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Jade S. Sasser - On Infertile Ground - Population Control and Women's Rights in The Era of Climate Change-NYU Press (2018)

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Jade S. Sasser - On Infertile Ground - Population Control and Women's Rights in The Era of Climate Change-NYU Press (2018)

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Nicholas Odicoh
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On Infertile Ground

On Infertile Ground

Population Control and Women’s Rights in the Era of Climate Change

Jade S. Sasser

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS


New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
www.nyupress.org

© 2018 by New York University


All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor
New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the
manuscript was prepared.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data


Names: Sasser, Jade S., author.
Title: On infertile ground : population control and women’s rights in the era of climate change / Jade
Sasser.
Description: New YorK : New York University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018012202 | ISBN 9781479873432 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479899357 (pb
: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Birth control—Environmental aspects. | Population—Environmental aspects. |
Climatic changes—Social aspects. | Women’s rights. | Feminism.
Classification: LCC HQ766 .S373 2018 | DDC 363.9/6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012202

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are
chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and
materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Also available as an ebook


For my parents
Contents

Introduction: Women as Sexual Stewards

1. The Population “Crisis” Returns

2. How Population Became an Environmental Problem

3. Scientists, Donors, and the Politics of Anticipating the Future

4. The Role of Youth in Population-Environment Advocacy

5. Co-Opting Reproductive Justice

Conclusion: Is There a Feminist Way Forward?

Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Introduction

Women as Sexual Stewards

One fine day in the spring of 2009, I found myself in a Berkeley, California
art gallery for a Sierra Club–sponsored wine and cheese reception. The
event was called Sex and Sustainability, and it featured presentations by
Sierra Club staffers, activist partners, and a local professor, all focused on
global population growth, family planning, and the environment. At the
time, the global population was well over 6 billion people (we would hit the
7 billion mark two years later), and climate change activists and
policymakers had long been frustrated with the U.S. reluctance to join the
global policy community in aggressively combating climate change.
Meanwhile, the pace of climate change was relentless. Floods, melting
glaciers, sea level rise, and threats to wildlife claimed newspaper headlines
every week. These weren’t just environmental impacts: reported human
death tolls in the tens of thousands from intense storms, heat waves, and
droughts found their way onto the evening news, illustrating climate
change’s deadly threat in frightening ways.
However, the reception was upbeat. Barack Obama had been elected
president several months prior, ushering in a new era of hope that the U.S.
would both increase funding commitments for international family
planning, as well as enact binding climate change legislation. The Sierra
Club facilitator gave a speech drawing a seamless line of connection
between women’s fertility, population growth, and environmentalism: “Poor
women all over the world are having babies in record numbers, with
disastrous impacts on their health, the health of their families, and the
environment,” she argued. We, the mostly student crowd in the room, had
an important part to play in making a difference, by signing up for the
Sierra Club’s Global Population Environment Program (GPEP) mailing list
and connecting to information on various legislative initiatives. “We have to
empower women globally, advance access to voluntary family planning,
advocate for sexuality and reproductive health education, work to reduce
consumption, and support the campaign for international family planning.
Oh, and write to Obama!”
Her words highlighted the issue that is central to this book, namely the
return of global population to prominence in environmental debates,
particularly in the context of climate change. Type “climate change” and
“birth control” or “family planning” into your Google search bar, and an
endless array of articles proclaiming the climate-solving benefits of
contraceptives comes back. Curiously, a number of these articles claim that
this solution is new, innovative, or so shrouded in taboo that no one is
talking about it. However, this could not be further from the truth. Neo-
Malthusians—people who view population growth as the main driver of
environmental, social, and economic problems—have been making these
arguments for decades, blaming human numbers for everything from
deforestation to air pollution, global poverty, civil unrest, international
migration, and now climate change. This is a long-enduring narrative that
permeates ecological sciences, international development, and everyday
conversations about the environment.
What is relatively new is the way women’s empowerment is being linked
to these debates. Population advocates argue that harnessing American
foreign aid to provide poor women around the world with universal,
voluntary access to contraceptives empowers them to make decisions about
their childbearing in ways that affirm their human rights while benefiting
the environment by decreasing human numbers. In this schema, fewer
people will consume resources and use polluting technologies, relieving
pressure on the earth and its atmosphere, which are already being
catastrophically stretched to their limits by destructive human activities.
While these advocates reject population control because of its historical
associations with coercion and human rights abuses, they do maintain that
population growth makes environmental and social problems worse, and
that their solutions will be easier to achieve if population growth is
stabilized.
The distinction, while subtle, is important. Population advocacy arises
historically from the deployment of neo-Malthusianism, an expansion of a
set of ideas developed in the late 18th century by British cleric and political
economist Thomas Robert Malthus. Malthus postulated a theory of the
exponential growth of human populations, comparing it to the more limited
growth of food production and arguing that human growth far outpaces the
earth’s capacity to maintain the necessary conditions to sustain human life,
leading to inevitable famine and widespread misery. Malthusianism is a
political-economic concept couched in the language of biological
fundamentalism. Malthus was writing at a time of recent, rapid growth in
Britain, primarily among the poor. Debates about state aid to impoverished
people were ubiquitous, and Malthus developed his ideas to make a case for
why British authorities should remove the state-supported food aid provided
to the poor via the British Poor Laws. However, he articulated the problems
of population growth and the earth’s capacity as functions of nature—
describing them as natural law, universal and unchanging.
Twentieth-century neo-Malthusian proponents updated this theory, using
it to explain environmental degradation writ large, including everything
from toxic air, soil, and water pollution, to deforestation, species extinction,
soil erosion, and most recently, climate change. They continue to posit these
problems as biological—a natural function and result of human population
growth. However, population advocates today reject Malthus’s ideas, at
least some of them do. One could argue that their position is more closely
aligned with what Angus and Butler refer to as “populationism.” Like neo-
Malthusians, populationists “attribute social and ecological ills to human
numbers”1; however, they reject coercive population control and
demographic targets, and support rights-based solutions, including
voluntary access to contraception, access to education, and income-
generating opportunities for women and girls worldwide.
Populationism suggests that one can uphold Malthus’s and his followers’
central claim that there are natural limits to the earth’s ability to sustain
human life, and that human numbers threaten those limits and must be
decreased, while also supporting human rights and international
development solutions as the right strategies to slow growth. This
populationist perspective is at the heart of population advocacy today. In the
words of many advocates I spoke to, family planning programs offer a
“win-win” solution for women, population, and the environment. But is it
that simple? Are there actual differences between neo-Malthusian and
populationist perspectives in terms of how they frame women’s
relationships to nature, the environment, and reproduction? If so, how do
these values shape the kinds of advocacy they develop, the partners they
engage, and the outcomes they seek?
Making Sexual Stewards
When population-environment advocates talk about “women” in workshops
and other messaging campaigns, they are constructing an idealized model of
a woman: a moral agent who manages her fertility and the environment
responsibly for the greater good. She is a modern woman who wants two or
fewer children, engages in monogamous sexual relationships within the
context of marriage, always uses contraceptives consistently and correctly,
and makes childbearing decisions in concert with environmental values,
including responsible (limited) consumption of energy and natural
resources. This is a neoliberal concept: a symbol of the ideal woman framed
within the logics of private, individual decision-making and choice, who
adopts a modicum of embodied environmental responsibility2 in the service
of global development goals, and who helps advocates weave together
narratives of the urgency of simultaneously addressing climate change and
empowering women around the world to use contraceptives. She is what I
refer to as a sexual steward, and she is vital to the future of international
family planning policy.
The sexual steward is exemplified in countless reports and articles
linking population, climate change, and social justice. Take, for example, a
quote from a report produced by the Worldwatch Institute: “Women and
children in poverty are among the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate
change, despite their disproportionately low contribution to the problem.
Removing the obstacles that hold back more than 3 billion potential agents
of change—women and girls—is both pragmatic and necessary.”3 The
obstacles the report is referring to are reproductive. And the report
postulates that removing them will not only improve women’s social status,
it will potentially solve problems for the entire world: “Through slowing
growth and other benefits, supporting women’s efforts to manage their own
lives and improving their status will in turn elevate the well-being of all of
the world’s population—with Earth’s climate representing one aspect of
this. And the most effective way to do all this is by making sure, to the
extent possible, that women and men everywhere realize their own
childbearing intentions, including timing, spacing, and number of
children.”4
This text encapsulates the sexual stewardship idea: “women” are
assumed to be fertile, reproducing beings, whose improved status will
ideally lead to making responsible family choices—choices that include the
proper spacing, timing, and number of children that will slow global
population growth. Linking these decisions and behaviors to climate change
places women’s individual reproductive lives in global context. Women’s
childbearing decisions are thus never individual, never free from the weight
of potential environmental catastrophe—and thus never free from a duty to
reproduce responsibly. In addition, women in this model are a monolith:
sexually active, heterosexual, able to become pregnant and bear children,
and free to make their own bodily choices, free of coercion or violence.
As I discovered at the reception described at the start of this chapter,
sexual stewards are not just a product of institutional development actors,
they also arise from youth activism. Consider the policy statement
developed and circulated by youth advocates at the international climate
change meetings in Cancun in 2010: “Climate change disproportionately
affects women, especially young women, who are often the stewards of
their area’s natural resources—as they must walk farther to collect water,
work harder to produce crops from dry soil, and cope with drought,
flooding, [other] natural disasters and disease. At the same time,
empowered women can be particularly strong agents for sustainable change
in their communities. An effective approach to climate change mitigation
and adaptation must support young people’s sexual and reproductive health
and rights (SRHR), as doing so is essential for adaptation while
contributing to reducing the impact of future climate change.”5 Linking
environmental problems to women’s agency through responsible
reproductive management is, apparently, the wave of the future—and the
people at the heart of the narrative are young people.
In this book, I argue that sexual stewardship was created to address an
international development sector in crisis. Population has been a troubled
issue for decades. Decreased funding, histories of coercion, racism, and
human rights abuses, and a lack of attention among the broader public have
eroded support for what was once a very popular topic of discussion in the
U.S. In the mid-twentieth century, population growth was front and center
in environmental activism, and had strong ties to the mainstream women’s
reproductive rights movement. However, as evidence of international and
domestic coercion increasingly came to light, coalescing with a
conservative political and religious backlash against family planning in the
1980s, population lost its place in the sun in development circles. In the
1990s, transnational feminists organized to offer the international policy
community a new way of addressing family planning—emphasizing
women’s empowerment through voluntary access to contraceptives within
broader programs supporting women’s SRHR in a human rights framework.
This approach is the foundation of sexual stewardship.
Sexual stewardship also rests on instrumental approaches: using a
technological solution (contraceptives) to address the complex social,
political, and economic drivers of population growth, as well as to build the
base of science and activism to support international family planning policy.
When women’s fertility and reproduction is lifted out of the social contexts
of entrenched poverty, gender inequality, growing wealth and income
inequality, inadequate access to comprehensive health care, educational
services and employment opportunities, and cultural norms favoring large
families, it is easy to imagine women as freely acting, autonomous agents
whose enduring high fertility is individually driven. In development circles,
this model is an attractive way to build a base of new advocates—
specifically young environmental activists—as well as to maintain support
from those who might otherwise have long abandoned the issue of
population.
Given that it rests on such long enduring ideas, is sexual stewardship
new? In some ways, it is. Gone is the long-familiar twentieth-century
language of population control, through which imminent “global famine,”
“death,” and “destruction” signaled the need for top-down, demographically
driven intervention programs. This language has been replaced by a focus
on women’s rights, justice, and affirmation of the importance of
voluntarism to the success of family planning programs. As many
population-environment advocates would argue, today’s focus on women’s
reproductive rights and justice evinces a clear break from the so-called dark
past of population control—and cements a decades-long shifting of
population concerns into the realm of progressive politics.
However, sexual stewardship is in line with a host of neoliberal
development strategies focused on population. One such strategy aims to
capitalize on the “demographic dividend” produced in a key phase of a
nation’s demographic transition6 from high to low population growth.
Theorists describe the demographic dividend as an opportunity that arises
when, in a transition from high birth and death rates to lower ones, the
relative proportion of adults in the labor force is high, compared to their
dependents. Their financial resources are more available for investment in
the family and the economy, leading to per capita income growth. This is
the first dividend. A second potential dividend comes in the form of the
increasing longevity of elderly populations, when a concentrated older
population accumulates and invests their assets, leading to increased
national income. In other words, when there is a higher proportion of
working age people relative to the number of dependents, production can
increase relative to consumption and GDP per capita may increase.7 These
gains are not automatic: there must be productive workers and consumers,
and governments must maximize the opportunities of the population growth
window by investing in education, health care, and neoliberal economic
policies favoring job markets and future pension programs.8
Family planning is central to the demographic dividend strategy in that it
slows birth rates and frees workers from responsibilities in the domestic
sphere, allowing them to invest more in the formal economy. This approach
has gained traction among the international family planning community,
and has been included in reports written by the World Health Organization
and UN Population Program. However, they promote the demographic
dividend as a counterpoint to the “youth bulge” concept, arguing that the
youthful demographic dividend must be managed in order to be productive
and peaceful; otherwise, if not properly supported, it could manifest as a
violent bulge of young people, usually men, that threaten global
geopolitical security. These concerns mirror mid-twentieth-century Cold
War anxieties about the spread of communism among rapidly growing
populations in the Global South. At that time, U.S. government leaders,
economic planners, and military officials all postulated that slowing
population growth in Global South nations through artificial means—
Western contraception—was necessary to their economic modernization, as
well as to global political stability. The contrasting narratives of
demographic dividend and bulge directly rehearse these old discourses,
shaping the ways young people access reproductive services. As
Hendrixson demonstrates, in the absence of fuller understandings of young
people’s sexuality and reproduction within the broader context of their
lives, dividend-versus-bulge discourses actually constrain young people’s
access to sexual and reproductive health services, particularly for young
men.9
In this project, I explore the context in which the sexual stewardship
model arose, why it continues to gain in popularity, particularly among
college-aged environmental activists, and what possibilities it holds for
social justice organizing in the future. Taking the concept of sexual
stewardship as my point of departure, my aim is to offer a new way to think
about recent population-environment advocacy, and its newest iteration,
population-climate advocacy. This advocacy is not comprised of strategies
supporting population control, but rather those designed to reframe
population interventions as progressive, socially just, and attractive to a
new crop of younger environmentalists. In exploring these strategies, I
focus on three key trends: recent efforts to build scientific knowledge
linking population growth and climate change, making a case for
contraceptive intervention from a scientific perspective; the role of private
donors behind the scenes; and non-governmental organization (NGO)
efforts to enroll youth as population advocates. In particular, I focus my
ethnographic observations on a now-defunct training program created by
the Sierra Club, known as the Global Population Environment Program.
The GPEP was designed to develop a new generation of global population
policy advocates through upbeat approaches linking youthful energy, the
language of women’s empowerment and justice, and policy-relevant
science.
This book has three main arguments. First, I argue that science plays an
important role in population-climate advocacy, one that functions to
legitimize advocates’ work and minimize controversy. The more scientific
studies that are produced to demonstrate linkages between population
growth and climate change, the more effectively the political underpinnings
of this argument are obscured. Yet, scientific knowledge is never produced
in a vacuum. The cultural beliefs of the day, prevailing scientific paradigms,
and funding opportunities and constraints all play a significant role in
shaping which scientific questions are answered, and which problems are
pursued. In many ways, this project demonstrates the impossibility of
understanding population-environment or population-climate science
outside of the context of politics. Because the perception of demography,
ecology, atmospheric sciences, and other quantitative sciences is that they
are objective, rational, and value-free, the ease with which political values
are embedded in science makes this arena of advocacy attractive to
potential advocates. In bringing these values to the surface, my aim is not to
expose evidence of “bad science.” Rather, it is to interrogate the ways
politics are deeply entrenched with scientific paradigms, operating largely
behind the scenes.
Second, I argue that populationism is currently growing in popularity
because of its appeal to young people, who are attracted to the neoliberal
language of individual choices and consumer actions as solutions to large-
scale environmental problems. This approach infuses how youth activists
understand the concept of women’s empowerment: it is action-oriented and
facilitated through individual access to contraceptives, based on narratives
of individual personal responsibility. These framings are key drivers of
young people’s desire to be population advocates as well: the narrative of
the individual, action-oriented development actor infuses trainings that
construct youth advocates as development experts and leaders on a global
stage. The private consumer choice model is so pervasive as a part of
American culture that it deeply informs our ideas about morality,
individualism, and personal responsibility in a range of ways—including
how we think about reproduction and environmentalism. While the young
activists I interviewed proclaimed that broad social values such as women’s
empowerment and reproductive justice are their primary motivations for
their advocacy, I demonstrate throughout the book that what actually
resonates with them most is a neoliberal activist model focused on
individualism.
Third, and most importantly, the term “social justice” seems to be losing
its meaning. Drawing on language and strategies rooted in civil rights
activism, a wide range of social actors describe their work as social justice–
oriented. This has been an effective and attractive rallying cry for young
people who are leading major movements on issues ranging from racial
justice (Black Lives Matter) to wealth inequality (Occupy Movement).
However, the vagueness and lack of precision of the term has led many
other kinds of advocates, including those representing conservative right-
wing social movements, to adopt this language, from the Tea Party to the
pro-life movement.10 As this terminology becomes diluted, anyone can lay
claim to it—including populationists whose advocacy has uncomfortable
historical resonances with population control. In so doing, they potentially
undermine the work of more radical movements that truly support
reproductive justice by challenging the structures of inequality that have
shaped reproductive politics historically, and continue to do so today.
Population and Climate Change in Development
From 2009 to the end of 2010, I followed a loosely assembled network of
international development actors whose goal was to increase U.S. funding
support for international family planning policy by emphasizing its benefits
for climate change, SRHR, and poverty alleviation. They pursued this goal
through workshops, advocacy training sessions, research reporting sessions,
private meetings, and Congressional lobbying visits. Members of the
network came from a range of backgrounds. Some were donors at private
philanthropic organizations or at the U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID); others worked at NGOs, universities, or were
simply volunteers in local communities or on college campuses. Some
