So Over Population [Parts I & II]
Overpopulation was one of the biggest environmental issues of the 60s and 70s, arguably bigger than saving the whales, planting trees, and acid rain. But then… it seemed to disappear from the conversation. That is until the release of the movie Avengers: Infinity War where the ultimate bad guy Thanos is motivated by one concern: overpopulation.
Today, we’re talking about population. How it went from being on the front pages of our newspapers and all over late night television to being the issue that you’ll only hear from out of the mouth of a comic book super-villain.
And this subject is… well, let’s just say it’s not the kind of story that you can handle breezily in a half-hour. So we’re going to spend two episodes on it. Buckle up! We’re going down the rabbit hole.
Part 1 features Derek Hoff, Dorceta Taylor, Frances Kissling, and Heidi Beirich.
Part 2 features Ben Zuckerman, Heidi Beirich, Arthur Erken, Joel Cohen, Michelle Nijhuis, Munira Bashir, Paul Watson, Stephanie Feldstein, and Bill McKibben.
In the second part of our two-part series, we’re digging into the story of how around the turn of the millennium, population got all tangled up in immigration in one vote at the Sierra Club.
That ugly fight represents a pivot point for the movement: a transition from the environmental politics of the 70s and 80s to the environmental politics of today.
A population reading list:
David Roberts’ story from Vox: “I’m an environmental journalist, but I never write about overpopulation. Here’s why.”
Historian Derek Hoff: “A Long Fuse: ‘The Population Bomb’ is still ticking 50 years after its publication.”
“Population and Environment” in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources
A hot take on Thanos (spoiler - Alessandra Potenza says he has it wrong)
Credits
Outside/In was produced this week by Sam Evans-Brown with help from Taylor Quimby, Hannah McCarthy, Justine Paradis, Nick Capodice, and Jimmy Gutierrez. Erika Janik is our Executive Producer.
Music in this episode by Komiku, Jason Leonard, Blue Dot Sessions, and Poddington Bear.
Thanos photo from Hannaford.
Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.
Audio Transcript: So Over Population, Part 1
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:00:01] Okay. We should probably just start by introducing ourselves.
Justine Paradis: [00:00:04] Well, I'm Jimmy Gutierrez.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:00:06] I'm Justine Paradis.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:00:07] You guys.
Justine Paradis: [00:00:08] All right, we'll do it again.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:00:09] Nope. Too late. We're moving on. Just to start us off, I'm going to give you two a little insight into this thing that happens to anybody who writes about the environment. And to illustrate this, I went and stood in front of our local independent bookseller and pestered people on the street.
Justine Paradis: [00:00:24] Great place to find environmentalists.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:00:26] That's true. If I were to ask you what you'd say the greatest [00:00:30] threat to the environment is today. What would you say it is? So people are freaked out by all kinds of things.
Person on street 1: [00:00:35] The exhaust, gasoline fumes.
Person on Street 2: [00:00:38] Factory farming?
Person on street 3: [00:00:39] Yeah, probably. That's what I would say too.
Person on street 4: [00:00:41] Very powerful. Very rich. It's businesses that are allowed to just drill oil and dump all their waste out with no consequences. Probably emissions, but I'm not sure what the biggest cause is.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:00:58] Generally speaking, there's one [00:01:00] freak out that is dominant climate change.
Person on street 5: [00:01:02] People talk about climate change.
Person on street 3: [00:01:04] Climate change. Yeah, I guess I presume that that's what you were supposing was climate change is the biggest.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:01:11] But if you discard that, say you're not allowed to say climate change. Okay. What if I said you can't say climate change?
Person on street 6: [00:01:18] That's not very fair of you.
Person on street 3: [00:01:20] Okay. Oh I see.
Person on street 5: [00:01:21] Well, no climate change really gets them all.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:01:23] So you don't have to dig very Deep to Know that there are a lot of people worried [00:01:30] about us humans.
Person on street 7: [00:01:33] The biggest threat to the environment. I mean, overall, I mean people.
Person on street 8: [00:01:38] Overpopulation.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:01:40] So overpopulation was one of the biggest environmental issues in the 60s and 70s, arguably bigger than saving the whales, planting trees, acid rain. And as an environmental journalist, inevitably you hear from people who still believe that to be the case. I hear from them at events, I hear from them in [00:02:00] emails, and they say, why don't we ever talk about population anymore? Okay. Hard pivot here. Have you seen Avengers?
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:02:10] I just saw it.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:02:11] Infinity war.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:02:11] The infinity war. Yeah.
Justine Paradis: [00:02:12] I'm going to be the foil who doesn't know anything about the Avengers.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:02:15] Infinity War is the climax of about a dozen superhero movies, which all have been building a storyline piece by piece of this ultimate bad guy, Thanos little one.
Thanos: [00:02:26] It's a simple calculus. This universe is finite, [00:02:30] its resources finite. Its life is left unchecked. Life will cease to exist. It needs correction. You don't know that. I'm the only one who knows that. At least I'm the only one with the will to act on it.
Justine Paradis: [00:02:47] Got it.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:02:48] Thanos' master plan is to kill half of the entire universes population. And he's motivated by one concern overpopulation.
Thanos: [00:02:58] Titan was like most planets. [00:03:00] Too many mounds, not enough to go around.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:03:03] Me watching this movie, I'm like, oh my God, the ultimate bad guy of all bad guys is basically a 1970s environmentalist.
Justine Paradis: [00:03:12] Woo!
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:03:15] Do you remember when Black Panther came out? There was all this Killmonger was right. Like there were t shirts. Killmonger was right. Reddit, Facebook groups. Same thing happened with Thanos. Where that take? Yeah, there there was a Reddit group that said Thanos [00:03:30] did nothing wrong. 700,000 people joined it. And obviously I'm not saying that environmentalists wanted to kill half of all the people in the world. All I'm saying is that culturally, we're in a really weird place when it comes to this subject. Like Hollywood saw fit to pick this this ideology as the worst. But then all sorts of people were still sort of like, you know, I'm kind of on board. This [00:04:00] is outside in a show about the natural world and how we use it today. We're talking about population, how it went from being on the front pages of our newspapers and all over late night television, to being the issue that you'll only hear out of the mouth of a comic book supervillain. And this subject, let's just say it's not the kind of story that you can handle breezily in a half hour or so, which means we're going to spend two episodes on it. So buckle up. [00:04:30] We're going down the rabbit hole. All right. We're starting out way back in the day.
Justine Paradis: [00:04:43] Like how far back?
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:04:44] We're starting? In the 1700s. And even back then, when there were less than a billion people on the planet already, there were people who were concerned about whether there was going to be enough to go around.
Derek Hoff: [00:04:55] Well, I mean, the population debate goes back to Benjamin Franklin, who was concerned about [00:05:00] all these German immigrants coming to the country. I mean.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:05:02] I'm gonnna introduce you to Derek Hoff. He's a historian at the University of Utah and has been studying the the discourse around population. And what you see is looking at this history. Anxiety about population has been around for a very, very long time. But have you heard of Thomas Malthus?
Justine Paradis: [00:05:18] Yeah.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:05:19] Malthusianism.
Justine Paradis: [00:05:20] Malthus --.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:05:21] I've heard of Malthusianism, but I have not heard of that character.
Justine Paradis: [00:05:24] Yeah. Bring us up to speed.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:05:25] Malthus was a clergyman and an economist back in the late 1700s, early 1800s in England. [00:05:30] And so he wrote about this after Ben Franklin. And that period was not a great time in England. The Empire was falling apart. The industrial Revolution was getting into swing. So a lot of big anxiety inducing changes. And if you hear something being referred to as Malthusian today, it's usually shorthand for people making very pessimistic predictions that ultimately turn out to be wrong.
Justine Paradis: [00:05:55] Were they mathy predictions?
