George Doesn’t Know Jack
Let’s End the Blame, Hypocrisy, and Inequity — and Prevent Worldwide Poverty
Diatribes against sustainable population advocacy are becoming a regular rant from UK Guardian columnist George Monbiot. His most recent, Population Panic Lets Rich People Off the Hook for the Climate Crisis They are Fuelling, piles on to his previous attempts to shame people who express concerns about and/or try to help solve the human overpopulation crisis. In this column, he describes some ugly attitudes and some atrocities in the history of efforts to end or slow population growth.
In 2020, these views or goals are held by a tiny portion of those concerned about human numbers — which are, in fact, crushing the planet’s capacity to provide decent lives for all. In no way do they describe the attitudes and recommendations of the modern sustainable population movement. We work diligently to educate the public, policymakers, and journalists about the nature of the crisis and the humanitarian solutions. Still, the strands of blaming, racism, and hypocrisy that raise Monbiot’s hackles concern us, too. So, we are trying to improve the situation through respectful dialogue and education, rather than public shaming, tirades, and attempts to silence the conversation.
It’s a shame Monbiot chooses divisive tactics that set up a fight, rather than working to bring us all together to correct course and move our society toward much more sustainable practices. We could, and should, all be collaborating to achieve sound environmental stewardship. I recommend dialogue and cooperation over blaming and shaming.
Modern sustainable population advocacy recognizes that the Earth cannot support 11, 10, or even 7.8 billion humans living current lifestyles. We recognize that we in the rich world (which includes most of us in overdeveloped, industrialized nations) need to shrink our overconsumptive lifestyles and systems, and leave room for those in the “developing” world to improve their standard of living — to have their needs met and live decent lives. But doing so will not be enough.
Likewise, hastening progress so human population peaks and begins contracting sooner is not sufficient to achieve sustainable balance on the planet. But it is an essential part of the equation. Our advocacy works to correct both misconceptions: 1) the myth that we can ignore population numbers and just adopt green lifestyles to solve overshoot, and 2) the myth (believed by few) that we can continue business-as-usual overconsumption if we just arrest population growth.
We should all be providing more support for education, empowerment and family planning services wherever these are in deficit. But Monbiot doesn’t seem to recognize that organizations like Population Matters and World Population Balance put much effort into supporting smaller family choices in the rich world. Just because our birth rates are below replacement level does not mean we’ve done our full part to solve the overpopulation crisis. A child born in the rich world today can have twenty to sixty times the impact of a child born in Niger or Pakistan. That’s why World Population Balance has run billboards on the subject in Minnesota and Colorado, and is about to put them up in Vancouver — not in sub-Saharan Africa.
I don’t think George Monbiot wants to condemn the poor to never have a chance to live decent lives. But he needs to do the math. Take the overshoot data provided by the Global Footprint Network. If we cut today’s global economic throughput in half to get us back to one-planet living, and then distribute it fairly and equally among the entire world population, today’s poor will not be lifted into decent lives. We will ALL live in poverty. There is nothing humanitarian and there is no social justice in continuing to run from the population issue. We need to be working hard to resolve the inequity, scale back the overconsumption, welcome declining birth rates, and hasten progress on all these fronts.
Dave Gardner co-hosts The Overpopulation Podcast and the GrowthBusters podcast about sustainable living. He is executive director of World Population Balance.
This was originally published here on the website of World Population Balance,