identified as feminists and reproductive health advocates, while others were
almost entirely consumed by environmental concerns, and saw the
importance of women’s reproductive health and rights as secondary. As one
network member stated in an interview, “There is no one uniform
movement; there are several streams or groups. Some are more concerned
with demography, some family planning, some the union of environment
and reproductive health concerns.” Despite this diversity, what held the
network together was the belief that providing poor women in the Global
South with contraceptives will slow global population growth, and that this
in turn slows the pace of greenhouse gas emissions and helps countries
adapt to climate change, eventually benefiting us all.
There are two key challenges to this perspective, the first being that the
countries that contribute the most greenhouse gases to the atmosphere every
year are not those with the highest fertility rates. China, the U.S., Russia,
India, and Japan emit the highest greenhouse gases (the gases that trap heat
in the atmosphere) every year; each of these countries has low fertility rates
(measured as the number of children born per woman over the course of her
lifetime). The average woman in China gives birth to 1.5 children over the
course of her lifetime. For the U.S., India, Russia, and Japan, the numbers
are 1.8, 1.7, 2.4, and 1.42, respectively. Compare these numbers with the
countries population advocates focus on for their family planning advocacy
efforts: high fertility countries in sub-Saharan Africa like Nigeria, Tanzania,
and Ethiopia. In those countries, fertility rates are 5.6, 5, and 4.4
respectively, while their national greenhouse gas emissions (GGEs) don’t
even rank in the top 75. In fact, with the exception of South Africa (which
has a fertility rate of 2.3), none of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa rate
in the top 75 greenhouse gas–emitting nations.11
The second challenge is that fertility rates are coming down all over the
world, and they have been for the past fifty years or more, albeit unevenly.
According to a 2015 report by the United Nations that looked at data from
197 nations, the average woman worldwide has 2.5 children in her lifetime,
a steep drop from rates of the past.12 Women in most parts of the world get
married later, have fewer children, and access higher education at higher
rates than ever before. At the same time, the report found that in 2014, 145
million women around the world had an unmet need13 for family planning—
a measure of the number of women who would like to delay or stop
childbearing, who are sexually active, but who are not using Western
contraception.
In these figures, sub-Saharan Africa stands as an outlier—which is why
the continent receives the lion’s share of focus in populationist circles.
Approximately half of women in sub-Saharan Africa who would like to
access Western contraceptives report not having full access. The region has
the world’s highest fertility rates, the lowest contraceptive coverage, and
among the lowest ages at marriage. These trends are changing, though
somewhat slowly. Fifty years ago, the average woman in sub-Saharan
Africa had 6.7 children, compared with today’s 5.1. In addition, these
figures mask wide variation between countries on the continent, where
fertility rates are impacted by religious and cultural diversity, poverty, social
inequality, and uneven access to health care and education. As women’s
access to education increases along with the growing trend toward
urbanization, fertility rates are expected to continue to decline across the
continent.14 Average fertility rates across the continent are projected to reach
3.9 children per woman by 2030, and 3.1 children per woman by 2050.
The significance of African fertility trends must also be understood
within the context of broader global discourses on population, particularly
those framed through the language of crisis. If Western contraceptive use,
replacement fertility (two children per couple), monogamous, married
couples, and educated, working women in urban settings are the modern
ideal in development narratives, discourses on Africa stand in sharp contrast
to that. The continent is all too often reduced to narratives of endless
failure, poverty and disease, war and extreme inequality, described as
always in need of Western intervention and salvation. These racialized,
colonial narratives have long constructed Western imaginaries about the
continent: Western societies have long viewed Africa as their “radical
other,” a counterpoint to “their own constructions of civilization,
enlightenment, progress, development, modernity, and . . . history.”15 As
novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reminds us, circulating a “single
story” of a place, or a people, is dangerous.16 The elisions and erasures
required to create such a limited narrative not only reinforce enduring
stereotypes, they also circumscribe the imaginations of those who construct
and maintain the narrative, in ways that foreclose new knowledge and
forms of engagement. These limitations directly shape understandings of
African social, cultural, and gender relations governing sex, fertility, and
reproduction, locking the continent into static images of high fertility in a
fixed, unending pattern of explosive growth.
Part of the reason for this is because population-climate narratives tend to
naturalize poverty and inequality in the Global South. In advocacy
trainings, images of the poor are presented as dark-skinned women of color,
often in tattered clothing and surrounded by children. While these images
do reflect the lives of some women, they are also constructed
representations, informed by colonial legacies that circumscribe Western
audiences’ understandings of the lives and experiences of those depicted.
Dogra’s 2011 analysis of images used in international non-governmental
organizations’ (INGOs) advocacy and fundraising materials demonstrates
that depictions of racialized Global South women are used to project
“universal” values of motherhood and womanhood at the same time that
they symbolize Global South difference. Stylized images of women and
children are particularly common in depictions of disaster, famine, the
environment, and grinding poverty, presenting visual narratives of women
and families—devoid of men—in ways that represent women as vulnerable
and needy. Their roles as mothers are represented as universal and
homogenous, in contrast with missing men, whose absence can be read as
either lack of family presence and responsibility—or worse, that missing
men are the cause of women’s vulnerability.17 These images of excessive
fecundity, lack of stable male presence, and extreme poverty pathologize
poor families while essentializing women’s vulnerability. More importantly,
they render women as always in need of, and in their vulnerability, always
deserving of, Western assistance.
As African feminist Everjoice Win argues, the image of the African
woman as “always poor, powerless, and invariably pregnant, burdened with
lots of children, or carrying one load or another on her back or her head . . .
is a favourite image, one which we have come to associate with
development. Like the fly-infested and emaciated black child that is so
often used by international news agencies, the bare-footed African woman
sells. Without her uttering a word, this woman pulls in financial
resources.”18 While this image proliferates, alternative images are obscured,
particularly those of the rapidly growing urbanized African middle classes.
In rendering class diversity invisible, the needs and desires of middle class
African women are erased, foreclosing opportunities for development
policies that address gender inequality across class lines.
Ironically, similar images of women of color in the U.S. historically
accomplished just the opposite. Prior to the mid-1960s, American news
media represented poverty in images of white families, primarily in
Appalachia. However, in the two-year period from 1965 to 1967, these
images became dramatically darker—with images of African Americans
coming to dominate the “face of poverty” in the news—while poverty rates
remained stable. This dramatic shift was facilitated by a change in the moral
tone through which poverty was described. As coverage of the poor was
presented in a more critical light and narratives of the “undeserving poor”
proliferated, images of African Americans as representative of “the poor”
flourished as well. Further, as poverty came to be seen through a less
sympathetic lens in the news, it was increasingly associated with blackness,
undeserving-ness, and laziness.19 Over the next decade, these images of the
black, undeserving poor coalesced around images of single motherhood,
closely associated with Ronald Reagan’s (fictional) model of the welfare
queen: the woman who gamed the system, whose children were produced
as a strategy to drain state resources and put cash payments into the pockets
of women who did not work. The idea of blacks as inherently poor and
undeserving—and of black women in particular as continually reproducing
a race of resource-draining children—was central to the policing of black
women’s bodies in the second half of the 20th century, particularly the
coercive sterilization of women of color in the U.S. (see chapter 5).
Yet, simplified images of conditions in the Global South remain central
to the visual narrative of development, tugging at the heartstrings of
audiences in the Global North, who project their own values onto the
difference rendered in these images.20 This visual imagery is central to
producing and maintaining ideas of sexual stewardship. As Chandra
Mohanty famously described, the homogenous, universal Global South
woman in these and similar images “leads an essentially truncated life
based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and her being
‘third world’ (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic,
family-oriented, victimised etc) . . . in contrast to the (implicit) self-
representation of Western women as educated, as modern, as having control
over their own bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own
decisions.”21 Sexual stewardship discourses are similar: Global South
women are presented as the homogenous poor, simultaneously burdened by
environmental problems, poverty, and their own excess fertility. These
representations trap them in a static, unchanging narrative of victimhood
and vulnerability that contrasts with the potential for assumed agency
through reproductive self-management. This model, which depoliticizes and
dehistoricizes poverty, gender inequality, and environmental problems, is
the basic recipe for sexual stewardship.
This book is written as a cautionary tale against the ways contraceptives
and family planning are taken up for advocacy in international development
by environmental activists. I argue that advocacy strategies that
problematize global population growth as an environmental and climate
problem, and contraceptives as its solution, are often simplistic and do more
harm than good. While family planning advocacy is a laudable goal that
needs more support and increased funding, the narratives that have been
used by the Sierra Club and their partners have reproduced problematic
ideas about demographic change as the driver of environmental problems in
ways that obscure social, political, and economic causes. They rest on an
“apolitical ecology”22 approach that says environmental problems are caused
by forces such as individuals’ poor choices, and by demographic changes
including population growth. This approach leaves no room for
understanding structural, political, and economic drivers of environmental
change, and in obscuring these forces threatens to undermine the very goals
populationists claim to hold dear: social and ecological justice and bodily
autonomy for poor women in the Global South. Apolitical ecology
approaches have long been at the heart of struggles to make sense of
environmental problems—and have been central to the history of
populationism and population control.
De-Naturalizing Environmental Problems
A key argument of this book is that population-environment discourses and
logics persist in international development due to the enduring power of
Malthusianism. Yet, Malthusian logic has been thoroughly critiqued—many
would say debunked—by critical scholars and activists for decades now.
Many of the most trenchant critiques of Malthusianism have been offered
by scholars of political ecology. For the past forty or so years, combining
“the concerns of ecology and a broadly defined political economy,”23
political ecologists have rejected simplistic biological, demographic, and
other apolitical framings of problems like deforestation, soil erosion, and
climate change, instead rooting these problems in unequal social, political,
and economic systems.
Beginning in the 1970s, Marxist political ecology writers have analyzed
the role of class and capitalism in Malthusian logic. Harvey, for example,
argued that the concepts of nature and natural resources are not fixed, but
rather are constructed socially through capitalist systems that assign them
value. Resource scarcity, then, did not arise from biological conditions of
overpopulation or human overconsumption, but instead from outcomes of
inequitable distribution of wealth.24 Studies of local and regional famine
events demonstrate that international markets and capitalist systems of
production, not overpopulation, have produced entrenched hunger and
poverty at the local level.25 For example, Davis’s analysis of nineteenth-
century regional famine events found that these famines, long constructed
in neo-Malthusian scholarship and media accounts as the result of local
overpopulation and unsustainable cultivation practices, were actually the
result of both of El Niño weather patterns that shape long-term trends in soil
fertility, as well as the introduction of colonialism and capitalism in Global
South countries. The resulting entrenched poverty and maldistribution of
food resources, based on the deep political-economic inequalities of
colonization, manifested in widespread starvation at national and
international scales.26
Political ecologists have also critically interrogated knowledge
production itself, specifically the ways scientists make and circulate
paradigmatic ideas about environmental change. Fairhead and Leach’s
sharp analysis of degradation narratives describing Guinean forest and
savannah landscapes details the ways ecological scientists and
policymakers literally saw population-driven deforestation where it did not
exist, by misreading islands of dense forest cover in broader savannah
wildlands as evidence of deforestation, when in fact they exemplified
afforested landscapes, restored by local communities. The scientists,
presented with data counter to the neo-Malthusian narrative so deeply
embedded throughout the ecological sciences, had no other framework
through which to interpret and explain what they were seeing, and thus
produced decades of erroneous results.27 In a similar vein, Jarosz’s historical
study of deforestation in Madagascar demonstrates that, counter to
prevailing arguments, the dramatic loss of forest cover across the island was
driven by colonial policies favoring market-based production of forest
commodities, rather than population growth. In fact, her research found
that, under colonial rule, forest loss was intensified during periods of
population decline in the country’s eastern rainforest corridor.28 Numerous
studies have demonstrated that the intersection of population control
programs and rural development schemes have resulted in the
intensification of local poverty, land dispossession, and few, if any, impacts
on fertility trends.29
Ecological problems, and the solutions that are devised to respond to
them, do not simply exist in the world of their own accord. Rather, they are
constructed by assemblages of actors and knowledge practices. Hajer
illuminates this through his analysis of discourse coalitions. Discourses, or
“ensemble[s] of ideas, concepts, and categories through which meaning is
given to phenomena,”30 provide the tools for constructing problems, as well
as providing the context in which problems are understood. A discourse
coalition—comprised of actors who share a given social construct—then
takes these up, using persuasion or force to convince others to accept their
interpretation of reality. When specific problems are discussed, discourses
are presented as particular narratives or storylines; the complexities of the
various narratives are concealed as they are assembled into a coherent
whole. Policymaking is similarly discursive; it is not just about problem
solving, but rather also about problem creation. This does not deny material
reality, but rather argues that environmental problems, for example, cannot
be understood without analyzing the discursive practices through which we
perceive reality and the options available for intervening on it.31 Further,
discourse coalitions function as advocacy networks.32 These networks
provide non-traditional actors the ability to mobilize information
strategically and transform the terms of policy debate in ways that influence
more powerful institutions.
Thinking through these issues with respect to population and
reproduction necessitates an analysis of questions of gender, and its
attendant roles, norms, expectations, and inequalities, all of which impact
environmental discourses, policies, rights, and access to resources. Feminist
political ecologists have long argued that experiences, interests, and
responsibilities for nature and environment are often constructed along the
lines of gender inequality, and mediated by race, culture, and gender.33 Their
work demonstrates that gender operates as a critical variable in shaping
resource access and control, interacting with other social categories such as
class, race, culture, and ethnicity to shape processes of ecological change,
struggles to sustain ecologically viable livelihoods, and sustainable
development. However, feminist political ecology does not simply add
another category (gender) to political-economic analyses of environmental
change; rather, it also addresses questions of identity and difference, and
how multiple forms of meaning are made in relation to environmental
struggle and change.
Moreover, feminist political ecology rejects the essentialist narratives,
common in gender, environment, and development scholarship of the
1980s, that posit women’s relationships to nature and the environment as
homogenous, static, and universal. Gendered social roles shape
environmental practices, policies, and their impacts, manifesting as unequal
norms, burdens, expectations, and blame narratives. Women’s employment
in formal and informal sectors, roles within environmental justice
organizing and other social movements, and centrality to smallholder
farming, traditional medicine gathering, and water and fuel collection have
all positioned women within close proximity to nature. This is not based on
a natural affinity for, or inherent closeness to, nature, but rather the
demands, expectations, constraints, and opportunities shaped by social
norms and expectations. While much of the literature on gender and
environment is focused on the Global South, feminists have also analyzed
these relations in the Global North, particularly with respect to how
gendered social norms impact household resource consumption and use.
For example, when researchers and policymakers focus on “green duty”
lifestyle changes—encouraging consumers to reduce resource consumption,
to use green products, and to educate themselves about the impacts of
everyday household products—these efforts fall heavily on women’s
shoulders.34
An enduring storyline of gender and environmental change has
predominated in environmental policymaking for decades.35 In this
storyline, women are vulnerable victims, subject to the harsh impacts of
environmental changes, based on an assumed close relationship to nature.
At the same time, development projects characterize women as particularly
resourceful and able to adapt to environmental changes. Thus, a second
image arises: that of the resilient and responsible actor, well poised to take
matters into their own hands to turn environmental problems into
environmental solutions.
This narrative, of closer-to-nature, victim, and potential agent of change,
has characterized much of the environmental thinking on women in the
environment and development sector. Resurreccion36 posits these enduring
storylines, or “persistent women-environment linkages,” as an important
historical means for women to secure a seat at the table in terms of
environmental policymaking. In order to play a role or have their concerns
recognized at all, women historically had to simplify and adopt
essentialized representations. However, these narratives are also
detrimental: they cast women in narrow, homogenous roles that offer little
room for diversity, historical contingency, or innovation. They also erase
men, and therefore gender itself as a relational condition of social
inequality, from the picture. In so doing, these representations depict
women’s condition as static and unchanging, thus naturalizing vulnerability
rather than rooting it in social relations.
Ironically, the images of victims-and-agents arose from efforts to better
understand women’s particular roles in environmental management in the
Global South. In the early 1970s, development debates arose around the
linkages between Women, Environment, and Development (WED), and
focused on addressing “all women’s interrelations with the environment in
the context of economic development as well as the effects that
environmental degradation has had upon women’s lives,”37 including
increased subsistence household labor (water and fuel collection), effects of
pollution of air, water, and soil, and increased workplace exposure to toxins.
Braidotti, et al. locate the emergence of WED debates in forestry
(specifically fuelwood energy) and agriculture circles in early questions
around fuel and water use, and women’s role as collectors of natural
resources for household consumption. Women began to be framed as unique
victims of energy and environmental crisis, and the category “women” in
this context began to be used interchangeably with “the poor.” At the same
time, international development circles began to focus on women’s
grassroots environmental activism in the Global South, concentrating on the
Chipko Movement in India and the Greenbelt Movement in Kenya as
examples of women’s particular role as protectors of the environment.38
However, the broader engagements with women’s roles in, and relationships
to, development extend far beyond questions of the environment and natural
resources—they range back to the earliest days of U.S. involvement in
international development intervention, and shape how women, gender, and
gender relations have been conceptualized and made into development
intervention strategies.

