Long-term listeners of Post Growth Australia Podcast will be very aware that we, the hosts, believe that the population issue should be discussed and not ignored. The fact that PGAP is supported by Sustainable Population Australia is of course, another reason why we discuss it! For us, it is about ensuring that the population issue is put into its proper context as opposed to making it the only ‘go to’ issue.
This podcast has always been about the broader issue of post-growth, which includes constructive discussions with our guests, who may often hold different or contrasting perspectives on population. Sometimes this necessitates some additional commentary from us in the outros in order to provide further qualification, clarification and nuance. However, we are also mindful that this may get repetitive, and it would be handy if there was one ‘go to’ place that people could go to for further reading. This, friends, is the place. Read on!
The issue of population is one of the most divisive issues in the environmental movement, but it does not need to be this way. This is because the effective solutions that lead to stabilising populations happen to be progressive social justice concerns that are worth advocating for, independently of our individual perspectives on the population debate. The planet doesn’t really care about what our opinions are, only the actions that we take and the impact that they have.
For example, universal access to services such as family planning and healthcare are important issues in their own right and very little attention is given to this in the media, in part because the dominant narratives around population from both sides of the political spectrum make issues around fertility a no-go topic.
However, these are serious issues that require our attention. In 2015 alone, approximately 303,000 women died from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth, with 99% of these deaths occurring in developing countries. In addition, the number of unwanted pregnancies in the world continues to be as high as fifty percent. As we point out, by talking about population, we are not advocating for population control but instead removing the religious and politically motivated forces that impede people from having control over their own bodies.
One of those political forces is neo-liberalism which is in part being perpetuated by much of the top one percent, including pronatalists Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. This is because population growth and fear of population decline is a central tenant of a growth-based economic system that relies upon ever increasing aggregate consumption.
Michael has written a blog for Population Media Centre, ‘POPULATION GROWTH AND WEALTH INEQUALITY ARE MORE ENTWINED THAN WE THOUGHT: HERE’S WHY’. This article summarises his central argument that population growth may often exacerbate the disparity of wealth inequality and the erosion of democracy, rather than these being discrete issues.
So, by dismissing the population topic, we also risk dismissing the fact that many countries, particularly in the anglosphere, rely on population growth in order to make up the shortfall of falling per capita GDP, as well as propping up over inflated housing markets.
As one growth-based economist recently said:
"Population decline poses several dangers to economic stability. One of the most immediate and pronounced effects is the reduction in consumer spending."
So, shutting down all conversation on population growth as opposed to having nuanced conversation on the topic is very much what advocates of growth-based economics want. But this is a Ponzi economic model that needs to be challenged.
A recent article on Earth.org pointed out that:
_“While economic growth might be smaller with a declining population, it is considered to be more stable and sustainable compared to economic growth caused by rapid population growth." _
However, we at PGAP along with the rest of the growing post-growth movement (no pun intended) strongly advocate that it is even better to develop a system that is not measured by economic growth at all.
The same article goes on to say:
“It is important to see declining populations in developed countries for what they are: inevitable, temporary demographic transitions that incentives countries to update their traditional socio-economic systems to a modern model that was long overdue.”
If Australia for example, was to stop relying upon population growth as a means of propping up its listing economy, it would rapidly have to innovate to create an economic model that is much more diverse and resilient and ultimately much more ecologically sustainable.
A huge part of Australia’s carbon footprint is brought about by the pouring of carbon intensive concrete for construction (often done badly). This leads to urban encroachment onto farmland and biodiversity. It also has the added impact of the loss of embedded carbon in existing buildings coupled with the massive pressures on landfill as entire neighbourhoods are razed to the ground in order to make room for ongoing densification . Furthermore, due to Australia’s massively over inflated housing market, population growth must also be kept ahead of demand, locking in a perpetual housing crisis.
Unfortunately, due to the impact of political parties such as One Nation, the political narrative has been twisted so that any talk about Australia moving away from GDP driven population growth towards a model of stabilisation is often perceived as racist.
But nuanced conversation could lead to the understanding that prioritising refugees and family reunions as well as providing proactive foreign aid to other countries, leads to not only more equitable outcomes but also to better environmental/social outcomes globally. This will benefit the poorest people in the world who are most effected by climate change. We encourage you to read the Sustainable Population Australia website on population and racism and diversity and social inclusion.
