One of the above is “problematic.”
Coco Khan interviewed a “global development lecturer” named Heather Alberro about “whether rising birth rates are really to blame for the climate crisis” for The Guardian.
This is Coco Khan:
This is Alberro:
Heather Alberro knows everything there is to know about fixing this planet’s problems.
Turns out that the “birthrate problem” isn’t the billions of blacks and browns from places such as Africa or India, but the evil white people.
Where did the idea of overpopulation come from?
It started with 19th-century economist Thomas Malthus, who argued that population growth would always outstrip available resources. That’s known as a “Malthusian argument”.
“Malthusian” is one of those words I hear only at a specific sort of middle-class lefty dinner party. He’s the guy who said it’s good for humanity to have population controls, right?
He’s not the only one, especially since the 70s when numbers were shooting up. The Population Bomb from Paul Ehrlich is a key text. But this debate has become a fixture in environmental activism, even though the growth is slowing, about to decline, and predicted to stabilise at 10 billion in 2100.
So what is the optimum number of humans?
Nobody knows. Overpopulation is defined as when a species exceeds the current capacity of its ecosystem. We’re consuming the resources of 1.6 planet Earths each day.
I feel the overpopulation debate isn’t looking at the planet as a whole, but countries such as China and India.
And sub-Saharan Africa, whose population is increasing. This is where population discourse has racial, coloniser undertones, often characterising women from the global south as breeding too much and focusing interventions there.
Conglomerates are the big polluters. A hundred companies are responsible for over 70% of the world’s emissions. And isn’t it fair enough that other countries want to develop?
People have a right to live a dignified life. The ecological footprint of somebody in the top 1% can be as high as 175 times that of somebody in the bottom 10%. So saying it’s all about population numbers is simplistic. And a bit rich, after the destruction caused by big business and colonisers on the natural world. We should be talking about redistribution of resources: putting curbs on the ultra rich – and even on us – to change our lifestyles.
The expert pretty much says:
- The problem isn’t the billions of blacks in Africa, who depend directly on the aid of the Western world, and isn’t India either. Implying that is racist.
- It is fair that these poor places develop even though they pollute the planet, because people have a right to live a dignified life.
- Redistribution of resources (in other words, it’s now black and brown people’s turn).
- We need to put curbs on ourselves to change our lifestyles.
You see how these people talking about overpopulation and climate change always point at white people as the problem?
You’d imagine that if the climate apocalypse were real, and if these people were real believers and not just virulent haters, that they’d try to get everyone everywhere to breed less and live more frugally. But it’s always exclusively about the Western world.
For people of color, the climate cult is really just about revenge against whites. They hate us because we took them out of their jungles.
But in the case of self-hating whites, it’s a bit more complicated than that.