Vol 5, No 2
First online: 22 July 2021
David
Samways
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DOI: 10.3197/jps.2021.5.2.5
Licensing: This article is Open Access (CC BY 4.0).
How to Cite:
Samways, D. 2021. 'Editorial Introduction'. The Journal of Population and Sustainability 5(2): 5–15.
https://doi.org/10.3197/jps.2021.5.2.5
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The
question of how to achieve environmental sustainability inevitably raises a
host of conceptual and philosophical problems. Not least amongst these is
defining what sustainability itself actually means. Any investigation of this
question soon throws up a myriad of other questions regarding the understanding
of other ideas and concepts such as nature and wilderness but also of autonomy,
the good life, global justice and so on. I will not attempt the somewhat
Sisyphean task of defining sustainability in this editorial, but the papers in
this edition of the JP&S, although tackling quite different subject matter,
nonetheless contain themes, issues and questions which relate directly to this
conceptual conundrum. In particular, questions of autonomy and behaviour
change, resource distribution and equity, as well as different conceptions of a
good life are apparent. These questions are deeply ethical and value dependent
and go to the core of the discussion of population and sustainability – making
it inescapably political in nature.
In
Becky Blackford’s paper sustainable food consumption
(SFC) is the matter under discussion. Her contribution considers how personal
food choices might be influenced to reduce environmental impact and meet demand
as the global population grows. As she notes, food security is not a question
of agricultural sufficiency since at present more than enough grain is produced
to adequately nourish the current world population and possibly accommodate
future growth. At base, the persistence of the best part of a billion people
living with food insecurity is a distributional issue caused by the growing
demand for meat and dairy foods which effectively price the poor out of the
global food market. However, the environmental sustainability of the global
food system at current levels of resource use is questionable – especially as
this relates to the consumption of animal products. Blackford’s
paper reviews the use of nudge theory in changing food consumption behaviour
toward more sustainable choices such as plant-based and locally sourced
products. She concludes that various types of nudges may be effective tools in
changing food choices, but that the type of nudge and context are important.
Perhaps most interestingly, Blackford’s review shows
that the most effective nudges are those which target so called “System 1
thinking”, the non-deliberative, automatic and intuitive part of consciousness
– what the sociologist Anthony Giddens (1984) calls “practical consciousness”.
Blackford’s paper raises some important
issues for those concerned with behaviour change as a factor in environmental
sustainability. Many, especially those on the political left (for example
Monbiot 2019; Klein, 2014), have argued that, rather than concentrating on
individual behaviour-change, only structural systemic transformation can
prevent ecological catastrophe. Such arguments are not without merit and draw on
a long-standing left-wing intellectual tradition focussed on the institutional
or structural level rather than the individual agent. However, the problem with
such approaches is that they tend to underestimate the role of individual
choices in social structural reproduction and reduce consumer preferences and
life-style choices to ideological effects of capitalism or consumerism. From
this perspective, much of what people regard as choice is an illusion since the
pervasiveness and power of the prevailing ideology manipulates behaviour to
serve the interests of the system or of the powerful elites who benefit from
it. This is an attractive approach since it focuses on power and the structural
constraints upon individual behaviour. However, such arguments also generate
some consternation regarding individual responsibility for consumption choices
and are in danger of regarding agents as structural dopes unable to reflect
upon and change their actions. This is related to a much wider discussion in
the social sciences regarding the relationship between structure and agency, a
full discussion of which is well beyond the space available here. However, it
is clear that while there are social structural constraints upon consumption
choices, and ideologies such as consumerism play their role, environmental
discourses which challenge the status quo are widespread and, in many cases,
individuals are capable of reflecting upon their choices and exercising agency.
Nudging might play a role in assisting the breaking of habitual choices with
high environmental impacts. Indeed, the fact that the ideas about autonomy and
self-determination are valued in western discourses is reflected in Blackford’s noting of the ethical qualms expressed about
behaviour manipulation via measures such as nudges – especially when operating
at the level of practical consciousness.
Food
security is perhaps the oldest population growth concern and is inescapably
political in nature. When Thomas Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population (1998 [1798]) he was responding to
William Godwin’s and the Marquis de Condorcet’s writings on the “perfectibility
of society”. Malthus argued that, since population grew geometrically while
agricultural production could only grow arithmetically, in a society without
inequality the population would grow at an unprecedented rate and quickly
outstrip food production. Thus, Malthus argued even in a society where
“benevolence had established her reign in all hearts”, food scarcity would
eventually result in “violence, oppression, falsehood, misery, every hateful
vice, and every form of distress, which degrade and sadden the present state of
society, …generated… by laws inherent in the nature of man” (p.60). Where
Godwin (1793) had reasoned that human nature could be transcended and the urge
to procreate diminished by the development of the intellect, Malthus insisted
that, inevitably, human nature and the limits of the natural world would
prevail, leading to immiseration as demand outstripped food supply.
