Green Fascism and the Greening of Hate
The Optimum Population Trust includes such well known environmentalists as Jonathon Porritt and Sara Parkin.
Probably the best critique of this stuff comes from Amartya Sen who in my opinion is about the most interesting conventional economist out there. Spotted this on Climate and Capitalism and thought I would paste it up. I am not suggesting that the OPT is racist but there is certainly a racist discourse around some discussions of this nature. And they do get quite excited about immigration which is never frankly a good sign.
June 27, 2008Population control — the ideology of the green right
Related reading:
“We’re not left or right, we’re green.” That phrase has been repeated ad nauseum by green politicos who think they are being clever, but constant repetition doesn’t make it true. The green movement can’t escape politics — there are eco-socialists and eco-anarchists and eco-liberals and eco-capitalists, and many subdivisions in each current.
A particularly nasty current in the eco-capitalist camp are the eco-racists, people who blame foreigners — especially foreigners with dark skins — for ecological problems.
Fred Pearce, an environmental writer for New Scientist magazine, has several times recently devoted his blog (Fred’s Footprint) to what he calls Green Fascism. He, like everyone else who writes or speaks on environmental issues, is regularly asked: “Should we be trying to stop others having babies, especially people in poor countries with fast-growing populations?”
“I must say I thought this kind of illiberal thinking had been banished from the environmental movement. But it keeps seeping back. When I give public talks on climate change, I am often asked if all the efforts in the rich world won’t be wiped out by rising populations in the poor world.
“Isn’t overpopulation more dangerous than overconsumption? I say no. But the unpalatable truth is that a lot of environmental thinking over the past half century has been underpinned by an unhealthy preoccupation with the breeding propensity of Asians and Africans.
“They were, it was often held, polluting the human gene pool as well as the planet. Such thinking was not fringe: it involved some of the great names of the environment movement. …
“No matter that the average European or North American has carbon emissions 10 times greater than the average Indian or African, somehow it is those pesky breeding foreigners who are really to blame.”
In a second column he added:
“Every time greens stress “over-population” among the poor as an environmental threat, they are denying the much greater threat to global resources from over-consumption among the rich.
“I do not really believe in the idea that the planet has some fixed “carrying capacity”. How many it can sustain depends on how we live on this planet rather than absolute numbers. Mahatma Gandhi wasn’t far wrong when he said there is enough for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed.”
Pearse’s Green Fascism articles echo important issues that were discussed in more detail by Betsy Hartmann, author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The global politics of population control (South End Press, 1995), whom he interviewed for New Scientist in 2003. The interview, headlined “The greening of hate,” is online here (subscription required).
The following are excerpts.What do you think is going on among environmentalists? Is the right wing taking over?
Hartmann: I first realised that the right wing was attempting to penetrate the mainstream environment movement when I sat on a panel at an environmental meeting in the University of Oregon in 1994. Beside me was a professor and environmentalist, Virginia Abernethy of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. She seemed to me to blame immigrants for overpopulating our country and destroying our environment. Some of the audience liked her ideas but I thought they were racist.
I started to investigate and found she wasn’t alone among conservationists. She was a leader of the group called the Carrying Capacity Network, which sounds like a benign environmental organisation but its main campaign is to halt what it calls mass migration to the US. They blame migrants for destroying pristine America. For instance, they blame Mexican migrants for starting fires in national forests near the border. This group has prominent environmental scientists on its advisory board. People like biologist Tom Lovejoy, the green economist Herman Daly and the ecologist David Pimental.
I call this the greening of hate.
It sounds like a conspiracy theory
Hartmann: Well, it seems to me that the anti-immigration movement in the US has a strong green wing. For instance, they formed a group within the Sierra Club — a prominent nature protection organization — trying to push it into a policy of immigration restriction and population reduction. Abernethy has spoken at conferences of the right wing Council of Conservative Citizens. And some of these people are getting funding from groups such as the Pioneer Fund, whose aims, as set out in its charter, are to fund research into genetics and study into “the problems of human race betterment”.
Aren’t these just political games?