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:05:57] They were mathy predictions about how much food we're producing [00:06:00] and when famine is going to hit, and starvation was going to be visited upon all of us. And he, in his wrong wrongness, was really worried about poor people. It is an.
Reading Thomas Malthus: [00:06:11] Evident truth that whatever may be the rate of increase in the means of subsistence, the increase of population must be limited by it, at least after the food has once been divided into the smallest shares that will support life.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:06:23] And what he's really saying here is that there will be poverty no matter what, and helping poor people will just lead to famine and which will kill them regardless. [00:06:30] And so,instead of helping them.
Reading Thomas Malthus: [00:06:31] Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits in our towns. We should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague in the country. We should build our villages near stagnant pools and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:06:57] So that's Thomas Malthus. [00:07:00] I mean.
Justine Paradis: [00:07:00] It's just math. The numbers don't lie.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:07:02] You also gotta love that this is where Thanos is coming from.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:07:05] So. Well, so it goes back a very, very long way. But again, when you look through this history, what you find is that this population angst of the Malthusian variety is often tied to people's concern about other people poor people, immigrants, Africans. It's like a Rorschach test for the mood of the time.
Derek Hoff: [00:07:25] But the debate really did take off after World War two, as the [00:07:30] world went through some of the most rapid population growth that it ever has. As birth rates were peaking, and as the Cold War made policymakers in the West very concerned about areas of poverty succumbing to the Stalinist temptation. And one of the main arguments was that excessive population growth combined with improvements in public health, which means that populations were growing all the more that those would become breeding grounds for communism.
Justine Paradis: [00:07:59] Red scare [00:08:00], instantly.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:08:01] Can I say something real quick before that? Like this is like post World War two?
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:08:05] Yeah. So it's like the right in the middle of the baby boom.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:08:07] Okay. And so like we had had conversations and like experiments with eugenics and sterilization and all of these things and, and this is still kind of like pretty okay to openly.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:08:19] We're coming back to eugenics.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:08:20] Okay.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:08:21] Okay, okay. We'll get to eugenics. But [00:08:30] that brings us to the 1960s and the population bomb. Have you heard of the population bomb?
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:08:37] No. Should I have?
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:08:39] It's a bomb.
Justine Paradis: [00:08:42] It's the p bomb.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:08:44] I try to Stay up on bombs.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:08:46] This was written by an ecologist named Paul Ehrlich in 1968. And just to be clear, there were a ton of demographers and think tanks and stuff like that that were already worried about our population growth rates. The idea didn't come from Ehrlich. He just [00:09:00] sort of wrote the airport bookstore version of it. And again, like Malthus, if I think if anything has penetrated the public consciousness about the population bomb, it's that his predictions were very scary. He was predicting widespread famine throughout the world by the 1980s, and none of that materialized. But over the course of the next ten years after its publication, he went on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson more than 20 times. So [00:09:30] one of the things that Erlich popularized was this formula called the IPAT. Impact equals population times affluence, times technology.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:09:52] Impact equals... I'm writing this down. Population times affluence.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:09:56] You were a good student, weren't you? I can tell.
Justine Paradis: [00:09:59] So again, [00:10:00] math. It doesn't. How could you argue?
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:10:02] Well, I mean, like, the idea that you can come up with a mathematical formula for impact is insane. So, like like, just lay that aside for a moment. It's more of like a thought experiment than an actual than actual math. What the formula says is that population is this inevitable multiplier of all of our environmental problems.
Justine Paradis: [00:10:19] Right. But so are the other two things.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:10:21] But but these folks were very focused on the population part of that formula. P yeah, okay. And it wasn't just an academic debate. I mean, there weren't many [00:10:30] TV channels back then. So this is like him being on one of television's biggest shows over and over and over. By the way, 1980 was when that interview happened during the oil crisis. Once again, population.
Justine Paradis: [00:10:58] Right.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:10:59] A mirror for whatever [00:11:00] we're worried about.
Justine Paradis: [00:11:00] Petroleum. It's just I think one thing that I continue to be struck by is just the like, incredibly like considered rational, calm tone, like we're just looking at the facts. But it is a really emotional, fear driven debate.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:11:12] Yeah. And this is happening and especially strange time too, because you had people that were anxious about overpopulation because they were freaked out about not having enough resources, fuel or food. And you had people who were anxious about overpopulation because they cared about the environment. Like all of these people [00:11:30] would fill up wild spaces. But in the 1970s, those two circles of people grew and in part merged. And it was at this moment that you've got the birth of sort of the modern environmental movement. I mean, the first Earth Day in 1970, there were 20 million people out in the streets in through the 70s you got the creation of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the EPA. You've got Nixon trying to harness all that energy and bring it over to the Republican Party.
President Nixon: [00:11:59] If [00:12:00] the present trends continue, it's going to be mean that 115 million people, this increase in population, most of it's going to go to the cities. That's the trend. And our cities are going to be choked with people. They're going to be choked with traffic. They're going to be choked with crime. They're going to be choked with pollution.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:12:19] People are out in the streets talking about population. It was everywhere. The Rockefellers started a think tank trying to deal with it. Republicans [00:12:30] were worried about it. Democrats were worried about it. The Pentagon was worried about it. It was everywhere. Again, here's historian Derek Hoff.
Derek Hoff: [00:12:35] This was not a Partizan issue. And many politicians and economists and, you know, rich people like Rockefeller, believe that the world needed to do something about population growth.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:12:48] But as is so often the case, when the entire country starts paying attention to one issue, fault lines start to form. And that's what we'll hear about after a break. [00:13:00]
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:13:00] Before the break, we walked through this cresting wave of anxiety about global population growth through the 1970s. But even as the seeds for that anxiety were being planted at the same time, the seeds for a backlash were being sown as well. And as Derek Hoff, the historian, explains it, it started on the right.
Derek Hoff: [00:13:20] Remember the population bomb in 1968? Roe v Wade is January of 1973. So as the conservative pro-life movement emerges, [00:13:30] it wants nothing to do with folks on the left who are advocating for access to family planning and abortion, usually at the same time. And one of the arguments that abortion activists made in the early 1970s is that this would help bring the population down. And for the first time, what had been a sort of bipartisan support for reducing population in the United States got completely splintered as it got sucked into and overwhelmed by the abortion wars.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:14:03] But [00:14:00] just like fear of overpopulation was bipartisan, so too was the backlash. And the left's outrage came from the fact that many Americans had this tendency to focus on other countries, places with really high birth rates. Here's Frances Kissling, president of the Center for Health, Ethics and Social Policy.
Frances Kissling: [00:14:21] And of course, the people who had to reduce their population were black people and brown people. Plain [00:14:30] and simple.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:14:30] And this is Dorceta Taylor, an environmental sociologist with the University of Michigan.
Dorceta Taylor: [00:14:35] So it's not, you know, right wing groups kind of putting ideas into people's head. It's the it's the emergence of dialogues of people of color. And so women of color from Africa, from Asia.
Frances Kissling: [00:14:48] Environmentalists had a blind spot. They had a blind spot about how one addresses those issues in ways that are sensitive.
Dorceta Taylor: [00:14:59] Fast [00:15:00] forward to the 19, late 1980s, and out of that period comes a lot of organizations that we now refer to as environmental justice organizations, who are not shy about putting the issue of race, racism, discrimination on the agenda, on the table, and calling out these blind spots.
Derek Hoff: [00:15:22] All right, folks like the Black Panthers are actually making a similar kind of neocolonial argument, right? Which is we don't want rich white policymakers [00:15:30] determining, you know, how people in poor community control their bodies and their procreation.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:15:36] This, by the way, was a line of argumentation that right wing critics found absolutely irresistible.
