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Title: The Population Myth Author: Murray Bookchin Language: en Topics: class struggle, population, social ecology Source: Retrieved on 20 March 2010 from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/gp/perspectives8.html][dwardmac.pitzer.edu]] & [[http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/gp/perspectives15.html Notes: From Green Perspectives #8 & 15
The “population problem” has a Phoenix-like existence: it rises from the
ashes at least every generation and sometimes every decade or so. The
prophecies are usually the same namely, that human beings are populating
the earth in “unprecedented numbers” and “devouring” its resources like
a locust plague.
In the days of the Industrial Revolution, Thomas Malthus, a craven
English parson, formulated his notorious “law of population” which
asserts that while food supplies expand only arithmetically, population
soars geometrically. Only by wars, famines, and disease (Malthus
essentially argued) can a “balance” be struck between population and
food supplies. Malthus did not mean this to be an argument to foster
human welfare; it was an unfeeling justification for the inhuman
miseries inflicted on the mass of English people by land grabbing
aristocrats and exploitative “industrialists.” True to the mean-spirited
atmosphere of the times, Malthus opposed attempts to alleviate poverty
because they would remove the limits imposed on “population growth” by
prolonging the lives of the poor.
Malthus’ “law” entered into Darwin’s explanation of evolution and
re-emerged from biology as “social-Darwinism.” Propounded vigorously in
the U.S. and England a generation later, this theory reduced society to
a “jungle,” in effect, in which a “law of survival of the fittest”
justified the wanton plundering of the world by the wealthy or the
“fittest,” while the laboring classes, dispossessed farmers, and Third
World “savages” were reduced to penury, presumably because they were
“unfit” to survive. The arrogance of bankers, industrialists, and
colonialists in the “Gilded Age” at the turn of the century who dined on
lavish dishes, while starved bodies were collected regularly in the city
streets of the western world — all testified to a harsh class system
that invoked “natural law” to justify the opulence enjoyed by the ruling
few and the hunger suffered by the ruled many.
Barely a generation later, Malthusianism acquired an explicitly racist
character. During the early twenties, when “Anglo Saxon” racism peaked
in the U.S. against “darker” peoples like Italians, Jews, and so-called
“Eastern Europeans” the notion of “biological inferiority” led to
explicitly exclusionary immigration laws that favored “northern
Europeans” over other, presumably “subhuman” peoples. Malthusianism, now
prefixed with a “neo” to render it more contemporary, thoroughly
permeated this legislation. Population in the U.S. had to be
“controlled” and American “cultural” (read: racial) purity had to be
rescued — be it from the “Yellow Peril” of Asia or the “Dark Peril” of
the Latin and Semitic worlds.
Nazism did not have to invent its racial imagery of sturdy “Aryans” who
are beleaguered by “subhuman” dark people, particularly Jews. Hitler saw
himself as the protector of a “northern European culture” from “Hebraic
superstitions,” to use the juicy language of a contemporary well-known
Arizona writer — a “cultural” issue that was riddled by fascist
sociobiology. From Hitler’s “northern European” viewpoint, Europe was
“over populated” and the continent’s ethnic groups had to be sifted out
according to their racial background. Hence the gas chambers and
crematoriums of Auschwitz, the execution squads that followed the German
army into Russia in the summer of 1941, and the systematic and
mechanized slaughter of millions in a span of three or four years.
One would have thought that the Second World War and the ugly traditions
that fed into it might have created a deeper sense of humanity and a
more sensitive regard for life — nonhuman as well as human.
Judging from the way the “population problem” has surfaced again,
however, we seem even more brutalized than ever. By the late 1940s,
before the wartime dead had fully decayed, the “neo Malthusians” were
back at work — this time over the use of newly developed pesticides for
eradicating malaria and antibiotics to control killing infections in the
Third World. Even eminent biologists like William Vogt entered the fray
with books and articles, directing their attacks at modern medicine for
preserving human life and predicting famines in Britain between 1948 and
1978 and imminent famine in Germany and Japan. The debate, which often
took an ugly turn, was overshadowed by the Korean War and the blandly
optimistic Eisenhower era, followed by the stormy sixties period with
its message of idealism, public service, and, if you please, “humanism.”
But the decade barely came to a close when neo-Malthusianism surfaced
again — this time with grim books that warned of a “population bomb” and
advocated an “ethics” of “triage” in which the nations that were
recommended for U.S. aid seemed uncannily to fall on the American side
of the “Cold War,” irrespective of their population growth-rates.
Viewed from a distance of two decades later, the predictions made by
many neo-Malthusians seem almost insanely ridiculous. We were warned,
often in the mass media, that by the 1980s, for example, artificial
islands in the oceans would be needed to accomodate the growing
population densities on the continents. Our oil supplies, we were told
with supreme certainty, would be completely depleted by the end of the
century. Wars between starving peoples would ravage the planet, each
nation seeking to plunder the hidden food stores of the others. By the
late seventies, this “debate” took a welcome breather — but it has
returned again in full bloom in the biological verbiage of ecology.