Hartmann: It’s more than that. There is an academic journal called Population and Environment, published by Kluwer, which is edited by Kevin MacDonald, an evolutionary psychologist who writes about a Jewish plot to liberalize immigration policies. In 1999, MacDonald appeared in court in Britain to defend the historian and holocaust denier David Irving. The journal’s advisory editorial board includes famous environmental scientists such as Paul Ehrlich, who wrote The Population Bomb, Pimental again, and Vaclav Smil, a professor at the University of Manitoba in Canada.
Sitting beside them on the board is J. Philippe Rushton, a psychology professor from the University of Western Ontario in Canada, who has a theory about how black people have small brains, low IQ, large sex organs and high aggression. What are environmental scholars doing getting mixed up with these kinds of people?
So how did you get involved in all this?
Hartmann: I was a feminist as a student. I got into development issues, learned Bengali and lived in a village in Bangladesh for a while in the 1970s. That was about the time when Henry Kissinger was calling the country a basket case, and international agencies like the World Bank were coming in and saying that population growth was the biggest problem. They were promoting coercive population control policies such as pressuring women to be sterilized. But I saw how poor people weren’t the main problem. In terms of environmental conservation, the peasants were the best practitioners. But government policies were stacked against them.
In the village where I lived, the largest landlord in the area was the person who got the World Bank aid money. I got involved in the politics of reproductive rights through that experience. I’ve been fighting for over 20 years against population-control programs, but from a feminist, pro-choice perspective.
How can you be pro-choice and anti-population control?
Hartmann: A lot of people find this hard to understand. But for me, family planning is about human rights and women’s health — not population control. It is about freeing women to have the number of children they want, not blaming them for a whole host of social problems.
* * *
Where did the environment come into your thinking on population?
Hartmann: I got concerned that conflicts over resources such as forests and land were being framed so that population pressure was seen as the main culprit. A variety of groups, including foundations that fund population work, were linking population and environment issues directly to national security. This seemed like a dangerous mix, especially when it got tied up with the growing anti-immigrant movement in the US, and maybe now in Europe, too.
But isn’t population pressure a real environmental issue?
Hartmann: It’s more than an issue, it’s an ideology. Ever since colonial times, Westerners have had what I call a degradation narrative. It says that poor peasants having too many children causes population pressures that degrade the environment and cause more poverty. It is the basic story that many Western environmentalists still tell. And it is now being extended to explain not just the loss of rainforests and species, but also migration and violent conflicts round the world.
You say that this degradation narrative is being used to explain foreign policy disasters. How?
Hartmann: From Afghanistan to Gaza to El Salvador to Indonesia to Somalia, some prominent environmentalists have blamed disorder on resource depletion and environmental decay. And foreign policy people have gone along with it. When the slaughter happened in Rwanda in 1994 and the rest of the world stood by and did nothing, we heard a lot about how it was inevitable because of the high population density that was causing land shortages and poverty. Even Timothy Wirth, Clinton’s undersecretary of state for global affairs and widely seen as an environmental good-guy, said it.
But even some of the theorists behind these ideas, such as Thomas Homer-Dixon, a writer on environmental and security issues, have acknowledged it wasn’t really like that. The massacres started where population pressure was least. It was about state-instigated racism, not environmental degradation. It’s not that population is always irrelevant, it is just that it gets overemphasised. Blaming poor peasants for deforestation is like blaming conscripts for wars.
Did this happen in the US?
Hartmann: Yes. In the US we had a great panic in the 1990s about Haitian boat people arriving on our beaches. The degradation story blamed their flight on population pressure that had destroyed their forests and dried up their wells and eroded their soils. I don’t deny that Haiti suffers from widespread environmental problems. But there were a lot of political issues that got conveniently lost, such as the decades of dictatorial rule by the Duvalier family, who were supported by the US, and an immense gap between rich and poor.
* * *
Do average Americans buy these ideas?
Hartmann: I find even well-educated and well-meaning acquaintances have alarming responses on population issues. They believe the poor create their own problems by breeding, and it absolves the rest of us from responsibility. Even some committed feminists will scapegoat poor women’s fertility for the planet’s evils. It is a kind of ideological schizophrenia. Phrases like the population bomb and the population explosion breed racism.
