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Beware the Malthusian Trap: We Aren’t the Virus

Calum Stewart

Like many others, I took comfort from a renewed relationship with nature during the first UK lockdown in March 2020. As the surreal gave way to the humdrum beat of press briefings and rising deaths, starlings were nesting in my chimney. Whilst humanity’s progressive trajectory was dented, the spring served to remind us that pandemics too would come to pass. Across the world, nature appeared to be rebounding. The water in Venice’s Grand Canal glimmered and Delhi’s air was alpine-fresh as lockdowns reduced pollution levels. Yet, in the background, the ever-present spectre of climate change lingered. The starlings learned to imitate chainsaws, and it wasn’t long before Twitter was joining the dots. “Humans are the disease” it proclaimed, “and coronavirus is the cure!”, “Earth is recovering. We are the virus.”[1]

This rhetoric is not new. In 1798, Thomas Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population, which argued that unchecked, and thereby exponential, population growth would eventually outstrip our environmental resources. Competition for these resources would create an emergency, famine, war, or epidemic which would lead to countless deaths. He argued that in this way, nature would self-regulate and restore equilibrium. To avoid this Malthusian trap and the death of swathes of society, humanity must have fewer children.

200 years later, however, the human population continues to grow. Having reached 4 billion by 1974 and 6 billion by 1999, the UN forecasts that humanity will grow to 8.5 billion people in 2030 and 11 billion by the turn of the century.[2] To unpack that vast number slightly, counting to 11 billion at a rate of one per second, without breaks, would take over 31 years. Faced with overwhelming statistics, it is perhaps easy to see why even David Attenborough laments overpopulation and the effect it bears upon climate change.

Since the coronavirus pandemic began, there has been much speculation on the triangulated relationship between overpopulation, climate change, and the increased incidence of pandemics. Inger Anderson, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, went so far as to say that through the pandemic, “nature is sending us a message.”[3] Humanity’s increasing population continues to encroach upon the natural world. Habitats are torn down for homes and forests for food production; bringing us into closer contact with displaced wildlife whilst exacerbating carbon emissions. These emissions, in turn, inflame environmental disasters, driving yet more animals from their habitats into the human realm, bringing diseases to which we haven’t previously been exposed. Indeed, 75 % of emerging infectious diseases are thought to originate from wildlife, including HIV, Ebola, SARS and COVID-19.[4] These diseases are often spread through close physical contact, a symptom of overpopulation in the guise of global urbanisation and more densely populated cities.

It seems logical, therefore, that combating pandemics and overpopulation should run hand in hand. Indeed, in 2017, researchers from Lund University in Sweden established that having one fewer child was the largest reduction any individual could make to their carbon footprint, ahead of plant-based diets, reducing transatlantic flights, and going car-free.[5] It follows that reducing overpopulation would decrease carbon emissions, limit climate change, and reduce the risk of further pandemics. All of which is good news for me. I can continue having lamb with smug satisfaction on long-haul flights for I, dear reader, am gay, and don’t want biological kids. In fact, the UK won’t need to change much either, with a rate of 1.65 births per woman creating a stable population.[6] Combatting climate change, therefore, seems to call for Queer love, free condoms, and little else really.

In case it wasn’t obvious, this argument is deeply flawed. For in the shadow of the overpopulation narrative lurks exceptionalism, racism, and xenophobia. Overpopulation allows more developed nations, which tend to have more stable populations, to shift the blame for climate change onto poorer states with larger families and a growing populace. It also acts to absolve rich nations of the suffering inherent to an exploitative system. This scapegoating of the marginalized allows the privileged to excuse themselves of radical and structural change.

There is a long tradition of western scientists using the myth of overpopulation to urge the genocide of Black, disabled, and/or poor people, amongst other marginalized groups. To this day, contraception and sex education are often hailed as answers to the overpopulation “crisis”. Yet, despite a positive legacy for feminism, contraception has a negative historical association with eugenics. For whilst contraceptives allowed women to exercise greater control over their own bodies, birth control also facilitated population control and the suppression of minorities. In the United States of America, for instance, the feminist Margaret Sanger was involved in both the push for birth control and the eugenics movement. After helping to develop the Pill in the 1950s, she considered that “the world, and our civilisation for the next 25 years, is going to depend on a simple, cheap, safe, contraceptive to be used in poverty-stricken slums, jungles and among the most ignorant people.”[7] Historians have debated her racism, but I think the sentiment is clear. Here, white, middle-class civilisation (read supremacy and note the exclusionary pronoun “our”) depends upon the continued suppression of minority groups through eugenics.

