Introduction

There are many approaches one can take toward the topic of population geography. This text is oriented toward the broad questions of population geography as it relates to social, economic, and environmental sustainability. Consequently, this book has less of a focus on demography and population modeling than other books might. Here, we adopt what might be regarded as an ecological economics approach to population geography. This warrants a brief overview of the evolution of thought regarding the philosophical, psychological, social, economic, and ecological aspects of population and population geography. In this chapter, we will review some speculation as to the impact of the cognitive “shift” that many have hypothesized to have taken place in Homo sapiens. This cognitive revolution perhaps explains why we have become the dominant species on the planet. A brief reflection on dualism or the idea that humans are distinct from other animals on the planet and how those ideas may have been woven into and influenced the nature of our relationship with the natural world. We then explore some premodern doctrines regarding population (e.g., the Bible’s charge to “be fruitful and multiply”). We will explore how the Black Plague’s impact on the population changed the economy of the Middle Ages and how the enclosure movement was a response to that change, altering the relationship of people to land, which likely spawned capitalism and the neoliberal economic system that dominates the world today. The growing influence of capitalism on human society resulted in schools of thought in the areas of Political Economy and Political Ecology. We review major thinkers and their ideas in these related fields of Political Economy and Political Ecology and how they have both influenced ideas about the need for population policies. Pronatalist and anti-natalist population policies are defined with a few case studies provided for several countries. The chapter concludes with a history of the marriage and divorce of population policy from environmental policy as seen through window of the United Nations Population Conferences, United States legislation, and the priorities of environmental NGOs.

Guiding Questions

How would Julian Jaynes and Yuval Harris suggest modern H. sapiens were cognitively different from H. sapiens 100,000 years ago?

Provide a broad overview of the history and evolution of integration, disintegration, and reintegration of economic and ecological theory.

How did the U.N. Population Conferences evolve?

How have environmental NGOs changed their policy positions on the desirability of population stabilization from the 1970s to the present?

Provide examples of pronatal and antinatal population policies and their success or failure.

Define Political Economy and Political Ecology and how they relate to one another.

Define the idea of a “Population Doctrine” and provide examples from history.

Learning Objectives

Understand how Political Economy and Political Ecology have coevolved with respect to the integration, disintegration, and reintegration of economic and ecologic theory as they both relate to demography and population geography.

Be able to provide some examples of the evolution of attitudes about population and population policy at levels ranging from individual human cognition to the national level to the international level.

Provide a brief summary of the United Nations Population Conferences and how they evolved.

Describe the specific population policies of a few countries (both pronatal and antinatal) and explain how and why they have succeeded or failed.

Key Terms and Definitions

Political ecology, Political economy, Population doctrine, U.N. Conference on Population, Dualism, Enclosure movement, Bicameral mind

8.1 Human Cognition of Population Challenges

8.1.1 Consciousness, Dualism, and Free Will

The Audubon Society uses a phrase to implore humanity to take collective action on the issue of climate change. The phrase is “Birds can’t fight climate change. We can.” There does seem to be some truth to that statement. Humans are arguably the only animals on the planet who are aware that climate change is taking place, understand what causes it, can anticipate the likely consequences, and are capable of developing and executing policies to alleviate and/or mitigate it. Climate change, loss of biodiversity, growing inequality, and numerous other social, economic, and environmental challenges all demand the exercise of some sort of collective will on the part of humanity as a whole. The Audubon Society, and Ecological Economists for that matter, believes that humans, both individually and collectively, do have “free will” and the capacity to collectively respond to these and other challenges. Nonetheless, the answer to these questions remains contested and a summary of some of the history of thought in these areas of political economy and ecology is warranted.

Yuval Harari Harris suggests that sometime between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, H. sapiens developed an ability to communicate using language at a level never seen before. This change in our cognition enabled more flexible use of language, communication about third parties (e.g., gossip about other humans, speculations on the behavior of animals), and collective fictions (e.g., money, human rights, corporations are people). Another theory regarding the development of human cognition is presented by Julian Jaynes. He suggests that in prehistoric times, humans had a bicameral mind, which could be described as having a mental state in which the experiences and memories of the right hemisphere of the brain were transmitted to the left hemisphere via auditory hallucinations. Jaynes hypothesizes that, until roughly 3,000 years ago, humans were not conscious in the modern sense. He further suggests that modern consciousness emerged as a cultural invention rather than a biological mutation. In the parlance of computer terms, modern consciousness was more a change of software than a change in hardware. This new mode of consciousness enabled a dramatic increase in the use of metaphor as a mode of thinking and reasoning. Jaynes argued that this “software upgrade” spread around the world by eroding and replacing the previous modality of human consciousness. The auditory hallucinations associated with the bicameral mind likely have contemporary vestiges in our belief in “gods.” Ideas surrounding human consciousness are often associated with the idea of “dualism” and related ideas of the “Mind–Body” problem. We raise the idea here because these ideas of consciousness are related to ideas of “free will,” which is relevant to the claim of the Audubon society that suggests that birds cannot stop climate change, but we can.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave may be one of the first descriptions of some sort of “dualism.” Dualism is the idea that the world is made up of material things (that manifest as physical forms) and immaterial things, such as the mind, that exist independent of one another. Rene Descartes, a philosopher known for his famous statement “I think therefore I am” fame, is often credited with describing the “dualism” that distinguishes the mind from the brain. Dualism has several flavors—three of which are substance dualism (i.e., mind and body are two different substances), property dualism (i.e., there is only one physical substance but mental attributes of subjects cannot be reduced to their physical properties), and physicalist reductionism (i.e., mental properties can be identified as physical properties—mind is matter—memories are arrangements of brain chemistry).

8.1.2 Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary psychology is the study of behavior, thought, and feeling as viewed through the lens of evolutionary biology. Evolutionary psychologists presume all human behaviors result from the influences of physical and psychological predispositions that enabled our ancestors to survive. Sociobiology preceded and developed into evolutionary psychology and is now considered by some to be the unstated basis of culture wars taking place in the world today (Kunzru, 2022). Perhaps not surprisingly Google is at the center of some of these culture wars. A Google engineer recently claimed Google’s Language Model for Developed Applications (LaMDA) was a sentient artificial intelligence (AI; Video 8.1). Renowned physicist, Stephen Hawking, suggested that robots will eventually completely replace humanity. Hawking stated “I fear that AI may replace humans altogether. If people design computer viruses, someone will design AI that improves and replicates itself. This will be a new form of life that outperforms humans.” (McMenemy, 2017). Julian Jaynes suggests that the profound change in human consciousness was a software upgrade in our wetware. Hawking is suggesting we may spawn a new form of life via software that we wrote onto hardware. Both are suggesting that software rather than hardware is the driving force of human evolution. Again, we see that the diverging rates of biological, cultural, and technological evolution present very interesting challenges to both humans as individuals and as societies in ways that dramatically influence both the size and spatial distribution of the human population.

In some respects, answers to the aforementioned questions may be unknowable and perhaps even irrelevant. Regular biological evolution taking place in nonhuman animals has resulted in population control by some species and a lack of population control in others. Wolves regulate their own populations by only letting certain members of their packs breed (Wallach et al., 2015). An interesting piece in Salon magazine describes 11 species that are destroying the planet because they do not control their own population: Kangaroos in Australia, Dogs in China, White-Tailed Deer in the United States, Jellyfish worldwide, Badgers in England, Cats in Canada, Elephants in South Africa, Beavers in Argentina, Monkeys in India, Lionfish in the Bahamas, and People worldwide (Kallon, 2013). Perhaps a cycling of booms and busts in populations a la the Lotka–Volterra model (Volterra, 1931) is the natural course of events. Most of the rest of this chapter involves a review of ideas related to moral philosophy, political economy, and ecological sustainability with an eye toward how they relate to demography and population policy. All these ideas assume that humans have individual and collective free will suggesting that the future is unwritten and that we (the human race) have a part in writing it. This short detour into the area of consciousness, free will, and dualism is presented because the ideas are still contested and likely have profound relevance to the viability of achieving a just, sustainable, and desirable future for H. sapiens as a species.

8.2 Premodern Doctrines

No species will continue to exist if it does not have sufficient propensity to procreate with enough offspring to survive to the next generation. Biologists have designated R and K reproductive strategies for which all living things exist on a spectrum (Video 8.2). R strategists produce large quantities of offspring with lower survival rates. R strategists typically engage in rapid reproduction to survive in unstable environments. K strategists, on the other hand, produce smaller quantities of offspring with higher survival rates because they live in more stable environments and have more favorable living conditions. In the early days of H. sapiens, high fertility was likely a good strategy for continued survival. As we approach or exceed carrying capacity, it is no longer a good strategy. The following summary of population “doctrines” traces an arc throughout human history of changing attitudes regarding fertility and stated or unstated population policy. This arc draws upon ideas in John Weeks’s textbook, Population: An Introduction to Concepts and Issues; Weeks, 2020).

8.2.1 The Bible’s “Be Fruitful and Multiply”

The divine injunction from Genesis 1:28 is a mandate from God to Adam and Eve to “Be fruitful and multiply.” The King James’s version of the bible states “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” This is clearly a pronatal population policy that suggests that Adam and Eve and their descendants should replenish and subdue the earth. Perhaps a contradictory edict. Nonetheless, later in the book of Genesis, there is the statement “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” Many interpret this as an edict of responsibility for stewardship of the earth. This is Old Testament writing that takes place after the cognitive changes suggested by the likes of Yuval Harari Harris and Julian Jaynes.