Malthus’
argument that there were natural impediments, both in the natural environment
and in human nature, which thwarted the eradication of want was rejected by
left-leaning progressive and socialist thinkers. Perhaps most powerfully in the
writings of Marx and Engels, it was argued that there is nothing “natural”
about poverty and scarcity, that they are a product of exploitative social
systems and can be solved through system change, technical progress and
equitable distribution. Indeed, as we have seen, the food supply has not been
determined by fixed natural laws of linear growth but has been continuously
expanded well beyond the needs of the population by technological means –
although the environmental sustainability of this expansion is highly
questionable.
In
the late 60s environmental arguments featuring population growth captured the
public imagination with books such as Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s Population Bomb (1968)
and The Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth (1972) becoming best sellers. While the
accuracy of the “Neo-Malthusian” epithet they attracted is debatable, their
general thrust was interpreted as such and although initially embraced by the
environmental movement, the idea of tackling population growth as a means of
averting ecological crisis came under increasing criticism. In particular,
environmental activists on the left were uncomfortable with the political tone
of population control discourses from the early 20th century and later the
abuses of human rights in India and China.
A
significant split emerged in the environmental movement around the issue of
human numbers, with eco-socialist thinkers such as Murray Bookchin (1987)
rejecting arguments in favour of population control from Deep Ecologists and
groups such as Earth First! who, it was argued, espoused an eco-fascist and
anti-human ideology. Bookchin traced the misanthropy of Deep Ecology to its
division between biocentric (ecocentric, nature
centred) and anthropocentric (human centred) thinking. For Deep Ecologists
biocentrism or ecocentrism is a recognition of the equality between all living
things. Such a position gives equal status to species as diverse as whales and
the small-pox virus – the latter of which might be regarded as an endangered
species. More importantly, Bookchin insisted, Deep Ecological thinking sees
modern human society as having become separated from nature and believes that
famine and disease should be left unchecked to reduce human “overpopulation”.
Like
many others who have followed, Bookchin laid the cause of the ecological crisis
squarely at the feet of modern industrial capitalism. Population growth, he
argued was a consequence of imperialism and capitalism:
Smash
up a stable precapitalist culture and throw its people off the land into city
slums, and due ironically to demoralization, population may soar rather than
decline. As Gandhi told the British, imperialism left India’s wretched poor and
homeless with little more in life than the immediate gratification provided by
sex and an understandably numbed sense of personal, much less social,
responsibility. Reduce women to mere reproductive factories, and population
rates will explode. (p.15)
However,
despite Bookchin’s criticisms of Deep Ecology being largely well grounded,
while accusing the movement of misunderstanding demography, he himself
reproduces common demographic misunderstandings and gives a specious account of
population growth, stabilisation and decline. While he correctly asserts that
population stabilisation and falling fertility are associated with development,
education and the empowerment of women, his suggestion that population growth
in the industrial age has been the result of increases in fertility is wide of
the mark. In fact, as far as can be determined, fertility rates remained
largely unchanged and decreases in mortality, due to improved nutrition, better
personal hygiene, public health measures and advances in medicine, are the
cause of population growth (Kirk, 1996).
One
of the problems with reductionist arguments regarding capitalism and ecological
degradation is that they fail to acknowledge that social systems of all kinds
have environmental impacts and that the size and power of the system is a
critical factor in its environmental sustainability. Moreover, capitalism and
imperialism cannot be reduced to a single ideology and the existence of a
multitude of other discourses, such as humanitarianism, produce unintended
consequences which exacerbate structural inequalities. Thus, despite the
exploitative nature of global capitalism and imperialism, due to the factors
listed above, mortality rates across the world have declined – especially
infant mortality – which, in the absence of access to modern contraception, has
led to population growth. The question of intervention into fertility outcomes becomes
all the more fraught for the modern left since liberal notions of autonomy have
been absorbed without much reflection upon the implications for sustainability
within finite bounds. Writers such as Diana Coole
(2018) and Julian Roche (2020) have tackled the question of reproductive
autonomy arguing that the prevention of the degradation of the natural
environment is a condition of possibility for all other forms of autonomy. From
such a perspective, autonomy is not reducible to the individual but must be
seen in the collective material context.