Derek Hoff: [00:15:41] Well, it's such a wonderful, wonderful neutralizer, right? People on the right are used to being accused of a racist agenda. All right. It's it does get old for conservatives to be called racist every other day. So here's an opportunity. Ah, look at those liberals giving dark skinned people birth control.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:15:58] And this wasn't just about [00:16:00] birth control. You don't have to look any farther than Paul Ehrlich, the author of The Population Bomb, to see some of this. He suggested mandatory limits on children might be necessary, and he even went so far as to suggest putting birth control chemicals into public drinking water in places where the birth rate was stubbornly high. I mean, these people thought all of civilization was at risk and they were not interested in half measures.
Derek Hoff: [00:16:25] Groups like zero population Growth that formed right after the population bomb. [00:16:30] You know, they weren't interested in the compromise politics of liberalism, in tune with the times. They were putting out a a radical message.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:16:38] And so what winds up happening, whether environmentalists intended this or not, is that countries start to develop population programs, and some of them were incredibly abusive. Between 1975 and 1977, there were reports of millions of forced sterilizations in India. These, like assembly line style operations, no follow up care. Unhygienic [00:17:00] conditions. In 1979, you get the Chinese one child policy and so on and so on, like all around the world.
Justine Paradis: [00:17:06] You know, and that's even happening in the United States is like with the original testing of birth control was tested on people of color without consent.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:17:14] You know, and it gets wrapped up with the eugenics movement. There were sterilizations of Native American people on reservations.
Dorceta Taylor: [00:17:20] In 1990, I took a trip to Burma, and after about two weeks in, the ladies in the village told someone to bring me [00:17:30] over to talk with the women. And the first question I got when I went over to sit with these ladies was, are you sterilized? And I was stunned. And then I said, why are you asking me if I'm sterilized? And they said, well, everybody in that village and everybody along the Burmese, all the women were sterilized by the time they were about 16 or 17.
Justine Paradis: [00:17:51] Yeah. I mean, I'm just imagining, like, hearing a story like this and and then realizing, like, how these ideas [00:18:00] about overpopulation can be wielded in ways that you just never intended and how horrifying that would be.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:18:06] Right. And it's interesting too. It's because, like, so much focus on the equation leaves out so much humanity.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:18:10] Well, it's it's also like even if you just look at the equation, you're doing it wrong. Right? Because if if the populations that have the affluence and the technology are the ones that are causing the impact, then why are we focusing on subsistence farmers in Burma?
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:18:24] Yeah.
Dorceta Taylor: [00:18:30] And [00:18:30] if you have eight cars, are you really contributing more to the global destruction of resources than a woman in the middle of Africa or Asia with four children who lives in maybe 1 or 2 rooms, who recycles everything, who grows her own food, who does rainwater catchment?
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:19:12] So [00:19:00] how did this all play out? To tell this story, I've called up Frances, who we heard from a bit earlier.
Frances Kissling: [00:19:19] I have so many titles. My name is Frances Kissling, and I am the president of the Center for Health, Ethics and Social Policy and formerly [00:19:30] the president of Catholics for a Free Choice.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:19:33] This was an advocacy group for pro-abortion rights Catholics that she ran for 25 years.
Frances Kissling: [00:19:37] My job was to make this as my standard line. My job was to make sure that the Pope did not have a good day.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:19:44] Frances started trolling the Pope in 1981, and when I say trolling, I mean trolling.
Frances Kissling: [00:19:50] And one of the most fun things I ever did was we rented a sailboat for 50 people, and we just spent a few [00:20:00] hours leisurely sailing back and forth, yelling slogans at the at the Vatican.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:20:07] Flying flags, pounding drums. Yeah.
Frances Kissling: [00:20:10] Yes, yes. Not the church, not the state. Women will decide their fate.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:20:14] When it comes to pushing back against the Vatican. One of the big places to do it is at the UN. So where did this work begin to intersect with environmentalism?
Frances Kissling: [00:20:27] Around around the time of the Rio [00:20:30] Conference on the environment.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:20:32] These conferences have been taking place every ten years since 1972, but 1992 was the first one that was attended by anyone besides diplomats. And so it was a really big deal. Heads of state from more than 100 countries. Thousands of activists, all in Rio de Janeiro.
Frances Kissling: [00:20:50] It was hot. It was. It was in Rio. It was very, very warm. And it's a huge meeting. The issue of population [00:21:00] and the environment was very much on the agenda.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:21:05] And this is a time where all of these environmental groups and foundations are staffed by young and middle aged professionals, who all came up during Paul Ehrlich's 60s and 70s. And for all of these people, you.
Frances Kissling: [00:21:17] Know, yeah, you know, the sky is going to fall and overpopulation is the problem. This is a deeply held belief stemming from the 60s.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:21:29] So these [00:21:30] environmental groups arrived all geared up to talk about human population growth. And instead of being the thought leaders at this conference, they were being attacked on all sides for their stance on overpopulation. The ground had shifted beneath them.
Frances Kissling: [00:21:46] Well, I remember one woman. I'm trying to remember who she worked for. She worked for one of the big environmental organizations who was a feminist and who who worked in the feminist with us in the feminist tents. And I remember her weeping. Weeping [00:22:00] when she suddenly found that she was not welcome with other feminists because of the positions of her organization on the link between environmental degradation and population size and growth.
Justine Paradis: [00:22:25] I don't I don't really get what they're saying, that population growth has no impact at all.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:22:29] Well, I mean, [00:22:30] if we go back to the formula, impact equals population times affluence, times technology. These women were saying, hey, global elite, why are you so focused on the P in that equation? The population? Why not go after the A? The affluence. Like if rich people are the ones causing proportionally more impact, why not start with reducing their impact?
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:22:49] I get that, yeah. Like why wouldn't you? I mean, it makes sense though, right?
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:22:52] Well, it's sort of like I mean, I think if you're coming from a certain place, you it's obvious that you'd start with the A, but [00:23:00] if you're coming from another place.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:23:01] If you're coming from the A, let's take a look at the population.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:23:04] Right.
Justine Paradis: [00:23:04] Yeah. It feels like there's, there's kind of that that requires questioning what you have. Right. So so there's a really scary, scary thing that lies in the affluence question.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:23:15] And what happened was two years later, in 1994, there was another U.N. conference in Cairo. This one explicitly focused on population. Basically, how was the world going to address population growth moving forward? And guess what?
Frances Kissling: [00:23:29] By the time [00:23:30] of Cairo, a number of the environmental groups did not go to the conference. And I don't think very many of those groups have population or family planning programs to this day.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:23:45] And what would you attribute that to? I mean, is it just sort of like, was it--?
Frances Kissling: [00:23:48] It was a pain in the neck!
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:23:52] What was created at that 1994 meeting in Cairo was a huge shift in how the international community approached this problem. [00:24:00] All of the policies became about voluntary access to family planning, what's called a rights based approach. So you can encourage people to use family planning if they want it, and you can make it available to them. But any other type of of coercive policy.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:24:18] One baby policy.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:24:19] One baby policies.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:24:21] Maybe that's not...
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:24:22] Maybe not a great way to go. And again, the environmental movement is big and diverse. So you can't say that everyone checked out, [00:24:30] but a whole lot of big American groups were like, we're getting burned on this. It's not worth it. And it was immediately after that decision that the international community righted its ship on population policy. And both Frances Kissling and Derek Hoff think the backlash resulted in something else too.
Frances Kissling: [00:24:49] The United Nations got the message that it was politically incorrect to talk about population and a taboo [00:25:00] set in. So if you look at, say, for example, the sustainability development goals, there's almost no mention of population in the goals.
Derek Hoff: [00:25:10] It's absolutely become a taboo. You can at best tiptoe around it in the most gentle terms, but you can never go so far as to say things like, we need to take steps to move toward population stabilization.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:25:24] And this really sets the stage for where things are today. There are folks like Francis and Derek who think [00:25:30] that the backlash was an overcorrection, but not everyone thinks so. Dorceta Taylor, for instance, when I reached out to her, rejected the idea that there's a taboo, and she told me that she almost didn't call me back.