Given the hysteria and the exaggerated “predictions” of earlier such
“debates,” the tone today is a little calmer. But in some respects it is
even more sinister. We have not been forced to turn our oceans into real
estate, nor have we run out of oil, food, material resources — or
neo-Malthusian prophets. But we are acquiring certain bad intellectual
habits and we are being rendered more gullible by a new kind of
religiosity that goes under the name of “spirituality” with a new-styled
paganism and primitivism.
First of all, we are thinking more quantitatively than qualitatively —
all talk about “wholeness,” “oneness,” and “interconectedness” to the
contrary notwithstanding. For example, when we are told that the
“population issue” is merely a “matter of numbers,” as one Zero
Population Growth writer put it, then the vast complexity of population
growth and diminution is reduced to a mere numbers game, like the
fluctuations of Dow stock-market averages. Human beings, turned into
digits, can thus be equated to fruitflies and their numbers narrowly
correlated with food supply. This is “following the Dow” with a
vengeance. Social research, as distinguished from the Voodoo ecology
that passes under the name of “deep ecology” these days, reveals that
human beings are highly social beings, not simply a species of mammals.
Their behavior is profoundly conditioned by their social status, as
people who belong to a particular gender, hierarchy, class group, ethnic
tradition, community, historical era, or adhere to a variety of
ideologies. They also have at their disposable powerful technologies,
material resources, science, and a naturally endowed capacity for
conceptual thought that provides them with a flexibility that few, if
any, nonhuman beings possess, not to speak of evolving institutions and
capacities for systematic group cooperation. Nothing, here, is more
illusory than to “follow the Dow.” The bad intellectual habits of
thinking out demographic — or even “resource” — issues in a linear,
asocial, and ahistorical manner tends to enter into all ecological
problems, thanks very much to the neo-Malthusians and to a “biocentrism”
that equates people to nonhuman life-forms.
Secondly, by reducing us to studies of line graphs, bar graphs, and
statistical tables, the neo-Malthusians literally freeze reality as it
is. Their numerical extrapolations do not construct any reality that is
new; they mere extend, statistic by statistic, what is basically old and
given. They are “futurists” in the most shallow sense of the word, not
“utopians” in the best sense. We are taught to accept society, behavior,
and values as they are, not as they should be or even could be. This
procedure places us under the tyranny of the status quo and divests us
of any ability to think about radically changing the world. I have
encountered very few books or articles written by neo-Malthusians that
question whether we should live under any kind of money economy at all,
any statist system of society, or be guided by profit oriented behavior.
There are books and articles aplenty that explain “how to” become a
“morally responsible” banker, entrepreneur, landowner, “developer,” or,
for all I know, arms merchant. But whether the whole system called
capitalism (forgive me!), be it corporate in the west or bureaucratic in
the east, must be abandoned if we are to achieve an ecological society
is rarely discussed. Thousands may rally around “Earth First!”’s idiotic
slogan — “Back to the Pleistocene!” — but few, if they are conditioned
by neo-MaIalthusian thinking, will rally around the cry of the Left
Greens — “Forward to an Ecological Society!”
Lastly, neo-Malthusian thinking is the most backward in thinking out the
implications of its demands. If we are concerned, today, and rightly so,
about registering AIDS victims, what are the totalitarian consequences
about creating a Bureau of Population Control, as some Zero Population
Growth wits suggested in the early 1970s? Imagine what consequences
would follow from increasing the state’s power over reproduction?
Indeed, what areas of personal life would not be invaded by slowly
enlarging the state’s authority over our most intimate kinds of human
relations? Yet such demands in one form or another have been raised by
neo Malthusians on grounds that hardly require the mental level to
examine the Statistical Abstract of the United States.
This arithmetic mentality which disregards the social context of
demographics is incredibly short-sighted. Once we accept without any
reflection or criticism that we live in a “grow-or-die” capitalistic
society in which accumulation is literally a law of economic survival
and competition is the motor of “progress,” anything we have to say
about population is basically meaningless. The biosphere will eventually
be destroyed whether five billion or fifty million live on the planet.
Competing firms in a “dog-eat-dog” market must outproduce each other if
they are to remain in existence. They must plunder the soil, remove the
earth’s forests, kill off its wildlife, pollute its air and waterways
not because their intentions are necessarily bad, although they usually
are — hence the absurdity of the spiritualistic pablum in which
Americans are currently immersed — but because they must simply survive.
Only a radical restructuring of society as a whole, including its
anti-ecological sensibilities, can remove this all commanding social
compulsion — not rituals, yoga, or encounter groups, valuable as some of
these practices may be (including “improving” our earning capacity and
“power” to command).
But the most sinister feature about neo-Malthusianism is the extent to
which it actively deflects us from dealing with the social origins of
our ecological problems — indeed, the extent to which it places the
blame for them on the victims of hunger rather than those who victimize
them. Presumably, if there is a “population problem” and famine in
Africa, it is the ordinary people who are to blame for having too many
children or insisting on living too long — an argument advanced by
Malthus nearly two centuries ago with respect to England’s poor. The
viewpoint not only justifies privilege; it fosters brutalization and
degrades the neo-Malthusians even more than it degrades the victims of
privilege.