8.2.2 Plato and Aristotle

The apocryphal quote often attributed to Yogi Berra—“The ancients have stolen all of my good ideas.” is perhaps relevant when discussing the ideas of Plato and Aristotle concerning population. Not only are they good ideas they are expressed cogently and concisely. “Brevity is the soul of wit” as Shakespeare said. In the Republic, Plato discussed the relationship between the population and the state. He suggested that when the state met the needs of society as a whole, the people “will live pleasantly together and a prudent fear of poverty or war will keep them from begetting children beyond their means.” He follows with the argument that most men would shift their efforts to acquiring luxuries, which would require a growing fraction of the working population to shift away from the production of necessities (Golding & Golding, 1975). The demand for necessities would not go away, while a growing fraction of the population would disengage from the efforts required to produce those necessities. Plato argued this would result in unsupportable population growth, which would require more land, which could only be acquired through war. Plato’s solution to the population problem he described was elitist and hierarchical and not one that would likely be accepted in contemporary society. Historical records suggest that Plato’s ruminations on population issues were a result of serious deforestation, soil erosion, and other social and environmental problems he witnessed in his time that he attributed to overpopulation (Holzwarth, 2020). In his Laws, Plato offers an optimal “scale” for the size of a polis or city. The number he presents is 5,040 heads of families, which is strangely seven factorial (i.e., 7! = 7*6*5*4*3*2*1). What was Plato thinking here? Plato’s actual numbers are not feasible today; however, his basic ideas of “Limits” perhaps are.

Aristotle espoused a population policy that involved strict government control of population growth. Aristotle insisted that the state had a responsibility to ensure a balance of resources with the population. Aristotle believed in a “Goldilocks” population size. Too large a population put too much pressure on available resources and led to shortages. Shortages led to public unrest and the inability of the state to maintain control. Too small a population led to insufficient production and division of labor, which had an adverse effect on the economy and trade. Too small a population also left the state too weak to defend itself. For Aristotle, control of birth rates and mortality rates was an essential and legitimate function of government.

Plato agreed with Aristotle regarding the need to ensure population growth was controlled to the extent that it did not become a threat to the state. However, Plato did not agree with Aristotle’s arguments, which demanded that family size should be controlled by the government and policies related to mandatory abortions. Both philosophers agreed that immigration rates and birth rates should be controlled by the state in order to maintain the balance necessary for security and the overall well-being of the citizenry. The Greek city-states were geographically isolated and restricted by the size of their agricultural lands. Consequently, Plato and Aristotle argued they were only capable of supporting a finite number of people. They advocated for laws and social behaviors that would allow them to be sustainable. Alas, along came Alexander the Great and a policy of expansion and domination characterized post-Aristotelian Greek history.

8.2.3 The Roman Empire: Pronatal Policy and Antinatal Subversive Behavior

Population Growth was also needed to support the Roman Empire, which was also one based on growth, domination, and exploitation. The Romans had no interest in establishing relatively small city-states that balanced population and resources. Roman policies described in Lex Iulia (Julian Laws) were pronatal, racist, and classist in that they encouraged marriage only to certain people and encouraged high fertility. Roman law financially penalized married couples who were unable or chose not to have children. Despite the pronatal policy of the Roman Empire, the Romans practiced birth control and used “exposure” as a mechanism of disposing of unwanted children. Exposure is abandoning a child in the environment, usually resulting in the death of an infant. To this day there are “Safe-haven” laws in the United States that decriminalize the leaving of unharmed infants with designated persons (often the Fire Department). Moses was exposed by his mother and found by a Princess of Egypt who adopted him. Not all “exposed” infants enjoy such a life. Romans also used other intentional and unintentional forms of contraception. Herbal remedies made from one or more of the following herbs were used to induce menstruation or prevent pregnancy: Silphium, Pennyroyal, and Queen Anne’s lace. Roman soldiers often contracted sexually transmitted diseases during their foreign exploits. The wives of these Roman soldiers were wisely not interested in contracting these diseases and used an early form of condom to protect themselves. These condoms, made from animal bladders and linen cloth, were used as a prophylactic (disease prevention), which also likely served to reduce the likelihood of conception.

8.2.4 Saint Augustine, Saint Aquinas, The Catholic Church, and Contraception

The Roman Empire evolved from a Pagan to Christian society, which may have contributed to its ultimate demise in 476 CE. Christian society can be paradoxically characterized as both pronatal and antinatal. Celibacy as a virtue is antinatal, while “Be fruitful and multiply” is pronatal. Two important Christian thinkers at the dawn of the Middle Ages in Europe were Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas. Saint Augustine (aka Saint Augustine of Hippo) was born in a Roman settlement in what is now Algeria. Augustine traveled far and wide during the twilight of the Roman Empire (he died in 430 CE). Saint Augustine is heralded as one of the most significant Christian thinkers for his attempts to synthesize Platonic, Roman, and Christian ideas. Saint Augustine’s Confessions elaborate on his sexual exploits and subsequent guilt about them. Elaine Pagels, in her book Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, suggests that Augustine’s equating of sex with original sin is the root of Western society’s negative attitudes about sexuality (Pagels, 1988). Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274 CE), on the other hand, had more favorable attitudes about sex as long as it was in marriage. Aquinas was an Italian Dominican Friar and priest who is regarded as perhaps the most influential thinker of the Middle Ages. Aquinas tried to synthesize Aristotle’s philosophy with the principles of Christianity (St. John-Stevas, 1960). The Roman Catholic Church is renowned for its opposition to birth control and repression of those who advocate its use. St. Aquinas is regarded as one of the earliest proponents of the idea that birth control was a sin. The Catholic position on contraception was formally explained in Pope Paul VI’s Humanae vitae in 1968: “Artificial contraception is considered intrinsically evil, but methods of natural family planning may be used, as they do not usurp the natural way of conception.” Note that this does NOT allow for “coitus interuptus” as a birth control mechanism, while it does allow for “the rhythm method” of birth control. Practitioners of the rhythm method of birth control are commonly referred to as “parents.”

8.2.5 Ibn Khaldun—The Rise of Islam Triggering the Birth of the Renaissance

Some people describe the time between the end of the Roman Empire (5th century CE) and the Renaissance (15th century CE) as an economically stagnant and fatalistic period of European History, while others describe it as one of a highly sophisticated and confident civilization that was ecologically sustainable (Winder, 2019). Regardless of what was or was not happening in Europe—a lot was happening in the Middle East and the Mahgreb. Islam emerged in the 7th century CE and expanded throughout the Mediterranean. Muslims took control of much of Spain, Italy, and Southeastern Europe. Muslims embraced Greek science and philosophy and adopted Indian mathematics and Chinese paper-making to develop perhaps the most sophisticated civilization on the planet at that time. Ibn Khaldun, one of the great Arab historians and philosophers, encouraged population growth because it allowed for specialization (presaging the ideas of Adam Smith’s pin factory), urbanization, economic growth, and the consequent spread of Islam. Ironically, Christian Europe, via the Crusades against Islam throughout the Middle Ages, likely learned from and adapted many of the innovations that were developed in the Ottoman Empire. This set the stage for the rise of mercantilism and the Renaissance.

8.2.6 Mercantilism—Gold and Silver Are Wealth in a Zero-Sum Economic Game

Mercantilism is an economic principle embraced by European colonial empires (Figure 8.1). This system of international trade existed from the 16th century to the 18th century. Gold and silver were the measure of a nation’s wealth. This was the era of the advent and subsequent domination of nation-states (i.e., self-governing countries) and the end of feudalism in Europe. Some key principles of mercantilism are (1) Accumulation of gold (the idea that money is wealth rather than land or other assets), (2) belief that wealth is fixed (e.g., zero-sum game), (3) desire for a large population, (4) positive balance of trade ($ value of exports > $ value of imports), (5) reliance on Colonies (based on the exploitation of “others”), (6) state monopolies are good, and (7) trade barriers can be good too. Mercantilism favored a growing population to provide a labor force, soldiers for an army, and colonists to manage and control colonies.

[figure number=Figure 8.1 caption=How Mercantilism Works filename=Fig_8.1.jpg]

8.2.7 Physiocrats—National Wealth Depends on Land

Physiocracy (the economic theory of the Physiocrats) originated as a revolt of the French people against Mercantilism. According to the physiocrats, the ultimate source of wealth was the land and the agricultural surplus it provided. Aldo Leopold would have been proud of them. The physiocrats were hostile to tariffs and supported free trade. The physiocrats likely laid the political foundation for the French Revolution. Physiocrats are credited with putting economics on a scientific basis by applying scientific methods and reasoning to economic phenomena. Economic development and distribution of wealth were a major concern of the physiocrats. Physiocrats recognized the interdependence of different classes in the economic system and advocated direct taxes on land rather than indirect taxes on goods because they regarded land as the ultimate source of production (Overbeek, 1973).

Thomas Robert Malthus, David Ricardo, and Adam Smith had diverging ideas about Physiocracy and Say’s Law (Semmel, 1965). Say’s law states that the production of a product creates demand for another product by providing something of value that can be exchanged for that other product. Say’s law conflicts with Mercantilist ideas that money inheres value rather than simply serving as a medium of exchange. Malthus saw wealth as resulting from the interaction of labor and land rather than land alone. Adam Smith regarded population growth as the result of a demand for labor based on the potential productivity of the land.

The diverging ideas regarding the nature of wealth between the physiocrats and the mercantilists are echoed in the debates between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, and to some extent in the conflict between labor and capital described by Karl Marx. Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the 21st Century points out that wealth derived from capital grows faster than wealth derived from labor suggesting that Capitalism as it is currently practiced looks more like mercantilism than physiocracy. Piketty demonstrates that Capitalism exacerbates rather than reduces wealth inequality thus refuting a promise of capitalism (Video 8.3). The idea that money can grow with interest is in direct contrast to the limits of the productive capacity of land. While physiocracy is mostly dismissed as a legitimate economic theory today, it should be noted that the physiocrats are much more likely to have recognized that there are limits to growth and that human populations could not exceed carrying capacity.

