If we had fewer people in the world, a couple of billion less, we could probably solve a few of the world's biggest problems, right? We could have an abundance of fed bellies, clean water. We would have less-crowded classrooms, less carbon emissions destroying our Earth's future. Fewer people in this world would mean that there would be enough resources to make sure that everyone is fed, healthy, educated, and that our quality of life is so much better than it is today. That idea should sound familiar because it's everywhere. Headlines, TV, YouTube recommendations. The faster we improve health, the faster family size goes down. It's the idea that because so many people, especially in Asia, Latin America and Africa, are having so many babies, our carbon footprint is increasing. And that just means more drowning coastal cities, never-ending fires destroying wildlife, perpetual states of hurricane recovery and increased mass migration. And so if the problem is framed as there just being too many people and not enough resources, then what's the solution if you can't create more resources or lessen the carbon footprint? It's fewer people, right? But is that true? That the answer to the climate crisis and a lack of resources is that impoverished families, again across Latin America, Asia and Africa just need to have fewer kids? That women just need education and birth control and we're on our way to a sustainable planet? Or is the real story here about a monopoly on resources, about the scarcity it created for most of the world's population, about industry practices that are reliant on environmental exploitation? And have we instead been pushing forward a narrative that plays into age-old Euro-American ideas about eugenics, border policing and which populations are deemed burdensome? Welcome to "Backspace," where we tell you how the story is told in the headlines, and then we think about how we can tell it a little differently. Like a lot of bad ideas, the basic premise of overpopulation and the solution to it come from an economist. In 1798's "An Essay on the Principle of Population," Thomas Malthus argued that the larger the population is, the greater the stress on resources and the greater the occurrence of poverty. And so the only way to avoid catastrophes such as famine, food scarcity and ensuing strife would be to decrease the number of births. At face value, it seems logical, and at this point very familiar. But it's an argument that has not only been more or less debunked, but relies on a premise we automatically believe is true because we've been told it is. And that invariably leads to looking at where the fastest growth of population are happening and asking, "What can we do to slow this down?" Researchers say there is a much better way to reduce our carbon footprint than driving hybrid cars, using energy-saving bulbs and recycling. Just have fewer children. -The skyrocketing world population is apparently affecting the environment. The carbon footprint of extra children is 20 times higher than other environmentally friendly practices. Climate change, the pressure of a growing population of 7 billion on our increasingly fragile planet. We have planetary limitations. But headlines and news reports won't call cities like New York and Paris overpopulated and struggling with resource distribution as a result of that overpopulation. Nor will they focus on the carbon footprint of these cities or other American and European cities. Even accompanying images in reports or articles about the impact of so-called overpopulation will more often than not consist of images of Asian, African and Latin American populations. So the term overpopulation, whenever I hear it, I always want to ask, "So, you know, who in particular do you have in mind?" Like, what kinds of people do you think shouldn't be here, and why is it you feel that way?" And this is where the far right and liberals end up meeting on climate issues because of how we've chosen to understand and tell the story of the human-made climate emergency. For the far right, it's about protecting resources from those others. Across Europe, far-right parties, which have been gaining political ground over the last decade, have revived what has been an old tradition on that end of the spectrum: eco-fascism. I think the only thing scarier than a far-right racist movement that denies the reality of climate change is a far-right racist movement that doesn't deny the reality of climate change, that actually says this is happening. Both the Christchurch and El Paso white nationalist mass murderers wrote manifestos that decried the so-called impact of overpopulation, specifically the overpopulation of immigrants, on the environment and on resources. The El Paso shooter wrote about how he wanted to stop the Hispanic invasion of Texas and that fewer people would mean that the American way of life would be more sustainable. He killed 23 people in a Walmart in 2019, injuring more than two dozen others. The Christchurch shooter identified himself as an eco-fascist and wrote in his manifesto that immigration was in fact environmental warfare. He killed 51 Muslim worshipers at two mosques in 2019, injuring over 40. And while eco-fascism may seem very modern, it's actually rooted in something very classically American. The roots of eco-fascism are traced back to America's Progressive Era, a period between 1896 and 1920, where social movements advocating for the betterment of society gained successful momentum and were led by upper- and middle-class white Christian men and women. So there is already this idea going all the way back before the First World War that the only way that white people in the world could survive was if they found some way of containing and eventually controlling the growth of populations in nonwhite places. In 1916, American lawyer and conservationist Madison Grant published one of the most influential books of the last 100 years: "The Passing of the Great Race: or, The