Dorceta Taylor: [00:25:41] Yeah, it's because of how you framed your story. Because I almost didn't respond to you either. I was at my cottage vacationing. That's where I was. And I was thinking, who is this and why do I need to go talk about population?
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:25:53] Her argument is that we are still talking about population. We're just doing it in a more nuanced and sensitive way, a way [00:26:00] that takes into consideration all this fraught history, like the problematic rhetoric that has become racialized around it.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:26:08] Like that's that's essentially where it's coming from, though, you know, like it is racialized.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:26:12] Well, so this is what I think is so fascinating about this, because if you go back through all the history, every time we've had one of these swells in anxiety about population, it has always been tied to concern about outgroups. So is it even possible to talk about population [00:26:30] without without being roped into that long history, or by associating yourself with this, with this debate? Are you de facto referencing all of that history?
Justine Paradis: [00:26:45] So some people would say: even with the best of intentions, there's no way to talk about this?
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:26:53] Right. Or at least that you can try to talk about it without referencing this history. But your opponents will weaponize this history against you, which [00:27:00] is another argument you see. There's this article which we can link to in the show notes that was written by David Roberts from Vox, who's one of the internet's most prolific writers about climate change. And he argued that if you talk about global population, it's just going to come back in your face so you can you can work on it without saying the word population. And it's an interesting thing to think about, because if you accept that you can do this work without talking about the environment at all, then it's really groups like [00:27:30] Planned Parenthood or other organizations that are working to expand access to contraceptives that are that are mostly doing this.
Justine Paradis: [00:27:38] Well, it's really interesting that you say that because one of my takeaways from that article was that he referenced the Drawdown Project, which was the study that quantifies how much carbon different policies can save. So like what are the best ways to really combat climate change. And there was this conclusion of that study that like the number one thing that you can do is family planning and the education of girls, which he calls the "female empowerment package." [00:28:00] David Roberts does, which I just think sounds like some sort of like airline hotel deal or something like educate girls and family planning, all for the cheap price of 120 gigatons of carbon. But yeah, like you don't need to say population. You can just say, oh, access to contraception. And is that a problem that we just decide to speak in those terms?
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:28:22] I've, like, every 15 minutes when I write and think about this, I go back and forth. What I can tell you is that I did talk to these two people who do think [00:28:30] that our avoidance of the term causes problems. So here's Frances Kissling again.
Frances Kissling: [00:28:34] I've had stories told to me. There's a marine biologist who wrote an article about the fact that in the research he is doing on coral reefs, one of the major effects on the destruction of coral reefs is human population. But his bosses don't want him to mention that a professor that I know who's an environmental ethicist [00:29:00] was filling in was applying for a grant. She wanted to include population and population ethics in her proposal. Her university told her not to do that. So the political taboo has affected the scientific and the policy community in ways that are not good.
Justine Paradis: [00:29:25] Like I kind of see saying, you know, if you're if you're creating the conditions in which an [00:29:30] academic debate has to speak in euphemism or talk around something, or there's like a fear, it just it limits the thought. It limits the creativity. It limits the sort of feeling of safety in a discussion.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:29:42] But at the same time, if bringing up population is going to make other people feel unsafe because they don't like where you're going because of this history.
Justine Paradis: [00:29:50] Right. And the intellectual freedom argument is wielded in really nasty ways, as we can see. You know, what's the problem? They just are just ideas. But again, I think that's where you can't [00:30:00] ignore eugenics, right? Because those ideas were used to justify the Holocaust and they're pretty dangerous. I thought I knew how I was going to come down on this. Maybe I still think that as long as we're able to work within this rights based frame and say that women everywhere should be able to just get educated and decide how many children they want. Because am I right that that's what leads to lower birth rates?
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:30:22] Yeah. I mean, the magic words are demographic transition. So when women go to school and get jobs and aren't [00:30:30] at home, affluence rises, family sizes get smaller. And that is what has happened in basically all the countries that have have done it.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:30:37] Well, there you go. Population bomb diffused.
Justine Paradis: [00:30:40] Bam.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:30:41] Well, but I mean, the people who are worried about it though, they're basically saying that's not happening fast enough and that you're not going to like the way the world looks with 11 billion people in it.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:30:52] But but even here, it's like, what is the conversation? Is the conversation that there are too many human beings? Or is the conversation [00:31:00] that we do not have enough resources to support life?
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:31:04] Well, that and that is the question. Right. And and I think the answer is that it depends on how we live, because there's this really crazy fact, which is that we already produce enough grain to feed 11 billion people right now, today. But between food waste and feeding grain to cows, which we then eat, the UN estimates that will still need to produce 40% more food than we do today by 2050. So. So [00:31:30] for one, our lifestyle really does matter. But but also it's not just about civilization surviving, but but also at what cost? Like as an extreme thought experiment, what if feeding that many people meant covering every square inch of the world with agriculture and not leaving space for wildlife?
Justine Paradis: [00:31:49] What would a global summit that in good faith that would really what would that really look like? They were like, all right, we're going to create Starship Federation global agreement that we all will live in peace [00:32:00] and and make a decision together about like, what are these different options for quality of life for human beings? We're not close to that.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:32:07] Right? Yeah.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:32:15] Okay, so now we've set the stage. The baby boom and better medical care led to longer life spans that got demographers freaked out about population growth. Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb and brought that freak out to the masses and freaked out. Politicians around [00:32:30] the world created abusive policies that caused a backlash, and made it so that some of the biggest groups are now very careful about how they talk about population. But while all this talk about population through the 60s and 70s and 80s created a backlash, it also created a whole generation of people who were convinced that human population was the problem. And that's the backdrop for the story that we're going to tell next.
Heidi Beirich: [00:32:55] I at the time was a researcher on staff. Right. I'd only been at the center for a couple [00:33:00] of years.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:33:00] This is Heidi Beirich, who works at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is a nonprofit that has a history of taking legal action against white supremacist groups.
Heidi Beirich: [00:33:09] And I was monitoring the publications of anti-immigrant groups.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:33:12] And she was reading one called The Social Contract.
Heidi Beirich: [00:33:15] And there was an ad in the Social Contract. It was like a quarter page ad, if I'm remembering correctly, that implored the readers of this anti-immigrant publication to join the Sierra Club and influence the board vote. [00:33:30]
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:33:30] The Sierra Club, if you don't know, is one of the nation's oldest environmental groups. It has chapters in almost every state. So what goes through your head when you see something like that?
Heidi Beirich: [00:33:38] Well, I was like, what the hell is this? Right? You know, like it was the last place in the world that I expected to see somebody recruiting for the Sierra Club. Right. The people who read the Social Contract spend all day long talking about how immigrants are criminals and invading the country. And this is the not this isn't like an environmentalist type publication.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:33:59] So [00:34:00] Heidi started to dig into this, and what she found is that there was a battle underway for the soul of the Sierra Club. And at the center of that battle was this fight, the fight about how to talk about population. And that's what we're going to talk about next time.
[00:34:26] Outside In was produced this week by me, Sam Evans-brown with help from Hannah McCarthy, [00:34:30] Justine Paradis, Taylor Quimby and Jimmy Gutierrez. Erika Janik is our executive producer. Maureen McMurray is director of directions. There's more to this story coming out in two weeks, so if there's something you expected to hear but didn't. Please stick with us. And it is a complicated topic. So if you've got something you want to say, come to our Facebook group and let's talk about it. Music. In this episode by Komiku, Jason Leonard, Blue Dot Sessions, and Podington bear. Our theme music is by Brake Master Cylinder. Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire [00:35:00] Public Radio.
Audio Transcript: So Over Population, Part 2
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:00:00] Hey there listener. This is a two part story, so if you're hearing this one without having heard the first of our stories about the politics of population, you should really go back and listen to that one. It's got a ton of historical context that really helps to understand this episode. Okay. Have fun. Justine Paradis.