8.3 Impacts of the Black Plague and Ensuing Enclosure Movement

Economists tend to credit capitalism for many of the good things that happen in human history. If humanity successfully meets the social, political, and environmental challenges we are currently facing do not be surprised if economists take credit for saving the day, while the vital and essential work of scientists and engineers will be relegated to minor supporting roles. Economists often give capitalism credit for ending feudalism. Jason Hickel takes umbrage with this sort of hagiography typical of many economists and their idolatry of capitalism (Hickel, 2022). The following is adapted from Hickel’s book, Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World.

Feudalism of the Middle Ages was a brutal system in which Lords and Nobles controlled the land and serfs were forced to render tribute to them in rents, taxes, tithes, and unpaid labor. Contrary to popular mythology, capitalism did not cause the demise of feudalism. Prior to the onset of the Black Plague, there were numerous violent peasant revolts that are often glossed over in history books. Common people across Europe began rebelling against the feudal system by refusing to work for free, refusing to pay taxes, and demanding direct control over the lands they farmed. This resistance was organized and manifested in many violent conflicts most of which the peasants and serfs lost. In Flanders in 1323, peasants and workers took up a battle that lasted 5 years before they were ultimately crushed by the Flemish nobility. Similar rebellions took place in Bruges, Ghent, Florence, and Paris. Then came the Black Plague.

The Black Plague was an unprecedented social, political, and economic crisis that resulted in the loss of faith and a devastating loss of roughly one third of the population of Europe. The black plague changed the balance of power between Serfs and Lords. Labor was now in scarce supply. Peasants, serfs, and workers saw this as an opportunity to change the very foundations of the social order. Even today in the United States, the much less severe impact of the COVID pandemic seems to be shifting a little power toward labor. In England in 1381, Wat Tyler led a peasants’ revolt against feudalism. By the 1400s, peasants were warring with Lords throughout Europe. The peasants and serfs lost most of the battles but ultimately won the war for a while. Serfs became free farmers generating livelihood from their own lands. Free farmers had free access to the commons: pastures for grazing, forests for game and timber, waterways for fishing, and irrigation. They now engaged in paid work if they needed money but often had no need for money. In some parts of Europe, peasants owned almost 90% of the land.

As feudalism collapsed, free peasants were building a new economy based on egalitarian principles and cooperation. An economic system rooted in self-sufficiency. This narrative of the Middle Ages is in stark contrast to images from Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail. Wages were up, rents were down, food was cheaper, and nutrition improved. Historians have described the period from 1350 to 1500 as “The Golden Age of the European Proletariat” (Braudel, 1967). In addition to social and economic improvements for the people the environment also improved. Feudalism was an extractive and exploitative ecological disaster. However, once free farmers won direct control of the land, they established a more reciprocal relationship with the natural world. Soils recovered. Forests grew. What could go wrong?

The lords and nobility were not pleased with this shift in fortune. During this “Golden Age of the proletariat,” the elites suffered a loss of wealth as national income was shared more evenly throughout the population. The ability of the elites to accumulate wealth was decimated. Capitalism needs elite accumulation of wealth for large-scale investment. The self-sufficiency, high wages, democratic practices, and collective management of resources were antithetical to the dream of elite accumulation. The elites recognized this and did something about it. The nobles, the Church, and the merchant class united to crush peasant autonomy and drive wages down. A return to serfdom was not viable; however, driving the free farmers off the land was.

A continent-wide campaign of evictions known as the “enclosure movement” drove peasants off their lands and fenced off and privatized the commons as “property” belonging to the elites and the church. The protestant reformation added fuel to this fire as Catholic monasteries were dismantled across Europe and appropriated by the elites. The peasant communities fought back but lost. A peasant rebellion in Germany in 1525 left more than 100,000 commoners dead. Over the course of 300 years, Europe was “enclosed” and millions of people were removed from their land triggering a massive refugee crisis and humanitarian catastrophe.

This brutal 300-year dispossession was a windfall for the capitalists and elites. Enclosure worked like a charm. The elites got their accumulated capital back which economists have always recognized as necessary for the rise of capitalism. Adam Smith blithely described it as “previous accumulation” that was acquired through the hard work of smart and industrious entrepreneurs. In reality, however, it was acquired through the violent seizing of land. Perhaps the physiocrats have a point. Wealth is ultimately derived from land. Capitalism also needed cheap labor to thrive. The enclosure movement solved this problem too. The dispossessed former farmers now needed to work for wages just to merely survive and merely survive they did.

This is a true history that puts the lie to the oft-told tale regarding the rise of capitalism. The transition from feudalism to capitalism was not gradual and involved the destruction of a brief political economy that was described as “The Golden Age of the Proletariat.” Capitalism used organized violence, mass impoverishment, and the systematic destruction of self-sufficient, sustainable, subsistence economies in order to “prevail.” From the 1500s to the 1700s, life expectancy dropped and populations declined. The “nasty, brutish, and short” life described by Thomas Hobbes in his work Leviathan was created rather than destroyed by capitalism. This history is reviewed in the spirit of Yogi Berra’s quip on history: “The only thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn a damn thing from history.”

8.4 Political Economy and Political Ecology

The lens through which this book explores the topic of population geography focuses on the relationship between the human economy and the earth’s ecology. This is a lens of Ecological Economics. The following summary of the history of thought in the domain of Ecological Economics is adapted from the book An Introduction to Ecological Economics (Costanza et al., 2015). Prior to the 20th century, science, philosophy, and morality were often simultaneously regarded. Aristotle reflected on the nature of matter as well as the nature of government. Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations as well as The Theory of Moral Sentiments. However, as our knowledge expanded and the number of scholars grew, the focus of scholarship narrowed and specialization won the day. The success of science as typified by Newtonian Physics was modeled by other disciplines including economics. This fostered specialization and isolation of scholarship and thinking. We now have isolated academic disciplines, which we often lament as being overly “siloed.” There is a growing call for multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary scholarship, although most university structures are not very adept at supporting those kinds of scholarship. There are practitioners of Political Economy who are typically in economics departments that often have a conservative or neoliberal leaning and practitioners of Political Ecology who often exist in Geography, Anthropology, or Environmental Science departments, which lean in a more paleo-liberal or even Marxist direction. Political Economy is the branch of social science that examines the relationships between individuals and society and between markets and the state. Political Ecology examines how and why economic structures and power relations drive environmental change in an increasingly interconnected world. Thus, we have seen, prior to the 20th century the codevelopment of Economics and the natural sciences. This was followed in the 20th century by a fragmentation of scholarship and thinking into distinct and isolated disciplines. Political economy and Political Ecology were nascent interdisciplinary reaggregations spurred by the rise of “ecology” and the holistic and systems thinking associated with that school of thought that was born in the middle of the 20th century. As Costanza concludes “Ecological Economics represents an attempt to recast economics in this different scientific paradigm, to reintegrate the many academic threads that are needed to weave the whole cloth of sustainability.” The following is a brief history of thought in these areas of political economy and political ecology with an eye toward the development of ecological economics. We begin with Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal.”

8.4.1 A Modest Proposal From Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)

Recognition of the problem of poverty and overpopulation certainly predates Malthus” 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population and Adam Smith’s 1776 publication of The Wealth of Nations. In 1729 Dr. Jonathan Swift wrote his infamous piece of satire titled “A Modest Proposal: For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the puclick.” Swift’s Modest Proposal was presented in the guise of an economic treatise that suggested that poverty in Ireland could be alleviated by butchering the children of the Irish poor and selling them as food to wealthy English landlords. Swift’s brilliant satire was very methodical and explicit in its suggestions. Here are six arguments he made in favor of murdering and eating children: (1) It would reduce the number of Catholics; (2) it would provide the poor with a tangible asset; (3) it would improve the economy and introduce a new food; (4) it would reduce the time “breeders” have to raise children, (5) it would improve business at taverns and pubs, and (6) it would encourage marriage. A Modest Proposal was a scathing reflection on England’s legal and economic exploitation of Ireland. The essay is a masterpiece of satire that mixed rational deliberation with an unthinkable conclusion and has come to symbolize any proposition to solve a problem with an effective but outrageous cure.

8.4.2 Adam Smith (1723–1790) and Neoclassical Economics

Adam Smith is regarded as the founder of modern economics. Smith’s work bridged objective and normative thought as evidenced by the titles and content of his works The Wealth of Nations and A Theory of Moral Sentiments. Modern Economics has strayed from Adam Smith in that it presents itself as “objective” science using assumptions that have been proven wrong and mathematics not fit for purpose while making normative policy prescriptions. A key idea of Adam Smith that has been overused and abused is the idea that people acting in their own self-interest unintentionally serve the greater social good. This “Greed is Good” premise is explained by the presence of “An Invisible Hand” that guides human behavior. In the roughly 250 years since the publication of Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, we have found absolutely no evidence of this “Invisible Hand.” Nonetheless, it is more real to many economists than the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus are to 5-year-olds. Smith’s rationale for the “Invisible Hand” is based on the idea that if two people who are fully informed of the consequences of their decision choose to enter into an exchange, it is because the exchange makes each of them better off. Modern economics “aggregates” this partial truth (we are rarely if ever “fully informed” nor do we always act rationally or in our own selfish interest) and assumes that the social good is the aggregation or sum of individual wants. Therefore, the theory states that markets optimally guide individual behavior to the common good. Sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of its parts (e.g., the Beatles were more than Ringo, John, Paul, and George) and sometimes the whole is less than the sum of its parts (psychopaths in the corporate workspace; Kranefeld & Blickle, 2019). Adam Smith was a brilliant thinker whose ideas have been cherry picked to support a neoliberal ideological agenda expressed in Lewis Powell’s infamous memorandum to the United States Chamber of Commerce titled Attack on the American Free Enterprise System (Roberts, 2021).