Racial Basis of European History." Many of the ideas in Nazi Germany's racial science that rationalized the Holocaust were actually inspired by these American eugenicists. Hitler called Grant's book his "Bible," and Hitler's "Bible" informed the foundation of environmentalism in this country itself. Grant argued that the so-called Nordic race was under threat from certain world populations and that in order to protect the Earth, its resources and the environment, we needed to eliminate the migration and even the existence of certain populations. And central to Grant's solution was eugenics. Eugenics ascribes societal value to a person's race and class. Those who aren't seen as valuable are considered leeches on resources and thus, under this outlook, they deserve to be lessened in numbers, to be culled, eliminated. Grant wasn't a lone pioneer in the realm of eugenics and conservation. He had the company of many, including President Theodore Roosevelt. In their view, it was the white affluent man's duty to preserve nature, not to save it from destruction, but to guarantee their continued ability to exploit and interact with it as they pleased. It was under men like that, men like Grant, Roosevelt, John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, Henry Fairfield Osborn and others that American conservation was possible. These guys were fundamental to the establishment of national zoos and parks and to the protection of endangered species. And these were the same people who went on to create and lead environmental clubs and organizations like the Sierra Club, the New York Zoological Society and the U.S. Forest Service. And of course, these eugenicist ideas didn't start or end with the conservationists. They proliferated across movements led by white Christian Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from birth control to temperance, both feminist movements which advocated better breeding to lessen the strain on resources, on poor families, and to help develop better children who would become better citizens. Margaret Sanger, the founder of the American Birth Control League, the precursor to Planned Parenthood, was a believer in eugenics, and her activism on birth control centered on, "weeding out the unfit and preventing the birth of defectives." And these ideas, especially as outlined by Madison Grant, had an impact on American governance and the shaping of the future of this country. Theodore Roosevelt's progressive presidency was influenced greatly by Grant's ideas about conservation and the decline of the Nordic race, which Roosevelt blamed on white mothers having fewer babies, threatening a so-called race suicide. Grant's book also informed one of the first, most expansive immigration bills in this country's history, the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which included the National Origins Act and the Asian Exclusion Act. It was signed into federal law by President Calvin Coolidge. In the period of the late 19th and early 20th century, the main way in which people in relatively rich and powerful countries wanted to regulate the population of the world was by making it harder for poorer people to migrate and move around the world. By the 1920s and '30s, increasingly they were trying to shape the way in which people chose to have children, and in some cases actually prevent people from having children. And so this was a period of the '20s and '30s especially, where you saw this idea of eugenics, where it wasn't just about the numbers. You had to manipulate, not just the quantity of people, but also the quality. And so that meant especially targeting people that were deemed to be unfit. Even in the 1930s and increasingly in the period of the '40s and '50s, there is the idea that as contraceptives improved and as it became possible to distribute them around the world, it might be possible to directly intervene in the population growth in poor countries, because some of the people we're talking about thought that there were whole countries that were relatively unfit, and the only solution was to reduce their growth rates relative to the rest of the world. So the American public was primed by these movements to believe in overpopulation by the time it engulfed imaginations, headlines and international organizations in 1968, when another book decrying the looming and inevitable apocalyptic catastrophes of overpopulation dropped. "The Population Bomb," by conservation biologist Paul Ehrlich. What would happen if we had a birth control miracle? A contraceptive, a population-control miracle in the next 30 years and all the people in the underdeveloped countries started reproducing just at replacement level. Virtually everything Ehrlich argues in the book was proven false, from 65 million Americans starving by the year 2000, to massive international famines killing millions more. None of it happened. But the book sold over 2 million copies, and Ehrlich became a media sensation, appearing on "The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson" over 20 times. How much has the world increased in population in, say, 10 years? Well, in 10 years we've, we're pushing putting on a billion people. And it ostensibly had an impact on President Richard Nixon, who in 1970 introduced a bill creating a commission on population growth, citing predictions found in Ehrlich's book. And it is an impact that still can be seen today in the underbelly of liberal and progressive thinking on issues of the climate crisis, development work, women's empowerment and resource distribution. -Is there anything that can be done to reduce the number of people predicted to be displaced by climate change? -Some proponents of the new reproductive health law say an entire nation's dream has been broken by its failure to control population growth. -I wonder if over the longer term we can really be hopeful about African democracy if we see that many more people come into a continent where there probably isn't going to be