The Environmental Impact of Overpopulation

The Ethics of Procreation

Trevor Hedberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781032236766
• eBook ISBN: 9781351037006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the link between population growth and environmental impact and explores the implications of this connection for the ethics of procreation.

In light of climate change, species extinctions, and other looming environmental crises, Trevor Hedberg argues that we have a collective moral duty to halt population growth to prevent environmental harms from escalating. This book assesses a variety of policies that could help us meet this moral duty, confronts the conflict between protecting the welfare of future people and upholding procreative freedom, evaluates the ethical dimensions of individual procreative decisions, and sketches the implications of population growth for issues like abortion and immigration. It is not a book of tidy solutions: Hedberg highlights some scenarios where nothing we can do will enable us to avoid treating some people unjustly. In such scenarios, the overall objective is to determine which of our available options will minimize the injustice that occurs.

This book will be of great interest to those studying environmental ethics, environmental policy, climate change, sustainability, and population policy.

Part I

Confronting the problem

1 The uncomfortable reality of rising numbers

As I write this sentence, our planet’s human population sits at about 7.8 billion people. A century ago we were only at 1.8 billion, and it took us all of human history until 1804 to reach 1 billion.¹ This unprecedented surge in the human population over the last century has resulted from a combination of significant technological advancements. Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccine, which was developed in 1796, helped to prevent 2–3 million annual deaths. Further developments in medicine increased life expectancy and reduced infant mortality rates. Advancements in agriculture also enabled us to feed larger groups of people. While these changes generally made human lives better, they also created conditions where our numbers could increase more rapidly than ever before.

Now, two decades into the twenty-first century, we face a series of moral challenges intertwined with our population size. The average global temperature is rising, and climate change threatens the welfare of present and future people alike. Species are rapidly going extinct, raising the specter of irreplaceable losses of beauty, biological knowledge, and environmental resources. Regional food and water shortages loom across the world. Population size in isolation does not necessarily cause any of these problems, but it contributes to all of them. We cannot address these issues adequately without considering the role that population size plays in their continuation.

Yet, while the importance of human numbers in these matters strikes some as obvious, not everyone shares that perception. Even those who care deeply about climate change, nonhuman animals, and the environment do not always view population growth as a central cause of our environmental problems or as something that we ought to address. Some are skeptical that global population will continue on its current upward trajectory for much longer (Pearce 2010; Bricker and Ibbitson 2019). Others believe that economic patterns entail that scarcities created by population growth are ultimately resolved (Simon 1996). Even among the environmentally conscientious, discussions of population are sometimes avoided because of their rhetorical challenges and worries about the fraught, morally unsettling history of previous population policies (Roberts 2018).

In the pages that follow, I will argue that these views are mistaken: population is a serious contributor to our environmental problems, we are morally obligated to pursue the swift deceleration of population growth, and there are morally permissible means of achieving this outcome – means that avoid the coercive measures employed in the past. The path to defending these conclusions starts with understanding our current circumstances. I begin by addressing the question of why population discussions have been so rare in the last three decades despite the topic’s importance. Once this background context is established, I highlight some important aspects of the book’s framework and outline how the remaining chapters will proceed.

Breaking the silence on population

While there has been an upswing in academic discussions of population growth recently (e.g., Clarke and Haraway 2018; Conly 2016; Coole 2018; Crist 2019; Rieder 2016), this trend was preceded by two decades of near silence on the subject, and even now, direct discussion of the topic in the political domain remains extremely rare. Mainstream media often ignores or understates the significance of population growth, and many environmental organizations and institutes – the Jane Goodall Institute, The Nature Conservancy, and the Rainforest Action Network among them – do not acknowledge the contribution of overpopulation to the environmental problems that they are trying to resolve (Shragg 2015, pp. 23–32). If population growth really is a noteworthy problem, then why did people stop talking about it in the 1990s even as global population continued to rise?

The retreat from the population question originated from a combination of factors (Campbell 2012). First, with few exceptions, fertility rates around the world have been declining since the 1960s. Even now, many nations are still above the threshold of replacement level fertility, which is about 2.1 births for woman, but a few decades ago, dropping fertility rates created the impression that the population problem was resolving itself. Moreover, as fertility was dropping, patterns of overconsumption started to become more visible, especially as concern about climate change grew. Developed nations have generally consumed far more energy and resources than developing nations, and as a result, they have been (and continue to be) the primary emitters of greenhouse gases.² The high-consumption lifestyles of those in wealthier nations have other powerful effects on the environment as well, such as pollution, deforestation, and biodiversity loss. These impacts are easier to see than the subtler effects of gradual population rise. Thus, the focus on reducing consumption has tended to eclipse concern about stabilizing and reducing population.

Declining fertility and a focus on reducing consumption were not the biggest factors, however. The most significant development in removing population growth from policy discourse occurred at the 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo, Egypt. ICPD, in contrast to previous population conferences held by the UN, emphasized the needs of women around the world. Prior to the conference, discussion of rising population and the connection between population growth and environmental destruction became politically incorrect because suggestions to stabilize or reduce population were perceived as disadvantageous to women. Recent history seemed to validate this perception: measures such as China’s one-child policy and coercive episodes of family planning in India appeared morally unacceptable. Conference attendees wanted to distance themselves from these policies, and this desire led to a new strategy for addressing population issues: family planning and all other health-related issues related to women were combined under the label “reproductive health.” While it was probably unintentional, the impression created by this change in language was that all family planning efforts prior to 1994 had been objectionably coercive. Those measures became associated with the derogatory label “population control” even though many family planning organizations established prior to ICPD made no efforts to limit or otherwise control fertility. Many of them aimed only at making family planning easier. Nevertheless, this false generalization has proven difficult to shake even decades later.