Justine Paradis: [00:00:20] Hi!
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:00:20] Jimmy Gutierrez.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:00:21] Yo.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:00:23] So I left you all in a bit of a cliffhanger at the end of the last episode.
Justine Paradis: [00:00:27] Right there was. There was about. There was [00:00:30] about to be a takeover, a mutiny.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:00:32] All right, let's start with Ben Zuckerman. He was born in the 40s. And I've heard him described as a red diaper baby.
Justine Paradis: [00:00:39] What? What does this mean? I feel like it can't mean what I think it means.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:00:43] Like, his parents were communists, and they raised him as a communist from the time that he was in diapers.
Ben Zuckerman: [00:00:48] My family was definitely very left wing, but we were also very involved in just general, you know, liberal causes. My, my sister Ellen was a Freedom rider. [00:01:00] She marched with Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965. I'm older than Ellen. In 1959, I was on the second ever civil rights march in Washington, D.C. Harry, this is before Martin Luther King. This Harry Belafonte was was the big celebrity on our march.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:01:20] That was when he was 15 years old, which, incidentally, is also the year he graduated from high school. Graduated early.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:01:26] Wow.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:01:26] He went on to MIT, studied physics, aeronautics [00:01:30] and astronautics, and then went on to Harvard. Got a PhD in astronomy.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:01:34] Real genius kid over here.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:01:36] Well, hard sciences for sure. And to hear him tell it from a very early age, he considered himself an environmentalist.
Ben Zuckerman: [00:01:41] When I was a teenager in the 1950s, I realized that American women were having many babies. I think the typical family size was about three and a half children or so per woman, which indicated that the United States was going [00:02:00] to undergo a huge population explosion if the fertility of American women stayed as high as it was during the 1950s. And I felt that even then, it seemed to me the US was populated enough.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:02:16] Ben graduates, moves to California, has a job teaching at UCLA. And then in 1969, as the environmental movement is getting into full swing, he joins the Sierra Club. Do we need a refresher on the Sierra Club?
Justine Paradis: [00:02:28] It's like the biggest and oldest, [00:02:30] right?
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:02:30] Biggest sort of depends on what you mean. It's not the biggest in terms of budget, but it's very grassroots. There are local chapters all over the place. So old school Western environmentalism, the mountains are calling and I must go. Recently they've had this thing called the Beyond Coal campaign, where they've hired lawyers to go out and get all these coal plants shut down. So they're big, they're effective. They have a long history.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:02:52] I'm nodding. You can't hear that, listener, but I'm nodding.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:02:55] And for decades, Ben wasn't really involved in the Sierra Club. [00:03:00] He just sent in his check. That is until 1996.
Ben Zuckerman: [00:03:04] But then in the mid 1990s, the Sierra Club board of directors took took a position to essentially not address U.S population growth.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:03:19] Ben actually slightly mischaracterized the Sierra Club vote. Their the decision they made was to take no position to declare themselves formally neutral on [00:03:30] U.S immigration policy.
Ben Zuckerman: [00:03:32] And I found that a tremendously anti-environmental. And so two other Sierra Club members and I got together and we founded an internal Sierra Club organization called Sierrans for U.S Population Stabilization.
Justine Paradis: [00:03:50] I just I just don't understand why is immigration policy coming up in a population discussion, like, because population is a global problem. What does immigration have to do with it?
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:03:59] That we [00:04:00] will get to that question. But Ben's group, the Sierrans for US Population Stabilization started to attract attention and the people who supported them came from all over the political spectrum, including some figures who had some, shall we say, more troubling ideas.
Heidi Beirich: [00:04:16] Nobody in the Sierra Club seems to understand that this is even happening, right? It was almost like a sleeper campaign.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:04:22] That's Heidi Beirich, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center, and back then she was working to track white supremacists. Part of her job was to read a [00:04:30] bunch of anti-immigrant and nativist newsletters. And as she was reading these pretty fringy publications, she noticed these ads that were urging people to join the Sierra Club.
Heidi Beirich: [00:04:42] Well, I was like, what the hell is this? Why? You know, like it was the last place in the world that I expected to see somebody recruiting for the Sierra Club.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:05:01] This [00:05:00] is Outside/In, a show about the natural world and how we use it. Today is the second in our two part series on the politics of population. In this episode, we're digging into the story of how around the turn of the millennium, population got all tangled up in immigration in one vote at the Sierra Club, and how that ugly fight represents a pivot point, a transition from the environmental politics of the 70s and 80s to the environmental politics of today.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:05:39] So [00:05:30] can we just take a quick stab at summarizing the takeaway from last episode?
Justine Paradis: [00:05:44] Why don't you take a quick stab at summarizing the last episode?
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:05:48] I'm not for that.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:05:49] I would say that the environmental movement got caught up in a particularly widespread flare of population anxiety, and because of their white, affluent roots. [00:06:00]
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:06:00] Cough, racism, cough.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:06:01] The solutions that they proposed were all directed at black and brown people and women's bodies. And then they, and then they got called out, and...
Justine Paradis: [00:06:12] Right, and then everyone in policy circles at this point just talks about it by promoting female empowerment and women's education and reproductive choice, which is great. You know?
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:06:22] Before we continue the story, I think a lot of people who wish that we were still explicitly talking about, quote, overpopulation, [00:06:30] unquote, and probably Ben Zuckerman fits into this category. I think a lot of these people believe that more than just not talking about it, we're not dealing with it either. The environmentalists are shirking their their duty to protect the planet. But having considered the evidence, I don't think we can say that's true. People are still actively working to limit population growth. For starters, there's a whole bunch of organizations that are working to give women access to health care and contraception in countries that have really [00:07:00] high birth rates. And some of these are even American organizations. Okay.
Munira Bashir: [00:07:03] Okay, so my name is Munira Bashir. Um, I'm the Kenya country director for the Nature Conservancy in based in Nairobi, Kenya.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:07:12] The Nature Conservancy is probably the world's biggest environmental NGO. Here in the US. Its budget is three times bigger than the next biggest NGO. So and when I asked to be put in touch with somebody who is working on population issues, the US based public relations person said no, no, no, [00:07:30] we don't, we don't actually do that. But then when she got me in touch with Munira, Munira was like, yeah, we work on women's issues, but population growth is a top ten concern for us here.
Munira Bashir: [00:07:40] There is limited land. The population is growing at a, at a high rate. And where will all these people live? How are they? How is the country going to feed them?
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:07:50] So there are still tons of organizations working on these little ones, big ones. And of course one particularly big one.
Arthur Erken: [00:07:57] I am Arthur Erken. I'm the director [00:08:00] of communications and strategic partnerships at the United Nations Population Fund, UNFPA.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:08:06] The United Nations. Globally, countries around the world give around $9 billion a year to support women's reproductive health and family planning spread among various agencies. Arthur Erken's program gets about 10% of that and estimates it helps around 12 million women prevent unintended pregnancies a year.
Arthur Erken: [00:08:21] I think what we see in Europe, there is still broad support for these activities across a broad political spectrum.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:08:28] What's more, American [00:08:30] environmental groups are actually talking about population.
Stephanie Feldstein: [00:08:33] And we do this in a number of ways. Our most well known is our creative media, such as our endangered species condoms.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:08:39] Wait, what did she say?
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:08:40] Endangered species condoms.
Justine Paradis: [00:08:42] So many questions.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:08:45] I've never heard those words together before.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:08:47] That is Stephanie Feldstein. She's with the center for Biological Diversity, which works mostly using the Endangered Species Act, suing people who are infringing on endangered species habitat.
Stephanie Feldstein: [00:08:58] We have volunteers that give [00:09:00] about 100,000 of these away every single year all across the country. And these are condoms that come in colorful packages with wildlife art on them. And sayings like, "wrap with care, save the polar bear."