enough land and enough jobs for most of them. -We're going to see mass migrations. We're going to see increasing conflict over water and land because of climate change. We're ill-prepared for that. The 1960s and '70s were filled with a lot of movement and work around so-called development. It had been almost two decades since World War II had ended, and many countries had achieved independence from the empires that had colonized them. The task ahead for these governments was how to build new countries, new institutions, new economies on new identities, while trying to undo the impact of hundreds of years of colonial rule and violence. And where there is opportunity, there is exploitation. The U.S., in particular, had a fear that increased populations would lead to increased poverty in vulnerable nations and thus lead to the spread of communism. And so American foundations like the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation led the charge among the UN, World Health Organization, the IMF and the World Bank in creating and pushing development programs that had family planning at the center. And the Ford and Rockefeller foundations led one of the biggest and most disastrous population-control programs under the guise of family planning and development in India. Who exactly elected those people? They were actually making life-and-death decisions about health care, about things like, should they pay incentives for poor people to be sterilized? And just picture it, if you will, they're talking about how they're doing all these things, what, in fact, were really drastic steps that led to gross human rights abuses. While China's disastrous and failed one-child policy receives a lot of deserved critique, India's sterilization program and the entire American-made infrastructure of it has notably received less of our attention. India had long been at the center of European and American eugenics conversation for being too populous. Human-made famines resulting from British colonial policies were blamed on the land not being enough to house and feed the Indians that inhabited it. And India itself was seen as a policy guinea pig by both the British and Americans. Even Sanger, who I mentioned earlier, wanted to open up birth control clinics in the British Raj to test out how beneficial it could be to alleviating the problems of India. And there were upper-caste Hindu Indians, part of the country's elite, many foreign-educated, many part of India's liberal Congress Party, who agreed with the colonial sentiments of too many people. But specifically with regards to the fertility rates of lower-caste Hindus and the Muslim community. And so family planning became a part of Indian domestic development policy through the late '50s and '60s, supported, even pushed, by many international American groups, and the U.S. government itself. The U.S. often used food aid as a leverage to push for population-control practices, while organizations like the Population Council, the Ford Foundation and the World Bank pushed IUDs for moderating population growth. In the mid-'60s, that led to 29 million Indian women being given IUDs in unsafe conditions and with disastrous, harmful results. Results like half of the women reporting prolonged bleeding, while others mentioned severe infections. And while the majority of sterilization efforts in Indian history have focused on women, in 1975, the family planning policy and infrastructure was used to target poor and rural-class men. There is no doubt that if our population continues to grow at the present rate, we are going to have very severe problems by the end of the century. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, in the midst of scandal and economic crisis and the possible loss of power, enacted what was called "The Emergency," a period of 21 months during which she had suspended the Indian Constitution. A key feature of the emergency was Gandhi's accelerated population-control effort, which included forced sterilizations of men. Her son, Sanjay Gandhi, who was poised to take over the leadership of the Congress Party, led the efforts. In 1976 alone, over 6 million Indian men were sterilized in pursuit of Gandhi's agenda to help the underprivileged, and it was made possible by a mass-sterilization infrastructure created by the Ford Foundation's Douglas Ensminger. And none of this is of the past either. Reproductive rights and even women's empowerment development programs are underpinned with the belief that access to contraceptives and education, for women especially, will lead to fewer births in burdened countries. What we do between now and 2050 with education, with economic growth, with health and nutrition, that'll really set the course for moderating the population growth between 2050 and 2100. So practically everybody now working in the field of family planning will tell you that they're doing it not because of overpopulation. They'll say that they're doing it because of reproductive rights. And this is exactly right. I think almost everyone could agree that people should be able to own and control their own bodies. The issue is that when organizations like the Gates Foundation support family planning, and say that they're doing it for the purpose of reproductive rights, the only kind of care they provide, typically, when it comes to things like choosing family size is to assist those who would like to limit their family size. But if you really believe in reproductive rights, if you believe this idea that family planning is about helping people to have the families that they choose to have, then you ought also to be assisting those who are not able to have children and would like to. That is, if they really believe in reproductive rights, then they wouldn't only be providing contraception and abortion. They would also and already be providing treatment for infertility, which in many cases can be taken care of at a relatively low cost. None of this is to say that having access to