8.4.3 Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) and His Essay on the Principle of Population

The core argument of Malthus’ 1798, anonymously published work was that the human population will inevitably outgrow its capacity to produce food. He argued that human populations could increase exponentially and would do so if there was enough food and other essentials for life. He further suggested that food supply could increase arithmetically through new technology and agricultural expansion to new lands. The exponential growth of humans outstrips the arithmetic growth of food, which results in war, starvation, and disease. The Malthusian premise is a compelling and simple idea. The simplicity and fundamental truth of Malthus’s model explain its persistence to this day. On the other hand, the interactions and complexity of population dynamics, agricultural science, and birth control technology make much of Malthus” essay seem quaint and irrelevant. Many use these developments and complexities to argue that Malthus was wrong. In any case, the fundamental idea of limits and carrying capacity initially expressed in Malthus” essay has not gone away nor will it go away. This is the contribution of Malthus to the ongoing challenge of charting a path to sustainability. Malthus acknowledged the influence of Adam Smith in his work, while Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace acknowledged the influence of Malthus in their codevelopment of the theory of natural selection and evolution. Karl Marx developed many of his ideas in opposition to Malthus, which relates to the tension between the historical materialism associated with Karl Marx and Marxist thinkers and the dualism of Frederick Soddy and many of those who regard themselves as ecological economists (Costanza et al., 2015, pp. 35–39; Smith, 2009).

8.4.4 David Ricardo (1772–1823) and Comparative Advantage

David Ricardo is perhaps the first economic geographer. He was interested in how geographic variation in land productivity influenced trade and rent. David Ricardo is most known for his theory of comparative advantage (Video 8.4), which is a cogent rationale for the benefits of international trade. He introduced another model of how the economy and the environment interact. He was not concerned about sustainability or environmental degradation but was interested in justifying why landlords received rent from land ownership. Ricardo argued that agricultural lands were farmed in a manner akin to the way geologists explain the exploitation sequence of oil fields (e.g., drill in the big easy reserves first moving on to more expensive and difficult areas as demand grows). Analogously in agriculture, people would initially farm the most productive lands where food-to-labor ratios were the highest. As the population increased, farming would extend to less fertile lands requiring more labor to produce food. Food prices would increase to cover the increased labor costs. The first exploited, high-fertility lands could now earn economic rent because the same amount of labor applied to them would produce more revenue than the newly farmed lands. Economic rent is an amount of money earned that exceeds what is economically or socially necessary. Ricardo’s theories of how agriculture is patterned on the land in response to population growth and changes in food prices are vital to understanding the complex relationship between human survival and ecological sustainability. Ricardo’s theory of differential rent suggests dismal consequences because an increasing share of the total product of the land went to landlords. This work presages the ideas of Piketty and the idea that increasing shares of the wealth go to people with “previous accumulation” of capital. The key difference is that the “previous accumulation” was land in the time of Ricardo and Money in the time of Piketty. Perhaps this suggests that the Mercantilists have ultimately prevailed over the Physiocrats.

8.4.5 Physical Scientists and the Laws of Thermodynamics

Thermodynamics is the branch of physics that looks at heat, work (aka energy), power, and temperature. James Prescott Joule (1818–1889), a noted physicist, mathematician, and beer maker is known for his study of energy and the recognition that mechanical energy and heat energy are interchangeable to a point. The metric system unit of energy is named after James Prescott Joule (Joule = Newton × meter aka − Work (energy) = force × distance). Thomas Savery (1650–1715) and Thomas Newcomen (1664–1729) built machines (steam engines), based on the piston, that burned wood and/or coal to convert heat to mechanical motion, which was used to pump water out of mines. James Watt (1736–1819) improved upon the designs of Savery and Newcomen and is likely responsible for the industrial revolution taking place in England rather than someplace else. The metric system’s unit of power is named after James Watt (Watt = joule/second − the temporal rate of energy consumption). These early pumps are known as heat engines. A heat engine (e.g., contemporary example being an internal combustion engine in a car) converts heat to mechanical energy. This necessarily involves the transfer of heat energy from a high-temperature reservoir to a low-temperature reservoir, which in the process creates some mechanical motion. No heat engine is 100% efficient. Sadi Carnot (1837–1894) had a practical interest in determining how efficient heat engines were and found that the bigger the temperature differential between the hot and cold reservoir the more efficient the engine. Carnot is regarded as the “Father of Thermodynamics.” Rudolph Clausius (1822–1888) and William Thomas (1824–1907 aka Lord Kelvin) supplemented the work of Sadi Carnot with a deeper scientific and mathematical perspective. Clausius and Thomas contributed to developing the three laws of thermodynamics, which are simply stated here (Video 8.5): (1) Energy cannot be created or destroyed; (2) the entropy of the universe is always increasing; (3) only at absolute zero temperature can entropy not increase. The laws of thermodynamics essentially state that it is impossible to build or create a perpetual motion machine. Ecological Economics has embraced the laws of thermodynamics as essential to their preanalytic vision of how the world works. Frederick Soddy (Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry) and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen are two seminal ecological economists who recognized that the laws of thermodynamics are fundamental and relevant to the study of economics.

8.4.6 Charles Darwin and the Theory of Evolution

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) published his magnum opus On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection in 1859. Darwin presented several pivotal ideas including the idea of biological evolution, survival of the fittest, and that all species (including humans) share a common ancestor. Darwin credits Malthus for helping him develop his insights. Darwin essentially stated that species exhibit natural variation in their biological traits (e.g., they can change over time from one generation to the next), new species come from preexisting species, and some of these new species inherited traits that improve their ability to compete, survive, and most importantly—reproduce. Darwin attributed natural variation to “Descent with modification” and was unaware of the role of DNA, mutation, and sexual reproduction as the mechanism of natural variation. Despite the brilliant simplicity of Darwin’s ideas, they are often misunderstood (Video 8.6). Darwin’s idea of biological evolution has been adapted to other phenomena including the idea of “Social Darwinism.” Social Darwinists suggest that the idea “survival of the fittest” could be applied to people to explain how those who become powerful in society became so because they are innately better. Social Darwinism has been presented as justification for imperialism, racism, eugenics, and social inequality at various times over the past century and a half. A common misconception regarding evolution is that the outcomes are optimal. This is not the case. The idea of “Path Dependence” has gained some traction in economics, particularly those economists who critique economics as an objective science and argue that it is really a historical social science (David, 2007). The idea of evolution is fundamental to so much thinking that it warrants a deep understanding when applied to nonbiological phenomena. As we have mentioned before the rate of biological evolution is much slower than the rate of cultural evolution, which is much slower than the rate of technological revolution. Technology can arguably be regarded as a subset of culture but it is not difficult to distinguish the two in many relevant cases (e.g., the technological evolution of “designer babies” vs. the cultural evolution of legal standards relevant to “designer babies” and genetic engineering in general).

8.4.7 John Stewart Mill and the Stationary State

John Stuart Mill in his 1848 treatise Principles of Political Economy explored the idea of a “steady state economy” (Video 8.7):

It is scarcely necessary to remark that a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much room for improving the Art of Living, and much more likelihood of its being improved, when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on.

Stuart Mill (1848), Principles of Political Economy

Mill made many contributions to political and moral philosophy. Herman Daly embraced the ideas of “Steady State” economics initially espoused by Mill (Video 8.7).

8.4.8 Karl Marx and Capital

Karl Marx (1818–1883) wrote his magnum opus Capital: A Critique of Political Economy in 1867. Karl Marx’s Capital (aka Das Kapital) is simultaneously a work of economics, sociology, and history. Marx presents a systematic account of the nature, evolution, and future of the capitalist system. The treatise examines the nature of commodities, wages, and the worker–capitalist relationship. Marx posits that the capitalist system is ultimately unstable because it cannot endlessly sustain profits. Capital was a detailed preview of the subsequent Communist Manifesto written by Marx and Engels arguing that class conflict would result in an inevitable revolution that would annihilate capitalism as an economic system. Marx provided a framework for how capitalism functions. He argued that commodities have both a use value and an exchange value and that their exchange value is rooted in how much labor power went into them. Capitalists use commodities differently than their traditional predecessors. The goal of capitalists is to increase profit. To do this, they attempt to control commodities and the productive “capital” that is necessary for the production of goods. This works because capitalists pay workers much less than the value of their work product, the difference being “profit” to the capitalists. Neoclassical economists are often hostile to the ideas of Karl Marx and contemporary advocates of the ideas of Karl Marx (aka “Marxists”). Neoclassical economics is focused on the idea of “efficiency,” which often manifests as the means of optimizing utility or maximizing “bang for buck” regardless of the distribution of wealth and income. Marxists are much more concerned about the distribution of income and wealth and argue that maldistribution results in class conflict. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century makes some very profound statements (supported by tons of historical evidence) about how Capital is more powerful than labor, particularly when it is distributed so unevenly. There is growing concern that neoclassical economics is failing for many reasons including its inability to recognize the importance of the distribution of wealth and income, its overemphasis on questions of efficiency rather than resilience, and its inability to value natural capital and ecosystem services appropriately. Many would argue that we are currently in “late-stage capitalism” that was predicted by Karl Marx over 150 years ago. If things go as Marx suggested a revolution is coming up next. Karl Marx regarded overpopulation as a normal characteristic of capitalism that likely fueled the revolution. Marx suggested that capitalists would encourage high fertility to depress wages from a strictly supply and demand perspective. Elon Musk (noted Capitalist and sometimes the richest person in the world) has said “population collapse is the biggest threat to the civilization.” Does Musk want cheaper labor?