Untangling Women, Gender, and Empowerment in


Development
Women in Development (WID) strategies were created in the 1970s in an
effort to integrate women into existing international development initiatives
focused in the political, economic, and social sectors. Following Ester
Boserup’s groundbreaking work on the sexual division of labor in agrarian
communities, women development practitioners in Washington, DC, were
concerned with ensuring that women would be better integrated into local
economic structures in the Global South.39 Their perspectives were informed
by, and closely associated with, modernization theory—the paradigm that
dominated international development from the 1950s to the 1970s and
focused on technological fixes such as technology transfer, market-based
skills, and the development of technologies to decrease or better marketize
women’s workload.
Feminist critics of WID approaches charged that they were based on an
acceptance of existing, unequal social, political, and economic structures,
and avoided questioning the reasons for women’s subordination. They also
focused on “women” as a singular and homogenous group, thus obscuring
the role of unequal relations with men, as well as the importance of race,
class, ethnicity, and religion in shaping women’s life conditions. Given that
WID programs were primarily focused on how to integrate women into
existing development initiatives, another central assumption was that
women were not already participating in development programs, which was
far from the case. In fact, women were first included in international
development in the 1950s and 1960s through a focus on their reproductive
roles in the household, via programs and policies addressing food aid,
malnutrition, and family planning. The approach primarily focused on
women’s role as mothers, with an underlying rationale of social welfare.40
International economic aid prioritized male-dominated industries in the
formal sector, while welfare for the family targeted women. This welfare
approach was based on three assumptions: first, that women are passive
recipients of development, second that motherhood is the most important
role in women’s lives, and third, that raising children is the most effective
role for women economically. In other words, women’s primary roles and
contributions were assumed to be reproductive, while men’s roles were
productive. As Moser argues, “Intrinsically, welfare programmes identify
‘women’ rather than lack of resources, as the problem, and place the
solution to family welfare in their hands, without questioning their ‘natural’
role.”41 Over time, development program managers argued that the
competitive free market was a better venue for maximizing women’s
potential via opportunities for self-improvement. As a result, women’s roles
as economic agents (micro-entrepreneurs, farmers, factory workers) were
increasingly recognized as central to integrating women into development.42
In the early 1980s, feminists mounted a formal response to the embedded
power relations and inaccurate assumptions of WID programs, under the
banner of Gender and Development (GAD). GAD approaches address not
only women, but women in relation to men, and how gender relations are
socially constructed within the contingent contexts of space and time. In the
GAD approach, both production and reproduction are socially constructed,
and both create the conditions of women’s subordination—thus social,
economic, and political life are all sites for questioning and critiquing the
roots of women’s subordination in the context of socially constructed
gender roles. GAD proponents were particularly concerned with integrating
these critiques into development approaches, arguing that women were
active participants in development from the beginning, operating as agents
of change rather than passive recipients of outside interventions.
A central concern within GAD is the question of power—how it operates,
circulates, and is embedded in development. Empowerment is central to
these concerns, particularly transforming power relations within
development. GAD proponents have developed multiple ways of thinking
about empowerment as a resource to transform interventionist models from
a grassroots, bottom-up perspective, as well as altering understandings of
what power is, how it operates, and how it can be harnessed and
transformed.
For example, Kabeer identifies three ways of thinking through
empowerment: the “power to” affects outcomes over and above the wishes
of others; “power over” refers to procedures that benefit certain groups at
the expense of others; and “power with” focuses on building solidarity and
alliances with others.43 Sen and Batliwala extend these orientations in
multiple directions, defining empowerment as the ability to mobilize
resources and to determine the rules of the game in ways that mask the
workings of inequality; as a “process of changing power relations in favour
of those at the lower levels of a hierarchy,”44 and as control over both
material resources and ideology. Sen and Grown, however, insist that
women’s empowerment must be an explicitly feminist enterprise that
responds to the needs and priorities of multiple kinds of women, and that is
“defined by them for themselves” (emphasis in the original).45 Their vision
of empowerment within development prioritizes strategies to meet human
needs, as well as transforming access to and control over economic and
political power. In this model, improved living conditions, socially
responsible resource use, and the elimination of gender subordination and
socioeconomic inequality are all linked sites of struggle and necessary
transformation.46
However, as Halfon’s analysis demonstrates, development institutions are
generally not organized around grassroots work, and tend to function in
more top-down structures. They also emphasize program efficiency based
on short term, easily measurable goals. Feminist empowerment models are
rooted in radical grassroots political change, which does not fit easily with
the kinds of bureaucratization and hierarchy found in many development
institutions. In the context of population, many NGOs narrow their focus to
reproductive decision-making as the center of empowerment, likely because
this approach serves as a discursive link between traditional populationist
groups and women’s rights advocates.47 As empowerment became
incorporated into population policy in the 1990s, it was translated from a
political approach to social transformation into a set of policy strategies.
This translation effort has diluted its radical framing in favor of efficiency
and achievement of development program goals—ironically, this is the very
kind of approach the empowerment model was designed to critique and
resist. Halfon describes the process of dilution thus: “The meaning of
women’s empowerment has become defined through the practices and
discourses of population institutions rather than strictly through feminist
and radical theorizing. Because of the looseness of its definition, its
reinterpretation through existing policy goals and planning strategies, and
the constraints posed by institutional and professional needs,
empowerment-oriented projects often resemble the development
frameworks they were originally conceived in opposition to.”48 As I argue
throughout this book, empowerment has become such a loose term that it is
rather far afield of its original intent. Today, in population circles and in
development discourse more broadly, empowerment is often “used in a way
that robs it of any political meaning, sometimes as no more than a substitute
word for integration or participation in processes whose main parameters
have already been set out elsewhere.”49

Sex, Population, and Science in Development


As Foucault has argued, population became an economic and political
problem requiring state level management and surveillance in the
eighteenth century. This was not a problem to be solved through
elimination, but rather one to be managed and governed in order to optimize
the capacities of populations. Techniques such as statistical data collection,
public health surveillance, collection of information on birth and death
rates, fertility, life expectancy, and health and illness status came to operate
as an opportunity for state authorities to direct the sexual energy of
populations, serving as a point of entry for ever-increasing interventions
into the most intimate spheres of family life. Sexual and reproductive health
interventions, including family planning, population control, and policies
designed to increase birth rates have all come to be managed in this way
over time. Sex and sexuality, reproduction, and life itself are objects of
study and intervention precisely because of the power relations governing
knowledge production, surveillance, and management of populations and
bodies that made them possible as such objects. And the knowledge and
discourses of sex and reproduction are deeply invested in questions of
power, authority, and sovereignty.50
Discourse operates as a vehicle for the consolidation of power based on
the management of bodies, sex, and reproduction. Ideas of nation, state, and
progress have long been tied directly to sexual conduct and reproduction
through science, modernization, and capitalism—and development
interventions, particularly in the arenas of sex and reproduction, operate as
vehicles for such projects. As sexuality has historically been transformed
into an object of scientific and medical study and intervention, sexual and
reproductive health development programs have advanced notions of what
it means to be modern in one’s sexual and reproductive behavior. Such
programs make possible new forms of governance in which bodies and
health become sites for control, management, surveillance, and dominance.
In this context, sex operates as a moral object as well as a site around which
projects of standardization, universalization, and scientific transformation
are organized. In the context of development, sex is simultaneously
rendered a moral object, an object of scientific knowledge production, and a
site for expanding notions of progress and modernity.51
Population advocates in the development arena have long been in a
constant quest for more scientific data to prove the link between population
growth and environmental change, to demonstrate that their advocacy is
driven by factual, unbiased science. The idiom of co-production,
conceptualized by Jasanoff, is particularly illuminating here. Jasanoff
argues that “the realities of human experience emerge as the joint
achievements of scientific, technical and social enterprise: science and
society, in a word, are co-produced, each underwriting the other’s
existence.”52 Co-production arises from the recognition that “the production
of order in nature and society has to be discussed in an idiom that does not,
even accidentally and without intent, give primacy to either,” and as a result
is reflective of a “self-conscious desire to avoid both social and
technoscientific determinism in S&TS (science and technology studies)
accounts of the world.”53 It does not conceptualize truth and power as pre-
formed entities that oppose each other, but rather argues that scientific
knowledge and political orders “shape, entail, and refer to each other.”54
These are also powerful processes: the ability to produce, shape, and
circulate knowledge is deeply linked to notions of authority and expertise,
the hidden practices of which co-productionist analyses help to expose.
While population-environment advocacy has been grounded by enduring
Malthusian ideologies, shifting political climates have forced the
development of new discourses, frameworks, and ideological approaches.
Analyzing the relationship between science and politics helps account for
these shifts, even as population sciences continue to proliferate. One of the
key aims of this project is to explore the political context of scientific
knowledge production around population and the environment. This is not
to rehearse debates about the role of “objectivity” in science, but rather to
demonstrate the social and political contexts within which scientific
knowledge is produced, and within which it continues to be deeply
entangled. In investigating these questions, I aim for this project to serve as
a corrective to ideas that naturalize relationships between population growth
and environmental problems as fixed, linear, and apolitical reflections of the
material world.