Bookchin
provides a powerful critique of what I have referred to as “eco-fundamentalism”
(Samways, 1996) and in particular the muddled and dualistic conceptions of
nature and human nature inherent in such a position. The idea of “human
exceptionalism” is frequently seen as interchangeable with that of
“anthropocentrism”, which for many is seen as the root-cause of the
environmental crisis. Bookchin provides good reasons for a version of the human
exceptionalist argument which recognises culture as
human “second nature” avoiding any hard cut-off point between humans and other
species whilst rejecting narrow anthropocentrism. This is an important argument
since, as Bookchin points out:
…
what is particularly unique about human societies is that they can be radically
changed by their members — and in ways that can be made to benefit the natural
world as well as the human species. (1987, p.8)
It is
the self-conscious reflection upon our behaviour and our ability to change it
that is at the centre of political action – including that required to avert
ecological catastrophe. For Bookchin and others it is social hierarchy in all
its forms that is problematic, but in particular the effect of the destructive
forces of capitalism and imperialism on social relations and on the
environment.
However,
while Bookchin’s pro-human and, I would argue, ecologically enlightened
anthropocentric argument, is to be welcomed, in common with other environmental
perspectives from the left, its focus on reprehensible, oppressive and
politically offensive instances and arguments concerned with population control
blind it to human numbers as part of anthropogenic environmental change. Such a
position is analogous to the claims of those who instance the oppressive
regimes of the Soviet Union, China or North Korea as demonstrations of why
collectivism, socialism or communism is fundamentally flawed and morally
objectionable – an argument which presumably Bookchin would have rejected. Yet
this is precisely what Bookchin and others on the left do when they equate all
forms of population concern with discredited and abhorrent population discoures.
In
his commentary piece published in this issue, Chris Tucker explores how the
dark history of these population control discourses was instrumental in the
removal of concern about population growth from the so called “Cairo Consensus”
which has informed UN policy on reproductive health over the last 30 years.
These are the same discourses which Bookchin and left-leaning environmentalists
also cite in their rejection of concerns around population growth. Tucker shows
how the close association of the idea of population control with eugenics and
human rights abuses has resulted in discussion of population growth becoming
taboo – despite its widely acknowledged environmentally unsustainability.
Tucker argues that the taboo around population control has led those embedded
in the Cairo Consensus to be unwilling to reopen discussion about the adverse
effects of population growth. Indeed, a faith in the sanguine view, typical of
figures such as the late Hans Rosling, that
population growth would sort itself out, coupled with a lack of acknowledgment
of the contribution of human population size to the transgression of planetary
boundaries, has further discouraged debate. Moreover, especially in relation to
greenhouse gas emissions, many have pointed out the inverse relationship
between fertility rates and environmental impact, with the correct implication
that tackling the climate emergency must be focussed on rich-world consumption
rather than population growth. However, Tucker notes that while this is true,
in the longer-term, as they develop, the environmental impact of high fertility
countries will also grow.
Tucker
argues that despite its silence on population growth, the Cairo Consensus
contains much of what is required, in the form of greater female empowerment, reproductive
rights, and the welfare of women and girls, to bend the projected population
curve toward a sustainable level. He advocates an aspiration of achieving a
total fertility rate, through equitable, just and empowering means, of 1.5 by
2030 in order to move toward a sustainable population by the end of the
century, thereby averting enormous human suffering. To this end, Tucker
proposes not only revisiting the Cairo Consensus, but also the introduction of
an eighteenth Sustainable Development Goal concerned with population, and the
creation of a United Nations Framework Convention on Population Growth.
While
Malthus argued that Godwin’s and de Condorcet’s utopian societies would
degenerate due to features of external nature and human nature, the majority of
contemporary concern about population growth is actually motivated by the
opposite sentiment. At one level, those, like Tucker, who are concerned with
the consequences of population growth agree with Malthus that external nature
is a critical limiting factor. However, modern population concern departs from
the accepted reading of Malthus, typified in Marx’s (1954 [1890]) critique,
where the resulting misery of the poor consequent of population growth is
inevitable and natural. For Marx, it was not abstract laws of nature which
produced an immiserated “surplus population” but the capitalist mode of
production:
The
labouring population therefore produces, along with the accumulation of capital
produced by it, the means by which it itself is made relatively superfluous, is
turned into a relative surplus population; and it does this to an always
increasing extent. This is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode
of production. (Marx 1954 [1890] p.591).