Few Americans know that, on average, woman round the world have less than three children each. They don’t breed like rabbits. And by 2050 a majority of the world’s population will be likely to live in countries with fertility levels below what demographers regard as replacement levels. It all avoids looking at the real issues on our own doorstep — of over-consumption, for instance. On climate change, we hype up fears of rising emissions in “overpopulated” India rather than looking at our own consumption patterns. Better a one-child policy there than a one-car policy here. We don’t understand that communities all over the world can and do live in sustainable relationships with their environments.
The notion of “Green Fascism” seems far more a niche issue than the substantially more widespread concern of green misanthropy. Contra to what this author suggests ecologism does exist as a distinct ideology which can be subscribed to without recourse to any industrialist dilution, however the consequences are often bleak.
Humanity often becomes the destructor and its capacity for astounding creation is overlooked, or simply seen in purely negative terms as a means to cause further harm. This leads to the “Mankind is a cancer” sort of outlook which, if anything, fits nihilism more than fascism.
We should be thankful for the Green Party being a bunch of cuddly socialists with the occasional eco-Marxist {a notion which makes barely any more sense than “Libertarian Marxism”} instead of that grimmer kind of environmental activist.
Comment by Grieves — 5 July, 2008 @ 2:13 am
Green Facism…? This stuff always reminds me of Orwell’s statement: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.”
Incidentally, even Sen looks forward to lower bith rates: “The population problem is serious, certainly, but neither because of “the proportion between the natural increase of population and food” nor because of some impending apocalypse. There are reasons for worry about the long-term effects of population growth on the environment; and there are strong reasons for concern about the adverse effects of high birth rates on the quality of life, especially of women.” All of which seems fairly obvious.
Comment by Sergioleonine — 5 July, 2008 @ 2:17 am
Well said Derek
Comment by David T — 5 July, 2008 @ 8:24 am
Interesting, population growth, and with it, the need for more housing, food, energy, are certainly live issues. David’s post is important. But it still does not make me love the Green Party. Below are extracts from the much-admired Tendance Coatesite International’s position paper on the the Greens:
The Greens come from a very distinct political tradition. They reject both capitalist and socialist ‘productivism’ in favour of ‘sustainable’ economics. The planet is an interdependent system (sometimes called Gaia) under threat from human activity. In the Manifesto for a Sustainable Society the Party describes its values as, ‘democratic participation’, ‘non-violence’, “personal freedom, social equity, happiness and human fulfilment.” Apart from these principles, which are as clear as Orwell Estuary silt, the Greens focus on issues affecting the global environment: climate change, GM crops, pollution, resource depletion, waste, and nuclear energy. The alternative offered is local production, decentralisation, more green spaces, better public transport, and eco-taxes. Agriculture should become organic and animal welfare is a priority
When one looks closer these policies are fraught with problems: reconciling the world demand for food with pristine organic cultivation, energy conservation with cars and factories, and the fact that the West depends on high levels of consumption that are unlikely to be changed by anything other than a revolution so total that it would make 1917 look like a mild shock to the system. For example, Green social plans include a universal Citizen’s Income, paid regardless of work. As capital flows move freely the Greens demand an end to immigration controls – so, one assumes, everyone will be welcome to come and receive a Basic Income in the UK. The political, economic and social bases of the conditions for such ambitious proposals are barely even sketched.