Methodological Entanglements
My research initially began with an exploration of the institutional politics
of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) working at the
intersections of global population, environment, and sexual and
reproductive health (SRH) in international development. The ENGOs that
have been active in this arena include the Sierra Club, as well as the
National Audubon Society, Worldwatch Institute, World Wide Fund for
Nature, Conservation International, and Population Connection (formerly
known as Zero Population Growth; despite the fact that the organization’s
name is population-focused, a senior manager described it in an interview
as an environmental organization). Most of these organizations employ a
small staff, often designating one employee to serve as their “population
person,” responsible for informing NGO members about global population
trends, tracking U.S. legislation on international family planning,
participating in congressional lobbying and other policy advocacy,
presenting their work at conferences, and when possible, joining with other
members of the population advocacy network for activities.
Over time, I realized that population advocacy at these institutions is
constituted by relations within a network of similarly engaged actors, from
individual donors to community and campus activists. As a result, my
ethnographic lens was retrained from a focus on ENGOs to a focus on the
network itself, studying how youth activists come to be so deeply
imbricated within it that they see its aims and priorities as their own. A key
aim of this book is to track the practices through which youth and others in
the network deploy political strategy and scientific knowledge on global
population growth and environmental change to produce, circulate, and
ground new modes of policy advocacy. These practices are far from static in
their development—rather, they are the result of the careful and persistent
efforts of network members who view population interventions as necessary
to ensure environmental sustainability at local and global scales.
Throughout this book, I refer to this group alternately as population-
environment advocates or simply population advocates. Through interviews
and participant observation with youth and other advocates, NGO program
managers, and donors, I sought to understand the politics and practices of
international development policy advocacy from the perspective of those
working behind the scenes. One of my goals here is to demonstrate the
multiplicity of motivations, goals, ethical positions, and moral frameworks
utilized by those in this field of development, as they attempt to advance a
coherent movement while navigating the thorny terrain of controversy. A
secondary goal is to investigate the ways in which knowledge about the
body, particularly poor women’s bodies and fertility in the Global South, is
constructed, disseminated, and utilized as the basis for political action by a
network of actors located at vast geographic, cultural, political, and
economic distances from those whose experiences they claim to represent.
In other words, I attempt to understand how the “other,” in this case the
universal “Woman” of the Global South (Mohanty 1992), is constructed
through the melding of scientific data and social activism in order to
advance an international policy agenda.
My research is grounded in three modes of data collection: participant
observation at population advocacy trainings, workshops, research
presentations, and conference sessions; in-depth interviews with members
of the network and other activists; and analysis of archival documents. I
conducted fieldwork that took place over a twenty-one-month period from
April 2009 through December 2010. During this period, I attended a dozen
workshops, conferences, trainings, and research presentations that
addressed population growth and environmental change. Of these meetings,
most advocated for reducing global population growth in order to promote
environmental and climate sustainability. One conference took a distinctly
different approach, using a critical race and gender analysis to reject neo-
Malthusian arguments in favor of an approach centered on reproductive
justice. Many of the population-environment advocacy trainings I attended
were focused primarily on enrolling youth activists from campus-based
environmental and SRH clubs at colleges and universities around the U.S.
These multi-day trainings were primarily led by the Sierra Club, in
conjunction with a series of SRH and women’s advocacy organizations,
ranging from the Feminist Majority Foundation to the International
Women’s Health Coalition, and took place in Los Angeles, Washington,
DC, and San Francisco. Attending trainings also provided the opportunity to
conduct in-depth interviews with youth population advocates, as well as
ENGO and SRH NGO representatives.
Near the end of my fieldwork, I spent three weeks in Cancun, Mexico,
participating in the international climate change conference (also known as
the 16th annual Conference of Parties, or COP 16), and the associated youth-
led Conference of Youth (COY6). Both provided key opportunities to
observe how youth activists trained by the population-environment
advocacy network operationalize their advocacy training in an international
context. Over the course of the project, I conducted formal, one-on-one
interviews with sixty-four NGO representatives, donors, community
activists, scientists, and scholars. Approximately twenty additional
interviews were conducted with feminist activists who critique the
network’s strategies from an intersectional perspective focused on
analyzing the race, gender, and class politics of the network’s efforts.
Finally, I pored over dozens of program reports, project descriptions,
funding analysis documents, meeting notes, and funder network reports, in
order to supplement my ethnographic material with archival and
contemporary documents. My informants were very generous in providing
me with these documents, as well as sharing private correspondence.

On Current Politics
The stakes of writing a book like this one are high, particularly in the
current political moment. As I write this, Donald Trump, a reality television
star who has been accused of multiple sexual assaults, who has repeatedly
questioned the existence of global warming, and who has referred to violent
white supremacists as “good people,” is President of the United States. In
his early days in office, he held the world in limbo for months, refusing to
come to a decision about whether the U.S. would remain party to the Paris
Agreement—the first legally binding climate change agreement in which all
signatories have agreed to work together to limit global temperature
increase to less than two degrees Celsius (he eventually made the decision
to withdraw the U.S. from the agreement). Just two days after the largest
women’s march in history, he reinstated the Global Gag Rule, an order that
prevents NGOs outside the U.S. from receiving U.S. family planning
funding if they provide abortions, or even offer counseling, referrals, or
educate clients on obtaining abortions elsewhere. In a particularly shocking
and unprecedented move, at the time of this writing, the Trump
administration had just delivered a proposed budget for fiscal year 2018 that
eliminated all global health funding for international family planning and
reproductive health. From over $600 million dollars in 2017 to zero, with a
stroke of a pen.55
Given the funding landscape and the realities of Washington politics,
population advocacy has become increasingly important from a pragmatic
perspective, in order to help ensure that women around the world will have
access to contraceptives and other reproductive health services. However, a
critical, feminist corrective to the narratives that sustain this advocacy work
is increasingly needed. This book offers this kind of corrective: it
interrogates the development and enduring roles of Malthusianism and
populationism in the ways activists think about, and act on, population and
family planning through international development. It centers critiques of
race, gender, and class politics in the construction and circulation of
populationist framings, and the ways activists link environmental
degradation and climate change to human numbers. It also explores the
politics of knowledge production and the stakes of the close relationship
between science and policy advocacy in creating and sustaining
international family planning advocacy efforts. With this said, I have long
been, and remain, a strong advocate for women’s voluntary access to
contraceptives and other family planning services within a context of
comprehensive sexual and reproductive, and broader, health services.

Organization of the Book


This chapter has laid the groundwork for understanding the conceptual
questions that this book seeks to address. In chapter 1, I take up the
tumultuous politics of population in development, linking historical
controversy and international policy activism with the context of declining
donor funding over time, and the recent focus on population as a climate
problem. I argue that, as climate change discourses bring environmental
crisis narratives to the forefront of population debates, these narratives open
the possibility for new ways of considering reproductive governance and
surveillance—and a return to population control. Chapter 2 traces the
history of neo-Malthusian thought, exploring how population was
constructed as a scientific and environmental problem in the U.S. over the
course of the twentieth century as it entwined with American anxieties over
nation, geopolitical stability, and the global racial balance of power. Chapter
3 explores the science-policy interface through an analysis of the close
relationships between climate-population scientists and their funders. It
analyzes the workings of donor advocacy behind the scenes, arguably the
most important element in how scientists’ models not only project, but also
produce, potential futures.
Chapter 4 departs from a focus on knowledge production to interrogate
the process through which young activists transform themselves from local
policy advocates to self-styled development leaders, experts, and social
justice actors. Focusing on training workshops, I explore how young people
negotiate their own ambivalent subject positions as population advocates,
attempting to reframe their role within the language of social justice.
Chapter 5 investigates the ways mainstream reproductive health NGOs
draw on the language of reproductive justice to frame population advocacy
as socially progressive, while obscuring the intersectional politics that
structure the reproductive justice movement’s history and current work. The
final chapter concludes the book not by offering solutions, but remaining in
a thorny, uncomfortable, and vitally important space—a space of fretting
over the future of populationism, and its ever closer engagements with
gendered neoliberal development discourses.
1

The Population “Crisis” Returns


In 2010, Mother Jones magazine ran a special issue with a cover asking,
“Who’s to Blame for the Population Crisis?” Inside, the issue’s lead article,
“The Last Taboo: What Unites the Vatican, Lefties, Conservatives,
Environmentalists, and Scientists in a Conspiracy of Silence?” centered on
a crowd thronging the streets of Calcutta late one night:1

It’s midnight on the streets of Calcutta. Old women cook


over open fires on the sidewalks. Men wait in line at
municipal hand pumps to lather skin, hair, and lungis
(skirts), bathing without undressing. Girls sit in the open
beds of bicycle-powered trucks, braiding their hair . . .
grandfathers under umbrellas squat on their heels, arguing
over card games, while mothers hold bare bottomed toddlers
over open latrines . . . Many people sleep through the lively
darkness, draped over sacks of rice or on work carts full of
paper or rags or hay. Groups of men and women, far from
their home villages, sprawl haphazardly across the
sidewalks, snoring.2