And frankly — they often lie. Consider the issue of population and food
supply in terms of mere numbers and we step on a wild merry-go-round
that does not support neo-Malthusian predictions of a decade ago, much
less a generation ago. Such typically neo Malthusian stunts as
determining the “per capita consumption” of steel, oil, paper,
chemicals, and the like of a nation by dividing the total tonnage of the
latter by the national population, such that every man, woman, and child
is said to “consume” a resultant quantity, gives us a picture that is
blatantly false and functions as a sheer apologia for the upper classes.
The steel that goes into a battleship, the oil that is used to fuel a
tank, and the paper that is covered by ads hardly depicts the human
consumption of materials. Rather, it is stuff consumed by all the
Pentagons of the world that help keep a “grow-or-die” economy in
operation — goods, I may add, whose function is to destroy and whose
destiny is to be destroyed. The shower of such “data” that descends upon
us by neo-Malthusian writers is worse than obscurantist; it is vicious.
The same goes for the shopping malls that are constructed that dump
their toxic “consumer goods” on us and the costly highways that converge
upon them. To ignore the fact that we are the victims of a vast,
completely entrapping social order which only a few can either control
or escape from, is to literally deaden the political insight of ordinary
people — whose “wants,” of course, are always blamed for every
dislocation in our ecological dislocations. On the demographic
merry-do-round, the actual facts advanced by many neo-Malthusians is no
less misleading. In the West, particularly in countries like Germany
which the neo-Malthusian prophets of the late 1940s warned would soar in
population well beyond food supplies, birth rates have fallen beyond the
national replacement rate. This is true of Denmark, Austria, Hungary,
indeed, much of Europe generally, including Catholic Italy and Ireland —
where tradition, one would expect, would make for huge families. So
traditions that foster the emergence of large, predominantly male
families by which the high birth rates of India and China were
explained, are not frozen in stone. The U.S., which the more hysterical
neo-Malthusians of some two decades ago predicted would be obliged to
live on oceanic rafts, is approaching zero population growth and, by
now, it may be lower.
Nor is food supply lagging behind overall population growth. Cereal
production rose by 12 percent since 1975, making it possible recently
for even Bangladesh to drastically reduce its grain imports. The markets
of western Asia are being flooded by Chinese corn. Even “barren” Saudi
Arabia is selling off its accumulations of wheat, and, in Finland,
farmers are so over loaded with surplus wheat that they are turning it
into mink fodder and glue. India, the so-called “worst case example,”
tripled its production of grain between 1950 and 1984. Its greatest
problem at present is not population growth but trans portation from
grain-surplus areas to grain-shortage ones — a major source of many
Indian famines in the past.
Although Lester R. Brown of Worldwatch Institute divides the world “into
countries where population growth is slow or nonexistent and where
living conditions are improving, and those where population growth is
rapid and living conditions are deteriorating or in imminent danger of
doing so” one might easily conclude by the mere juxtaposition of Brown’s
phrases that declining living conditions are due solely to increasing
population. Not so — if one closely looks at even Brown’s data as well
as other sources. How much of the disparity between population growth
and bad living conditions is due in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, for
example,largely to patterns of land ownership? In southern Asia, some 30
million rural households own no land or very little, a figure that
represents 40 percent of nearly all rural households in the
subcontinent. Similar figures are emerging from African data and, very
disastrously, Latin America. Land distribution is now so lopsided in the
Third World in favor of commercial farming and a handful of elite
landowners that one can no longer talk of a “population problem” without
relating it to a class and social problem.
It would take several volumes to untangle the mixed threads that
intertwine hunger with landownership, material improvements with
declining population growth, technology with food production, the
fragility of familial customs with the needs of women to achieve full
personhood, internal civil wars (often financed by western imperialists)
with famines — and the role of the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund with patterns of food cultivation. Westerners have only
recently gained a small glimpse of the role of the IMF and World Bank in
producing a terrible famine in the Sudan by obliging the country to
shift from the cultivation of food in areas of rich soil to the
cultivation of cotton.
This much must be emphasized: if the “population issue” is indeed the
“litmus test” of one’s ecological outlook, as the top honcho of ”Earth
First!”, David Foreman, has declared, then it is a wildly scrambled
bundle of social threads, not a Voodoo ecology talisman. Greens,
ecologically oriented people, and radicals of all kinds will have to
unravel this bundle with an acute sense of the social, not by playing a
numbers game with human life and clouding up that social sense with
thoroughly unreliable statistical extrapolations and apologias for
corporate interests.
Nor can human beings be reduced to mere digits by neo-Malthusian
advocates without reducing the world of life to digits — at least
without replacing a decent regard for life, including human life, with a
new inhuman form of eco-brutalism.
Before the 1970s, Malthusianism in its various historical forms claimed
to rest on a statistically verifiable formula: that population increases
geometrically while food supply increases merely arithmetically. At the
same time, anti-Malthusians could refute it using factual data.