From the Green left, Derek Wall (Babylon and Beyond. 2005), offers a more developed economic programme. He is for “the rejection of exchange values” to reduce consumption and alienation.” (P 177) He considers that “markets can be embedded in society and state provision decentralised” (P 188) In line with the Green tendency to paint pictures of an ideal world Wall asserts, “While state provision can be humanised and markets tamed by the social, the more fundamental task requires that both the state and the market are rolled back. The commons provides an important alternative to both.”(P 183 – 4) Finally there is a vague call for a self-managed society, “individuals should control the process by which they produce goods and services.” (P 146)
No doubt this has been said before. But nobody, least of all a political party, can choose to ‘reject’ exchange values: capitalism cannot be overcome by asserting that ‘use’ is the guiding principle of the economy. One of the strengths of Marxism is its analysis of how the present economic system produces a range of real contradictions. Between those who create of goods to be used and those who benefit from the surplus wealth they produce. There is a gulf here that no amount of participative democracy, can reconcile. It is hard to see how Wall intends that can be achieved. Corporations can be controlled, regulated, and embedded to sleep peacefully without the successful conclusion of a conflict over the very root of their power: divesting them of their property… Or does Wall intend to draw up a list of real use-values, which would be used to guide the economy, by decree. The only force that could impose ‘real’ needs has to arise form the economy itself, from the class struggle. That is the agent of change to Marxism, not a force for co-operative harmony, but one that divests the capitalists of their power and property. This is not about increasing the ‘productive forces’ but changing the social relations of production. .
These are, obviously, questions of a over-arching goal. What of the present? The principles of the Green Party lay down extremely ambiguous foundations for their day-to-day politics. The dream is that: all decent people can agree on freedom, equity (notably not the absent equality), saving the environment, and the planet. It is only dark forces, multinationals, states and military blocs, malevolent individuals that prevent them from realising their goals. It seems that conflict itself, the agonistic heart of politics, is at fault. This is not without effects. Anyone who has contact with Greens realises that their culture is marked by an aversion for clashes. We may wish that the aggressive wild things that pullulate on the far-left would end up in the nearest ditch, but is stultifying harmony preferable?
Comment by Andrew Coates — 5 July, 2008 @ 11:57 am
That should have read, Derek’s post is important. Whoops! (new computer system here now).
Comment by Andrew Coates — 5 July, 2008 @ 11:58 am
An interesting post as ever from Derek.
I think there is an emerging and increasingly ‘Green’ philosophy however - merging liberalism, ecologism and socialism - see this article on the Scottish Young Greens website http://www.scottishyounggreens.org/?p=18
Perhaps you might copy and paste it as a post with your thoughts?
Comment by Digital Scotsman — 5 July, 2008 @ 12:23 pm
How would this Univeral Citizens’ Income be funded? It sounds very much like the National Dividend that the Social Crediters used to tout (and they ended up in the camp of the far-right).
Comment by Dave — 5 July, 2008 @ 2:21 pm
Being right wing does not equal fascism.
Racism does not equal fascism.
Using scapegoats does not equal fascism.
This is elementary stuff, which you have somehow missed.
Comment by Kronsteen — 5 July, 2008 @ 4:20 pm
The term ‘racism’ is chucked about with such wild abandon on ‘the left’ that it’s hard to know what it means anymore: a few weeks ago the bizarre ‘Islamophobia Watch’ website ran a post on ‘atheism as a cover for racism,’equating rationality with ‘racism.’ The TUC/CBI/Nu-Labour position on corporate globalisation/neoliberalism equates resistance to the project with racism and xenophobia. Objections to NAFTA in the US met with a similar fate. Simultaneously we have variants of post modern ‘critical theory,’ ‘locating’ rationality and logic as part of a discredited ‘enlightenment discourse’ rooted in racism. The word is rapidly losing any coherent meaning.
Comment by Sergioleonine — 5 July, 2008 @ 7:21 pm
Thanks, Derek for posting a link to my articles. They were a slightly hurried attempt to summarise the situation and to suggest that a socialist alternative needs to address the issue of resources, without falling into the traps of the population controllers. I should add that I have been criticised for not concentrating enough on how population control programmes are an attack on women and their right to control their bodies. This criticism is probably justified. What is interesting in reading population controllers stuff is that the racism and class prejudice jump out at you (e.g. the quote from Jonathon Porritt from the Ecologist on Africa, for example), but the underlying context of arguing for a programme to control women is (of course) never made explicitly and it is fairly easy to “miss the wood for the trees”.