Rather than a conspiracy of silence, a review of media and popular writings


at the turn of the millennium reveals just the opposite. In fact, the Mother
Jones issue appeared in the midst of a veritable explosion of articles, blog
posts, journal publications, and think pieces linking women’s fertility,
global population growth, and the environment. From 2005 to 2008, writing
that cited the terms “population growth” and “environment” or “climate
change” increased fourfold.3 Like Mother Jones, magazines began to
publish special issues and entire series dedicated to the issue. Scientific
American’s population issue in summer 2009 claimed that “Malthusian
limits are back—and squeezing us painfully,”4 while the next year, National
Geographic initiated a yearlong series focused on population growth’s
environmental consequences, titled “State of the Earth 2010.” With striking,
glossy images of people around the world farming, fishing, driving cars,
extracting minerals, and thronging the streets, juxtaposed with pictures of
the denuded, heavily plowed or constructed earth, the images told a
gripping story of a planet sagging under the weight of human activity. And
in 2011, after the United Nations published new global population
projections, the New York Times responded by publishing articles and blogs
detailing the ways ongoing population growth would intensify demands on
the global food supply, colliding with limiting factors like climate change,
water scarcity, and land shortages.5
Increasingly, these writings focused on climate change.6 A 2015 editorial
in the Los Angeles Times argued that “sensitive subject or not, the reality is
that unsustainable human population growth is a potential disaster for
efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions,”7 while the Huffington Post
reported that “access to voluntary birth control . . . will cut our collective
human carbon footprint.”8 Specialized scientific reports have also taken up
this theme, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a
transnational body of climate scientists and policy actors, stating in its 2014
assessment report that “globally, economic and population growth
continued to be the most important drivers of increases in CO2 emissions
from fossil fuel combustion.”9
If population growth is a secret, it is an open one—yet, the language of
secrecy and taboo continues to predominate. Collectively, the majority of
recent population-environment writing is focused on two central themes:
population interventions as secret, controversial, or overlooked, but
necessary solutions to environmental problems; and the mutual social and
environmental benefits of supporting women’s universal, voluntary access
to Western contraceptives. These writings insist that, while taboo,
population must be addressed if we are collectively going to make progress
on climate change, and—equally importantly—that increasing women’s
access to contraception as a climate mitigation strategy is empowering to
women. Moreover, this argument has also been taken up by prominent
Western feminists, including Hillary Clinton, Gloria Steinem, and Mary
Robinson, all of whom have advocated family planning and population
stabilization as a necessary, women-centered climate change strategy.10
Behind the scenes, a different story emerges. In international
development, the arena that has turned the rhetoric of population problems
into intervention programs and policies, population and family planning
have lost the prominence they once enjoyed. Development actors speak
often of the disappearance of population, in comparison to the days when its
role in international development and foreign policy seemed unshakable.
Where was population before, and where did it go? Why is it “coming
back” now?
This chapter explores the historical and contemporary reasons for the
supposed silence and re-emergence of population in public. It begins with
an exploration of the history of global population control and the resulting
feminist activism that resulted in a dramatic transformation of international
population policy. It then explores the often-invisible role of funding by
documenting the role of private and public sector donors in mobilizing
resources and securing new strategies to restore it. Finally, I close with a
discussion of why climate change is such an expedient way to bring
population back to public debate—and why this approach is particularly
dangerous.

The American Roots of Population Control


In 1954, Hugh Moore, founder of Dixie Cup and a population activist,
wrote a pamphlet called “The Population Bomb” and began distributing it
through mass mailings, eventually reaching over 1.5 million people. One of
those people was General William Draper, who led a commissioned study
on U.S. military aid for then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Draper
invited population experts to brief his staff, and at the end of the
commission’s work, they wrote a report calling for the U.S. government to
fund interventions in maternal and child welfare overseas (which, although
not explicitly stated, included contraception). This marked a turn in the U.S.
foreign policy establishment—one in which rapid population growth was
now officially marked as a security issue, and birth control was seen as a
part of national defense. Draper and Moore formed the Population Crisis
Committee (later renamed Population Action International), using it as a
platform to advocate the necessity of population control in international aid.
Draper, Moore, and the committee were not motivated by humanitarian
or public health concerns, but rather Cold War concerns about the spread of
communism. Moore’s pamphlet was based on Washington’s anxieties over
the spread of communism in rapidly growing nations of the Global South,
fears that were closely aligned with concerns about continued access to raw
materials, labor, and markets in nations gaining independence from
colonialism. The “bomb” he referred to symbolized the potential for rapid
population growth in the Third World to have the same kind of explosive
and devastating effects on earth as a nuclear bomb.11 Demographers were
critical of this approach; they argued that it was dangerous to go with the
“offensive and potentially controversial” proposition that population control
in the Global South should be used as a tool to counter the spread of
communism. However, Moore was unmoved; he wanted to influence
business and government elites as well as the general public.
Population control efforts were under way across the newly independent
nations in the Global South, led both by state governments and international
donors, with the U.S. government playing a prominent role. International
agencies began to tie food aid and government loan packages to
contraceptive distribution schemes. In the mid-1960s, the U.S. government
under Lyndon B. Johnson began to produce and circulate experimental
contraceptives intended for mass distribution across India, including over
one million intra-uterine devices. Promotional incentives such as cash
payments and radios were used as part of carrot and stick incentives for
community-based contraceptive providers, with support from the Indian
government. After Indira Gandhi took the reins of power in India’s
government in 1966, she immediately intensified population control efforts
across the country. Doctors were given bonus payments in exchange for
reaching targets for IUD insertions and surgical sterilizations. Non-clinical
practitioners were paid per service, with vasectomies paying out double the
price for that of IUD insertions. Between 1966 and 1967, 1.8 million
Indians were implanted with IUDs or sterilized, a number that would
increase dramatically a decade later under India’s national Emergency
period. During the Emergency, family planning became integrated into all
government offices’ activities, cash payments to IUD and sterilization
“acceptors” increased more than ten-fold, and compulsory sterilization was
introduced as a component of state policy, often enacted in “sterilization
camps.” Within one year, more than eight million sterilizations, including
6.2 million vasectomies and 2.05 million tubal ligations were conducted,
primarily among the poor.12
As historian Matthew Connelly’s comprehensive study of global
population control demonstrates, while India is a particularly egregious
case, it is not entirely unique in the history of global population control.
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) aid distribution in Haiti became
tied to contraceptive incentive programs, and the governments of India,
Singapore, and Indonesia denied housing, tax, and other benefits to parents
who had more than two children. By the early 1980s, Bangladesh was the
largest recipient of international population assistance, and as a result, the
state imposed harsh punitive measures on those who refused family
planning efforts. In one particularly horrifying example, members of the
Bangladesh army rounded up hundreds of people for forcible sterilization,
and food aid from the World Food Program was denied to Bangladeshi
flood victims who refused to be sterilized.13
This is not to suggest that women in the Global South were not interested
in birth control. However, even when they did attempt to secure access to
contraceptives voluntarily, the lack of consistent service delivery,
comprehensive options, and education about methods and their side effects
often formed a formidable barrier. The emphasis on family planning in aid
programs also helped deepen poverty in already-struggling nations—
particularly across sub-Saharan Africa, where U.S. foreign aid in the 1980s
was predicated on countries adopting structural adjustment programs tied to
population control. Connelly refers to the twentieth-century escalation of
global population control as a “system without a brain,” characterized by
policies and other interventions that gained a momentum of their own.
Population control seemed to be a machine that ran itself, and it was
running amok.14
At the same time, population has long been a site of international struggle
in the development policy arena. While population control had been central
to the American international development agenda from the late 1950s,
leaders in Global South countries at times resisted this approach. In 1974,
when the first World Population Conference was convened in Bucharest,
many leaders rejected population control imposed by the North, arguing
that it was a distraction from the inequalities underlying the international
economic order. Instead, they pointed out the long shift in Europe from high
population growth rates to very low growth, arguing that economic and
social progress were responsible, not population control. Accordingly, they
developed the slogan “development is the best contraceptive.”15
Within ten years, however, many leaders’ positions had shifted. At the
1984 World Population Conference in Mexico City, leaders from the Global
South argued that their resources could not support unrestricted population
growth, whereas the U.S. under Reagan adopted a neutral position on
population growth, arguing that slow economic development in the Global
South was attributable to too much state intervention, not demographic
changes. The best contraceptive, according to Reagan’s administration, was
the free market.
Why such a reversal? The answer had less to do with actual questions of
population and development, and more to do with the rising influence of
religious fundamentalism in the U.S. In the early 1980s, a well-organized
group of pro-life advocates who were key to Reagan’s base of support had
begun pressing for three things: defunding and dismantling the population
office at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID); using
population funds to support “natural family planning”; and sending a pro-
life delegation to the 1984 World Population Conference in Mexico City. In
response to this pressure, the U.S. sent a delegation with a neutral position
on population growth; at the conference, they argued that free markets
provide a solution to social problems like poverty and inequality, and that
family planning alone could not address these issues effectively. Abortion
could not address them at all. As a result, the Reagan administration
withdrew support from any organization providing abortion services,
information, or referrals (this became known as the Mexico City Policy,
also known as the Global Gag Rule). In this context, the Mexico City
Conference “marked the moment when population growth was no longer
treated as a global problem requiring a global solution.”16
By the time of the next world population conference at Cairo in 1994, the
terms of the global population debate had shifted once again, this time to
focus on the role of population in producing environmental problems. And,
as the next section will demonstrate, the policy document produced at the
Cairo conference reflected a perspective that had never before been
formally enshrined in international population policy: a focus on women’s
rights to healthy sexuality, reproduction, and autonomous bodily decision-
making.
The Roots of Sexual Stewardship: Rio, Cairo, and Women’s
Embodied Environmental Responsibility
Feminist organizing for the 1994 International Conference on Population
and Development (also known as the Cairo Conference) began years before
the conference. In preparation for the 1992 UN Conference on Environment
and Development (UNCED) in Rio, also known as the Earth Summit,
activist gathered to outline their position and organizing strategy. The
Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) convened
a 1991 meeting of over one thousand women activists from ninety countries
who gathered in Miami to discuss the “women’s dimension” of the global
environmental crisis. Unlike neo-Malthusians, the feminists at the
conference de-centered population from the debate, instead focusing on the
global economic crisis, third world debt, and the impacts of nuclear testing
and other military operations on land, wildlife, and human health across the
globe. A central theme of the conference was that these effects were
gendered, in that they disproportionately impacted women’s bodies and
livelihoods. They also focused on the political dimensions, specifically the
fact that women were drastically underrepresented in decision-making
bodies that made global environmental policy.17
The following year, at the UNCED meetings, debates about the role of
population growth emerged in an area of the conference’s non-official NGO
forum known as the Women’s Tent (Planeta Femea). The Tent was co-
organized and hosted by the Brazilian Women’s Coalition and WEDO, and
offered a program of daily workshops and presentations structured around
drafting a Population Treaty and a separate Women’s Treaty. By the time
negotiations had concluded, coalition actors led by Southern anti-
Malthusians and Northern feminists firmly rejected inclusion of population
control as a component of international environmental development, opting
instead for a critical focus on Northern consumption practices and
advocating for development approaches favoring women’s comprehensive
sexual and reproductive health care.
The document produced from these debates is known as the Treaty on
Population, Environment and Development. It asserted that “women’s
empowerment to control their own lives is the foundation for all action
linking population, environment and development,” and explicitly rejected
all forms of control over women’s bodies by governments and international
institutions, including coerced sterilization, experimental contraceptive
development, and denial of access to abortion.18 Although the document
located the drivers of global environment in militarism, debt, structural
adjustment, inequitable trade policies, and patterns of consumption and
production in the industrialized North, it did include mention of population.
However, this mention of population was in sharp contrast to prevailing
arguments, focusing on resource consumption in the Global North. In the
preamble, the treaty’s authors stated that they “affirm and support women’s
health and reproductive rights and their freedom to control their own
bodies,” an approach which demanded “the empowerment of women, half
of the world’s population, to exercise free choice and the right to control
their fertility and to plan their families.”19 The document made it clear that
population was not central to discussions of Global South environmental
development and poverty reduction, aside from a critical analysis of the role
of Northern populations’ consumption patterns in producing degradation.
Some of the language from the treaty became the basis for negotiations
among diverse actors—neo-Malthusians, feminist activists, women’s health
advocates, population controllers, environmentalists, and others—in
preparation for the 1994 International Conference on Population and
Development (ICPD) at Cairo.
In the leadup to Cairo, feminist activists from the Global South were
concerned with ensuring that language on women’s empowerment, sexual
health, and reproductive self-determination would be included in the
upcoming negotiations. Unlike the treaty produced in the Women’s Tent, the
document coming out of the ICPD meetings at Cairo would be enshrined as
formal international policy governing how population interventions would
be devised moving forward. The stakes were very high. Reproductive health
activists situated contraceptives as one component in a broader constellation
of reproductive health services for women, including maternal and child
health care, cancer prevention, abortion access and post abortion care, and
STD prevention and treatment. “Women’s rights principles and respect for
bodily integrity and security of the person” were also central to the
framework, which offered a “groundbreaking consensus among feminists
and the international community, going well beyond the basic-needs
approach historically advocated by policy makers in the South.”20
Reproductive rights became the central framework for their advocacy
efforts, situated within a broader context of needs focused on women’s
health across the life span, and not just the reproductive years.21 By the time
the ICPD meetings began, women in the South were a leading and majority
presence in transnational feminist organizing for the conference, and they
had articulated a framework that situated sexual and reproductive health in
a context of human rights and global economic policies. Health was
integrated as a component of a broader development agenda focused on
international debt, structural adjustment, and state investments in basic
needs.
A Southern coalition, Development Alternatives with Women for a New
Era (DAWN), played a prominent role advancing Southern feminist
interests. They advocated negotiating and applying pressure to the
development establishment—including the population establishment—by
situating women’s reproductive health within a comprehensive human
development framework. In this framework, meeting the basic needs of the
poor, particularly women, was necessary to empower them to control their
own lives and livelihoods, and crucial to ensuring sustainable development,
equitable economic growth, and human rights. DAWN also critiqued
Western cultural notions embedded in reproductive health and rights
discourse—particularly the concept of individual ownership and control
over bodies.
At the end of negotiations at the Cairo ICPD, delegates produced a policy
document, the Program of Action (also known as the Cairo Consensus), that
was signed by 179 countries. It declared reproductive rights to be universal
and asked all nations of the world to foreground women’s empowerment as
a central component of population and development programs. It also
enshrined principles such as advancing gender equality, elimination of male
violence against women, prioritizing women’s ability to control their own
fertility, and the abandonment of demographic targets and quotas.22
Despite the efforts of feminist activists, the Cairo Consensus articulated
an individualistic, responsibility-centered model for managing fertility in
the service of sustainable development goals. While it states clearly that
“any form of coercion has no part to play,” it nonetheless offers a clear
message that successful population programs are predicated on the
responsibility of individuals: “The success of population education and
family-planning programs in a variety of settings demonstrates that
informed individuals everywhere can and will act responsibly in the light of
their own needs and those of their families and communities”23 (emphasis
added). The document also argues that governments should formulate
population policies and programs that integrate demographic data into
environmental assessments and planning, promoting sustainable resource
management and reducing unsustainable patterns of production and
consumption.
Although the Cairo Consensus has been widely heralded for enshrining
women’s SRHR and empowerment and breaking away from
demographically-driven population policies, the development of the
document was the result of a complicated and problematic process. The
ICPD negotiations that produced the document were racked by fractures,
bitter struggles, philosophical and political debates, and ultimately a
struggle over the future direction of global population policies, including
the role of women’s reproductive health and rights. Ultimately, the Cairo
Consensus united the perspectives of neo-Malthusians, environmental
activists, and mainstream and more radical feminists in a pragmatic policy
compromise.24 Many radical and Southern feminists felt that their aims were
not satisfied in the consensus document, arguing that it enshrined a weak
stance on abortion and watered down language on women’s empowerment.
American population-environment advocates also had mixed reactions to
the consensus. Some felt that their priorities were effectively silenced in the
new focus on individual women and SRHR, while others suggested that the
new approach offered natural benefits to the environment and a “win-win”
perspective.25 Over time, many leaders of environmental organizations came
to see the population-environment connection as one that could no longer
be talked about openly. The post-ICPD euphoria that did exist among some
populationist supporters began to wane as funding support decreased and
environmentalist interest in family planning weakened in the shadow of the
new focus on voluntarism and women’s reproductive rights.26