8.4.9 William Stanley Jevons and Resource Scarcity

William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) was an influential thinker who developed the economic idea of the marginal utility theory of value. He also looked at dwindling supplies of coal as a source of energy driving the British economy. To this day, many governments and environmentalists believe that improvements in efficiency (e.g., more “bang for buck”) will lower resource consumption. Sadly, they are failing to appreciate William Stanley Jevons’s profound insight known as the Jevons paradox which states that when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used the reduced cost of its use increases demand for the resource which negates the gain in efficiency and results in more rather than less of that resource being consumed. This ties back to the improved steam engine developed by James Watt, which was much more efficient with respect to how much water it could pump out of a mine for a given quantity of coal. Watt’s steam engine actually increased the rate at which coal was consumed in England. Jevons paradox tells us that energy efficiency leads to more energy use, not less. In some respects, the phenomena of the Jevons paradox with respect to food, water, and energy is accelerating growth. An important reality is relevant to the subject material of this book.

8.4.10 Ernst Haeckel and the Dawn of Ecology

Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) first used the word oecologie in 1866. Haeckel provided an early definition of ecology as:

By ecology we mean the body of knowledge concerning the economy of nature—the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and to its organic environment including above all, its friendly and inimical relations with those animals and plants with which it comes directly or indirectly into contact—in a word, ecology is the study of all those complex interrelations referred to by Darwin as the conditions of the struggle for existence.

A variety of definitions of ecology would manifest later including “The study of the distribution and abundance of animals” and “the study of the structure and function of ecosystems.” Haeckel was the first to capture this holistic and complex idea of interacting life forms and their environment—an economics of the natural world. Ecologists have only recently begun to incorporate humans in their worldview. Economics has historically been the purview of the “economy of humans.” Ecological Economics is a transdiscipline that aspires to build a more effective science integrating humans into the economy of nature.

8.4.11 Alfred Lotka and Systems Thinking

Alfred Lotka (1881–1949) was notable in that he tried to treat ecology and economics as an integrated whole that would exhibit nonlinear dynamics that would be constrained and structured by flows of energy. Lotka is best known for his equations describing the two-species population dynamics of a predator–prey biological system (Video 8.8). Lotka and Vito Volterra simultaneously developed what are now known as the Lotka–Volterra equations.

8.4.12 Arthur Cecil Pigou and Market Failure

Alfred Pigou (1877–1959) was notable for his thought in the area of pollution as a market failure. Pigou suggested that externalities, like pollution or congestion, generate market failures (Video 8.9). He presented the idea of a Pigouvian tax that could cost-effectively remedy the situation by internalizing external costs using taxes or subsidies. These “Polluter Pays” policies have come to be known as Pigouvian pricing, or Pigouvian taxes or subsidies. Pigouvian taxes are often confused with the Coase theorem (Slaev, 2017). Pigou’s solution used government intervention to solve the problem of externality, while the Coasean solution prefers to use market methods to solve the externality. Carbon taxes to mitigate climate change are a kind of Pigouvian tax that is designed to change behavior rather than raise revenue.

8.4.13 Harold Hotelling and Spatial And Temporal Issues

Harold Hotelling (1895–1973) made some very profound observations about the time value of natural resources. Hotelling compared the rate of growth in value of natural products (e.g., forests) to the rate of growth of money in the bank or other similar financial investments. If a $100 investment in U.S. securities earns 10% per year, whereas the same $10 invested into growing trees for timber earns 8% per year, there is no incentive to invest in planting trees. Hotelling’s work is related to economic rent and the discount rate (Video 8.10).

Harold Hotelling also made a profound geographic observation about a market failure in which the socially optimal situation is NOT produced by an “invisible hand” guiding the individual decisions of rational, informed, vendors. Hotelling’s model of spatial competition is an elegant way of refuting the idea that individuals, acting in their own self-interest, produce socially optimal outcomes (Video 8.11).

8.4.14 Ludwig Von Bertalanffy and Systems Theory

Ecosystems are complex. The human economy is complex. Many of us believe we understand our Solar System precisely, but it is more complex than most of us realize. Many of us regard physics as a quantitatively dialed-in science. Our understanding of the solar system and other established knowledge is perhaps a bit more limited than we realize (Video 8.12). Our understanding of so many phenomena is often developed by making simplifying assumptions. Economists often use “ceteris parabus” assumptions (all other things being unchanged or constant), which isolate the relationship between two variables (often by using partial differential equations) and assume there are no interactions with other variables. Interactions between variables are real and often more important than the isolated effects. Drug A may relieve symptom B, while Drug C may relieve symptom D; however, when Drug A is taken at the same time as Drug C, they “interact” and cause your breathing to stop and symptoms B and D are the least of your problems. That is an example of a drug interaction. These simplifying assumptions are almost always wrong to some extent. This exemplifies a reductionist approach to understanding systems that is sometimes useful when the interaction between the components of the system is nonexistent, weak, or essentially linear (allowing them to simply be added up). Systems analysis is the study of groups of interacting, interdependent parts linked together by complex exchanges of matter, energy, and information. Ludwig Von Bertalanffy’s General System Theory suggested an approach to holistic systems thinking that attempted to capture the complexities of interaction via mathematical models that were dramatically more complex than the aforementioned Lotka–Volterra predatory prey model. The “Limits to Growth” World 3 model was a systems model. Ludwig Von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) made fundamental contributions to Systems Theory (Video 8.13).

8.4.15 Elinor Ostrom, Garrett Hardin, and Tragedy of the Commons

Property held in common, or what is increasingly referred to as open-access resources, presents many problems. Who owns the air? Who owns the fish in the sea? Is the idea of ownership even appropriate when it comes to land, sea, and air? Garrett Hardin’s 1968 publication “The Tragedy of the Commons” (Hardin, 1968) made a Malthusian argument that human overpopulation will stress ecosystems beyond their limits resulting in a resource catastrophe. Hardin proposed a significant challenge to the ideas of Adam Smith’s invisible hand guiding individual behavior to an optimal social outcome. In the tragedy of the commons individuals acting in their own self-interest result in socially disastrous outcomes. Hardin argued that the only solution was to cede our freedoms to the state and be bound by “mutual coercion mutually agreed upon.” In many respects, we have already done this in many areas of life. We must stop at stop signs, pay taxes, and many other mutually agreed-upon limits to our absolute freedom. Hardin argued that the population problem was a moral problem and that there was no technical solution to the challenge. Economists’ solution to the problems described by Hardin were often to privatize resources. Elinor Ostrom (1933–2012) won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 (the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics). She challenged the ideas of Hardin with her work on common pool resources. Ostrom studied the governance of common pool or open-access resources. Ostrom demonstrated that, within some specific communities, nonmarket-based rules and institutions could manifest from public planning and emerge from the bottom up to ensure a sustainable, shared management of resources, which is economically efficient and resilient. Ostrom observed places such as the village of Törbel, the Japanese villages of Hirano and Nagaike, the Huerta irrigation mechanism between Valencia, Murcia, and Alicante in Spain, and the Zanjera irrigation community in the Philippines. She summarized her work with the following eight institutional design principles: (1) The commons need to have clearly defined boundaries, (2) rules should fit local circumstances, (3) participatory decision-making is essential, (4) commons must be monitored, (5) sanctions for those who abuse the commons should be graduated, (6) conflict resolution should be easily accessible, (7) commons need the right to organize, and (8) commons work best when nested within larger networks (Williams, 2018). Ostrom undoubtedly identified local communities that had successfully managed a commonly held resource. These communities will nonetheless be impacted by globally mismanaged commons such as the atmosphere. Hopefully, we will learn how to implement something akin to Ostrom’s rules at the global level to ensure we have a chance to achieve a just, equitable, sustainable, and desirable future.

8.4.16 Howard T. Odum, Nicholas Georgescu-Rogen, Energy and Systems

The economist Nicholas Georgescu-Rogen (1906–1994) was unusual in his recognition of the role of energy as it pertained to economics. His 1971 book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process applied the physical laws of thermodynamics to economic theory (Video 8.14). Howard T. Odum (1924–2002), a noted ecologist, wrote another book on the topic in the same year titled Environment, Power, and Society. These works set the stage for thinking of the entire planet as an open system through which energy flowed from the sun and was reradiated to space. Human civilization has been existing via the exploitation of energy stored over the course of hundreds of millions of years in fossil fuels. At some point, the energy party will be over and the biosphere (and the humans within it) will have to live on a flow of energy equivalent to what is provided by the sun. Both Odum and Georgescu-Rogen brought this point home and likely influenced Kenneth Boulding’s thinking of the idea of “Spaceship Earth.”

8.4.17 Kenneth Boulding and Spaceship Earth

The term “Spaceship Earth” embodies a worldview that expresses concern over the use of limited resources available on a finite planet and the idea that the behavior of everyone on this planet should be to act as a cooperative crew working toward the greater good. The idea of “Spaceship Earth” is alluded to in Adlai Stevenson’s 1965 speech to the UN in which he said “We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil.” In 1966 Kenneth E. Boulding used the phrase in the title of an essay, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth (Boulding, 1966). Boulding contrasted the historic “frontier” or open economy of apparently unlimited resources, to “The closed economy of the future which might similarly be called the ‘spaceman’ economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system.” Buckminster Fuller also used the idea in his 1968 work titled: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth:

…we can make all of humanity successful through science’s world-engulfing industrial evolution provided that we are not so foolish as to continue to exhaust in a split second of astronomical history the orderly energy savings of billions of years’ energy conservation aboard our Spaceship Earth. These energy savings have been put into our Spaceship’s life-regeneration-guaranteeing bank account for use only in self-starter functions.