Arguments between Malthusians and their opponents were thus based on
empirical studies and rational explorations of the proliferation of
human beings (despite the failure of Malthusians to introduce social
factors that could either promote or inhibit population growth).
Anti-Malthusians could empirically inventory the food that is available
to us and take practical measures to increase the supply; food
production could be assessed in terms of technological innovations that
enhanced productivity. Land available for cultivation could be explored
and put into production, often with minimal ecological damage. In short,
pro- and anti-Malthusian arguments occurred within a rational arena of
discourse and were subject to factual verification or refutation.
Today this situation seems to be changing radically. In an era of
aggressive irrationalism and mysticism, earlier empirical assessments
are becoming increasingly irrelevant. The 1980s have seen the emergence
of a New Age, indeed a mystical Malthusianism that does not draw on
rationality to justify its own amorality and indifference to human
suffering. The relationship between population and food is being
thoroughly mystified. Herein lies a major problem in contemporary
discussions on demographics.
Often this view surfaces as a pious concern about the human suffering
that could be alleviated in presumably “overpopulated” areas through
population control measures. This view can be as sincere as it is naive.
But taken still further — as it commonly is it can shade into a more
sinister demographic ethos that argues for the need to keep those
populations that are sinking into chronic famine from climbing into and
overloading the human “lifeboat.”
If earlier discussions on population were anchored in rational
discourse, the current crop of Malthusians tend to mystify the
relationship between population and the availability of food. Human
beings are often seen as a “cancer” on the biosphere, a force for
ecological dislocation and planetary destruction. The earth, in turn, is
deified into an all-presiding “Gaia.” “Gaia” is imparted with a mystical
“will” and with divine powers that countervail a socially abstract
“humanity,” bereft of any gender, class, ethnicity, or social status.
“Gaia” can then visit upon this socially undifferentiated “Us”
retributive acts like famine, war, and, more currently in the Malthusian
repertoire of vengeance, the AIDS epidemic. This view is not arguable;
it is totally irrational.
Cast in this sinister form, the eco-mystical Malthusians of the
post-sixties era tend to reduce human misfortune and its social sources
to an ecotheistic apocalypse. The traditional Malthusian numbers game
tends to give way to a New Age morality drama in which the social
sources of hunger are eclipsed by ineffable supernaturalistic ones. All
this is done in the name of a theistic version of ecology — one that
ironically is grounded in a crudely anthropomorphic personification of
the earth as a divinity.
In principle, Malthusianism and most of its later variations have argued
that people breed indefinitely, like lemmings, until they come up
against “natural limits” imposed by the food supply. “Biocentricity” has
provided a new wrinkle; the biocentric notion that human beings are
“intrinsically” no different in “worth” from other animals lends a
helping hand to Malthusianism. For after these “natural limits” are
reached, “Gaia” dictates in some strange voice of “Her” own that
starvation and death must ensue until population is reduced to the
“carrying capacity” of a particular region.
By reducing the need for social sophistication to biological
simplemindedness, biocentrism’s broad identification of the “worth” of
human beings and the “worth” of nonhumans denies to our species the
enormous role that conceptual thought, values, culture, economic
relationships, technology, and political institutions play in literally
determining the “carrying capacity”, of the planet on the one hand and
in influencing human behavior in all its forms on the other. With
startling mindlessness, socioeconomic factors are once again erased and
their place taken by a crude biologism that equates human “intrinsic
worth” with that of lemmings, or — to use the animals of choice in the
firmament of biocentrism — wolves, grizzly bears, cougars, and the like.
Two very important conclusions emerge from such one-dimensional
thinking. The first is the equatability of human with nonhuman beings in
terms of their “intrinsic worth.” But if human beings are no better
“intrinsically” than lemmings, their premature death is at least morally
acceptable. Indeed, their death may even be biologically desirable in
the “cosmic” scheme of things — that is, in order to keep “Gaia” on
course and happy. Population control can then go beyond mere
contraceptive advice to calculated neglect, fostering a “permissible”
degree of famine and welcoming mass death from starvation. Such a
situation occurred in Europe in the terrible Irish potato famine of the
1840s, when entire families perished due in no small part to Malthusian
arguments against “intervention” in a “natural course of events.”
Whether biocentrism’s mystical equation of the worth of humans and
lemmings will pave the way to a future Auschwitz has yet to be seen. But
the “moral” grounds for letting millions of people starve to death has
been established with a vengeance, and it is arrogantly being advanced
in the name of “ecology.”
A second conclusion that emerges from biocentric mysticism is an attempt
to deprecate human intervention into nature as such. A blanket
assumption exists among many biocentrists that human involvement in the
natural world is generally bad and that “Gaia knows best.” With this
mystical assumption of a “knowing” Gaia that has a suprahuman
personality of its own, the earthquake that killed tens of thousands of
Armenians could easily be justified as “Gaia’s response” to
overpopulation.