Donors and Funding: Navigating the Tides


While they are not the public face of population advocacy, donors have
arguably the most important role behind the scenes. Foreign assistance for
family planning and other development programs is funded on the basis of
key program sectors—global health, environment, democracy and
governance, etc.—that, while clearly impacting each other in life, do not
often cross funding streams. Providers of this money (governments, private
foundations, individuals, the corporate sector) transfer funds to institutions
(bilateral agencies, NGOs, intergovernmental organizations [IGOs], and
private foundations) to manage and distribute funds to the organizations
(multilateral agencies, NGOs, private sector, community-based
organizations) on the ground that spend the money on programs and
services.27 Within sectors—global health, for example—donors allocate
funds for different programs (family planning/reproductive health,
HIV/AIDS, non-transmissible diseases, nutrition, malaria, etc.). Depending
on the funding source, the intra-sector allocation for a particular area of
development work can fluctuate significantly, making an issue that was
once well resourced suddenly impoverished, sending its funders scrambling
for resources.
This has been the case for American government-led funding for
international family planning, which has been stagnant for decades, after
reaching its zenith in the mid-1990s. For years, U.S. government-led
foreign aid has been subject to a “global crisis model” in which issues
deemed crises mobilize significant attention, and garner disproportionate
resources relative to other issue areas.28 This happened within global health;
when the immediacy of crisis thinking about “overpopulation” dissipated
after the Cairo conference, attention and funding priorities turned to global
AIDS prevention and treatment. Many in the population sector have been
seeking to restore population to its former funding prominence within
global health ever since. Several former donors from the Office of
Population, Health and Nutrition at the U.S. Agency for International
Development wrote a 2008 report advocating for more public resources to
be allocated for international family planning. Describing an “enormous
pent-up and growing unmet need for family planning,” the report cites
“mistaken” perceptions of declining global population growth, diversion of
funding to HIV/AIDS programs, and a general lack of awareness of the role
of family planning in economic development as reasons for funding
declines. As of fiscal year 2017, U.S. government allocations for
international family planning were at $607 million,29 a figure that has
fluctuated, but largely stagnated, over the years since 1994.
While the report does not mention the Cairo Consensus (and the resulting
turn toward women’s health, rights, and empowerment) as a reason for
funding declines, some donors have privately stated that the conference
agreement was a cause of funding cuts to international family planning
budgets. In an interview, one former USAID population program donor
stated, “There’s been a decline in family planning funds since the Cairo
conference. What happened at Cairo was that there was a focus on women’s
welfare and reproductive health and less emphasis on population-
development, and population-environment. For better or for worse, I think
the link between population and environment . . . well, there was the
concern that if you were concerned about numbers it would lead to coercive
programs, so it became politically incorrect to focus on numbers. The
women in the forefront didn’t intend to take money away from family
planning, but that’s what happened.”30
Given that, in previous decades, population and family planning was one
of the most-funded sectors of U.S. development aid, these shifts are striking
and deeply disturbing to members of the population-development
community. The state of institutional uncertainty about the future of
program funding fuels a sense of urgency among those who see new
advocacy strategies and narratives as crucial to protecting the sector in
which they have made their careers.
One donor I interviewed at a private foundation noted that the decreased
funding landscape heightens the need for private donors, who have more
freedom and flexibility with how they allocate resources, to be creative in
their practices, including directly reaching out to potential grantees (see
chapter 3). Yet this process is not without its frustrations: “Some funders
offer a lot of money to nonprofits and ask that they do this work. Nonprofit
organizations take the idea of connections between population and
environment, but don’t really get behind it. This rarely works. The
ownership is still with the funder.” Some donors see the emphasis on Cairo-
led language, specifically emphasizing women’s reproductive rights and
empowerment, as increasingly necessary to avoid controversy and appeal to
a wider audience, even though the process often feels experimental and
uncertain. As the same private donor lamented, “We’re still in kindergarten
when it comes to finding the connections, frameworks, models, and
prototypes that might actually move things forward.”31
The donors I spoke to agreed on one strategy in particular: strengthening
the scientific base linking population growth to climate change and other
environmental problems. During interviews, donors and grantees often
spoke appreciatively about the role of science in minimizing controversy,
arguing that if the broader public, and particularly legislators, were more
scientifically literate, they would no longer see population as a controversial
issue. One former USAID donor spoke passionately on the subject: “The
general scientific illiteracy of the American people is important. We have
climate change deniers who get as much credibility as climate scientists. So
I think the weakness of our system to use science to set policy . . . an
overarching issue is emotion and politics more so than clear thinking based
on our best science.” Despite the impulse to separate science from politics,
such a teasing apart is nearly impossible. Political goals are precisely what
motivate some of the scientific research linking population growth to
climate change and other environmental problems. Some private donors,
based on their politics, see themselves as uniquely positioned to increase
the scientific basis to inform global population policies, and they have
pursued grantees accordingly. Chapter 3 delves further into this donor-led
advocacy. In the meantime, in what follows, I turn to investigating one of
the most enduring and effective ways of engaging public interest in
population: the urgency of impending environmental crisis.