Since writing the article, I have read Matthew Connelly’s book “Fatal Misconception” on the development of the population control movement from the 1800’s. Its account of the Indian and Chinese programmes has led me to be even more convinced that there is no such thing as a “voluntary population control” programme, in the sense that, if there is a government foreign agency or NGO advocating/organising such a programme, it will inevitably end up using using coercion, or at the least bribery - and pretty early on at that.
The interview with Betsy Hartman is interesting too: in fact it was this interview that led me to start looking into the latest round of population control propaganda (and its new context, climate change), but I had forgotten that I had read it! So it is useful to be reminded of its existence!
Some words on the Optimum Population Trust. I recommend visiting their web site. These people are not on the fringes of society, as a look at their supporters and officers shows. I debated population with a member of the OPT at the recent Campaign Against Climate Change conference in London. The workshop was obviously self-selecting, in that it was only likely to attract people who thought population was a burning issue, but I was shocked at how closed many of the participants’ minds were on the issue. None of the advocates of population control addressed my arguments. A member of the Green Party held up a map of the diminishing land per head in Africa over the last forty years (or whatever), making it clear that the problem was “too many Africans”, without addressing at all questions of land ownership (including for women, who do most of the agricultural labour), crops for exports and that labour power could be used to rebuild the environment in Africa. He then stated that the eugenic practices of the Nazi era were over: I pointed out the Fujimori had had sterilised 200,000 native Americans in Peru in 2000. Of course, this outlook is not the official policy of the greens (now).
If people are interested in reading about reactionary environmentalism, I can recommend TC Boyle’s novel The Tortilla Curtain. This curtain refers both to the US-Mexico border and the class divide between middle class eco-reactionaries and the super-exploited immigrants of California.
I just want to make some comments about Andrew Coates’ contribution. One of the things about ecological politics is that demands you sketch out some kind of plan for the possible future, and Andrew rightly points out that this trend is common amongst Greens. It is, of course, possible to get too prescriptive, but I think some “utopian” thinking is essential, even, dare I say, part of the “transitional method”. I don’t think it needs always to be accompanied by an account of “how to get there”. Derek Wall’s writing and speeches on contemporary political questions, particularly on the struggles in Latin America, indicate that he is not averse to the class struggle.
Andrew also raises the issue of changing the social relations of production. This is clearly a necessary for a sustainable society, but it is not sufficient. The forces of production cannot (in the main) be taken over read-made and used in the service of the working class: they need to be transformed as well. New practices need to evolve, in Agriculture as well as industry and all other sectors of the economy. Part of the reason for this is ecological. Some of these issues re addressed (in a too “utopian” manner for some?) by Michel Lowy at:
http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article4635
Comment by PhilW — 6 July, 2008 @ 12:14 pm
Andrew
“The only force that could impose ‘real’ needs has to arise form the economy itself, from the class struggle. That is the agent of change to Marxism, not a force for co-operative harmony, but one that divests the capitalists of their power and property.”
I agree, but I’m not sure this is at all incompatible with what groups like Green Left say - as I understand it Green Left’s view of ‘eco-socialism’ must involve divesting capitalists of their property in the means of prod, exchange etc. At least this is Joel Kovel’s and Michael Lowy’s understanding of eco-socialism - whose manifesto Green Left seems to subscribe to. they describe themselves as anti-capitalist too. I’m sure Green Left includes ‘reformists’ as well as ‘revolutionaries’ and is, as a result, a little fuzzy around the edges sometimes in its vision of the necessary solutions to capitalist environmental/planetary destruction, but this is not necessarily any bad thing - lots of groups are like this and lots of socialists think that a broad, inclusive party is better than a programmaticaly precise but very small one.
Comment by Ed — 6 July, 2008 @ 12:23 pm
Please. Be clear. When you say Green Fascism you mean Tony Greenstein. Obviously!
Comment by Jeff — 6 July, 2008 @ 2:19 pm
When I say ‘fuck off troll’ the meaning is precise, claro.
Tony Greenstein may be in a different political party to me but he is a real hero as far as I am concern, he does good and gets flack…any way I think Tony is a different thread to this one.
