of human disturbance on the Earth Systems (i.e. “Anthropocene”: see the author's next book Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System).
--I’m disappointed this book didn’t emphasize the other context: the height of decolonization (The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World), when the Global South masses challenged global capitalism’s
--The tragedy: (liberal) science’s pathetic attempts to apply their physical scientific findings to the social world, given their undiagnosed liberalism obscures capitalist social structures of power/finance/production/distribution/ideology.
--The farce: thus, sciences’ fixation on “population” in the abstract, from the famine scares of the 1960’s to today’s environmental degradation debates. If we let the real world intrude, it turns out population growth is negatively correlated with emissions. The G20 rich nations dominate emissions while having birth control and low birth rates. “In short, if your computer model assumes that population growth causes emissions growth, then it will tell you that fewer people will produce fewer emissions. Malthus in, Malthus out.”
--Within rich nations is also great inequality. Furthermore, this “too many (Western) consumers” argument (ex. Clive Hamilton, Jared Diamond who wrote the dismal Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed) is convenient for liberals who assume capitalism is driven by consumer demand (basically consumer democracy). This erases the actual structures of capitalist power: finance + production + distribution is driven by profit (private surplus) and competition:
i) Economic growth (endless private accumulation) = capitalism's economic health, i.e. the purpose of investments, rather than targeting social needs; thus GDP is not a driving “idea gone bad” but a reflection of capitalism’s needs: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
ii) Environment is a free gift, thus the necessity to exploit and pollute in order to survive competition: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power=
iii) Given the need for constant consumer demand to match economic growth, demand must be manufactured with the sprawling advertising industry + planned obsolescence. The vast majority of waste/pollution is hidden in the production process, well-hidden from individual consumers. Capitalism is “efficient” in private accumulation; meanwhile, garbage is profitable: Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage
--“Too many consumers” confuses 2 types of consumption by:
i) obscuring the capitalist structural consumption (production + distribution), and attributing all this to...
ii) the surface-level individual/household consumer consumption of goods/services. End consumers have little visibility or say over what is beneath the tip of the iceberg:
The great majority of “consumption” (throughput) does not involve individual product users at all. For example, the average rate at which people produce waste, mentioned above by Diamond, is calculated by dividing the total population into the total waste. But since 99 percent of all solid waste in the United States today comes from industrial processes, eliminating all household waste would have little effect on per capita waste. Diamond’s “average rate” is meaningless. [Emphases added]...Furthermore, averaging out consumption as individual/household consumers completely obscures institutional consumers, with the US military industrial complex being the biggest outlier. Not even the most pro-gun American consumes such quantities of military vehicles (aircrafts/ships/tanks etc.), ammunition (bombs/missiles etc.), and supporting industries, i.e. not just Halliburton reconstruction, but all the service industries surrounding the military industrial complex (how crazy is it to “need more jobs” to destroy each other and the planet, just to survive capitalism's maldistribution of resources? Bullshit Jobs: A Theory); this complex is spread throughout the US to try and keep capitalism circulating (also, capitalism needs to plan for violence to prevent planning for social needs; And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future). Colonization remains at the center of ecological crises.
--Thus, we have this appalling situation where the psychopathic pro-capitalists are using “merchants of doubt” tactics to spread denialism for their short-term gains (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming), while the “enlightened” ivory-tower pro-or-default-capitalist science community chase their tails in social application with abysmal modeling assumptions.
...A core example is IPAT: Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology. The appendix includes a 1995 article by the most progressive of the “Limits to Growth” (original report in 1972) systems scientists, Donella H. Meadows, where she concedes that directly applying IPAT’s abstraction erases real-world power relations. Meadows concludes with the off-the-cuff idea of Impact = Military + Large Business + Small Business + Gov + Luxury Consumption + Subsistence Consumption, each with its own P/A/T variables, before retreating to say this is very complex. This was in 1995; I’m reading the 2004 The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update and I’ve yet to see much improvement.