Marx
saw population growth as a systemic outcome, favouring and reinforcing existing
capitalist social relations and resolved by the eventual and inevitable change
in the mode of production. The character of the communist society in which all
contradictory relations of the capitalist mode of production would be resolved
was only hinted at by Marx. Moreover, there is little to show what he thought
would happen to economic and population growth. Authors such as Saito (2017)
have somewhat undermined the claim that Marx thought there were no natural constraints
on the human enterprise, but apart from a few comments about the dispersal of
the population between town and country Marx is quiet on the subject of
population in communist society. Indeed, the only visions of life in communist
society are utopian and bucolic (for example Marx 1972 [1846] p.33) and imply a
low population density.
Present-day
authors concerned with human population size may well advocate political
transformation of the global socio-economic system, consisting of the
establishment of an alternative economic system, the reduction of global
inequality, and the empowerment of women. However, rather than the achievement
of utopia, it is the avoidance of a dystopia that is the principle concern.
Such writers generally maintain that human population size and growth will push
already breached planetary boundaries beyond recovery resulting in suffering
and misery which will afflict not only a large part of humanity but devastate
the other species and ecosystems upon which we ultimately depend.
It is
the examination of possible dystopian futures with which David Wadley’s essay
is concerned. In his book The City of Grace (2020), Wadley models an eco-tech city
which rather than being utopian is anti-dystopian, a sustainable haven situated
in a surrounding sea of dystopic neoliberal globalisation. In the paper
presented here, Wadley considers, from the perspective of systems, complexity
and chaos theories, this dystopic environment in terms of population and
sustainability. Questioning accepted notions of rationality, he explores two
possible failure modes connected by demographic factors: the first,
capital-labour dynamics, is within the social sphere, while the second concerns
the human-environment nexus. Somewhat echoing Marx’s position regarding population,
capitalist social relations and labour supply, Wadley argues that the
continuing substitution of capital and management for labour could suppress the
demand for labour in developed countries. At the same time, in less developed
nations the global displacement of labour by technological innovation could
result in devastating underemployment of the large labour forces produced by
population growth. This first failure mode articulates with what Wadley
identifies as a second dystopian contingency, unconstrained growth exceeding
planetary boundaries. Employing a systems approach to the IPAT equation, he
argues that too much faith is placed in the development of environmental
technical fixes, and that curbs on affluence, as well as the substitution of technology
for labour, will produce social disquiet. Wadley concludes that to achieve
long-term sustainability at good standards of welfare, population size must be
tackled. Avoiding these two dystopian failure modes, he contends, requires an
abandonment of the obsession with economic growth and a refocussing on labour
and population issues to achieve sustainable and equitable real per capita
wealth. However, given the pervasiveness of irrationality in human affairs,
Wadley is not convinced that a dystopian future can be avoided.
In
contrast, Doug Booth’s follow-up to “Achieving a post-growth green economy”
published in the last issue of the JP&S strikes a more optimistic note. In
his previous paper Booth argued that the combination of a trend toward post-materialism
and the establishment of a “Green New Deal” could offer considerable hope in
tackling the environmental crisis. Here, Booth further explores what he calls
the “post-material silent revolution” providing detailed empirical evidence
showing that post-materialists: are less orientated to material consumption;
are more likely to choose to live in denser, more energy efficient urban
environments; have fewer children; and, through political action, support the
environment. The analysis of the Wave 6 World Values Survey confirm that
post-materialism is positively correlated to younger and more educated groups,
who are likely to belong to voluntary organisations, work in the creative and
independent sectors and be politically engaged. Post-materialism is also
positively associated with higher social class membership.
Perhaps
most significantly, Booth notes that post-materialism is intrinsically
anti-capitalist in orientation and that taken to its logical conclusion leads
to a dampening of demand growth for consumer goods, ultimately undermining the
expansion of capitalism’s global influence. It is also interesting to note that
both middle-class post materialists and those in the very lowest socio-economic
classes share common interests in the reformation of the economic system. For
post-materialists this interest relates to their value objectives, while for
those at the bottom of the socio-economic system greater economic security and
a fairer share of material pie eclipses their support for the environment. However,
Booth argues that the institution of a Green New Deal will create a convergence
of the interests of post-materialists and working-class materialists as the
decarbonisation of the economy creates well-paid jobs and a sustainable global
economy.
The
papers in this issue of the JP&S have covered a wide range of issues
relating to the “population-consumption-technology-environment nexus”. From the
granular level of nudging food choices, through to the macro-level of systems
theory and dystopia, at one level or another all are concerned with population
and sustainability from both a behavioural-agentic and a systemic-structural
perspective. All demonstrate how population and sustainability issues require
an approach which understands the relationship between our everyday practices
and choices and wider structural systemic factors. Most importantly perhaps,
all of the papers in this issue grapple with autonomy and power and show that
attention must be simultaneously paid to both individual social practices and
the social structures which both enable and constrain them.
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