This idea of spaceship earth set the stage for Herman Daly’s ideas associated with a steady state economy in which the rate of resource consumption was constrained by the idea of using only the energy that flowed to the earth from the sun. Herman Daly’s ideas continue to be promulgated in academia and through NGOs such as the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE https://steadystate.org/). It is worth noting that all visions of a steady state economy necessarily involve a zero-population growth vision.

8.4.18 Robert Costanza, Gretchen Daly, and Ecosystem Services

Haeckel’s vision of an economy of nature was built upon the works of Gretchen Daily and Robert Costanza. Daily’s 1997 publication of Nature’s Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems (Daily, 1997) brought together several celebrated scientists from a variety of disciplines to examine the nature and value of ecosystem services, the damage that has been done to them, and the consequent implications for human society. Robert Costanza and another group of scientists published an article in the journal Nature titled The Value of the World’s Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital (Costanza et al., 1997) that suggested the value of ecosystem services was larger than the global economy. This was and is a profound challenge to the neoclassical economic paradigm because it points out that economics as an academic discipline and policy-guiding framework is failing to recognize more than half of the resources it is presumably allocating optimally. Daily and Ruckelshaus summarized the impact of that article 25 years later in this piece in Nature (Daily & Ruckelshaus, 2022).

8.5 Population Policy—The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly?

8.5.1 Evolution of Birth Control Technology and Sexual Politics

Historical evidence demonstrates that birth control is a fundamental human need. Modern forms of birth control (e.g., latex condoms, IUDs, and a variety of birth control pills) are still new in the context of overall human history. Controlling human reproduction has been a concern for almost all of human history. Early birth control methods from around the world included:

condoms (external and internal) made of animal bladders, linen, silk, or plants

spermicides made of acacia, honey, rock salt, or crocodile dung

sponges made of moss, grass, or bamboo

vaginal douches or sponges soaked in oil, vinegar, lemon juice, or cedar oil—substances believed to slow or weaken sperm

oral contraceptives, including Queen Anne’s lace seeds, lead and other toxic metals, pomegranate seeds, silphium, unripe papaya, and blue cohosh

This history is drawn from Crystal Raypole’s piece From Acacia to IUDs: The History of Birth Control in the United States (Raypole, 2021). Some of these methods worked, others did not. We are certain that some came with dangerous side effects, including infection and poisoning. Queen Anne’s lace is related to other toxic plants, like hemlock, which likely led to many accidental deaths. There are many options for safe and effective birth control today. Nonetheless, despite the wide variety of contraceptives available today not all are suitable to all users and the need to expand contraceptive choices still exists. Novel products such as new implants, contraceptive vaginal rings, transdermal patches, and newer combinations of oral contraceptives have recently been introduced in family planning programs (Sitruk-Ware, 2013). A variety of birth control technology was reviewed in Chapter 4 (Section 4.2.2). We provide this cursory summary to remind the reader that pregnancy and child-rearing throughout history have been and continue to be an obstacle for many women with respect to achieving a level of freedom and control over their own lives that is comparable to men. This has social, political, and economic implications. To this day, many religious leaders, including Pope Paul VI, criticized and condemned the artificial manipulation of conception along with female sexuality. Many people still believe women should be “barefoot and pregnant” and stay home and raise children. The birth control pill allowed women to subvert this biological “destiny” and take charge of their own lives while still enjoying a healthy sex life. The landmark 1972 Supreme Court case “Roe vs. Wade” was recently overturned in the United States. Many are concerned that the same political forces hope to eradicate the legal use of birth control. It was only in 1965 (not very long ago) that the landmark Supreme Court case of Griswold v. Connecticut recognized that a married couple had a right to privacy that made state laws banning contraceptive use by married couples unconstitutional. It was not until 1972 that this ruling was extended to granting single people the same right to privacy (Eisenstadt v. Baird). Sexual politics is a real thing. Pay attention, vote, and advocate according to your values and beliefs.

8.5.2 Pronatal versus Antinatal Population Policy

Pronatalist policies are designed to increase the birth rate/fertility rate of an area. They are typically found in countries with either very slow natural increase or natural decrease and in areas with aging populations. France has explicit pronatalist policies that provide women with paid leave and cash incentives to mothers who stay at home to care for children. Antinatalist policies aim to do the reverse to encourage people to plan smaller families, lower fertility rates, and reduce the number of births. These tend to be found in countries with high birth rates and rapidly growing populations. China’s one-child policy is a prime example of an antinatalist population policy. Pronatalism is an often-unstated societal value that manifests through a suite of cultural, patriarchal, religious, political, and economic pressures imposed upon people (particularly women) to have children. Pronatal policies can be pervasive and often oppressive pressures that prevent free and responsible decisions regarding parenting. Roughly 270 million women worldwide experience major barriers to family planning education and contraceptive uptake. These obstacles are often rooted in fear and misinformation about contraception as a result of deceptive and false pronatalist mythology. Nandita Bajaj of the NGO Population Connection argues that we must move beyond dichotomous narratives that pit one choice against another. Autonomous, authentic, and responsible choices, be it parenthood (biological or adoptive) or nonparenthood, are equally valid and a hallmark of a liberated society (Bajaj, 2022).

8.5.3 Fertility Autonomy and the International Declaration of Human Rights

Bajaj’s arguments are supported by Hamity et al. in their article titled A Human Rights Approach to Planning Families (2019). This article explores the implications of evolving “Human Rights Declarations.” In 1948 Eleanor Roosevelt served as the chairperson of the commission on human rights which produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights). Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution. This article implies that the individual parent has the right to procreate to any extent they so desire. Times change, a little over 50 years ago at the 1968 International Conference on Human Rights, the emphasis evolved. At this conference, family planning became a human rights obligation for all nations of the world. The conference’s manifesto, known as the Teheran Proclamation, stated “Parents have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children.” Throughout all of human history, efforts to plan, avoid, or delay pregnancy had been a private struggle endured by women and girls. But at the 1968 International Conference on Human Rights, family planning became a human rights obligation of every country, government, and policymaker. Embedded in this legislative language was an unprecedented realization: Women and girls have the right to avoid the exhaustion, weakening, and danger of unwanted pregnancies. Men and women have the right to choose when and how often to embrace parenthood—if at all. Every individual has the human right to determine the direction and scope of his or her future in this fundamental way. Hamit and his coauthors argued that the evolving attitude of human rights with respect to procreation and family planning needs to continue to evolve. They state:

Over the last half-century, environmentalists, ecological economists, and child psychologists have raised key issues facing child rights: the threat of climate change and environmental degradation, the critical importance of childhood development, and growing economic inequality. As these challenges have become more widely recognized, organizations and governments have responded by investing in renewable energy, preschools, and availability of birth control. However, human population is expected to reach an alarming 11 billion or more in 2100, endangering nearly all life on Earth. Family planning interventions are the most effective way to reduce population growth and improve human well-being while simultaneously preventing ecological collapse.

Their article proceeds to make the case that the rights of the children that are about to enter the world must be considered. Do potential children have the right to be born into an environment and society that has the capacity to provide them with a reasonable expectation of health and happiness? Also, Hamity and coauthors argue that the rights of the community into which the child is to be born must be considered. They are advocating for further evolution of our collective ideas about whose autonomy is relevant with respect to childbearing: the parent, the potential child, or the community. In many respects, the article harkens back to the ideas of Garrett Hardin when he suggests that individuals should cede their reproductive autonomy to the state for many of the reasons espoused by Hamit et al.

8.5.4 Selected Case Studies of Birth Control and National Policy

Several countries have determined that they want to have an explicit population policy. In the 1970s China felt that an antinatal population policy (the One-Child Policy) would help them develop economically. Some countries experiencing declining fertility rates embrace pronatal policies (e.g., France, Hungary, Poland, Greece, Korea, Japan, Finland, and Latvia). Other countries have unstated or not explicit population policy both pronatal and antinatal. The United States is a mixed bag in this respect. The United States is one of the only countries that does not have paid maternity leave (antinatal), while simultaneously it has one of the most open immigration policies, which results in higher fertility rates (pronatal). Neither of these policies are explicitly related to population but they nonetheless have profound demographic impacts on fertility and the age structure of the population. Australian Treasurer Peter Costello coined the phrase “One for mum, one for dad, and one for country” to encourage population growth in Australia. The following is a brief look at a few population policies implemented by several nations in the world today.

8.5.4.1 China’s One-Child Policy

The one-child policy was a program in China that limited most Chinese families to one child each. The policy was implemented in the aftermath of China’s “Great Leap Forward” (1948) and subsequent “Cultural Revolution” (1966–1976) led by Chairman Mao Zedong. The “Great Leap Forward” resulted in famines that killed 40 million people. The Cultural Revolution left many people dead (estimates range from 500,000 to 2,000,000), displaced millions of people, and disrupted the country’s economy. Chairman Mao initially had a pronatalist population policy that supported his “human wave” national defense strategy and was defended with phrases like “with every mouth two hands come attached.” By the start of the 1970 even Chairman Mao recognized China’s population problem. There was a “Later, Longer, Fewer” plan encouraging couples to marry later, wait longer to have children, and have fewer of them. Mao increasingly used the slogan “One is good, two is OK, three is too many” as the 1970s progressed. Deng Xiaoping assumed power when Mao died in 1976. Deng supported the antinatal population policy and implemented the one-child policy. It was implemented nationwide by the Chinese government in 1980, and it ended in 2016. It restricted most couples to only a single offspring, and for years authorities argued it was a key factor in supporting the country’s economic growth. This argument was supported when one contrasts the economic growth of China versus India. China’s population policy was effective, whereas India’s population policy was not, and China’s economy grew much faster than India’s. The one-child policy was enforced by the National Health and Family Planning Commission, with a system of fines for violators and often forced abortions. Civil servants and employees of government-affiliated organizations risked losing their jobs if they were found to have had more than one child. China’s one-child policy remains controversial and there are significant disagreements as to its benefits and costs. Some of the costs include an unbalanced sex ratio and a challenging dependency ratio (Video 8.14). It was originally designed to be a temporary policy and was eliminated in 2016. China now allows families to have up to three children, although the impacts of the one-child policy on cultural norms suggest fertility rates in China are unlikely to ever pass 2.0 in the future.