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:09:12] "Wrap with care, save the polar bear." "When you're feeling tender, think of the hellbender." "Before it gets any hotter, remember the sea otter." And we've had two years in a row now of record low birth rates in the US, below replacement level. So the [00:09:30] idea that people aren't working on this question at best, I think it could be argued that nobody's making it a big enough priority. But really, it feels to me like this just comes down to why aren't people still using the word overpopulation?
Michelle Nijhuis: [00:09:42] Yeah, I mean, it goes back to those, those emails that that you and I often get that in so many words say, gotcha. You know, you haven't used the word population, therefore you're avoiding the issue.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:09:54] This is Michelle Nijhuis, a journalist out West who has gotten the same kind of emails that I always get. [00:10:00] She's actually writing a book right now about the history of the conservation movement.
Michelle Nijhuis: [00:10:03] It kind of reminds me of the fight that the Trump campaign had, where they were trying to shame the Obama administration for not using the words radical Islamic terrorism.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:10:14] Michelle says environmental groups know about the history with population that we laid out in the last episode, and they're just being a little more sensitive. They say.
Michelle Nijhuis: [00:10:23] You know, we're not using those words for a reason. We're not using those words because we don't want to alienate people who [00:10:30] very much want to help us.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:10:33] Remember last episode in the early 90s at the UN conference on the Environment in Rio, environmentalists were forced to reckon with the coercive population programs that had resulted from the doomist rhetoric of the 60s and 70s. And then, as they're trying to be more careful around this issue in the late 90s and the early aughts, along comes Ben Zuckerman, who's mounting a campaign to get the Sierra Club to weigh in on what he sees as the big problem, [00:11:00] specifically US population growth fueled by immigrants.
Ben Zuckerman: [00:11:05] Thankfully, the fertility rate has come down. To replacement level were somewhat below, but because there's so much immigration from abroad, the US population still continues to grow rapidly.
Justine Paradis: [00:11:24] I just, I don't understand why our immigration and population the same topic?
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:11:28] Yeah. I mean, there are two pieces. One [00:11:30] of the things that he says is, hey, I'm an American and I can only affect American policies.
Justine Paradis: [00:11:36] But I guess even besides, like the racial elements of this discussion, how are you addressing population by addressing immigration? Like population is a global problem. Where does it matter where the people are?
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:11:47] And and not only that, like if people move to America and sort of become part of the American economy, the forces of demographic transition will probably mean they'll have fewer babies.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:11:56] Exactly.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:11:57] Which is what we've seen. So Hispanic birth rates are the fastest [00:12:00] to fall in the US. There's like a 26% drop in Hispanic birth rates over the last ten years, faster than any other demographic group. But the second piece is about the different impact that members of different economies have. So he says, we already consume too much. We have the highest per capita carbon emissions. We eat more meat than any other country in the world. So it's like they're already too many Americans. And and maybe we should just have fewer Americans.
Justine Paradis: [00:12:26] Um, fair.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:12:27] Yeah. Why not? The problem [00:12:30] with that is, though, is like it it cements in place the inequality that already exists everywhere else. Like, assuming this is a solution to human impact, is also assuming that the rest of the world is never going to achieve our level of affluence.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:12:44] Yeah, right. And I think, I think Ben would say that he believes Americans do need to consume less, but generally he agrees that the rest of the world can't consume like we do.
Ben Zuckerman: [00:12:53] I mean, if China ever achieves the same per capita level of affluence as the United States does, the whole biosphere will be [00:13:00] destroyed. Because there are four times as many people in China as there are in the United States. So there is no way that these other countries can ever come up to the level of affluence of the United States.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:13:18] Maybe you agree with Ben. Or maybe you think that asserting that poor people all over the world can't have what we have is just another problematic position in a long line of problematic positions? [00:13:30] Either way, when Ben Zuckerman first launched his insurgent campaign against the Sierra Club establishment, members of the Sierra Club were sympathetic to his ideas. And in 2002, when he first ran for the board, he was the top vote getter.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:13:43] This guy?
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:13:43] Yes. And then the next year, two others made it onto the board, who were supported by the Sierra for US Population Stabilization. SUPS. If you want to shorten it. One of them was a guy named Paul Watson, who's kind of famous. Did you ever hear about Whale Wars? Animal [00:14:00] Planet show?
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:14:02] Do you have a clip for us?
Paul Watson show: [00:14:03] That stands for everything I hate. Killing innocent animals. It's up to us to stop them.
Justine Paradis: [00:14:11] Is this like a Greenpeace thing?
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:14:13] So Paul Watson was a co-founder of Greenpeace, but left because it wasn't extreme enough. They were not willing to go far enough in his mind.
Justine Paradis: [00:14:21] Okay.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:14:21] I interviewed Paul as well, and my takeaway was this crew wasn't some sleeper cell organized from above by a mastermind in UCLA. [00:14:30] Paul says that he decided to run for the board after debate that he had on stage with Carl Pope, who was the head of the Sierra Club at the time.
Paul Watson: [00:14:38] A question was asked, you know, how can one person make a difference? And Carl said, well, all we really have to do is talk to our neighbor. If everybody just talk to our neighbor, that would change things in the world. And I remember saying, what am I up on the stage here with Mr. Rogers or something? You know? It's not that simple.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:14:57] But it sounds like though you wanted to run on your own [00:15:00] volition. So this idea that Ben was like, you know, in charge of some sort of movement is maybe an oversimplification.
Paul Watson: [00:15:07] No, Ben wasn't in charge of any movement. He was representing a position. You know, we had support for that position from numerous people.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:15:15] And according to both Ben and Paul, there were a lot of folks who supported them. So David Brower founded the anti-nuclear group Friends of the Earth. Gaylord Nelson organized the first Earth Day. Stewart Udall. E.O. Wilson. This list actually [00:15:30] goes on for a really long time.
Justine Paradis: [00:15:31] Well, they're like. Well, they're kind of big. These are all big names.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:15:34] Yeah,I've heard I've heard of those people.
Justine Paradis: [00:15:35] Yeah.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:15:36] And this position, plain and simple, according to these two, is that if you want to stabilize the US population, you have to deal with immigration.
Paul Watson: [00:15:42] The focus was not on immigration alone. The focus was right across the board on ways to deal with this. Immigration was just one of the issues. But think what the bottom line was this that the US should come up with a policy that would maintain population stabilization. [00:16:00] So it wouldn't grow. And whatever contributed to the increase was what was to be addressed. Nobody was saying, shut the borders and not allow any immigrants to come in. I mean, what we're saying is that the immigration should be consistent with keeping stabilization.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:16:16] It is worth noting that these guys also believe that the Sierra Club was in the pocket of neoliberal capitalists on this issue. This West Coast hedge fund billionaire had given $100 million to the club around this same time, and it later came out that he told the [00:16:30] club that they'd never get a penny from him if they voted to oppose immigration. So as the 2004 board election rolls around, there are three Sierrans for US population Stabilization backed candidates on the board already, and another three endorsed candidates were running. If all six of them made it on to the 15 person board, they would have been able to make a coalition with some other Sierra Club malcontents that were already on the board and make a majority. They would have been able to overrule the Sierra Club establishment.
Ben Zuckerman: [00:16:57] Well, this completely terrified the establishment. [00:17:00] They pulled out all stops to destroy us.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:17:04] We'll hear that story after the break.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:17:15] So as we're coming into the 2004 Sierra Club board election, that's when Heidi Burack with the Southern Poverty Law Center enters the story. She had been monitoring this publication, called The Social Contract, because it's published by someone named John Tanton. [00:17:30] Heidi had been following him for years because of his close ties with overtly racist people, and she noticed these ads in the Social Contract, urging the readers to join the Sierra Club to support Ben Zuckerman and the candidates he was endorsing. So when Heidi sees these ads, she's like a racists are being told to join the Sierra Club and vote for these candidates. This seems like some sort of coordinated racist takeover.
