Something Like a War: Environment x Population Control, a reading list
A full-page ad in the New York Times, via the Princeton University Library, via the New Atlantis (with apologies, I couldn’t find another; less problematic source).
In November, a letter signed by over 10,000 scientists calling for urgent action to address the climate crisis was published in the journal BioScience. Amongst other recommendations, the letter urged efforts to stablise global population – and then gradually reducing it – using ethical approaches that ensure ‘social integrity’ such as access to primary and secondary education for girls.
It doesn’t sound like a bad argument: ensure womxn and girls have (informed) access to family planning services, and address gender equality through greater access to schooling and education. It’s even a compelling one, but two key things stick out for me: (i) there’s historical amnesia here, of what happens when we tie population reduction/control to womxn’s fertilities & who that is visited upon, and (ii) where we continue to place the blame and the responsibility (womxn’s fertilities)- it makes the climate emergency one more tool in the arsenal of population control. It also doesn’t acknowledge who remains at the front lines of the climate emergency & is the most affected by it: poor womxn and girls in the Global South.
The letter garnered a fair bit of debate & discussion, including critiquing the fertility control recommendations (example). The linked article points out that the scientists’ website goes a step further, ‘sounding the overpopulation alarm’. This battle of ‘population’ vs reproductive justice is an old one- and it’s never really gone away. It’s shaped population policies and programmes, including ‘voluntary’ family planning efforts. In my PhD thesis, for example, I traced the construct of ‘overpopulation’ in India, from colonial-era explanations for famine to its influence in interpreting India’s first post-independent census (‘improvident maternities’) to current day exhortations by Prime Minister Modi to tackle the ‘population explosion’.
In attempting to confront the challenges of climate emergency, Neo-Malthusian ideologies have taken on a new, insidious form of ‘education’ and ‘rights’, without fully tackling the assumptions and ideas underpinning it. To tackle some of that aforementioned historical amnesia and to push for a more nuanced discussion on the links between climate emergency, womxn’s fertilities, and the larger project of ‘development’; I complied a reading list. I first shared this on twitter, drawing on some of the readings I sent students on one of the courses I teach.
It ought to go without saying, but this is an incomplete reading list/a work in progress. I’ve complied this based on conversations with and recommendations from incredible activists (e.g. WGNRR) and academics including Dr. Katie Dow who was very generous in sharing recommendations when I was trying to build an argument for my PhD chapter (thank you!). I will keep updating this as I go along, adding relevant links or posts. I’ve tried to theme/categorise the list, but it isn’t set up in a hierarchical order and should allow dipping in and out of different ‘sections’.
Feminist Contestations
Ruth Dixon-Mueller’s ‘Population Policies and Women’s Rights’ (1993) pillories the emphasis on technological fixes (e.g. family planning) in population policies at the expense of women’s needs. As Gita Sen (1994) describes in her review of the book, Dixon-Mueller articulates the opposing agendas that women find themselves trapped in: (i) population ‘controlistas’, (ii) pro-natalism of traditional, patriarchal systems, and (iii) the vagaries and prioritisations of private providers of reproductive health services.
Ruth Dixon-Muller & Adrienne Germaine’s (1994) article on Population Policy and Feminist Political Action in Three Developing Countries draws on some of the work in the book, exploring the impact of women’s political participation in Brazil, Nigeria, and the Philippines on population policies in the 1980s.
A feminist classic, Betsy Hartmann’s ‘Reproductive Rights and Wrongs’ (1987, reprint 2016) challenges the idea of ‘overpopulation’, contextualising population growth within entrenched gendered inequalities, poverty and enivronmental degradation. Her work connecting ‘population growth’ fears with threats to global security and the environment (1998) was prescient and remains highly relevant in today’s fractious times. Her piece with Elizabeth Barajas-Román in ISIS Women’s (a feminist nonprofit) newsletter (2009) provides an excellent overview of the feminist contestations of overpopulation and population control (including a take down of an LSE student’s unproblematised cost-benefit analysis of family planning technology).
While several feminist objections to population control technologies have been framed within human rights approaches, I (and Betsy Hartmann above) find Reproductive Justice (RJ) frames- coined and theorised by Loretta J. Ross and SisterSong WoC- essential to any discussion on reproductive rights x environment. This primer on RJ by Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger is essential grounding for challenging population control frames. This briefing book by Loretta Ross and SisterSong, also sets out some key concepts- including the incredible chapter on 10 reasons to rethink ‘overpopulation’.