8.5.4.2 Population Policy in India

Population growth has long been a concern of the government of India. The question as to whether or not India needs a population control policy today is still contested (Video 8.15). In the 1950s, India initiated one of the earliest explicit, national, government-sponsored family planning efforts. The Indian government believed India could repeat the experience of the developed nations where industrialization and a rise in the standard of living were accompanied by decreases in the population growth rate. In the 1950s, hospitals and health care facilities made birth control information available; however, there was no aggressive effort to encourage the use of contraceptives or limit family size. By the late 1960s, many policymakers felt that the high rate of population growth was the greatest obstacle to economic development. The government began an aggressive program to lower the birth rate from 41 per 1,000 to a target of 20–25 per 1,000 by the mid-1970s. Education programs about the population problem became part of the school curriculum under the Fifth Five-Year Plan. Government-enforced sterilization caused many to question the propriety of state-sponsored birth control measures. In the 1980s, an increased number of family planning programs were established. The programs were extended to rural areas through a network of primary health care centers. By 1991, India had more than 100,000 public health facilities through which family planning programs were offered. Four family planning projects were executed under the Seventh Five-Year Plan. One was the All-India Hospitals Post-partum Program hospitals throughout the country. A second program involved the reform of primary health care facilities in urban slum areas, while a third project reserved some hospital beds for tubal ligature operations. The fourth program called for the renovation of intrauterine device (IUD) rooms in rural family welfare centers. Despite these developments in promoting family planning, the 1991 census demonstrated that India continued to have one of the most rapidly growing populations in the world. Research suggests that most Indian couples regard family planning positively. Nonetheless, the typical fertility pattern in India diverges from the two-child family that the government desires. Women continue to marry at a young age. In the 1990s, women averaged just over 18 years of age at marriage. Additionally, the strong preference for sons is a deeply held cultural ideal based on economic roots. Sons not only assist with farm labor as they are growing up (as do daughters) but they provide labor in times of illness and unemployment and serve as their parents’ only security in old age. A significant result of this desire for sons is that the Indian population has a deficit of females. Human rights activists estimate there are at least 10,000 cases of female infanticide taking place in India annually. The cost of ostensibly illegal dowries and the loss of daughters to their in-law’s families are further disincentives for some parents to have daughters. High infant mortality and early childhood mortality remain significant obstacles to population control. Despite these challenges, India’s total fertility rate (TFR) is decreasing. It stood at 3.4 in 1994 and was lower than those of its neighbors (Bangladesh had a rate of 4.5 and Pakistan had 6.7). Today India’s TFR is roughly equal to that of Bangladesh (the TFR of both countries is roughly 2.0). India is likely one of only two countries to join the “billionaires club” of having a population of 1 billion or higher. Because of the effectiveness of the one-child policy in China and the age structure and associated population momentum of India (despite its current below-replacement fertility level), it is anticipated that the total population of India will exceed China’s in the not too distant future.

8.5.4.3 Population Policy in Mexico

Mexico experienced rapid population growth in the second half of the 20th century. In 1950, the population of Mexico was roughly 28 million and by 2000 the population was roughly 100 million. By the 1960s, population policy was getting increasing consideration in Mexico. President Echevarria, who had not been supportive of birth control, began to feel pressure and announced the creation of a national family planning program. This plan was later followed by the creation of a National Population Council (CONAPO). CONAPO developed a series of programs utilizing mass communication to teach sex education, women’s health, and advocate for a variety of birth control alternatives. Mexico provides a profound success story with respect to noncoercive, yet very effective, policy to achieve a variety of public health messages including spreading the message of the advantages of lower fertility rates. During the decade from 1977 to 1986, six Mexican soap operas (aka telenovelas) were aired on Televisa (Acompáñame—“Accompany Me,” Vamos Juntos— “Let’s Go Together,” El Combatev “The Struggle,” Caminemos—“Going Forward Together,” Nosotros las Mujeres—“We the Women,” and Los Hijos de Nidea—“Nobody’s Children”; Population Media Center, 2022). During that time, the country experienced a 34% decline in its population growth rate. Phone calls to CONAPO requesting family planning information increased from 0 to an average of 500 a month. Many people calling mentioned that they were encouraged to do so by the Acompáñame telenovela. In May 1986, the United Nations Population Prize was presented to Mexico as the foremost population success story in the world. These methods of population control appear to have been very successful. The TFR of Mexico dropped from 6.7 in 1966 to 2.1 in 2020. The Population Media Center continues to develop media to bring about positive social change via media that is engaging and includes both positive and negative role models (Video 8.16). Mexico’s large population, which surpassed 100 million shortly after the turn of the 21st century, has severely taxed the ability of the government to provide basic social services and economic opportunities for its people. Migration undoubtedly contributed to the decline in Mexico’s fertility rate because young people of child-bearing age have a much higher propensity to migrate. Out-migration from Mexico has acted as a safety valve in easing the country’s social and economic problems due to population growth. In addition, remittances of income earned abroad, the vast majority of which come from the United States, are a vital contribution to Mexico’s economy. The flow of legal and illegal migrants from Mexico to the United States has increased sharply since the late 1970s. Estimates are highly inaccurate and vary greatly, but it is believed that between 8 and 13 million Mexicans relocated illegally to the United States between 1970 and 2000. At the same time, Mexicans have become the largest group of legal U.S. immigrants, with more than 170,000 recorded in the year 2000 alone. Mexico is an unusual success story with respect to population policy. Their policies brought about desired demographic change in a short period of time which likely contributed to the improved standard of living enjoyed by many Mexicans today.

8.5.4.4 Population Policy in Japan

Japan is one of many countries in the world that is currently experiencing population decline. A Japanese population projection suggested the population of Japan would decline from its 2010 population of 128 million to a projected population of 87 million in 2060 (East-West Center, 2022). Japan has gone through two fertility transitions. The first brought the TFR to roughly 2.1 and occurred after WWII. This transition resulted from married couples having fewer children. The second fertility transition resulted in the TFR of Japan dropping to 1.35 which is likely due to the fact that fewer Japanese are even getting married at all. This is likely due to improved employment opportunities for women with declining employment opportunities for men. In addition, married women continue to spend significantly more time engaged in work outside of their employment than men. This reality has made marriage an increasingly unattractive proposition for many women in Japan. The Japanese government has implemented a variety of policies and programs related to childcare services, paid parental leave, and direct cash payments to women who have children. Japan is clearly engaging in pronatal policies that are not proving to be effective. Japan is aware of its demographic destiny and is anticipating many problems associated with changing dependency ratios including the building of robots to support an aging population (Video 8.17). Japan is likely the harbinger of the challenges all nations will face as we chart a path to a just, equitable, sustainable, and desirable future.

8.6 Evolution of the Population—Development–Environment Connection

The second half of the 20th century marked the beginning of a global awareness and concern about the total size and growth rate of the human population. There were many reasons for this including the idea that population growth impaired economic development and that it was causing resource depletion and environmental degradation. While there is no simple relationship between population size and environmental change, it is clear that as the global population continues to grow, limits on global resources such as arable land, freshwater, forests, and fisheries have come to the fore. Decreasing farmland accelerated concern regarding the limits to global food production. Per capita, land requirements for food production will approach the limits of arable land in the 21 century. Despite the renewable nature of water and the benefits provided by the ecosystem services associated with the hydrologic cycle, continued population growth occurs in the context of a growing and accelerating demand for water: Global water consumption increased by a factor of six between 1900 and 1995. That was more than twice the rate of population growth. These realities undoubtedly were the impetus for many of the United Nations sponsored Population Conferences and the establishment of many NGOs concerned about a variety of ecological and environmental issues.

8.6.1 The Evolving Nature of the United Nations Population Conferences

The United Nations was established in the aftermath of WWII in 1945. Since then there have been five international conferences on population in 1954, 1965, 1974, 1984, and 1994 (Video 8.18). These were followed up by special sessions of the general assembly in New York (2014), New York (2014), and Nairobi (2019). A brief summary of the conferences follows here.

8.6.1.1 World Population Conference (Rome, 1954)

The first World Population Conference took place in Rome in 1954 with the objective of exchanging scientific information on demographic variables, their determinants, and their consequences. This was a particularly academic rather than political conference that resolved to establish what baseline demographic information needed to be gathered for developing countries and to encourage the establishment of regional training centers to help address population problems and to prepare specialists in demographic analysis.

8.6.1.2 World Population Conference (Belgrade, 1965)

The second conference was held in Belgrade in 1965. This conference emphasized the analysis of fertility dynamics as an essential element of development planning policy. During this time studies of the demographics of development coincided with the establishment of population programs funded by the United States Agency for International Development.