3) Imperialist Consequences:
--The abstract farce gets uglier in the real world: Western environmentalism is sickened with:
a) Immigration control:
--Once you apply the fallacious “too many people” + “too many consumers”, you eventually end up with the repulsive “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor” and the “deep ecology” of “Defend climate oases”. The problem with blaming people is the hate gets turned on visible minorities/vulnerable rather than on the actual structural causes; yes, liberalism/imperialism breeds fascism (Discourse on Colonialism), in this case “eco-fascism”.
...Much of this book catalogs the range within Western environmentalism, from Garrett Hardin’s (popularized the “Tragedy of the Commons” myth: https://youtu.be/xcwXME-PNuE) compulsory population reduction to the more subtle immigration controls (linked to a disturbing list of prominent Western environmentalists, ex. David Attenborough, Jane Goodall, James E. Lovelock).
b) Birth control (in the Global South):
--Even at its best (ex. Michelle Goldberg using “populationist” fallacies to get liberal aid for women’s reproductive rights), this entire “Western aid” mirage perpetuates imperialism: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions. Need to read Reproductive Rights and Wrongs (Revised Edition): The Global Politics of Population Control. And as reviewed, “too many people” is a distraction for environmentalism.
--This ecosocialist book is a great start for critical Western audiences, inspired by the best from the West (Eugene V. Debs, Barry Commoner). The next step is to move beyond listing Global South movements to considering theories from the anti-imperialist Global South: Vijay Prashad, Utsa Patnaik:
-Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism
-The Veins of the South Are Still Open: Debates Around the Imperialism of Our Time.
February 4, 2012
the best book i've read so far for explaining and then taking apart the malthusian/populationist arguments. a must read for environmentalists. very thorough book without a lot of overlap from other general surveys of environmental problems and solutions.
April 23, 2020
This book is thoroughly sourced and offers lucid explanations. The quotes at the beginning of each chapter were well-chosen. It doesn't spend a whole lot of time talking about Malthus or Mathulsianism (the appendix has a great section on that) but is instead more concerned with everyday populationists, and it frequently refers to Ehlrich's The Population Bomb and similar works.
Main idea/thesis: to address ecological crises and rampant inequality, we must target the overarching social and political structures that produce astronomical waste and maldistribution of resources, not the predominantly poor and powerless victimized by these structures and with little control over their circumstances. Populationist thinking obstructs and obfuscates from real, positive environmental change so long as the goal is nonexistence of fellow comrades instead of building a mass movement with them. To populationists, less feet on the ground becomes the goal in and of itself.
If you read one chapter from this book, let it be Chapter 3: "Dissecting Those 'Overpopulation' Numbers." It presents a devastating critique of the misuse of numbers and the tendency to draw spurious conclusions from otherwise valid, accurate statistics. The authors provide insight on the conflation of correlation with causation used to wrongly attribute increasing CO2 emissions to more or higher density of people. The disguising of the ratio "pollution per capita" as a rate leads to hilariously circular reasoning and self-contained models akin to dividing any number by population and then multiplying by population again to get the same number. The alluring I=PAT formula is so groundbreaking to say: total impact = average x number of people.
As silly as these antics are, they are intentional and speak to a larger point about of the assumptions besides statistical models. If scientists make the assumption that population growth causes emissions over time, then they will design and run computer models that tell them that (garbage in, garbage out.) Scientists are necessarily immersed in their social, political, cultural milieu, and as the purveyors of science, they exercise their normative values and conceptions of what is true or just. (This is the subject of other books. See Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA and Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health)
Another thing this book does a good job at is highlighting the ideological project of redressing complex social and political problems as simple mathematical equations or biological buzzwords. And it has been successful, with crude DMT graphs presented in high school human geography textbooks as laws rather than models. Poverty and hunger simply becomes facts of life rather than a product of social, political, economic, and historical determinants. Terms like “carrying capacity” are borrowed from animal ecology and fudged onto humans, because math.
The authors go on to show particularly strong arguments for why so-called “humanitarian” family planning agendas exported to developing countries only serve to restrict reproductive autonomy, as sterilization effectively becomes a contingency for social mobility and even survival.
