Today the world celebrates Earth Day. Sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) since 1970, groups of people will gather around the world to tackle, as stipulated by the UN, environmental dangers, such as the production of plastics, safeguarding babies against microplastics, sustaining abortion, climate change, and last but not least, overpopulation.

Population alarmists claim that because of the continual increase of people in the world, the Earth will eventually be stripped of its useable resources and will outpace innovation and rates of production. According to the UN, the world’s population is more than three times larger than it was in the mid-twentieth century. The global human population reached 8 billion in mid-November 2022 from an estimated 2.5 billion people in 1950, adding 1 billion people since 2010 and 2 billion since 1998.

The world’s population is expected to increase by nearly 2 billion persons in the next thirty years, from the current 8 billion to 9.7 billion in 2050 and could peak at nearly 10.4 billion in the mid-2080s. As a result, it is argued that the standard of living will diminish with more poverty, more hunger, famine and starvation, water shortages, pestilence, war, and conflict over diminishing resources, the evisceration of wildlife habitats, and environmental catastrophes (i.e., global climate change). In the words of the conservative pundit Tucker Carlson: ‘Mass population growth makes life worse for pretty much everybody.’

The apocalyptic notion of overpopulation, which is taught in grade schools, instilled in centers of higher education, and pushed by NGOs,

has even drawn together conservative politicians with their left colleagues,

though for different motives. The latter sustain the pretext of saving the environment at all cost, even at the cost of human beings themselves. The former, instead, argue on the vitality of offsetting the growing fertility among immigrants with that of their decreasing indigenous population. In the US, for example, many hardline conservatives hold that population rates in the Global South are so out of control they are causing the present-day ecological crisis. In addition, in what tends to a baseless accusation, is that immigration from the South to the North is causing climate change.[1]

Just like the Aryan race Adolf Hitler promoted, the Malthusian doctrine is being linked to national and ecological purity. For example, as German right-wing politician Björn Höcke says:

‘The countries of Africa, they need German borders. The countries of Africa, they need the European borders in order to arrive at an ecologically sustainable demographic policy.’

The Malthusian Doctrine

The myth of doctrine of overpopulation was first presented in 1798 by an Anglican minister, Thomas Malthus, who in his publication An Essay on the Principle of Population, speculated that, under perfect economic conditions, humans reproduce exponentially while their ability to increase agricultural output increases only linearly at best.

Malthus held that overpopulation was the root of many ills in industrial European society, specifically poverty, malnutrition, and disease. This was a mathematical inevitability, for while resources tended to grow arithmetically, populations exhibit exponential growth. Therefore, if left unrestricted, human populations would continue to grow until they would become too large to be supported by the food grown on available agricultural land. In other words, humans would outpace their local carrying capacity, the capacity of ecosystems or societies to support the local population.

To counteract this, Malthus proposed ‘moral restraint’, that is, population control, like forced sterilization where necessary, as well as, criminal punishments for so-called unprepared parents who had more children than they could support, specifically the poor who were deemed too underdeveloped to contribute to society. One of the eventual consequences of the Malthusian doctrine was the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 enacted by the Whig-led British Parliament, which curtained assistance to the poor since it was believed that helping the impoverished only encourages them to have more children and thereby exacerbate poverty. Malthus went so far to say that towns should ‘court the return of the plague’ among the poor by making ‘the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses…[and] encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations.’

Naturally, Malthus was proven wrong, for the world survived. Yet the long-term effects of his doctrine have been draconian, to say the least.

Effects of the Malthusian Doctrine

In the early twentieth century, the Malthusian doctrine paved the way for eugenics and forced sterilization culminated in the United States after the Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell (1927), by a vote of 8 to 1, upheld a state’s right to forcibly sterilize a person considered unfit to procreate. Speaking for the majority, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. infamously opined: ‘Three generations of imbeciles are enough.’ The result was the sterilization of approximately 70,000 Americans.

The theory that not all races are the same and that the ‘bad’ races must die out to make room for the ‘good’ ones is something the National Socialists built upon when they took over the reins of government in Germany in 1933. The ‘bad’ races generally referred to  those who were poorer and darker.

Early proponents of this theory included Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood

who openly expressed racist beliefs, advanced a controversial Negro Project, which focused solely on the population control of the Black population. Neo-Malthusians eventually proposed the practice of abortion to control the growth of population.

Governments and NGOs continue to insist population control policies in order to control the number of children being born with the pretension that it is a protective measure to their national resources. Everyone of these policies have not just failed, but have been brutal, such as:

• China’s then one-child policy, where women were severely fined, arrested, or forcibly sterilized for exceeding the birth limit—they are now unsuccessfully pushing for their citizens to have more children.
• India’s sex-selective abortion where approximately 15.8 million girls have been eliminated since 1990 due to a cultural preference for boys—the government, in like manner like Beijing, wants to impose their own two-child policy.
• Latin America’s forced sterilization programs where women where arrested for being pregnant and their babies where aborted in unsanitary conditions.
• The UN’s ‘education programs’ that refuse aid to developing countries unless they accept contraception, abortion, and sterilization to prevent the false idea of population over-growth.

Debunking the Myth

In truth, the theory that the world will become dangerously overpopulated, and that a a result will annihilate the human race as we know it has never been true. The truth of the matter is that the total population has been shrinking since the 1960s.

While  the world population has more than doubled since then, the growth rate has been in decline. We are  actually facing the most fundamental shift to take place in modern human history, one of a pervasive and permanent low fertility and ageing population, and eventual depopulation.

Indeed, if fertility stays the same as it is today, by the turn the year 2100 China’s population, for example will be less than half of its current size—a loss of about 800 million people; South Korea’s will be down by 63 per cent; Poland’s and Japan’s by half; and Italy’s and Thailand’s by 44 per cent; Eastern Europe by 40 per cent. Even India the number of young people entering the workplace has already peaked. We are on track for there to be more people to reach age sixty than under the age of fourteen by mid-century. The UN itself has projected that by the beginning of the next century, the world population should plateau at about 10.4 billion people.

Further, those who panic about population that there are too many people using far too much land and consuming far too much food, wrongly hold that this is causing harmful emissions.

Emissions correlated much more tightly to GDP than population. In fact, fewer people do not necessarily equal to less emissions. If we see countries that are not densely populated, they can still produce high levels of per capita emissions (metric tons of CO2), such as Saudi Arabia (18.70), United Arab Emirates (21.79), and Qatar (35.59).

As Austin Ruse pointed out:

‘The population controllers continue to make their case, however. They still say the world will soon starve, and that we will soon run out of natural resources, and that the planet is running out of room. Anyone can test the theory, however. Next time you are in an airplane flying virtually anywhere in the world, even in the very populous United States, look down from on high and what you will see is a remarkably empty planet straining to be made a garden by more of us.’

^[1] Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism. London-New York, Verso, 2021, 172.

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