Heidi Beirich: [00:17:54] Nobody in the Sierra Club seems to understand that this is even happening, right? It was almost like a sleeper campaign, and this was [00:18:00] obviously far before, you know, you had the Twitter and you had Facebook and all these kinds of things where you could make a stink over something. So we were using more traditional means, like reaching out to the press. And we did something that we've we'd never done before and haven't done since, which was to have our co-founder, Morris Dees, run for the Sierra Club board. You know, we had to scramble to get him on the ballot. And if I'm remembering correctly, he was allowed to make about a 300 word statement in this pamphlet that everybody who's a member of the Sierra [00:18:30] Club gets. And what we did was, you know, Morris basically said, "Don't vote for me, right. I don't want to be on the board of the Sierra Club. I'm no expert on environmentalism, but don't vote for these other people."
Justine Paradis: [00:18:43] The Southern Poverty Law Center planted a candidate?
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:18:46] To use the candidate statement to try to discredit these other candidates.
Justine Paradis: [00:18:52] That is bonkers.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:18:52] This story is wild.
Justine Paradis: [00:18:53] So is this really a racist takeover of the Sierra Club?
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:18:59] Well, all three of these candidates [00:19:00] were in favor of somehow limiting immigration to the United States, but all of them took great offense in the press when they were painted with the same brush as these blogs and newsletters that were promoting their cause. And as Ben points out, they had some serious pedigree.
Ben Zuckerman: [00:19:14] Here's something that amazed me, Sam, about the 2004 election. Here. The Sierra Club membership had a chance to have on the board of directors, a three time Democratic governor of the state of Colorado. [00:19:30]
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:19:30] A guy named Richard Lamm.
Ben Zuckerman: [00:19:31] Frank Morris, a African-American leader in Congress.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:19:37] Co-founder of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Ben Zuckerman: [00:19:39] And David Pimentel, one of the outstanding agricultural scientists in the United States, a professor at Cornell University. These three gentlemen were all willing to spend the time at some of these interminable Sierra Club board meetings in order to try and help the Sierra Club be more effective, [00:20:00] and they got completely demonized and slandered.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:20:03] This move by the SPLC resulted in a lot of press coverage, and unsurprisingly, Ben Zuckerman was absolutely infuriated and still is.
Ben Zuckerman: [00:20:12] Sam, it's unfortunate that you even mentioned the Southern Poverty Law Center. They are a political organization that has own agenda.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:20:23] He completely denies that there's any sort of conspiracy.
Ben Zuckerman: [00:20:26] Your mention of John Tanton and the [00:20:30] Sierra Club is a perfect example of how they distort the truth. John Tanton had nothing to do with SUPS. He never was a member of SUPS. For all I know, he was not even a member of the Sierra Club during the decade or so that Sus was active.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:20:50] I have to say I do believe him when he says that there isn't any conspiracy. The idea that some UCLA professor was able to pull together a [00:21:00] co-founder of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Whale Wars guy just doesn't seem credible. It seems much more likely to me that this anti-immigrant John Tanton saw something that he liked that was happening and jumped on the bandwagon. And and this part is really hard because I didn't talk to all the candidates who ran, and I don't want to paint them with one brush, but you can see how some of their rhetoric could attract people like John Tanton. I want to play you one piece of tape. And this is from Richard Lamm, who was the former governor of Colorado, [00:21:30] Democrat. He gave this speech that you're about to hear in 2003 before the election, but it didn't become public until after the election.
Richard Lamm: [00:21:37] I would like to share with you my plan to destroy America. Number one, I'd make it a bilingual, bicultural country. History shows us that no bilingual, bicultural country lives at peace with itself. My second part of my plan would be to invent something called multiculturalism. Those would be two parts. Number one, I would say that all cultures are created equal. [00:22:00] It wouldn't be make no difference and make it impossible to talk about such things as culture. And the second one is that I would really try very hard to make people continue their cultural identity. I would replace the melting pot with the salad bowl.
Justine Paradis: [00:22:17] Wait, so. So this guy was running for the board of the Sierra Club?
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:22:22] That is crazy.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:22:24] Well, in particular, because it's factually wrong, right? Like, let's Google some some bilingual countries [00:22:30] like Luxembourg, Switzerland, Singapore, like, these are places that are doing fine.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:22:35] The US.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:22:37] Right, the US, Canada.
Justine Paradis: [00:22:39] How does Ben Zuckerman feel about being on the same slate as this, this person?
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:22:44] Well, I'd say, Ben, like this type of rhetoric isn't his cup of tea, but...
Ben Zuckerman: [00:22:50] But here's here's one of my basic philosophies of life, which I think applies in this case. One should not stop doing the right [00:23:00] thing for the right reasons, just because somebody else is doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. And if there are some racists or whatnot who are who are against immigration because they don't want more people of color coming to the United States, there's nothing at all I can do about that.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:23:33] So [00:23:30] what I've been trying to do in these episodes is show that debates don't occur in a cultural or historical vacuum. Whatever Ben's reasons for wanting to limit immigration or talk about population more generally, leave those aside. But the decision to focus on this subject does come with this incredible baggage that you just can't ignore. And I'm also trying to argue that for the environmental [00:24:00] movement, this vote in the Sierra Club, it signals a turn towards a moment of reckoning. Are we going to finally face this history? For instance, we talked about the forced sterilizations in the 70s in the last episode. But really, it goes way deeper than that. And to be clear, again, there have been racist people all over American society. So it's not like these early conservationists you're going to hear about were the only bigots. But there were some real standouts.
Michelle Nijhuis: [00:24:28] Madison Grant may [00:24:30] be the most notorious example. He helped found the Bronx Zoo, and he also was a was an important member of the Save the Redwoods League in California. You know, he wrote a book called The Passing of the Great Race, which Hitler praised as his quote unquote, Bible.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:24:48] Oh my gosh.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:24:49] That's Michelle Nijhuis again. She actually covered this battle at the Sierra Club as a journalist. There was also a guy named William Vogt whose book, The Road to Survival, was this pre-Population [00:25:00] Bomb, Malthusian text that advocated for eugenics as a solution to the alleged overpopulation problem.
Michelle Nijhuis: [00:25:06] So there have been these associations and it's and sometimes much more than associations. There have been very tight connections between conservation of other species and racism.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:25:22] These characters have intermittently been used by opponents to discredit environmentalists like, hey, look at these people who are foundational to American environmentalism. [00:25:30] You don't want to be associated with them, right? The Misanthropes, the Nazis, Hitler.
Michelle Nijhuis: [00:25:36] When this controversy erupted within the Sierra Club, you know, the Sierra Club was quite understandably concerned about reawakening that stereotype of environmentalists as being anti human. And then I'm sure that they were at some level aware of this history of racism within the conservation movement and aware that they [00:26:00] had made, you know, very sincere, I think, efforts to distance themselves from that history.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:26:05] So environmentalism is trying to represent all air breathers and water drinkers, but it sort of handicapped by its roots and its it's just recently come off being called out for having huge blind spots when talking about population control through the 70s and 80s. And now you've got a group of people running for the board of one of the country's oldest, biggest environmental nonprofits, people who want to limit immigration and who are attracting the support of some racist, anti-immigrant [00:26:30] newsletters and websites. What kind of reception do you think they'd get?
Michelle Nijhuis: [00:26:34] And the Sierra Club actually ended up putting a notice on the ballot that they sent out to members saying, you know, warning them that outside groups were trying to manipulate their opinion on this issue and were trying to manipulate the vote.
Heidi Beirich: [00:26:49] Well, Morris Dees was not elected to the board. And the candidates, the three candidates did not get elected either.
Michelle Nijhuis: [00:26:58] Yeah, they were defeated by quite a [00:27:00] large margin.