They demonstrate that starving people not having enough food to eat does not necessarily mean that there is not enough food to around; rather, global food production is in the hands of big agribusiness, which seeks to reroute production in profitable areas only, convert grains into beef, corn into biofuel, and straight-up dispose of surplus food. They make the distinction between productive consumption and individual consumer-side consumption. For each of these points, populationists either never realize, or worse, don't care.
But when populationists do decide to look at the evidence, it does not seem to matter whether it has borne out in their favor or not. If food and resources are scarce, these comprise the doomsday predictions at the cornerstone of populationist argument. Conversely, if an unprecedented agricultural revolution happens that far outstrips any growth in population, then the trend is only temporary and unsustainable. The putative conditions can be molded to fit their agenda as needed.
After reading this book, you will see that there is no need to label poulationists as "Malthusians" or "ecofascists" since outright calls for involuntary sterilization or “let them starve” have fallen significantly out of fashion. More often than not, they’re just plain old racist liberals who actively partake in victim-blaming and the greening of hate.
Main idea/thesis: to address ecological crises and rampant inequality, we must target the overarching social and political structures that produce astronomical waste and maldistribution of resources, not the predominantly poor and powerless victimized by these structures and with little control over their circumstances. Populationist thinking obstructs and obfuscates from real, positive environmental change so long as the goal is nonexistence of fellow comrades instead of building a mass movement with them. To populationists, less feet on the ground becomes the goal in and of itself.
If you read one chapter from this book, let it be Chapter 3: "Dissecting Those 'Overpopulation' Numbers." It presents a devastating critique of the misuse of numbers and the tendency to draw spurious conclusions from otherwise valid, accurate statistics. The authors provide insight on the conflation of correlation with causation used to wrongly attribute increasing CO2 emissions to more or higher density of people. The disguising of the ratio "pollution per capita" as a rate leads to hilariously circular reasoning and self-contained models akin to dividing any number by population and then multiplying by population again to get the same number. The alluring I=PAT formula is so groundbreaking to say: total impact = average x number of people.
As silly as these antics are, they are intentional and speak to a larger point about of the assumptions besides statistical models. If scientists make the assumption that population growth causes emissions over time, then they will design and run computer models that tell them that (garbage in, garbage out.) Scientists are necessarily immersed in their social, political, cultural milieu, and as the purveyors of science, they exercise their normative values and conceptions of what is true or just. (This is the subject of other books. See Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA and Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health)
Another thing this book does a good job at is highlighting the ideological project of redressing complex social and political problems as simple mathematical equations or biological buzzwords. And it has been successful, with crude DMT graphs presented in high school human geography textbooks as laws rather than models. Poverty and hunger simply becomes facts of life rather than a product of social, political, economic, and historical determinants. Terms like “carrying capacity” are borrowed from animal ecology and fudged onto humans, because math.
The authors go on to show particularly strong arguments for why so-called “humanitarian” family planning agendas exported to developing countries only serve to restrict reproductive autonomy, as sterilization effectively becomes a contingency for social mobility and even survival.
They demonstrate that starving people not having enough food to eat does not necessarily mean that there is not enough food to around; rather, global food production is in the hands of big agribusiness, which seeks to reroute production in profitable areas only, convert grains into beef, corn into biofuel, and straight-up dispose of surplus food. They make the distinction between productive consumption and individual consumer-side consumption. For each of these points, populationists either never realize, or worse, don't care.
But when populationists do decide to look at the evidence, it does not seem to matter whether it has borne out in their favor or not. If food and resources are scarce, these comprise the doomsday predictions at the cornerstone of populationist argument. Conversely, if an unprecedented agricultural revolution happens that far outstrips any growth in population, then the trend is only temporary and unsustainable. The putative conditions can be molded to fit their agenda as needed.
After reading this book, you will see that there is no need to label poulationists as "Malthusians" or "ecofascists" since outright calls for involuntary sterilization or “let them starve” have fallen significantly out of fashion. More often than not, they’re just plain old racist liberals who actively partake in victim-blaming and the greening of hate.
October 14, 2011
This book showed me how simplistic my own thinking was on population.
It exposes the theory that there are too many people in the world as politically naive, and does it in a clear, well-argued way.
Here are a few quotes that jumped out at me:
"For the planet-destroying rulers of the world, the excess people are never themselves. The excess people are always somebody else."