Giovanna Di Chiro draws on RJ, linking it to environmental justice issues in her article on cultivating solutions for climate justice (2011), as well as in this article on social reproductive and coalition politics in environmental justice (2008). Greta Gaard’s (2015) work on ecofeminisms and climate change is also an excellent read, considering structural inequalities that shape and govern the rights of womxn and LGBTQI persons, including the environmental challenges that they face.
One of Dr Katie Dow’s excellent recommendations, drawing on RJ, is Noël Sturgeon's fantastic 'Penguin Family Values', which explores how the much-heralded documentary March of the Penguins found itself at the forefront of calls for greater attention to climate emergency, as well as co-opted by the Christian Right as a representation of traditional, Christian ‘family values’, whilst invisibilising the plight of indigenous communities struggling to survive in the face of inequities that exacerbate the impact of climate emergency on their lives and existence. Sturgeon asks a crucial question, ‘Does it matter in terms of environmental consequences what kind of familial and sexual arrangements we make?’, and offers ‘environmental reproductive justice’ as a way to respond to it.
Earlier this year, the excellent PopDev programme at Hampshire College published a statement signed by a number of activists, academics (& activist-academics), and organisations on a renewed call for Feminist Resistance to Population Control.
Hxstories of Population Control
Matthew Connelly offers a historical analysis of population control and their new permutations (2003) and his book Fatal Misconceptions offers a harrowing documentation of population control policies (but also easily band wagoned by the anti-abortion lot, so proceed with caution).
Sarah Hodges’ review of three relevant texts also provides an excellent overview- Malthus is forever (2010). Her excellent piece on tracing population and reproduction in India through a Foucauldian lens (2004) is a must-read, as is the book ‘Reproductive health in India : history, politics, controversies’.
An ‘oldie’, but Rosalind Petchesky’s understanding of reproduction as inherently political is evident in her exploration of the feminist faultlines in population and reproductive rights (1995).
If I ever get around to pulling together a course on reproduction, I will screen Deepa Dhanraj’s ‘Something like a war’ in the first three weeks. A searing portrait of what population reduction policies have wrought on the poor and vulnerable in India- even after the ‘end’ of coercive/incentivised population control policies- the documentary forces you to witness the careless & cruel abrogation of rights.
[update] Bonus watch: Deepa Dhanraj (the filmmaker) in conversation with Navroze Contractor and Swati Dandekar, discussing Something Like a War at the Bangalore International Centre.
The discussion about how Deepa Dhanraj identified the doctor in the film - Dr Patel- through an article in The Lancet, praising his technocratic approach to mass sterilisations… is absolutely shocking and unbelievable in how womxn are treated as a cog in a much larger machinery of medicalisation of their bodies.
A Renewed Feminist Contestation
Gender, Place, and Culture have been publishing some excellent pieces on populationism, gender and sexuality, and notions of development over the last few years. A few brilliant pieces:
Emma Foster’s (2013) piece on the (re)production of sexual norms through the SDGs and ‘eco-discipline’ (link) challenges the construction of gendered and hetrosexual identities in relation to the ever-pressing threat of climate emergency.
A number of critical feminist scholars and demographers (many of whom crafted PopDev’s statement linked above), wrote a piece on ‘populationism’, exploring new manifestations and iterations of population control (2019).
Diana Odeja et al (2019) take on Malthusian approaches to ecological disaster critiquing the racist and depoliticising lenses that underpin them.
Continuing the conversation on ‘populationism’, Anne Hendrixson et al (2019), identify three forms of populationism that allow an analysis of the resurgence of population control rhetoric.
Focusing on two LARCs, Bendix et al (2019) argue that target-driven population policies mark a return of technical solutions to reproductive health challenges, and may be underpinned by Neo-Malthusian ideologies. Related, Shaw and Wilson (2019) interrogate the Gates Foundation’s ‘necro-populationism’.
Attempting to respond to the range of questions raised in the face of climate emergency and the resurgence of depoliticised, technocratic solutions, Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway’s edited volume ‘Making Kin, Not Population’ (recommended by Dr Katie Dow) offers new ways of thinking about the Anthropocene (‘Chthulucene’). This interview with Prof Haraway also delves into her thoughts on Making Kin/Chthulucene/Plantationocene.
Another excellent Dr Katie Dow recommendation is Michelle Murphy’s ‘The Economisation of Life’ (Murphy is also one of the authors in the Clarke & Haraway volume) which explores the calculations that underpin ‘population management’ and are intrinsically tied to notions of development.
This review of ‘Making Kin, not Population’ and the Economisation of Life offers an excellent overview of the two books and their overlaps.Dr Schaffnit recommended another book- On Infertile Ground by Jade Sasser. It’s an excellent read alongside the Gender, Place and Culture articles, challenging the role of development actors in the resurgence of population control rhetoric.