Neo-Malthusianism

Historical development

The revival began with two bestsellers of 1948, William Vogt’s Road to Survival and Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet, which presented soil erosion and deforestation as results of a rising population. Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968) argued that freedom to breed in a commons ruins everyone, and called for “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon”. His later “lifeboat ethics” (1974) argued that rich nations should not share resources with poor ones whose populations were growing.

Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) predicted mass famine in the 1970s and made population the central issue of the first Earth Day. The Limits to Growth (1972), modelled for the Club of Rome by Donella Meadows and colleagues, gave the argument the form of a systems model. William Catton’s Overshoot (1980) supplied the ecological language of carrying capacity and collapse. Groups such as Zero Population Growth, Population Matters and the Optimum Population Trust carried the tradition on. Disputes over immigration split the Sierra Club in the late 1990s and 2000s.

Principal claims

• Every environment has a carrying capacity. Human societies, like other species, can overshoot it and then decline.
• Environmental impact equals population times affluence times technology, the identity known as I = PAT. No gain in technical efficiency can make up for unchecked growth in numbers and consumption.
• Exponential growth of any kind cannot continue on a finite planet. Stabilising and then reducing population has to come before every other environmental goal.
• A commons is destroyed by overuse that makes sense for each user, unless binding rules restrict access.
• Policy should be judged by its effect on the overall ecological balance, even where that conflicts with the claims of particular people or nations.

Policy implications

Neo-Malthusians have supported universal access to contraception, incentives for small families, an end to subsidies for large families, and population targets in national planning. Many have backed strict protection of wild land as a reserve against human expansion, and restraint in the use of energy and materials.

The harsher wing has argued for tying foreign aid to population programmes, for limiting immigration into wealthy countries on environmental grounds and, in a few cases, for compulsory measures. Critics most often cite India’s forced sterilisations of 1975–77 and China’s one-child policy as where the tradition’s coercion leads.

Internal disagreements

The tradition divides between those who stress population and those who stress consumption. Paul Ehrlich himself bridged the two, and many later thinkers came down on the side of consumption. It divides again over means. Most population groups today support only family planning based on rights, along with education for women, while Hardin and others saw coercion as unavoidable. A third division concerns borders. Some see limits on immigration as necessary environmental policy, and others as a nationalist distortion of a global problem.

Criticisms and controversies

The famines predicted for the 1970s never came. Critics such as Julian Simon argued that human ingenuity expands resources faster than population uses them up, and the bet between Simon and Ehrlich in 1980 is the emblem of that dispute. Environmental justice and feminist critics argue that the tradition blames the poor and the global South for damage done mostly by the consumption of the rich, and that it has been used again and again to justify coercing women and minorities. Its links with immigration restriction have drawn it toward ecofascism, from which most of its adherents explicitly distance themselves.

Supporters answer that the arithmetic of limits still holds even where particular predictions failed.

Relationships to other traditions

Neo-Malthusianism shares with steady-state economics and degrowth the conviction that growth must end. It differs from both in putting population at the centre, and in its readiness to judge by total outcomes instead of by fairness. Its call for binding rules overlaps with eco-authoritarianism. Its nativist fringe overlaps with ecofascism, which takes the same arithmetic to racial conclusions that the mainstream rejects. Its defence of wild land against human expansion links it to preservationism.