8.6.1.3 Bucharest World Population Conference (Bucharest, 1974)

The Bucharest conference created the World Population Plan of Action. This plan advocated for the social, economic, and cultural development of countries. The document posited that demography and development are interdependent and that population policies and demographic targets are an integral part of socioeconomic development strategies. This was nonetheless a conference marked by controversy between developed and developing countries (which were then characterized as “First World” and “Third World”). Developing countries were strongly critical of aid for population control that was not accompanied by comparable amounts of aid for social and economic development. The phrase that captured the essence of this conference was “Economic Development is the best contraceptive.” This conference marked the beginning of the tension associated with the population versus consumption debate as to the cause of environmental degradation. This conference could be characterized as the developed world pushing birth control on the developing world. Ironically, at the next conference in Mexico City, the tables will turn.

8.6.1.4 International Conference on Population (Mexico City, 1984)

The 1984 Mexico City conference took place during the Reagan administration in the United States. This is not insignificant. This conference endorsed most of the Bucharest conference agreements and promoted greater focus going forward on human rights, conditions of health and well-being, employment, and education. Recall that by 1984 China had implemented the one-child policy and many countries in the developing world were coming to see that demographic factors were in fact very important with respect to influencing economic development. Sadly, Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 with a campaign that included an antiabortion message. Reagan canceled funding for international family planning aid and dropped funding to the United Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) because they provided funding to China, which performed abortions in support of the one-child policy (Willis, 1985). This conference marked the beginning of a regular oscillation in United States funding for international family planning aid in which republican administrations canceled the aid and democratic administrations reestablish it. In addition, Reagan appointed Julian Simon to the U.S. delegation at the Mexico City conference in which Simon argued that population growth and economic development were unrelated. The Reagan administration was bringing a pro-life, antiabortion agenda to the population conference, which was regarded as a disaster by most of the development community (Holden, 1984).

8.6.1.5 International Conference on Population and Development (Cairo, 1994)

This conference produced a new Program of Action that was adopted as a guide for national and international action in the field of population and development for 20 years. This new agenda emphasized the enduring relationship between population and development and focused on meeting the needs of individuals within the framework of universally recognized human rights standards rather than simply responding to demographic goals. The NGO Negative Population Growth argued that this was a step backward and that the U.N. Conferences were fragmenting into a “Tower of Babel” of incoherence (Grant, 1995). This conference was also characterized by conflict. In many respects, the environmental movement, population activists, and women’s rights activists agreed that improving the political, economic, educational, and social status of women was the best way to curb population growth, reduce fertility, and protect the environment. Ironically, a strange alliance took place between the Catholic Church and many leaders in the Islamic world that was opposed to the “empowerment of women” consensus that seemed to be crystalizing at the Cairo conference (New York Times, 1994).

8.6.1.6 Conference on Population and Development +25 (Nairobi, 2019)

Two special sessions of the U.N. General Assembly were convened in 1999 and 2014 to review the progress of the Program of Action adopted at the Cairo conference. This Nairobi conference organized political will to make the Program of Action happen. This focused on achieving zero unmet need for family planning services, preventing maternal deaths, and addressing sex and gender-based violence.

The history of 1974, 1984, and 1994 International Conference on Population in some respects focused in reverse order on Ansley Coale’s preconditions for fertility decline (Coale, 1973). The 1974 conference focused on providing family planning technology, the 1984 conference focused on economic development, and the 1994 conference focused on changing personally desired fertility at the individual level. Perhaps the conferences would have been more successful if the sequence were reversed. Tim Wirth, the former U.S. senator and vice-chair of the United Nations Foundation and the Better World Fund, made the unusually frank and perhaps uncharacteristically undiplomatic statement regarding the two U.N. Population conferences prior to the Cairo conference:

Simmering tensions ignited at the two previous U.N. Population conferences. At the World Population Conference in Bucharest in 1974, the U.S. and other industrial countries advocated programs to slow population growth, while the developing countries of the world countered that “Development is the best contraceptive.” By 1984, when the U.N. held its second Conference on Population in Mexico City, the tables had turned: the developing countries acknowledged the need for population programs, but President Reagan’s U.S. delegation pronounced population “a neutral factor” and scaled back funding for international family planning efforts. And at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, a variety of representatives question the importance of population growth as an environmental concern (Tim Wirth)

This characterizes, to a great extent, the evolution of the sociopolitical awareness of the population–development–environment connection. Increasingly, environmental concerns have been divorced from population issues as it has become increasingly taboo to address demographic pressure as a direct cause of environmental degradation. The following section traces this history of increasing dissociation of environmental advocacy groups from advocacy for population stabilization and related issues of family planning, immigration, and demography in general.

8.6.2 Environmental NGO Abandonment of Advocacy for Population Stabilization

The environmental movement in the United States arguably began in the 1960s with publications such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and her literary speculations on the disappearance of birdsong due to extinctions caused by DDT (a pesticide that has since been banned in the United States). The history of environmental policy and politics in the United States has evolved profoundly since then (Kraft, 2000). The efforts of many NGOs in the 1960s to conserve dwindling natural resources and prevent further deterioration of the air, water, and land have changed into an extraordinarily complex, diverse, and often controversial array of environmental policies. Some of the controversy has been associated with disagreement as to the role of population and immigration regarding environmental issues. Zero Population Growth (ZPG) was likely the best-known population group in the United States. ZPG was founded by biologists worried about the environmental impacts of the growing human population. Many of the nation’s environmental NGOs had or were considering “Population Control” as a major plank of their policy prescriptions (Beck & Kolankiewicz, 2000). Concern about population growth in the United States was a central theme of the first Earth Day in 1970. The 1970s were remarkable in their bipartisan support for dramatic environmental legislation. Who could imagine a republican president (Richard Nixon) establishing the EPA and passing the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act? The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was passed in 1970. NEPA opens with the statement “The Congress, recognizing the profound impact of man’s activity on the interrelationships of all components of the environment, particularly the profound influence of population growth.” Numerous environmental NGOs were aligned with these sentiments and endorsed population stabilization. Yet this alignment deteriorated by the 1990s.

The Clinton administration (1992–2000) concluded in its 1996 President’s Council on Sustainable Development that there was an integral relationship between a stable population and sustainable development and that “clearly, human impact on the environment is a function of both population and consumption patterns.” This supported the ideas embedded in Ehrlich and Holdren’s Impact = Population × Affluence × Consumption (I=PAT) paper (Ehrlich & Holdren, 1971). Despite this governmental recognition of the reality of the population problem, the NGOs were walking away from the population issue. This was particularly intense within the Sierra Club and the controversy as to whether or not the Sierra Club should take a stance on immigration (Barringer, 2004). Roy Beck and Leon Kolankiewicz argue that there were five causes for the environmental movement’s abandonment of embracing population-related policy prescriptions in their platforms (Beck & Kolankiewicz, 2000):

1. U.S. Fertility dropped below replacement level in 1972
2. Abortion and Contraceptive Politics Created Organized Opposition
3. Emergence of Women’s Issues as Priority Concern of Population Groups
4. Schism Between the Conservationism and New-Left Roots of the Movement
5. Immigration protected by “Political Correctness” became chief cause of U.S. Growth

Clearly, we have a situation in which there was a disintegration or fragmentation of coherence regarding the focus of concern regarding environmental degradation. This continues to this day and can be found in some of the cartoons posted at the 2021 U.N. Climate Conference held in Glasgow. The thinking about the population–development–environment connection has evolved into a complex problematic. The COP26 cartoons depicted captured some of this growing incoherence that seems to manifest from trying to please so many conflicting and contradictory objectives and stakeholders. It must be acknowledged that the population–development–environment problematic is as complex, if not more complex, as the market economy. Government policy with respect to the market economy can be distilled into two basic levers of control: Monetary Policy and Fiscal Policy. Monetary policy is associated with the setting of interest rates and other actions of central banks to achieve macroeconomic policy objectives such as price stability, full employment, and stable economic growth. Fiscal policy refers to the tax and spending policies of the federal government. The population–development–environment problematic or the sustainability problematic might consider getting back to basics regarding the basic levers of control. Human impact on the environment is basically driven by population size and per capita consumption. As we move toward achieving a just, equitable, sustainable, and desirable future we might benefit from remembering this simplified perspective and recognize that both of these levers of control must be exercised in order to achieve a sustainable and desirable future.

Summary/Key Takeaways

Human cognition likely evolved in such a way as to set the table for the ascent of H. sapiens to the point where the Nature Conservancy statement: “Birds can’t fight climate change, People can” is now recognized as being fundamentally true. Fighting climate change and addressing the broader population–development–environment problematic will have to include population stabilization as an implicit or explicit objective to succeed. A variety of population doctrines have developed in the course of human history that have evolved back and forth from pronatal to antinatal positions. Political Ecology and Political Economy represent schools of thought from environmental and social perspectives that address demographic questions from distinct perspectives. Explicit and implicit pronatal and antinatal population policies have been implemented by countries throughout history to varying degrees of success. The United Nations Population Conferences have influenced and mirrored the contested nature of population policy and our understanding of the population–environment–sustainability problematic. This problematic is so controversial that most environmental NGOs have distanced themselves from incorporating population issues into their policy advocacy.

Comprehensive Questions

• How has population policy evolved as expressed via the U.N. Conferences?
• Why did U.S. Environmental NGOs distance themselves from population policy advocacy?
• Compare and contrast the population policies of China, India, Mexico, and Japan.
• Define Political Ecology and Political Economy. Summarize the evolution of thought in these two areas of inquiry.
• Explain how Adam Smith, Thomas Robert Malthus, and Charles Darwin represent a thread of thinking over time.
• What is “Systems Theory” and how does it relate to holistic thinking or systems thinking?
• What are some examples of “Population Doctrines” and where did they come from?
• How might the evolution of human cognitive ability be related to our demographic history?

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