Heidi Beirich: [00:27:01] And they sued. Actually, those three candidates sued, saying that they were sort of submarined by the, Morris running for for a position and so on. That suit just ultimately went nowhere.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:27:19] So the mutiny was basically over. The next year, in 2005, the Sierra for US Population Stabilization crew that was already on the board, got the Sierra Club to vote on a different resolution [00:27:30] in favor of limiting immigration. But it too was soundly defeated. And so they finished out their terms or resigned. And that was that.
Justine Paradis: [00:27:37] All right. But you said at the beginning that this whole debate kind of represents a real shift in the capital E Environmentalism of the 70s versus now.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:27:47] Yes. And to prove that point, I called up.
Bill McKibben: [00:27:50] And at this point, black people in [clatter] I just dropped this phone. Hold [00:28:00] it up near enough....
Justine Paradis: [00:28:02] I like this person already.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:28:06] Bill McKibben.
Justine Paradis: [00:28:10] Eyyy!
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:28:10] He recorded himself on his iPhone and sent me the audio. It just felt like we need some comic relief in there.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:28:16] Appreciate it. Oh my God.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:28:18] So, Bill McKibben, cross-country ski enthusiast, wrote End of Nature, first, first book for regular folks about global warming. And he founded this climate change advocacy group, 350.org. But [00:28:30] also at the time of this Sierra Club battle, he wrote an article that said, you know, this Ben Zuckerman guy, at least he's got us talking about population again.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:28:39] Bill!
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:28:41] Did you did you go back and read the piece that you wrote in?
Bill McKibben: [00:28:44] Mhm.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:28:44] How did you feel about that when you read it over?
Bill McKibben: [00:28:46] I think I felt queasy about it. I think it made me feel sad because it was clear to me that myself, and probably a large number of other people, understood then [00:29:00] immigrants as simply a kind of abstract numerical quantity.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:29:05] Bill says he wrote this piece because he's friends with Ben's sister Ellen, the one that he mentioned at the beginning who was a Freedom Rider in the Civil Rights era.
Bill McKibben: [00:29:12] And Ellen called and said, my brother is not a racist. Would you say so? So I wrote what I wrote and promptly forgot about it. And I think everyone, as far as I can tell, no one actually read the piece either.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:29:25] And I think Bill kind of perfectly shows how environmentalism [00:29:30] is changing politically. So in 1999, he wrote this book called Maybe One, in which he talks about human impact associated with population growth, especially population growth in affluent countries. And maybe because of that, you should just have one kid in 2004. Even though this wasn't his idea initially, he was willing to write this piece about the battle for the Sierra Club, but now he's involved with 350.org, which is a very progressive organization that talks a lot about the disproportionate [00:30:00] impact that climate change has on poor people, people of color, people from third world countries. They're trying to pivot away from environmentalism's upper class European American beginnings, trying to embrace the lessons from the environmental justice movement, trying to be more inclusive.
Bill McKibben: [00:30:17] The old stereotype of environmentalists is that they're affluent white people. At this point, the best environmentalists in America are people of color and, above all, Hispanic Americans. [00:30:30] Every bit of polling shows that who cares about climate change? And not surprisingly, because that's who gets hammered first by climate change.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:30:39] The Sierra Club, when I called them about this story, they didn't want to talk about it. They didn't provide me with anyone to do an interview, but they did send me all of these articles and blog posts about work they're doing on gender equity and to help immigrants. All of these materials that show how they're trying to be good members of the Progressive Coalition, which is a move that I think a lot of environmental groups are either [00:31:00] making or pondering right now. And also in general, you see a lot of scholars and writers really wrestling with the problematic roots of their movement. I think as a whole, it's just a move away from the sort of, hey, don't blame me, I'm just doing the numbers and the numbers don't lie approach.
Bill McKibben: [00:31:18] I think the point is that doing the whole thing as a math problem just is stupid. I mean, I think it's like trying to solve climate change by, you know, each person [00:31:30] one by one, installing new light bulbs or something. What's needed is systemic change and that change in the direction of human solidarity.
Michelle Nijhuis: [00:31:41] The environmental movement, in order to have the effect that it wants to have in order to attract, you know, the number of people that it needs to attract in order for its ideas to prevail. It has to be pro-environment, and it has to be pro-human. It can be anti excessive human footprint, [00:32:00] but it can't be anti-human.
Jimmy Gutierrez: [00:32:02] Can I just take a moment to say, I don't know if this is going to get in, but just the fact like that we've been, we've and we're guilty of it too, is that we spent so much time talking about the equation in the first episode, right? And then for him to humanize it, talking about these are actual people, not a part of a numerical equation like is something that was, I don't think, like explicitly stated by anyone yet, which is like really [00:32:30] troubling. I do appreciate the fact that that someone has used humanizing language.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:32:36] Yeah.
Justine Paradis: [00:32:36] Yeah.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:32:49] Have you heard the term carrying capacity? Carrying capacity is how many organisms a given habitat can support. You hear it a lot in reference to species that we hunt like [00:33:00] deer and beaver and the like, and it's something that population scholars of all stripes have been trying to calculate for the number of humans on planet Earth for more than 100 years. And just as I was poking around looking for info for this story there. There are six papers that say the Earth can support only 2 billion people or fewer. So we're already over. And there are five that say we can support more than 100 billion people on the planet. So they're all over the map.
Joel Cohen: [00:33:27] People have used carrying capacity [00:33:30] as a political number.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:33:32] This is Joel Cohen, a demographer at Rockefeller University.
Joel Cohen: [00:33:35] The problem is a problem of poetry. The whole notion of carrying capacity is borrowed from wildlife management. But people are not wildlife. People change their interactions with the environment through knowledge and through their institutions and through their cultures.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:33:55] Joel thinks that it's impossible to figure out what the carrying capacity of Earth is, [00:34:00] unlike wildlife. We adapt, we innovate, we come up with solutions to our problems. And because of that, so far, every Malthusian prediction that has been made has been bested by our cleverness. But for now, the environmental movement seems to have settled on the fact that because of all of this history, it's very problematic to be anti human population. But it's still reasonable to be anti human impact. And so they focused on the ways that we can try to decouple [00:34:30] the scale of our impacts from the number of us out there. We can change our agriculture and our homes to use less land. We can change how we eat and how we make energy so as not to cook ourselves. But if that is our strategy, things really do have to change.
Joel Cohen: [00:34:45] I think it was Eisenhower who said: it's absolutely essential to plan and plans never work. But there is a world outside of human will. There is a, [00:35:00] an earth with oceans and crusts and atmospheres. And we can modify the atmosphere. We've done it. And we can raise the temperature, increase the acidity, and pollute the oceans. We're doing it. But if the ocean's warm water expands, that's a law of nature. And if [00:35:30] the ice in Antarctica and Greenland melts, the oceans are going to go up some more. This is the only place we've got to live, and we're not paying enough attention to the constraints on human wants imposed by the reality of the world we live in.
Sam Evans-Brown: [00:36:17] Outside/In [00:36:00] was produced this week by me, Sam Evans-Brown, with help from Hannah McCarthy, Justine Paradis, Taylor Quimby, and Jimmy Gutierrez. Erika Janik is our executive producer. Maureen McMurray is the director of Endangered Species Condoms as fun drive premiums. [00:36:30] Special thanks to NJPR's Josh Rogers, who was the voice of Thomas Malthus in the last episode and who I forgot to thank. And to everyone who spoke to me for this story, it's obviously a fraught topic. If you have thoughts or opinions about our treatment of this subject, we want to hear from you. You can typically find a lively discussion on our Facebook group. That's the one that you have to request permission to join. And of course you can at us on Twitter. I'm @SamEBNHPR [note: now @SamEBEnergy] and the whole crew is @outsideinradio. [00:37:00] Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions and Podington bear. Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.