'Overpopulation' Is A Racist Trope. It's Time We Laid It To Rest
A new movie satirises the myth that climate change is a consequence of too many people. In the real world, our overpopulation obsession must be euthanised.
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“The United States is more concerned than any other country with spreading and imposing family planning in the farthest outposts. Not only the government, but the Rockefeller and the Ford foundations as well, have nightmares about millions of children advancing like locusts over the horizon from the third world. In our day this global offensive plays a well-defined role. Its aim is to justify the very unequal income distribution between countries and social classes, to convince the poor that poverty is the result of the children they don't avoid having, and to dam the rebellious advance of the masses”—Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America,1971.
Who among us has not, at one time or another, been a misanthrope? In my days as a brooding, melancholic teenager, like all other brooding, melancholic teenagers, I detested humanity in general and other teenagers in particular. There were, I thought, just too damn many people on this Hell of an Earth. And I was as alarmed as the next kid by Bad Religion’s song Ten in 2010, a 1996 punk number that warned about exploding population growth (the titular Ten stands, of course, for 10 billion people).
I was to grow out of my misanthropy, if not punk. But the belief that the Earth needs to shed a large proportion of its human residents persists within our culture, among both online weirdos and people who ought to know better.
The too many people trope is indulged in gluttonously in a new movie, Humane, directed by Caitlin Cronenberg, daughter of David. Humane’s premise is that all of Earth is undergoing an ecological catastrophe brought on by climate change, so 20% of the human population must be killed.
This dark comedy plays on our climate reality for its grim laughs. In the film, the entire international community has signed up to something called the “Athens Accords”, a mockery of the Paris Agreement, whereby all the nations of the world have pledged to exterminate 20% of their population via voluntary “enlistments”. But it’s not going so well. “We are severely behind our 20% pledge,” a professor tells an interviewer on the movie’s facsimile of CNN. “Not enough people are willing to enlist!”
In interviews, Caitlin Cronenberg has shown herself to be very sincerely concerned about about the threat of climate change. And yet, in its satirical meta-commentary, Humane appears almost to endorse the pronouncements of fossil fuel industry propagandists like Steve Milloy and Alex Epstein, who make a living claiming that cutting carbon emissions is a genocidal endeavour. The logic goes that, because fossil fuels helped enable the rapid expansion of populations from the Industrial Revolution onward, cutting their use must necessitate killing people. This ludicrous piece of concern-trolling is nonetheless seductive in its dumb-guy logic: doing x caused y, therefore stopping x must destroy y. And the thesis is leant no small amount of credence thanks to the many high profile “environmentalist” figures who have, indeed, taken up stances that could, fairly or not, be characterised as anti-human.
Take, for instance, the almost universally loved figure of David Attenborough.
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