This racist argument ignores the reality that the world’s privileged, both within and between nations, are most responsible for carbon emissions and consumption climbing out of control. For whilst the richest 10 per cent are responsible for 50 per cent of global carbon emissions, the poorest 3.5 billion contribute a mere 10 per cent.[8] This is an in inconvenient truth for charities such as the UK’s Population Matters, who argue that the world population must be reduced through family planning in poorer nations, based on the aforementioned 2017 Swedish research. Yet the report’s emissions calculations are based upon those of the average US citizen, whose 16.5 tonnes of yearly carbon emissions vastly outstrip the 0.1 tonnes emitted by the average Ethiopian.[9] Whilst acknowledging the disproportionate impact of the west, Population Matters insists that as the world further develops, emissions will increase and climate change will worsen. They can, therefore, only conceive of a world which develops steps behind the West, following in the footsteps of unchecked economic growth, consumerism, and capitalism. This jars spectacularly with the more sustainable, adaptable, and reflexive response poorer nations have shown to the coronavirus pandemic. Their successful approach demonstrates that the Global South, being most at risk, is in the vanguard of the climate emergency, rather than cowering behind the West as is so often depicted.

Besides, exponential global population growth is a myth. The rate of growth has been reducing since the 1960s, and the UN predicts that the number of people on earth will peak before the turn of the century. Rising wealth and education levels naturally lead to a reduction in birth rates as people opt to have fewer children at a later age.

The overpopulation argument also pretends that technology will stay the same forever. Over the years, forecasts of apocalyptic overpopulation have repeatedly been disproven as technological improvements keep pace, allowing a greater number of people to be supported by society. Just as the Industrial Revolution supported rapid population growth in 18th century Britain, so the greater efficiency of the agricultural “green revolution” of the 1960s satisfied the appetites of ever-more human beings, preventing the starvation forecast for the 1970s by Paul Ehrlich in his book The Population Bomb.

Retweeting “we are the virus,” therefore, plays into tropes of eco-fascism, whereby environmental concerns about overpopulation are used to legitimise far-right ideologies of racism and xenophobia. Rather than perpetuate hate and shift the blame from ourselves, we need to affect systemic change. The very notion of individual responsibility for carbon emissions, on which this whole discourse rests, was constructed by the oil giant BP in 2005 in a PR campaign popularising the metaphor of the ‘carbon footprint’ to circumvent real change. It is time we disabused ourselves of this delusion and brought down the divide between the individual and the collective, between human and nature. We are not the virus, but the solution.

It is doubtful that coronavirus has had a positive effect upon either climate change or nature, having simply made the latter more visible. Emissions will surely bounce back, bringing pollution and death to our cities. The global recession is likely to decrease investment in renewable technologies. Important climate talks, including the much-anticipated COP-26 due to be held in Glasgow, have been forced to delay due to lockdowns and travel restrictions. If there is any hope to be had, it is not that nature is miraculously on the mend; but rather that COVID has afforded us a glimpse of what is worth fighting for, whilst exposing the very real ability of the state to bring about long-lasting change.

 

Sources


Footnotes

  1. Sarah Manavis, "David Attenborough's Claim That Humans Have Overrun the Planet Is His Most Popular Comment," New Statesman (London), November 2020.

  2. Zhou Minxi to CGTN newsgroup, "Is Overpopulation to Blame for Pandemics," July 2020.

  3. Damian Carrington, "Coronavirus: 'Nature Is Sending Us a Message', Says UN Environment Chief," Guardian (London), March 25, 2020, Coronavirus.

  4. Minxi, "Is Overpopulation to Blame."

  5. Richard Webb, "The Great Population Debate," New Scientist 248, no. 3308 (November 14, 2020): 36.

  6. Office for National Statistics, Births in England and Wales: 2019, July 22, 2020.

  7. "The Pill: Eugenics and Birth Control," PBS.

  8. Manavis, "David Attenborough's Claim."

  9. Webb, “The Great Population Debate,” 38.