Comment by Derek Wall — 6 July, 2008 @ 3:34 pm
# When I say ‘fuck off troll’ the meaning is precise, claro.
“Right speech” doesn’t figure in Zen Buddhism, then Derek?
To automatically tar anyone with concerns about population as a racist or a fascist is just plain stupid. To talk about conspiracies is even more so.
Comment by Charles Dexter Ward — 6 July, 2008 @ 8:00 pm
a good Book on this topic: Murray Bookchin: Re-Enchanting Humanity: A Defense of the Human Spirit Against Antihumanism, Misanthropy, Mysticism, and Primitivism … there is also some good stuff by Jutta Ditfurth on eco-fascism, which unfortunately is only available in German
Comment by Entdinglichung — 6 July, 2008 @ 8:36 pm
I don’t see that socialism is necessarily incompatible with environmentalism or feminism. They’re all broad churches, but the Optimum Population Trust has been chosen by Derek as his lead example. The OPT wants a sustainable future for humanity: surely a progressive goal. Its policy recommendations of affordable family planning, female empowerment and sex and relationship education are advocated by most professionals in the field, as well as socialists and feminists for decades. It does advocate limiting immigration to the UK to the level of emigration, on a non-racial basis, but this is because the record immigration of recent years is the principal cause of UK population growth. The bottom line is that climate change, resource depletion and environmental degradation are happening right now and population growth is a principal cause. We shouldn’t put off addressing them till “after the revolution”.
Comment by Simon r — 7 July, 2008 @ 7:41 am
We should try to keep a sense of balance in all this: although some of what Hartmann, for instance, says, may have some validity, the lack of balance is shown in such pronouncements as
“Isn’t overpopulation more dangerous than overconsumption? I say no. But the unpalatable truth is that a lot of environmental thinking over the past half century has been underpinned by an unhealthy preoccupation with the breeding propensity of Asians and Africans.”
To anybody who thinks about it, it’s obvious that we all – developed & not-developed alike, have to reduce our fertility & numbers; the developed nations also have to reduce their per cap consumption levels to allow ‘convergence’ to take place. it is morally correct for the UK to both reduce consumption and numbers, because we should not take resources from people who need them, by fair means or foul, to feather our already overstuffed nests. It is pragmatically correct because we shall need to approach self-sufficiency as the Ct grinds on.
But the data suggest that overpopulation is the greater ill. The biological footprint of the N American Region is about 950 million global hectares; the biological footprint of the Asia-Pacific Region, because of much greater numbers, is about 4 times as great as the biological footprint of the N American Region. This is shown graphically on P 18 of The WWF’s Living Planet Report 06. So, whilst NA per cap consumes more than A-P per cap, so far as groaning Planet Earth is concerned, A-P treads harder than NA.
Hartmann says:
“When the slaughter happened in Rwanda in 1994 and the rest of the world stood by and did nothing, we heard a lot about how it was inevitable because of the high population density that was causing land shortages and poverty… it wasn’t really like that. The massacres started where population pressure was least. It was about state-instigated racism, not environmental degradation. It’s not that population is always irrelevant, it is just that it gets overemphasised”,
…but she should consider the ‘state-instigated racism’. The tribal system seems to grind into gear when triggered by underlying, subliminally sensed population pressures. The ex co-chair of Optimum Population Trust, Professor John Guillebaud, should know: he was born in Rwanda and lost good friends there in the massacres.
Hartmann again:
“But for me, family planning is about human rights and women’s health — not
population control. It is about freeing women to have the number of children they want, not blaming them for a whole host of social problems. ”
The ‘for me’ is telling; as a recent paper by Carter Dillard* argues, the choice of the number of children people have is not personal but of legitimate public concern, because each extra consumer jostles for resources with already existing consumers: in Bangladesh as anywhere else. ‘For me’ precedes a personal gut reaction, not a rational thought.
And as for:
“Few Americans know that, on average, woman round the world have less
than three children each. They don’t breed like rabbits.”
So long as significant numbers of women – often under cruel coercion – do ‘breed like rabbits’ , and global fertility stays even marginally above replacement, then the problem deepens. Hartmann seems not to understand that, for example, 1% of 6.5 billion (approximate world population) is the same as 0.65% of 10 billion (a higher-end UN projection). So if world annual percentage increase were to drop from 1% pa to 0.65% pa, we’d be no better off.
Edmund Davey OPT.
* Carter Dillard: honours programme attorney for the US Department of Justice
Comment by Edmund Davey — 7 July, 2008 @ 1:07 pm
Simonr the danger is the panderising to racism over issues relating to immigration which you cannot divorce from the wider use of the word which in practical politics is synononymous with african or asian migration to Europe. Whateber the smoke screnn that is the political reality. However the words racist and fascist are bandied around too much in this debate.
To start with the second ‘characterisation’. There is a nasty totalitarian streak that runs through many strands of broader Environment thinking. This is wholly logical in those parts of Environmentalism which have no roots in real society and class relations. If it is accepted that human behavious degrades the environment then human behavious must change and if that is not able to be acheived by pursuasion then it requires legislation and ultimately force.
The charge of racism must be more narrow and in my view it clearly does have an echo in the thinking of the OPT. There is a cross over between Migration Watch where racism is a little below the surface and OPT. Contribiutor to both cross over to a significant degree.
Interestingly the MW/OPT faction are increasingly embedded in the English equivelent to the Sierra Club - the CPRE.
The real problem however probabaly does not relate to the subjective approaches of these strands of ‘Environmentalism’ but rather the objective cover they give to racist and totalitarian groups.
Comment by ray p — 8 July, 2008 @ 12:10 am
I find it truly unbelievable that what purports be a socialist web site allows comments such as some of the above to be aired, with so little rebuttal!
The OPT claims that the population of the UK needs to be reduced to 17 million. How the hell are they going to do that?
The claim of “overpopulation” on the grounds that “we” are consuming 1.4 times the world’s “global hectares” (i.e. the land is only about 70% as productive as is required to sustain us and promoted by the WWF in particular and referred to in a US context by Ednumd Davey, above) is based on a sleight of hand: 50% of the global hectare use is assigned by the “Global Footprint Network” (http://www.footprintnetwork.org/) to forest that would be required to soak up current carbon dioxide emissions. In other words, it isn’t used.
NO-ONE thinks it is realistic to use forest to sequestrate 15 billion tonnes of CO2 (1/2 current human output) per year, and in any case, as I said above, it isn’t being done. That’s we are still alive (some of us, at least: this is another discussion). CO2 emission reduction is the main way GHGs need to be dealt with, not sequestration of emissions. (The issue of ecological footprint is discussed in more detail in the second of my articles Derek links to (above)).
“Human behaviour” doesn’t destroy the environment. Capitalism does, often directly and secondarily by forcing us to behave in certain ways. People are needed to restore the environment.
Comment by PhilW — 8 July, 2008 @ 9:47 am
Sorry Ray P, I may have misread your comment: I don’t think YOU are suggesting that “human behaviour is degrading the environment”.
On a related note, in my toalk on ths subject at the CACC conference, I put up a slide which sums up the reasoning of population controllers: “people cause climate change, therefore get rid of (some) people”. As far as I am concerned, that is the level of sophistication of their argument.
Comment by PhilW — 8 July, 2008 @ 9:57 am
I think you did misinterpret Phil but no worries
I agree that there is a strong Malthusian thread in much of the thinking. You are absolutely righ that the OPT recipe is one which proposes a very simpl(istic)causal relationship between environmental degradation and population growth. It does not raise issues of the relatiionship to the means of production and conveniently does not address how the objective is to be achieved.
Comment by rayp — 8 July, 2008 @ 12:54 pm
PhilW/ Rayp
From your comments, it sounds like we aren’t sufficiently clear about ourselves.
“The OPT claims that the population of the UK needs to be reduced to 17 million. How the hell are they going to do that?” ” It does not raise issues of the relatiionship to the means of production and conveniently does not address how the objective is to be achieved.”
OK, What we argue is this:
a)Understand that the planet is finite
b) Appreciate that world population will rise from 6.6bn now to around 9bn by 2050
c) Recognise that the ongoing industrialisation, urbanisation and rising consumption of large parts of the developing world will put even more pressure on the climate, environment and resources than they currently face
d)Given a), b)and c), suggest that people might want to, if they want to, limit their reproduction to their replacement. This isn’t hard: it’s true of the developed world already
e) Ensure that people have the ability to make that choice through the universal provision of affordable family planning. Groups like the UNFPA and IPPF are doing their best here: they just lack funding.
I agree it’s a limited programme. It doesn’t address capitalism at all. But I think it is part of keeping the planet a liveable place to be and it does need saying.
Comment by Simon r — 8 July, 2008 @ 6:47 pm
PhilW/ Rayp
From your comments, it sounds like we aren’t sufficiently clear about ourselves.
“The OPT claims that the population of the UK needs to be reduced to 17 million. How the hell are they going to do that?” ” It does not raise issues of the relatiionship to the means of production and conveniently does not address how the objective is to be achieved.”
OK, What we argue is this:
a)Understand that the planet is finite and that climate change, biodiversity and habitat loss, soil, water and energy depletion are already happening
b) Appreciate that world population will rise from 6.6bn now to around 9bn by 2050
c) Recognise that current and projected industrialisation, urbanisation and rising consumption of large parts of the developing world will put even more pressure on the climate, environment and resources than they currently face
d)Given a), b)and c), suggest that people might want to, if they want to, limit their reproduction to their replacement. This isn’t hard: it’s true of the developed world already
e) Ensure that people are provided with the ability to make that entirely voluntary choice through the universal provision of affordable family planning. Groups like the UNFPA and IPPF are doing their best here: they just lack funding.
I agree it’s a limited programme. It doesn’t address capitalism at all. But I think it is part of keeping the planet a liveable place to be and it does need saying.
Comment by Simon r — 8 July, 2008 @ 7:11 pm
“d)Given a), b)and c), suggest that people might want to, if they want to, limit their reproduction to their replacement. This isn’t hard: it’s true of the developed world already”
Actually, the “developed world” is well below the accepted replacement rate of 2.1. (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2127rank.html
http://www.pregnantpause.org/numbers/fertility.htm
Of course, this doesn’t stop the population rising (as various bumps and booms work their way through). In “developing countries”, birth rates are higher, but there is a need for labour power to reorient agriculture in a sustainable way. And these higher birth rates correlate with much higher death rates. However, birth rate were already below replacement rates in 20 “developing countries” by 2000.
Clearly, when women have access to contraception, they choose to have fewer children. That choice would be helped by increased availability of education, property rights and rights within and outside of marriage. But that is not an argument for a population control campaign, which is a political diversion from the fight against climate change. It is an argument for women’s liberation, which is a completely different thing.
What Simonr proposes won’t bring about the OPT’s stated “need” for a UK population of 17 million, especially if the country increases its commitment to provide asylum (which it should do). I don’t think it needs to be lower and the OPT figure is based on a subterfuge perpetrated by the Global Footprint Network which Simonr doesn’t address. But assuming for the moment that this was a practical option - how would it be achieved, and would it be quicker and more effective than dealing with current economic structures? (The biggest cuts in GHG emissions have been the result of - not necessarily positive - economic changes, the transformation of the economies of the USSR and Eastern Europe and the reorientation in Cuba, with declines of about 30% over a couple of years. These mainly negative experiences at least show the radical effects economic changes can have).
In the 70s and 80s, the UNFPA and IPPF (and USAID) put massive funding into bribing people (men and women) to get sterilised, into providing incentives for health practitioners and their of functionaries to meet sterilisation, abortion and IUD quotas and into flying their bureaucrats round the world on various jollies (see the account and the tables in Matthew Connelly’s book). This is the nature of population control programmes.
Comment by PhilW — 9 July, 2008 @ 10:40 pm
Fantastic post Derek. Encouraging to see debate over the issues of forced or economic sterilisation of the poor that often seems to be put forward as a solution.
Comment by Chris H — 25 May, 2010 @ 6:42 pm