"As Mahmood Mamdani showed, bigger families made economic sense in very poor agricultural communities that had no social security benefits or reliable medical care: having fewer children 'would have meant to willfully court economic disaster'."
"In the hands of the self-seeking, humanitarianism is the most terrifying ism of all."
"The impact of the super-rich on the environment results not primarily from their individual greedy gluttony but from their ownership and control of organisations and institutions whose ecocidal activities far exceed those of any individual or group of individuals."
"In the end, the idea of consumer sovereignty doesn't add up. It is a myth convenient for those who would locate responsibility for social and environmental problems on the backs of consumers, absolving those who truly have market power and who write the rules of the game and who benefit the most."
"It's important to remember, whatever lens you use, that it lets you see some things but it prevents you from seeing others."
It exposes the theory that there are too many people in the world as politically naive, and does it in a clear, well-argued way.
Here are a few quotes that jumped out at me:
"For the planet-destroying rulers of the world, the excess people are never themselves. The excess people are always somebody else."
"As Mahmood Mamdani showed, bigger families made economic sense in very poor agricultural communities that had no social security benefits or reliable medical care: having fewer children 'would have meant to willfully court economic disaster'."
"In the hands of the self-seeking, humanitarianism is the most terrifying ism of all."
"The impact of the super-rich on the environment results not primarily from their individual greedy gluttony but from their ownership and control of organisations and institutions whose ecocidal activities far exceed those of any individual or group of individuals."
"In the end, the idea of consumer sovereignty doesn't add up. It is a myth convenient for those who would locate responsibility for social and environmental problems on the backs of consumers, absolving those who truly have market power and who write the rules of the game and who benefit the most."
"It's important to remember, whatever lens you use, that it lets you see some things but it prevents you from seeing others."
February 20, 2021
I'm going to firm stand on the side of Paul Ehrlich.
As others have noted, not even taking one full page to discuss the book 'The Limits of Growth' is pretty telling.
July 23, 2018
I love when non-fiction teaches me something new about a topic I felt I knew a lot about. Somehow in all my efforts to support nature I never happened across the populationist argument about climate change. Populationists blame climate change and food shortages on rising population. Most propose anti-immigration laws and strict control of births.
On its face, populationism seems feasible. More people = more mouths to feed. More people = more carbon emission. Seems straightforward. Perhaps that's what's appealing about it. But the studies Angus and Butler cite seem to tell a different story.
For food, studies show that there's a surplus being produced, but not a lot of it gets to the people who need it most. Instead it goes to wealthy nations who go on to waste a large percent of it.
For personal pollution, the average person can't come close to polluting as much as a factory or coal mining operation or nuclear power plants or any other kind of large money making endeavor.
The common thread between those two examples is money. Uh oh, is this book arguing that capitalism is to blame for climate change? Yep! And it's right, too. Angus and Butler create some very eye-opening arguments.
The first bit of the book spends time refuting your typical populationist propaganda. They really cut it to bits and it's quite amusing. Angus and Butler must have a good sense of humor about all this, despite the catastrophic troubles. The later bits of the book go on to show how really it's capitalism.
How the richest something percent pollute more than some countries. Grossly wasteful existences dwarfed by wasteful capital gluttony. The rhetoric here is quite effective.
It's brief, entertaining, and very well argued and supported. There's an appendix I scanned through with some other interesting articles. And as with most Haymarket books there's a chunky section of notes. Tons of stuff to really dig into this topic.
On its face, populationism seems feasible. More people = more mouths to feed. More people = more carbon emission. Seems straightforward. Perhaps that's what's appealing about it. But the studies Angus and Butler cite seem to tell a different story.
For food, studies show that there's a surplus being produced, but not a lot of it gets to the people who need it most. Instead it goes to wealthy nations who go on to waste a large percent of it.
For personal pollution, the average person can't come close to polluting as much as a factory or coal mining operation or nuclear power plants or any other kind of large money making endeavor.
The common thread between those two examples is money. Uh oh, is this book arguing that capitalism is to blame for climate change? Yep! And it's right, too. Angus and Butler create some very eye-opening arguments.