So, having nuanced conversation about population, rather than dismissing it, ensures that powerful developer interests such as the Property Council and the Business Council do not have free reign to decide Australia’s population policy, which is based on very narrow and biased economic interests.
Another important reason to not dismiss the population issue is to be able to call out the myth that you need to grow the taxpayer base to fund an ageing population. As Timothee Parrique says, you do not need to build more wealth by selling SUVs to pay a rich capitalist to build homes for our grandparents; we can just shortcut to supporting the elderly.
The myth that we need to grow our population to support an ageing population only kicks the can further down the road and for any population to stabilise, it requires a larger ageing cohort for a while. But the issue of course is not a lack of people or resources but where we choose to allocate those people and resources. For further information, please read the Sustainable Population Australia discussion paper: Silver tsunami or silver lining? Why we should not fear an ageing population.
Discussing population within this broader context also helps to dispel the dangerous myth that reducing population is the only major environmental issue. Even if the fertility rate of every country were to instantly fall to below replacement fertility rate, the world’s population would continue to increase for several more decades (though it would peak much sooner) and these are the decades that we need to turn this ship around.
So, in short, we will need to solve the multiple crises we are facing with more people than we have now. The qualifier is that this daunting task becomes ever more challenging the higher the population. A stable or slowly declining population is part of the longer-term solution.
In the short to medium term however, embracing a path towards population stabilisation/decline will put greater pressure on society to develop an economic system that does not demand perpetual growth. This is because we will no longer be able to use population growth as a means of hiding behind the falling per capita consumption that occurs in a system that transfers wealth from the poor to the rich, while also demanding perpetually increasing consumption.
In countries like Australia, a slower rate of growth will lead to the higher standard development and social outcomes that occur when you are not always playing catch up with high population growth (for futher information, see here and here). For example, it would mean being able to put an end to all further greenfield development while selectively densifying in a way that does not raze entire communities to the ground.
The resources that would be saved by taking this approach would be much better utilised in the ‘developing world’ as part of a wider proactive foreign aid approach that is about partnering with other countries to lift everyone out of poverty in a way that works within limits to growth.
A model of living that is geared towards population stabilisation in the medium term will also mean that we can start to develop an agricultural approach that is less about feeding ever more mouths and more about providing greater opportunity to free-up more land for rewilding and regenerative farming. This is part of a much-needed new approach to food production that embraces the most traditional forms of farming together with modern innovations such as precision fermentation. In part, this is because the demand for meat is increasing in line with a rapidly growing global middle class. This means that the population of livestock that humans rely upon for food is projected to grow far more than the human population, with multiple environmental consequences. So we cannot sustainably feed at least nine billion people with traditional farming practices alone.
In the long term, a slowly declining population will play a role in reducing our overall emissions because we can rightly expect the poorest people in the world to want to increase their emissions as the top ten percent reduce theirs. As well as increased meat consumption, this is already happening with countries such as China that used more concrete between 2011 and 2013 than the U.S. used in the entire 20th Century . Also, Air India recently ordered 470 new aeroplanes from Boeing and Airbus.
This is not however to pass the buck. Why shouldn’t poorer countries seek to increase their emissions when we in the Global North refuse to curb ours? For this reason, the onus must be on us to rapidly reduce our emissions as opposed to pointing to countries such as China as an excuse not to, which is the modus operandi of many right-wing commentators.
But even from a degrowth perspective, we understand that while we need to share the world’s resources more equally, we also simultaneously need to be reducing our collective use of those resources by a considerable amount. And in that context, it is helpful if the global population is on course towards stabilising while we achieve this.
Choosing to discuss the population topic within its proper context also isolates the racists who will have no time for such nuance. It also helps to reduce the risk of more people heading down the slippery path towards far-right extremism as the ever-diminishing returns that neo liberalism brings, takes its toll. Because calling someone a fascist for thinking that population is an issue is much more likely to make them into one than acknowledging their concerns while working with them to put the issue into its proper context. "That context is about urgently reducing the emissions of the top ten percent as part of a systemic change towards a different kind of economic system. Embracing population stabilisation/decline is one component of achieving this. For this reason, we find the ‘population versus per capita consumption’ dichotomy to be for the most part, unhelpful."
PGAP believes that we need to build a more holistic form of activism that does not dismiss controversial issues such as population but instead puts them into their proper context. That way, we can build an integrated comprehensive movement for change without any single-issue distractions that will knock us off course.