Not surprisingly, assorted environmental groups who have made
biocentricity a focal point in their philosophies tend toward a
passive-receptive mysticism. Heidegger’s numbing “openness to Being,”
Spinoza’s fatalism, and various Asian theologies that enjoin us to yield
to a mindless quietism have attained a trendy quality that beclouds
ecological issues with mystical overtones. We thus spin in an orbit of
circular reasoning that subordinates human action to a supernatural
world of largely mythic activity. The result is that action as such
becomes suspect irrespective of the social conditions in which it
occurs.
Exactly at a time when we need the greatest clarity of thought and
rational guidance to resolve the massive environmental dislocations that
threaten the very stability of the planet, we are asked to bend before a
completely mysterious “will” of “Gaia” that serves to paralyze human
will and that darkens human perception with theistic chimeras. The
ability to clearly think out the contradictions this mentality produces
is blocked by theistic appeals to a mysticism that places a ban on logic
and reason.
When a prominent ecological poet who has embraced deep ecology can claim
(as he reportedly has) that for humanity to co-exist with grizzly bears
and redwood trees, California’s population will have to be reduced to
one million people, another dilemma confronts us. It is no longer even
an area’s material “carrying capacity” that is to determine the human
population it can sustain. “Carrying capacity” itself is literally
dematerialized and redefined in an eco-mystical way as “wilderness,”
which acquires suprahuman, even mysterious qualities of its own. No
longer do people seem to be crowding out wilderness, but rather
wilderness is expected to crowd out people.
This counterposition of “primal” wilderness to humanity and to
humanity’s social “second nature” is completely atavistic. The view
pivots on a myth that humanity is a stranger to natural evolution —
indeed, that humanity’s social “second nature” has no relationship to
biology’s presumably enchanted “first nature.”
To the Enlightenment of two centuries ago, humanity — at least,
potentially — was the very voice of nature, and its place in nature
utterly noble insofar as society was rational and humane. Today we are
beginning to hear a new message. “The human race could go extinct,”
declares Dave Foreman, “and I, for one, would not shed any tears.”
Absurd as it may be, this view is not a rarity. Indeed, it is implicit
in much of the thought that exists among the ecomystics and eco-theists.
What is important is that when grizzly bears can be placed on a par with
human beings in the name of biocentricity — and I am surely not trying
to make a case for the “extermination” of bears — we are witnessing not
a greater sensitivity to life in general but a desensitization of the
mind to human agony, consciousness, personality, and the potentiality of
human beings to know and to understand that no other life form can
approximate. In an era of sweeping depersonalization and irrationalism,
the value of human personality and human rationality ceases to matter.
Reverence for nature, even respect for nonhuman life, provides no
guarantee that humans will be included in the orbit of a “life-oriented”
mythos, the present crop of eco-mystics and eco-theists to the contrary
notwithstanding. The classical example of this is what Robert A. Pois
has called an “ingenuous permutation of mysticism” in the Nazi movement.
Nazism, alas, was more than ingenuous. Hitler’s Mein Kampf registered a
stern, indeed “cosmic” view “that this planet once moved through the
ether for millions of years without human beings, and it can do so again
someday if men forget that they owe their higher existence, not to the
ideas of a few crazy ideologists, but to the knowledge and ruthless
application of Nature’s stern and rigid laws.” Alfred Rosenberg, the
ideologist par excellence of Nazism, railed against Jewish “dualism” and
avowed a neopagan pantheism “for a bridging of the gap between spirit
and matter through deification of nature,” to cite Pois’s summary. This
kind of language can be found at varying levels of intensity in the
writings of deep ecologists, eco-mystics, and eco-theists today, who
would certainly eschew any association with Nazism and who would avow
their innocence in fostering the cultural legacy they are creating.
Heinrich Himmler, who deployed the entire machinery of the SS in a vast
operation to systematically kill millions of people, held this view with
a vengeance. “Man,” he told his SS leaders in Berlin in June 1942, at
the height of the Nazis’ extermination operations, “is nothing special.”
Ironically, his icy rejection of humanism found its fervent counterpart
in his passionate love of animal life. Thus Himmler complained to a
hunter, one Felix Kersten, “How can you find pleasure, Herr Kersten, in
shooting from behind cover at poor creatures browsing on the edge of a
wood, innocent, defenseless, and unsuspecting? It’s really pure murder.
Nature is so marvelously beautiful and every animal has a right to
live.” Such a passion for animal “rights” is often the flip side of the
misanthropic coin. Indeed, hatred of humanity has often reinforced
adulation of animals, just as hatred of civilization has often
reinforced hypersentimental “naturalism.”
I have adduced the shadowy world of suprahuman “naturism” to suggest the
perilous ground on which many eco-mystics, eco-theists, and deep
ecologists are walking and the dangers raised when desensitizing an
already “minimalized” public, to use Christopher Lasch’s term. As the
late Edward Abbey’s denunciations of Latin “genetic inferiority” and
even “Hebraic superstitions” suggest, they are not immunized from the
dangerous brew in its own right. The brew becomes highly explosive when
it is mixed with a mysticism that supplants humanity’s potentiality as a
rational voice of nature with an all-presiding “Gaia,” an eco-theism
that denies human beings their special place in nature.