birth control or even girls education is eugenics. It is to say, however, that even those who have presented themselves with the best of intentions for the development of impoverished and struggling postcolonial countries have done so based on beliefs about populations rooted in the same ideas that were foundational to 20th-century fascism. If the climate emergency is going to be the defining crisis of our time that impacts everything from migration to food security, then we're going to need to find a way to talk about it without casually strolling into the trap of the overpopulation myth, a myth embraced by the far-right and propelled by the most liberal of our institutions. So, how do we do that? How do we avoid falling into that trap? It's actually quite easy. But it involves first an honest reckoning with the history of environmentalism and who is consistently given the mantle of public and international policy shaping, as well as dictating how we talk about it. We now realize that the disasters that continue increasingly to afflict the natural world have one element that connects them all: the unprecedented increase in the number of human beings on the planet. When it was considered politically incorrect to mention it, and I was determined to mention it, I decided to call it voluntary population optimization. Billionaires have a vested interest in philanthropy that not only obscures their own role in exacerbating the problems they position themselves to be the saviors of, but also sustains a need for them. In other words, instead of a glorification of Bill and Melinda Gates, billionaires and their philanthropist organizations having the unchecked, unelected vast reach and impact on issues of reproductive health and education in already exploited regions, there should be a questioning of it. Better coverage also begins with being accurate about the causes of the climate crisis, about who is responsible. Because when we talk about how the world is too populated, it assumes that all people live equally and thus have an equal impact on the environment. There's a lot about climate change that's very complex, but there are certain elements of it that seem simple. So, for example, if you think that the core problem is that there are too many people who are consuming too much stuff and consuming too much energy, then one way you might think of addressing that would be to reduce the numbers of people in the world. Now the issue with that is anyone who's even begun to investigate what's really driving climate change, you quickly realize it's not the absolute number of people in the world. What really matters is how those people are choosing to live, whether those people are choosing to have high-consumption lifestyles. The richest 10% of humanity accounts for 50% of the world's pollution. One hundred companies produce 71% of the world's emissions. Five meat and dairy companies produce more emissions than the three big oil giants. Africa, the entire continent, is responsible for only 3.8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And the United States? It's the biggest plastic polluter in the world, and its military is the largest consumer of hydrocarbons in the world. That's not about too many people. If you're living in a relatively wealthy country and you have the great fortune to have lots of disposable income and there's lots of stuff that you can buy and have, you know, then you begin to think about your own choices, right? And the way that you and perhaps your elected leaders are contributing to a way of life that is simply unsustainable, especially if you imagine the rest of the world aspiring to that same kind of life. Now, if, on the other hand, you think that, "Well actually, the problem is all these people in the world. There're just too many of them," then you shift attention away from the choices that you're making, and you find ways of blaming other people in other countries, even though those people are only consuming a fraction as much as somebody in a high- consumption society like the United States. That's what needs to be at the center of the coverage of the climate emergency, our economies of unfettered consumerism and wasteful pursuits mixed in with the control that corporations, philanthropic groups and lobbying money have on environmental and public health policies. There is critical journalism out there that is pushing back against the overpopulation trope. There are journalists warning about the meaning of eco-fascism and liberal movements and holding to account the systemic practices that enforce destructive habits. But the fears of overpopulation still crop up because they hold political currency. If you think that we're living in the midst of a crisis or even an emergency, you have to think about like what sort of actions does that authorize? Well, there's a long history now. You know, the history of the population-control movement more than once declared that we were living amidst a population crisis or even an emergency. And there were times in which, because of that kind of language, because of that idea, they authorized appalling human rights abuses. When we hold accountable those who repeat the myths of overpopulation and those who create the conditions for the climate crisis, we're able to make it a lot harder for ugly and violent ideologies to find a comfortable home. And when we do that, we no longer grant the panic of an uncertain future the power to determine who can and cannot share it with us. Hey guys, thanks so much for watching. Population control is a heavy subject, but what's really also interesting about it is that, again, once you kind of know the history of it, you see it everywhere. You know, you'll be like watching the nightly news or something of that sort and all of a sudden, just like that, they'll be like, "Oh, you're having too many kids and it's not good for the environment." Oh, I don't feel so good right now. Anyways, don't forget to, like, share and subscribe.