Martha Campbell (2012) highlights three other reasons that population discourse faded in the 1990s. For one, while these other developments were taking place, conservative think tanks and religious leaders opposed to abortion and family planning managed to reduce the attention being paid to population growth. The general strategy of these groups was to reinforce the notion that world population growth is at an end (Lutz, Sanderson, and Scherbov 2001). This idea has gained a foothold in the media and diminished the public’s concern for population growth.³ Additionally, the AIDS epidemic in Africa drew a lot of attention, and many believed that it would reduce population growth in the region significantly.⁴ Finally, classic demographic transition theory suggests that people have to be coaxed by changes in society to want a smaller family (Potts and Campbell 2005, pp. 180–181). According to demographic transition models, people are naturally inclined to have high birth rates until their societies develop from a pre-industrial to industrialized economic system. While this phenomenon has many exceptions, its general acceptance led people to believe that we cannot incentivize people in the developing world to have fewer children without unjust forms of persuasion or coercion.

Thus far, I have highlighted six different factors that contributed to avoiding discussion of population growth, but there is one more worth mentioning. Population growth tends to be associated with economic growth, and as I will discuss in later chapters, population shrinkage can lead to short-term economic challenges. Thus, at least in economics, population growth tends to be viewed in a positive light. Given that economic growth is a priority in many societies, political leaders are not always motivated to promote measures that could reduce birth rates.

We now have a fairly comprehensive account of why the population question has been neglected in recent decades. We should acknowledge that this neglect was in part motivated by sensible moral concerns. The unsettling history of coercive population policies cannot be ignored, and those mistakes must be avoided in the future. A further worry is that population policies will be racially inequitable in their application. Since the countries that have the highest birthrates are predominantly in Sub-Saharan Africa and other areas of the developing world, non-white populations would be the most affected by any policy placing restrictions on procreation. Some also worry that focusing on population’s contribution to environmental problems will shift the focus away from the high-consumption lifestyles of the wealthy. Since reducing the consumption rates of those in the wealthiest parts of the worlds will be an essential part of responding to our environmental problems, it is reasonable to keep that objective as a top moral priority.

Unfortunately, limiting discussion of population may have done more harm than good. Following ICPD, access to family planning options did not expand sufficiently to accommodate the increasing numbers of women who wanted them, and the term “reproductive health” was more difficult for governing bodies and the general public to understand and support than the narrower term “family planning” (Campbell 2012, pp. 47–48).⁵ Additionally, dismissing population growth created new problems for reducing overall consumption. The effects of population growth can be hard to detect, so people often fail to notice the ways that population growth undermines the efficacy of reducing consumption rates.⁶

To see how population growth can subtly undermine efforts to reduce total environmental impact, consider efforts to preserve rivers in the United States.⁷ During the first half of the twentieth century, thousands of dams were built across the United States. Once people realized that these dams caused considerable damage to local ecosystems, many tried to preserve the best remaining rivers in the nation. Demand for water was still rising, but instead of taking water from others or creating more dams to make additional water available, people tried to make more efficient use of the water that was already available. From 1980 to 1995, per capita use of water in the United States decreased by 20 percent (Jehl 2002). Their efforts to reduce consumption were successful, but those efforts were undone by rising population. The United States population grew by 16 percent during the same 15-year time period, so the progress toward solving the problem was negligible: the need for water was virtually as great in 1995 as it was in 1980 despite the reduction in the water consumption per person.

The moral of this short history lesson is that improvements to efficiency in our use of resources are solutions only to the extent that they outpace population growth. Reduced rates of consumption are only temporary solutions in the context of an ever-increasing population: if numbers continue to rise, then eventually new solutions will be needed. To reiterate an earlier point, there is no doubt that we must reduce our consumption rates to avoid perilous climate change and a host of other catastrophes, but reducing each person’s greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption, water use, and other resource consumption will not amount to sustainable living if population growth continues unchecked. Some even claim that we must ultimately reduce global population to about two billion to maintain an adequate to comfortable standard of living in the long term (Smail 1997; Foreman 2012). I will return to that estimate in the next chapter. For now, what matters is recognizing that we should not ignore the problem any longer. We have to assess what should be done to promote population stabilization and reduction if we are to adequately respond to the moral challenges that await us in the remainder of the century.

Moral principles and reflective equilibrium

Throughout this book, I will be making claims about what people should do (or ought to do) in various circumstances. The “should” in this context denotes a moral duty or obligation. This is the same usage that applies when we tell children that they should respect their neighbors or that they should not tell lies. We all have some experience making moral judgments, so there is hopefully nothing mysterious about this concept. Where my approach diffe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• PART I: Confronting the problem
• PART II: Intergenerational ethics, population policy, and personal procreative obligations
• PART III: Objections from alternative approaches to procreative ethics
• PART IV: Lingering questions
• Appendix: the non-identity problem
• Index