Reverence for nature is no guarantee that the congregant will revere the
world of life generally, and reverence for nonhuman life is no guarantee
that human life will receive the respect it deserves. This is especially
true when reverence is rooted in deification — and a supine reverence —
in any form whatever, particularly when it becomes a substitute for
social critique and social action.
It was Marx who made the firm observation that every society has its own
“law of population.” When the bourgeoisie needed labor in its early
years to operate its industrial innovations, human life became
increasingly “sacred” and the death penalty was increasingly reserved
for homicidal acts. Before then, a woman in Boston was actually hanged
merely for stealing a pair of shoes. In an era of automatic and
automated devices, human life again tends to become cheap — all pieties
about the horrors of war to the contrary notwithstanding. A social logic
that involved depopulation, mingled with a pathological anti-Semitism,
guided Hitler even more than his mystical “naturism.” Demographic policy
is always an expression of social policy and the type of society in
which a given population lives.
The most disquieting feature of deep ecology theorists, Earth First!
leaders, eco-mystics, and eco-theists is the extent to which they
nullify the importance of social factors in dealing with ecological and
demographic issues — even as they embody them in some of their most
mystified middle-class forms. This is convenient, both in terms of the
ease with which their views are accepted in a period of social reaction
and in the stark simplicity of their views in a period of naivete and
social illiteracy.
William Petersen, a serious demographer, has carefully nuanced what he
calls “Some Home Truths About Population” in a recent issue of The
American Scholar. Political factors, he points out, may play a larger
role in recent famines than economic or even environmental ones.
“Mozambique, recently named the poorest country in the world, has a
fertile soil, valuable ores, and a fine coastline,” Petersen observes.
“That its GNP has fallen by half over the past five years and its
foreign debt has risen hy $2.3 billion, one must ascribe to its
Communist government and the destabilizing efforts of neighboring South
Africa. Of the population of roughly fourteen million, more than one
person in ten is a would-be refugee, on the road fleeing civil war but
finding no refuge anywhere.”
Even more striking is the case of the Sudan, a land once celebrated for
its agricultural fecundity. The Sudan is now an appalling example of
mismanagement, largely as a result of a British colonialist legacy of
commitment to the cultivation of cotton and to World Bank loans for the
development of agribusiness. Pressure by the Bank for increased cotton
production in the late 1970s to offset balance-of-payment problems, the
impact of rising oil prices on highly mechanized agricultural practices,
and a considerable decline in home-grown food reserves — all combined to
produce one of the most ghastly famines in northern Africa. The
interaction of declining world prices for cotton, interference by the
World Bank, and attempts to promote the sale of American wheat — a
cereal that could have been grown in the Sudan if the country had not
been forced into the cultivation of crops for the world market — claimed
countless lives from hunger and produced massive social demoralization
at home.
This drama, usually explained by the Malthusians as “evidence” of
population growth or by eco-mystics as an apocalyptic visitation by
“Gaia” for presumably sinful acts of abuse to the earth, is played out
throughout much of the Third World. Class conflicts, which may very well
lie at the root of the problems that face hungry people, are transmuted
by the Malthusians into demographic ones in which starving country folk
are pitted against almost equally impoverished townspeople, and landless
refugees against nearly landless cultivators of small plots — all of
which immunizes the World Bank, American agribusiness, and a compradore
bourgeoisie from criticism.
Even in the First World, with its growing proportion of older people
over younger ones, lobbies like Americans for Generational Equity (AGE)
threaten to open a divide between recipients of social security and the
young adults who presumably “pay the bill.” Such lobbies say almost
nothing about the economic system, the corporations, or the madcap
expenditures for armaments and research into “life control” that devour
vast revenues and invaluable resources.
Population may soar for reasons that have less to do with reproductive
biology than with capitalist economics. Destroy a traditional culture —
its values, beliefs, and sense of identity — and population increases
may outpace even soaring preindustrial death rates. Life expectancy may
even decline while absolute numbers of people rise significantly. This
occurred during the worst years of the Industrial Revolution amidst
major tuberculosis and cholera pandemics, not to speak of monstrous
working conditions that repeatedly thinned out the ranks of the newly
emerging proletariat. Ecology, the “carrying capacity” of a region, and
least of all “Gaia” have very little to do with social demoralization
and the breakdown of cultural restraints to reproduction in periods of
demographic transition. Economics and the exploitation of displaced
agrarian folk are the really decisive factors, mundane as they may seem
in the “cosmic” world of eco-mysticism and deep ecology.
But conditions can stabilize and, given a higher quality of life, yield
a relatively stable demographic situation. Entirely new factors emerge
that may give rise to negative population growth. I refer not only to a
desire for small families and more cultivated lifestyles, and concern
for the development of the individual child rather than a large number
of siblings, but, above all, women’s liberation movements and the
aspirations of young women to be more than reproductive factories.