The first bit of the book spends time refuting your typical populationist propaganda. They really cut it to bits and it's quite amusing. Angus and Butler must have a good sense of humor about all this, despite the catastrophic troubles. The later bits of the book go on to show how really it's capitalism.
How the richest something percent pollute more than some countries. Grossly wasteful existences dwarfed by wasteful capital gluttony. The rhetoric here is quite effective.
It's brief, entertaining, and very well argued and supported. There's an appendix I scanned through with some other interesting articles. And as with most Haymarket books there's a chunky section of notes. Tons of stuff to really dig into this topic.
April 9, 2017
Poorly written pile of pseudo-scientific ersatz-socialistic verbiage.
Instead of intelligent discussion, Ian Angus simply misrepresents ideas of multiple other authors. When we talk “multiple” – it feels like about two hundred (I did not bother to count). On average, two citations per page, mostly out of context – even Karl Marx got misquoted once (Marx never said, over-population is nonsense, but just the opposite – see Capital I Part III Chapter 13-IV).
Nine times out ten, the one-paragraph synopsis of each mentioned source is useless if not downright misleading.
An example, perhaps? To one of the most influential books on the subject, “The Limits to Growth”, Angus allocates the whopping ¾ of a page! Out of two paragraphs, one copied from an irrelevant critic on a corporate payroll. With that, the book, which sold 3 million copies, and without doubt shaped our global understanding – is dismissed as an “outdated earlier work”.
Well done, Ian Angus!
Who gives a damn about the Earth?
Instead of intelligent discussion, Ian Angus simply misrepresents ideas of multiple other authors. When we talk “multiple” – it feels like about two hundred (I did not bother to count). On average, two citations per page, mostly out of context – even Karl Marx got misquoted once (Marx never said, over-population is nonsense, but just the opposite – see Capital I Part III Chapter 13-IV).
Nine times out ten, the one-paragraph synopsis of each mentioned source is useless if not downright misleading.
An example, perhaps? To one of the most influential books on the subject, “The Limits to Growth”, Angus allocates the whopping ¾ of a page! Out of two paragraphs, one copied from an irrelevant critic on a corporate payroll. With that, the book, which sold 3 million copies, and without doubt shaped our global understanding – is dismissed as an “outdated earlier work”.
Well done, Ian Angus!
Who gives a damn about the Earth?
January 10, 2022
This book is truly phenomenal. I've read dozens of books on climate change and the environment. Too Many People? is easily among the best of that lot. I particularly recommend it to those on the political left, as your views on population may be more rightwing than you even realize.
January 10, 2021
Best progressive explanation of the issue that I've seen - since the chapter on population in Barry Commoner's Making Peace With the Planet.
July 10, 2020
A really great book for exploring how the world’s poor gets scapegoated for the environmental crisis.
January 3, 2022
In general, the book is well-written and makes a good argument that overpopulation should not be the focus of the environmental movement.
I read this book coming from the complete opposite view and while I still believe overpopulation is an issue (it is trivial to see we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet) the book did convince me that to focus on it as the principal problem is an oversimplification.
The book points out the large inequalities that exist within societies that mean that average figures can become misleading and that to look at populations without considering their constitution (the wealth, power etc. of the individuals that make them up) is insufficient to arrive at useful, actionable strategies.
It's good that it doesn't hide away from issues of economic and power inequalities which are often glossed over by the liberal environmental movement and is probably a large reason behind it's failure to resonate with much of the population. For example, it's easy to blame people for driving so much - but do they have a choice if they want to get to work on time? Do they have the power to change transportation policies etc.?
I felt the chapters on immigration were a bit unnecessary and felt a bit like a strawman. Mainly because the argument they were arguing against (that immigration causes increased CO2 emissions etc.) seems an obviously weak one. But it seems some people do genuinely argue that despite as the authors point out the clear hypocrisy it implies (assuming that the citizens of Western nations are entitled to emit more pollution than those of developing countries).
I would recommend this book to others.
I read this book coming from the complete opposite view and while I still believe overpopulation is an issue (it is trivial to see we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet) the book did convince me that to focus on it as the principal problem is an oversimplification.
