The Neo-Malthusian Reflex in Climate Politics: Technocratic, Right Wing and Feminist References

ABSTRACT

A neo-Malthusian reflex can be observed in the climate debate: statistical calculations link climate change to world population growth and suggest strategies for birth control. The undead neo-Malthusian ghost is being revived, with its reference to the category of ‘population’ and its colonial-racist and social-Darwinist legacies. This article discusses this dangerous development, paying particular but not exclusive attention to German constellations, showing that the actors who strengthen this narrative range from ecological mainstream positions to those right-wing forces who do not deny climate change. However, some climate activist and feminist positions have also contributed by advocating a birth strike as a strategy for containing climate change. The article analyses three dimensions of neo-Malthusianism: the abstract statistical construction of an excess population; the historically deeply rooted racist and classist attribution of this excess to ‘others’; and the totalitarian visions of global ‘fertility’ management. The argument is that even if the racist and classist attributions are not directly addressed by the more progressive political actors, the three dimensions of neo-Malthusianism strongly flow together and reinforce each other. In conclusion, the text takes up anti-Malthusian feminist perspectives which place a special emphasis on the concept of reproductive justice.

KEYWORDS:

• climate change
• reproductive justice
• fertility
• population control
• racism
• demography
• malthusianism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Neo-Malthusianism is a political-theoretical perspective that refers to the "principle of population" posited by the British theologian and economist Thomas R. Malthus at the end of the 18th century. The basic position is that the population is in principle growing too fast compared to the resources needed, and therefore poverty and social crises are linked to the cause of ‘overpopulation’. The term neo-Malthusianism refers to movements that developed in the 19th century, which referred to Malthus in their crisis diagnosis but differed in the means proposed to cope with ‘overpopulation’; they mainly advocated contraceptive and sterilization technologies.

2 The single inverted commas mark those elements of the population discourse which the author wants to quote but distance herself from.

3 By social-Darwinist I mean the class-arrogant perspective that sees those excluded from resources as the ‘superfluous’ or as those less ‘capable of survival’ and thus also stigmatised as less worthy of reproduction (even without recourse to the dimension of an evolutionary biological ‘quality improvement’).

4 The term population establishment refers to the network of national development agencies, multilateral organisations, think tanks, foundations and other actors established since World War II, which organises and coordinates international population programmes on the basis of a common knowledge production about a ‘world population problem’.

5 Following Foucault (1991), I understand rationality as a specific epistemological approach to reality that makes certain political strategies appear plausible and rational.

6 Ehrlich and Ehrlich (2009): it was no problem for the Ehrlichs that the apocalyptic predictions of the ‘Population Bomb’ had not been fulfilled (cf. Hartmann and Barajas-Roman 2009, 71).

7 The author referred to a report of Christian Aid (Ware and Kramer 2019) on the unequal distribution of CO₂ emissions.

8 For example the left-liberal German newspaper taz organised a public event for a discussion of Smith’s book in November 2018. Generally the discourses on the threat of an ‘overpopulated’ ‘Africa’ remain almost uncontested. There was one exception when Clemens Tönnies, the football club Schalke’s supervisory board chairman, suggested in 2019 to finance power plants in Africa because of climate change so that people there would stop "producing children when it's dark", and the media reacted with charges of racism (see Die Zeit, 2.8.2019.https://www.zeit.de/sport/2019-08/clemens-toennies-tag-des-handwerks-klimawandel-rassismus)

9 The concepts of ‘Umvolkung’ and ‘Volkstod’ are difficult to translate because of the specific German concept of the Volk as central for the racist ethnocentric Nazi ideology. Both concepts link the idea of a shrinking, disappearing or degenerating German Volk with the narrative of a dangerous and increasing presence of ‘other’ populations.

10 In this article examples are selected that are especially startling because the proponents stand for transformative politics of change, not for liberal mainstream feminist ideas. Among liberals, there is a long history of feminist consensus with anti-natalist strategies for curbing population growth, often in the name of women’s empowerment (Schultz 2010). Recently, for example, Frances Kissling, former director of Catholics for Choice, argued together with utilitarian bioethicist Peter Singer and Population Council member Jotham Musinguzi in favor of neo-Malthusian climate politics under the title ‘Talking about overpopulation is taboo. That has to change,’ (Kissling, Musinguzi, and Singer2018)

11 The author gathered impressions in 2019 in discussions with activists at climate camps, among other places. However, the idea of a birth strike was only articulated by some, by no means all, activists in debates on population and climate.

12 The literal translation of the book title is ‘Child-free instead of Childless’.

13 The data used by Wynes and Nicholas in order to compare abstaining from having a child (calculated as 58.6 tons CO₂ equivalent emission reductions) with, for example, abstaining from flying (calculated as 1.6 tons for one year) are highly distorted. The individual CO₂ emissions per year of the possible children were calculated with reference to a study by Murtaugh and Schlax (2009) which refers to data from the US, Russia and Japan, and in which the emissions of future grandchildren and even more generations are integrated into the calculation.

14 Haraway does not take into account the fact that these long-term projections to 2100 are permanently being revised to lower levels and are highly speculative (see Stöcker 2019; Schultz 2019b; Vollset et al. 2020). She even presents her own calculation, which suggests an alarmist number of 19 billion humans by 2100 (2018, 74).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susanne Schultz

Susanne Schultz is a sociologist at the Institute of Sociology at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research interests are bio/necropolitics of population, women's health movements, intersectional feminist and migration studies, politics of demography, relations of reproduction and human genetics. She was Senior Fellow of the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America and teached as guest professor in Frankfurt/Main, Vienna and Graz. She lives in Berlin.