In demographic transition, changes from traditional agrarian economies
to modern industrial and urbanized ones involve a change from conditions
of high fertility and mortality to conditions of low fertility and
mortality. Demographic transition has been called by George J. Stolnitz,
a serious demographer, “the most sweeping and best-documented historical
trend of modern times.” What should be added to his characterization is
a crucial provision: the need to improve the living conditions of people
who make this transition — an improvement that has generally been
brought about by labor movements and socially concerned educators,
sanitarians, health workers, and radical organizations. If demographic
transition has not occurred in the Third World (as a population-bomber
like David Brower has suggested), it is largely because semifeudal
elites, military satraps, and a pernicious domestic bourgeoisie have
harshly repressed movements for social change. It is evidence of the
incredible myopia and intellectual crudity of deep ecology,
eco-mystical, and eco-theistic acolytes that the notion of demographic
transition has recently been written off as operative, with no attempt
to account for the festering shantytowns that surround some of the
largest Third World cities.
In the meantime, relative improvements in the material conditions of
life in the First World have produced not the soaring population growth
rates one would expect to find among fruit flies and lemmings but rather
negative rates. In Western Europe, where Malthusians of several decades
ago predicted soaring populations and accompanying famines —
particularly in England and Germany — the bulk of the populations are
far from starving. Birth rates in Germany, Denmark, Austria, Hungary,
and even Catholic Italy have either fallen below the national
replacement rate or are approaching zero population growth. Food
production, in turn, has equaled or exceeded the needs of growing
populations. Cereal production since 1975 rose 12 percent. Even India,
the so-called “worst case example,” tripled its production of grain
between 1950 and 1984.
Much of the correlation between population growth and harsh living
conditions is due to patterns of land ownership. In southern Asia, where
population growth rates are high, 30 million rural house holds own no
land or very little. These figures encompass nearly 40 percent of all
the households in the region. Similar conditions can be cited for Africa
and Latin America. Land distribution is so heavily weighted in the Third
World toward commercial farming and elite owners (who have reduced rural
populations to virtual peonage) that one can no longer talk of a
“population problem” in purely numerical terms without providing an
apologia for terribly harsh class and social disparities.
Divested of its social core, ecology can easily become a cruel
discipline. Malthusians — contemporary no less than earlier ones — often
exhibited a meanness of spirit that completely fits into the “me-too”
Yuppie atmosphere of the eighties. Consider the following excerpts from
William Vogt’s The Road to Survival, the work of an eminent biologist,
that was published a generation ago. Anticipating more recent
prescriptions, he avowed, “Large scale bacterial warfare would be an
effective, if drastic, means of bringing back the earth’s forests and
grasslands.” And in a more thumping passage, he adds well on into the
book that the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations”
should not ship food to keep alive ten million Indians and Chinese this
year, so that fifty million may die five years hence” — a gothic form of
“generosity” that recurs throughout the Malthusian literature of the
eighties. (That this kind of prediction, like so many others uttered by
older Malthusians, was utterly fallacious and irresponsible seems never
to affect new generations of Malthusians.)
Recipes like Vogt’s essentially faded from fashion in the sixties, as
social unrest in the Third World began to surge up and render them
untenable and as the Cold War demanded new political alignments abroad.
The year 1968, however, was not only a climactic one in radical politics
but an initiating one in reactionary politics. In that year, an early
manifestation of the move to the right was the publication and
staggering popularity of Paul R. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, which
ran through thirteen printings in only two years and gave birth to an
army of Malthusian population-bombers.
That deep ecologists George Sessions and Bill Devall call Ehrlich a
“radical ecologist” verges on black humor. The book still reads like a
hurricane on the loose, a maddening blowout of spleen and venom.
Beginning with a sketch of human misery in Delhi in which “people” (the
word is used sneeringly to open almost every sentence on the first page)
are seen as “visiting, arguing, and screaming,” as “thrusting their
hands through the taxi windows, begging ... defecating and urinating,”
Ehrlich and family seem to swoon with disgust over “people, people,
people, people, people.” We have a sense — one that was by no means felt
by most of the book’s American readers — that we have entered another
world from Ehrlich’s sublime campus at Stanford University. Thus it was,
we are told, that Ehrlich came to know “the feel of overpopulation,”
that is, the sense of disgust that pervades the entire work.
Thereafter, our “radical ecologist” runs riot with his misanthropy. The
Third World is depersonalized into computer-age abbreviations like
“UDCs” (underdeveloped countries); medical advances are described as
forms of “death control”; and pollution problems “all can be traced to
too many people” (Ehrlich’s emphasis). Terrifying scenarios engage in a
ballet with each other that is strangely lacking in noticeable
references to capitalism or to the impact of an ever-expanding
grow-or-die market economy on all social questions. Along with the usual
demand for increased tax burdens on those who “breed” excessively, the
need for contraception, and educational work on family planning, a
centerpiece of the book is Ehrlich’s demand for a “powerful governmental
agency.” Accordingly: “A federal Department of Population and
Environment (DPE) should be set up with the power to take whatever steps
are necessary to establish a reasonable population size in the United
States and to put an end to the steady deterioration of our
environment.” (The book enjoyed a great vogue, incidentally, during the
Nixon Administration.) Lest we waver in our resolve, Ehrlich reminds us:
“The policemen against environmental deterioration must be the powerful
Department of Population and Environment mentioned above” (my emphasis
in both quotations). Happily for the “business community,” Ehrlich
quotes one J. J. Spengler to the effect that “It is high time,
therefore, that business cease looking upon the stork as a bird of good
omen.”