The book points out the large inequalities that exist within societies that mean that average figures can become misleading and that to look at populations without considering their constitution (the wealth, power etc. of the individuals that make them up) is insufficient to arrive at useful, actionable strategies.
It's good that it doesn't hide away from issues of economic and power inequalities which are often glossed over by the liberal environmental movement and is probably a large reason behind it's failure to resonate with much of the population. For example, it's easy to blame people for driving so much - but do they have a choice if they want to get to work on time? Do they have the power to change transportation policies etc.?
I felt the chapters on immigration were a bit unnecessary and felt a bit like a strawman. Mainly because the argument they were arguing against (that immigration causes increased CO2 emissions etc.) seems an obviously weak one. But it seems some people do genuinely argue that despite as the authors point out the clear hypocrisy it implies (assuming that the citizens of Western nations are entitled to emit more pollution than those of developing countries).
I would recommend this book to others.
January 3, 2013
I started and finished this book during the winter break. It guided me through the history of conservatism and environmental movements. The ideas and 'science' behind the myth that overpopulation is the root cause of ecosystems' exhaustion. It describe step by step (15 chapters), putting numbers in context, the idiosyncrasy of our social and economic system. A system which 'growth of die' profit-based order will never stop for the sake of preserving or protecting the environment. I could not stop reading given the logic and the abundant references the the authors provided for a more comprehensive research. Goodreading!
January 29, 2021
Très bien documenté, offre une autre perspective sur des débats qu’on entend souvent. Je saurais utiliser des arguments de ce livre dans le futur!
Cependant, j’ai moins aimé la conclusion où la position socialiste est mise de l’avant et peu expliquée. Elle est mentionnée à la toute fin, et dans les annexes, mais je ne trouve pas que ça avait tant sa place dans cet ouvrage qui tentait de présenter des faits. Surtout que les propositions de la fin étaient pour le moins utopique et qu’aucun moyen de les réalisées n’étaient présentés. Je crois que ça n’allait pas dans le même sens que le reste du livre.
Cependant, j’ai moins aimé la conclusion où la position socialiste est mise de l’avant et peu expliquée. Elle est mentionnée à la toute fin, et dans les annexes, mais je ne trouve pas que ça avait tant sa place dans cet ouvrage qui tentait de présenter des faits. Surtout que les propositions de la fin étaient pour le moins utopique et qu’aucun moyen de les réalisées n’étaient présentés. Je crois que ça n’allait pas dans le même sens que le reste du livre.
April 25, 2024
This is a great book. There’s certainly a train of thought within the environmental movement that there are too many people and only a finite amount of resources, thus we need to cut down on population. The authors argue that even under our current system, we could feed everyone if we didn’t waste so much. More specifically if capitalists and bosses didn’t waste so much in the name of profit. And further refocusing the source of climate change to multi-billion dollar corporations. The authors also criticize population control policies for being inherently racist in both theory and practice.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 8, 2025
As an Ecoligist, with the Enviromentallist colledge degree, this book opened my mind about the issue of too many people vs the magnitude of human impact, which seems to be proportional, but it's not. Of all the books I've read about enviroment, human impact, carbon footprint, climate change, waste, ecosystem degradation, global resources depletion, etc., I asure you, this book is really fundamental and a must read for any person interested in ecology.
March 2, 2025
A thorough, insightful, accessible dismantling of populationist myths and rhetorics. The problem was never too many people. The problem was, remains, and will continue to be the cancerous growth imperative of capitalism.
Want to Read
November 11, 2020Thankyou Haymarketbooks for book discount from $9.99 into $ 1.00
March 26, 2023
Very important work to get rid of the ‘reduce the population’ as environmental argument. It changed my assumptions and gave be deep understanding why reducing population is not a solution.
February 28, 2025
really accessible for anyone wanting to read two people debunking populationists and their bullshit!
June 24, 2024
Ian Angus
Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis
Haymarket
280 pages
8.0
Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis
Haymarket
280 pages
8.0
Read
November 11, 2018Insightful look into the arguments for and against population control as a means to stave Of The environmental crisis. It's Capitalism, stupid.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews