Anti-populationists - the new imperialists

This is a story about the rise of anti-humanism and imperialism in the Australian environmental movement. The anti-populationists represent environmental politics gone mad. And they are coming to a forum or blog near you.

The national president of the Sustainable Population Australia, Sandra Kanck recently called for a one child per family policy to avoid “environmental suicide”. She wants the population to fall back to seven million people - about what it was in the Great Depression.

“Population stabilisation and then reduction has to be part of a suite of measures that ensure the cuts in emissions the Government has promised,” the former SA Democrat said recently.

It’s the population “reduction” part of Kanck’s comment that has interested media commentators, academics and bloggers.

For liberals and humanists there are serious problems with the anti-pops thesis. It is founded on the proposition that we will not be able to feed the world’s people or cope with the pollution generated by about 9 billion people in 2050. Currently the world’s population is 6.5 billion.

This is blatantly untrue. There is enough food to go around - although try tell that to people in Africa. The main problems are high first world consumption (20 per cent of people consuming 80 per cent of resources) creating high carbon emissions and high birth rates in Africa.

The anti-pops “theory” is based in socio-biology and systems theory. It states the world and all life forms on it are finite and are bound together in an ecological web. All life and all energy can be measured in units and from these units we can determine how much human beings will consume in the future.

They support their spurious arguments with second- and third-hand sources such as websites that carry anti-pop research or YouTube and Facebook sites. They are creative in sampling and citing their sources.

One of their key calculations is that the carbon footprint of every American uses 9.4ha of the globe, each European 4.7ha, and those in low-income countries 1ha. Adding it all up, we collectively use 17.5 billion hectares. Unfortunately, there are only 13.4 billion hectares available. The anti-pops say we are eating the future.

They presuppose that technology, imagination and creativity cannot alter human destiny and that human technological progress and the capitalist system, as it stands now, will irreducibly lead us to ruin. They hate capitalism, science and progress.

When I was a young student studying Marxism at Flinders University in Adelaide in early 1980s, the enemy wasn’t capitalism, it was socio-biology.

The sociobiologists say that we are ruled by biology and, like ants, our society can be deconstructed (as we would a hive) by examining and measuring our chemical processes and our relationship with the environment. Humans are units. This places the locus of control beyond human agency. For the anti-pops, we are lemmings heading pell mell towards a cliff.

Michael Lardelli’s argument is classic socio-biology. He debunks educating women in the third world so they can to control their reproductive destiny. Education and food aid are stop gap measures. Educating third world women, especially in Africa, is ineffective “political correctness”.

The anti-pops use a curious form of syllogism in their arguments which have been used by cults since time immemorial. It goes like this:

a. population is killing the environment;
b. we can save the environment;
c. help us rid the earth of population.

The fact that we are people in an environment traps us in the set called “population”. So they can link any human activity such as growing wheat, mining iron ore, building hospitals or picking your nose with environmental degradation. Who says? They do. What’s the internal pay off for the recruit? They feel like they’re saving the earth. It’s both an illogical and untrue syllogism.

The anti-pops play on the fear of an unknown future. They say that instead of waking up in the morning and having mangos and cereal for breakfast, the world will take a Hobbesian turn. It will be brutish with dog set against dog. Fear is their lever. Where’s the proof? They offer none.

The anti-pops are anti-immigration. They believe that the Australian environment - which many doubt they have seen - cannot take more refugees. Refugees of all types are portrayed as rabid consumers of goods and energy. Here the anti-pops meet One Nation. It’s a curious pairing. Their position sails dangerously close to the old “blacks and Asians out!” chant of the National Front.

The anti-pops have enemies and none harsher than Professor Frank Ferudi from the University of Kent in the UK.

“These (anti-populationist) environmentalists are fundamentally misanthropic. Their sociobiological stance is arguably more influential today than ever before. It reflects a loss of confidence in human potential and agency and indicates that humanist ideals enjoy little cultural affirmation,” Professor Ferudi says.

According to the UN the population of the more developed regions such as Europe, America, Canada and Australia is estimated at 1.2 billion and will change very little in the coming decades. The population of Europe is projected to decline, as fertility levels remain below replacement level.

In the developed world, the death rate of the post-war population will soar, not withstanding their death-defying attempts at immortality, over the next 40 years, as they pass on to the great gig in the sky.

Families in China on average have two children and in India it is 2.3 children per family. According to the UN, those numbers are trending down. Although these two population giants currently have 1.3 and 1.1 billion people respectively, they are not the prime focus of concern. The real concern is urban Africa with families of five, six or seven children.

The UN’s Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development and the Millennium Declaration wants to promote sustainable development and reduce child mortality.

It recognises that population is an important variable in nation building and recommends that governments in the developing world implement policies to address the ecological implications of future population numbers. It has called for universal access to family planning services but not like those of India and South American of the 1950s and 1960s.

While the anti-pops have danced around the notion of mass sterilisation programs, this is the only way to reduce population on a large scale and they know it. This form of “family planning” was tried in the 1950s and 60s.

The first serious attempts at international family planning started in the 1930s in the USA and spread throughout Asia as part of a “civilising mission”. The move to control population for the betterment of mankind also inspired visions of world community.

“Many of the leaders of the world population control movement claimed to represent future generations. All of these leaders tended to treat governments as a means to an end, and they claimed to represent groups that would not fit within national frameworks, whether universal sisterhood, or future generations, or the community of the faithful,” says History Professor Matthew Connelly of Columbia University in New York.

In India in the 1960s the “family planners” used Disney pictures of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse to entice families to come and see that having fewer children was the way to ensure that these children would be happier, healthier and cleaner.

“But more and more, in addition to providing incentives to providers, healthcare workers and sometimes social workers to perform IUD insertions and sterilisations, these programs began to rely on incentive payments. People were simply offered cash, in some cases as much as two or three month’s wages, if they agreed to sterilisation.”

India was at the cutting edge of population control throughout the 60s and 70s. They created temporary operating theatres to encourage as many people as possible to agree to sterilisation. They performed up to 60,000 sterilisations in a month in what they called the family planning Festival of Vernaculum in the state of Kerala.

“Even if some couples make poor choices, governments have done an even worse job in deciding who should be able to have children, and how many they should be able to have. It's the most powerless members of society who are hurt in the process. And this sordid history has done tremendous damage to the cause of reproductive rights,” Professor Connelly said.

The notion of population control is political dynamite, especially for the reproductive rights of women.

“Women’s health activists, here and abroad, have fought long and hard for the right to safe, voluntary birth control and abortion services. Pitted against them are not only religious fundamentalists who would deny them access to contraception, but those who are prepared to sacrifice reproductive rights, and human rights, on the altar of population control,” said Betty Hartmann, Director of the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College in the States.

“We know full well what happens when women’s fertility becomes the object of draconian top-down social engineering as it has in China and was in the dark days of eugenics when thousands were involuntarily sterilised. The war on population always has been, and will continue to be, a war on women’s bodies,” Ms Hartmann said.

So while some might applaud the anti-pops pro-abortion stance, they won’t be calling on women in Vaucluse to step up first for sterilisation. They will target women in the developing world and then say they are doing them a favour. This is imperialism of a staggering order.

Apocalyptic visions of the end of the earth are nothing new. They constitute a whole movie genre such as V for Vendetta, ZPG, Soylent Green and Planet of the Apes. Chris Berg, writing for The Age, wrote a very funny article on this genre that tracks, in an unintentional way, the environmental dystopia behind the anti-pops thinking.

It’s intellectual hubris to imagine that at this exact moment in human history that we have crossed the "too many people" line. In the 1970s, zero population growth advocates were sure the end was nigh. Wrong again.