The Population Bomb, climaxes with a favorable description of what is
now known as “the ethics of triage.” Drawn from warfare, as Ehrlich
explains, “The idea briefly is this: When casualties crowd a dressing
station to the point where all cannot be cared for by the limited
medical staff, some decisions must be made on who will be treated. For
this purpose the triage system of classification was developed. All
incoming casualites are placed in one of three classes. In the first
class are those who will die regardless of treatment. In the second are
those who will survive regardless of treatment. The third contains those
who can be saved only if they are given prompt treatment.” The
presumption here is that the medical staff is “limited” and that
diagnoses are free of political considerations like the alignment of a
patient’s country in the Cold War.
Among New Age Malthusians, hardly any attempt is made to think out
premises, indeed, to ask what follows from a given statement. If we
begin with the premise that all life forms have the same “intrinsic
worth,” as deep ecologists contend, what follows is that we can accord
to malarial mosquitoes and tsetse flies the same “right” to exist that
we accord to whales and grizzly bears. But complications arise: Can a
bacterium that could threaten to exterminate chimpanzees be left to do
so because it too has “intrinsic worth”? Should human beings who can
control lethal diseases of chimps refrain from “interfering” with the
mystical workings of “Gaia”? Who is to decide what constitutes “valid”
and “invalid” interference by human beings in nature? To what extent can
conscious, rational, and moral human intervention in nature be seriously
regarded as “unnatural,” especially if one considers the vast evolution
of life toward greater subjectivity and ultimately human
intellectuality? To what extent can humanity itself be viewed simply as
a single species when social life is riddled by hierarchy and
domination, gender biases, class exploitation, and ethnic
discrimination?
The importance of viewing demography in social terms becomes even more
apparent when we ask: would the grow-or-die economy called capitalism
really cease to plunder the planet even if the world’s population were
reduced to a tenth of its present numbers? Would lumber companies,
mining concerns, oil cartels, and agribusiness render redwood and
Douglas fir forests safer for grizzly bears if — given capitalism’s need
to accumulate and produce for their own sake — California’s population
were reduced to one million people?
The answer to these questions is a categorical no. Vast bison herds were
exerminated on the westem plains long before the plains were settled by
farmers or used extensively by ranchers — indeed, when the American
population barely exceeded some sixty million people. These great herds
were not crowded out by human settlements, least of all by excessive
population. We have yet to answer what constitutes the “carrying
capacity” of the planet, just as we lack any certainty, given the
present predatory economy, of what constitutes a strictly numerical
balance between reduced human numbers and a given ecological area.
All the statistics that are projected by demographers today are heavily
conditioned by various unspoken values, such as a desire for pristine
“wilderness” or for mere open land, a pastoral concept of nature, or a
love of cultivated land. Indeed, human taste has varied so widely over
the centuries with respect to what constitutes “nature” that we may well
ask whether it is ever “natural” to exclude the human species — a
distinct product of natural evolution — from our conceptions of the
natural world, including so-called “pristine” wilderness areas.
This much seems reasonably clear: a “wilderness” that has to be
protected from human intervention is already a product of human
intervention. It is no more “wild” if it has to be guarded than an
aboriginal culture is truly authentic if it has to be shielded from the
impacts of “civilization.” We have long since left behind the remote
world in which purely biological factors determined evolution and the
destiny of most species on the planet.
Until these problematic areas that influence modern thinking on
demographics are clarified and their social implications — indeed,
underpinnings — are fully explored, the Malthusians are operating in a
theoretical vacuum and filling it with extremely perilous ideas. Indeed
it is a short step from writing anti-Semitic letters to Jewish furriers
in the name of “animal rights” to scrawling swastikas on Jewish temples
and synagogues.
Eco-mystics, eco-theists, and deep ecologists create a very troubling
situation when they introduce completely arbitrary factors into
discussions on demographics. “Gaia” is whatever one chooses to make of
“Her”: demonic avenger or a loving mother, a homeostatic mechanism or a
mystical spirit; a personified deity or a pantheistic principle. In all
of these roles, “She” can easily be used to advance a misanthropic
message of species self-hatred — or worse, a hatred of specific ethnic
groups and cultures — with consequences that cannot be foreseen by even
“Her” most loving, well-meaning, and pacific acolytes. It is this
utterly arbitrary feature of eco- mystical and eco-theistic thinking,
often divested of social content, that makes most New Age or “new
paradigm” discussions of the population issue not only very troubling
but potentially very sinister.