The Return of Apocalypse


Climate change comprises a broad range of physical, atmospheric, and
material changes to the earth and the atmosphere. It also operates as a set of
discourses signifying ideas about the future, resource use, “the global,” and
personal responsibility, often through the lens of impending crisis. These
futures are fundamentally dystopian, characterized by dramatic sea level
rise, disappearing coastlines, intense heat waves, and extreme storms. Yet,
the future is also already here. Climate change is already disrupting
ecological systems and human societies; it is already killing people via heat
waves, storms and other disasters, nutritional deficiencies, the intensified
spread of infectious diseases, and even chronic disease. The effects are so
significant that in 2009 a group of global health researchers declared
climate change the biggest threat to human health in the twenty-first
century.32
Against this backdrop, Bill McKibben published a widely read 2012
Rolling Stone article that described the “peril that human civilization is in,”
arguing that “we’re losing the fight, badly and quickly.”33 By crunching a
few numbers, he layed out the predicament: human beings are pouring far
more gigatons of carbon and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,
far more rapidly, than expected. In order to remain under the two degrees
Celsius warming limit agreed to by world leaders, we would need to add no
more than 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by
midcentury. As of the date of McKibben’s article, we were on track to add
more than 2,700 additional tons. Several years later, he followed up with a
second, markedly more aggressive message. This time, he likened climate
change to war, arguing that “World War III is well and truly underway. And
we are losing . . . by most of the ways we measure wars, climate change is
the real deal: carbon and methane are seizing physical territory, sowing
havoc and panic, racking up casualties, and even destabilizing
governments . . . It is not that global warming is like a world war. It is a
world war.”34 Even more terrifying, the war he described was not a war of
winners and losers, but rather a zero sum game in which we will inevitably
be decimated. McKibben’s prescription for a response? Meet fire with fire,
declaring war on climate change and mobilizing the kind of response
marshalled during World War II.
Climate change discourses are often communicated in this apocalyptic,
doom-and-gloom language. They are organized around the idea of
“planetary emergency,” and if those listening do not retreat into denialism,
the focus on crisis is a powerful strategy; it can “mobilize powerful actors
around the threat of massive risks and uncertainties.”35 It can also open up
the possibility of solutions that are otherwise unacceptable, including
population control.
In 2016, a group of bioethicists published an article identifying climate
change as one of the most important moral problems of the day, due to its
urgency and widespread harmful impacts. Their solution? Population
engineering—defined as intentional manipulation of population size and
structure—“a practical and morally justifiable means to help ameliorate the
threat of climate change.”36 The basis of their argument is the following:
population growth and climate change are both proceeding in ways that
have destructive impacts on the availability and quality of natural resources,
and current international climate mitigation policies and technologies are
insufficient to prevent the kind of CO2 emissions that lead to rapid
warming. Planning for climate change mitigation while remaining at current
population growth rates is both impossible and morally indefensible, given
the global spread and the depth of the impacts global warming is having on
the planet. Thus, some level of population engineering is required to
address the urgency of the climate problem.
Here is where their argument becomes dangerous: they state that, due to
the urgency of the climate problem, the best interventions are neither those
that are the least coercive, nor the most, but those somewhere in the middle.
Achieving quick, climate-stabilizing results morally justifies actions that are
along a coercion continuum; after all, they remind us, “We don’t have the
luxury of solving this problem at a leisurely pace.”37 Specifically, the
authors advocate a “global population engineering program” comprised of
an expansion of choice-enhancing interventions (such as women’s
education and comprehensive reproductive health care), along with
“preference adjustment”—changing cultural norms and influencing
childbearing preferences—as well as “incentivization”—altering the costs
and benefits associated with particular reproductive behaviors.38 Ironically,
they conclude with the statement that reducing childbearing is a more
attractive climate change mitigation strategy than reducing resource
consumption because it is easier, thus helping individuals avoid making
unnecessary personal sacrifices.
The article encapsulates many of the arguments writers and scholars are
making today, namely that population growth is an important cause of
climate change, that slowing population growth will be an effective means
of slowing GGEs, and that the urgency of the global climate problem
morally justifies—even requires—a narrow focus on fertility reduction.
Where it departs from others is in the authors’ willingness to consider
coercion as morally justifiable in the service of the greater good. However,
this is not an unfamiliar argument within environmental circles. In the
1960s and 1970s, in the heyday of public advocacy for population control,
environmental scientists openly called for coercive measures, including
punitive taxes and other population control policies. More recently, drawing
on militaristic language similar to McKibben’s, members of the defense
community have increasingly described climate change as a national
security threat, and talk of impending “climate wars.”39
The narrative of apocalypse is frightening, not just in what it describes
but what it makes possible, including military maneuvers, increasing
surveillance and policing of borders, and racial profiling of migrants and
refugees. This is linked to another development-industry population
narrative: the youth bulge theory. Youth bulge theory says that in
populations with large proportions of youth, particularly adolescents and
young adults, access to employment and social services is limited, fueling
frustration among disaffected young people—rendering youth susceptible to
recruitment in rebel or terrorist organizations, and making the societies they
live in more vulnerable to social unrest and violence. The theory describes
populations with age structures that skew heavily toward youth, with young
people in their twenties or younger comprising more than a fifth of the
overall population.
Of course, the vast majority of countries with these age structures are in
the Global South. The theory is meant to be frightening, and to invoke fear
of the “other.” A Newsday article describes it thus: “Dangerous
demographic trends typified by a massive youth ‘bulge’—an extraordinary
high proportion of young people among the population—all but guarantee
increased social instability that few regimes will be able to withstand.”40
Similar discourses had been circulated twenty years prior, in a National
Security Council report in 1974 describing “young people, who are in much
higher proportions in many less developed countries, [who] are likely to be
more volatile, unstable, prone to extremes, alienation and violence than an
older population.”41
Population researchers and NGO program managers have been paying
more and more attention to the youth bulge theory in the context of recent
international focus on two issues: terrorism and climate change. Take for
example a 2010 report by Population Action International on youth bulge
theory, The Shape of Things to Come: Why Age Structure Matters to a Safer,
More Equitable World. The report argues that “the threats to the well-being
and security of our world—from HIV/AIDS and terrorism to climate
change and poverty—require a bold mix of interventions and partnerships
that combine elements of both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power.”42 The report
describes terrorism, security concerns, and fragile or failing states as
resulting from youth-heavy population age structures, adding that age
structures can and should be shaped through “policies that affect the
demographic forces (i.e. births, deaths, and migration) that determine these
age structures”—namely policies that support family planning.43 This
approach to “strategic demography”44 was replicated just two years later,
when a group of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley
convened a meeting to discuss how to prevent “a huge humanitarian
catastrophe” from occurring in the Horn of Africa. Over a hundred people
gathered to review population projections and models of climate-driven
food and water shortages, and to pore over data arguing that rapid
population growth, extreme temperatures, and expected drought would
likely create conditions leading to “the largest involuntary migration in
history.”45 The solutions proposed at the meeting focused on agricultural
adaptation, water management, and predictably, voluntary family planning
for women delivered through a human rights approach, arguing that these
interventions must be “immediate and on a large scale.”46
These discourses make it clear that members of the population network
are nimble in applying the Cairo Consensus approach to family planning to
a broad range of conditions, and in doing so, they harness the exact kinds of
discourses Cairo activists worked so hard to reject. Operating within a
discourse of entrenched gender stereotypes of “dangerous” Southern men,
they harness a powerful set of images that have already taken root in U.S.
policymaking groups and in the national psyche. In an era when terrorist
threats are perceived around every corner, when terrorist attacks are quickly
used to racially profile young men from the Middle East and Africa, and
when this generalized perception of Muslim-led terror becomes embedded
in U.S. policy in the form of travel bans and refugee exclusion, youth
bulges operate as an explanatory framework for racialized framings of
population problems. They also make a case for the familiar technological
quick-fix: contraceptives.

Conclusion
This chapter demonstrates how population narratives and discourses, far
from silent or invisible, are continually revived through popular media,
development interventions, and various forms of policy advocacy. Climate
change, however, is making these narratives more salient, visible, and
urgent in an era of heightened environmental and social risk. Characterizing
population through crisis narratives has a long history among neo-
Malthusians, particularly those tasked with developing scientific theories
that link population to environmental problems and policy solutions.
Chapter 2 delves into these questions, investigating the ways key actors
constructed population as a scientific and environmental problem across the
twentieth century—and the roles of politics and policy agendas in the
process.
2

How Population Became an Environmental


Problem
One afternoon in 2009, a friend and I flew home to Northern California
from our Costa Rica vacation, gazing through the window and marveling at
how many trees covered the land just south of San Francisco. “It’s so
beautiful,” he said. “People should start using some birth control so that we
can get this back in San Francisco!” A lifelong resident of the city, he was
struck by the contrast between the view from the airplane and the landscape
of concrete, steel, and glass that had shaped everyday life in his hometown.
I, on the other hand, was surprised by the casual way he linked
deforestation and population growth without any broader context. Those
details didn’t matter. The paradigm he was operating in said that a lack of
forest cover had to be the result of too many people in the region. When I
asked him where he thought his idea originated, he responded defensively:
“What do you mean? It’s obvious, it’s just common sense. My idea came
from me. No one has to tell me there are too many people around. You can
look out the window and see that.”
I tried to probe further, suggesting that he had learned this idea from
somewhere—a class, a textbook, newspaper article, television ad, or
conversation with an environmentalist friend—but the conversation quickly
degenerated as his insistence on the obviousness and inevitability of
population growth’s environmental destruction met with my own
unyielding position that his ideas did not originate in his own mind. Things
became heated. As we descended, both toward the airport, and more deeply
into our entrenched positions, I was struck by how the conversation brought
to life a key issue I’d been grappling with in my research: how and why
populationist approaches are accepted, and stridently defended, as common
sense. It seems to be a natural and obvious connection: the more people
there are consuming natural resources, the more those resources will
inevitably be depleted and become scarce. Of course, the real picture is far
more complex than that. And our ideas of what counts as common sense,
particularly in the context of population-environment linkages, are heavily
shaped by the assertions of scientists and environmentalists, many of whose
ideas were historically shaped by social and political concerns.
As this chapter will demonstrate, these concerns lay at the foundation of
much of the thinking about carrying capacity and planetary limits. This is
not to say that there are no limits to the earth’s ability to sustain and renew
itself and its resources, nor am I arguing that human numbers do not play a
role in stretching those limits. However, what I do argue is that there is not,
and never has been, a single, evidence-based model that has successfully
calculated or predicted the global environmental impact of human numbers
alone. Local context, resource consumption, polluting technologies, state-
and corporate-based resource extraction and pollution, and the
environmental impacts of military operations all make it impossible to
produce such a number on a global scale.
Population has not always been thought of as a problem, and certainly
not an environmental one. Rather, it has been socially constructed over time
as a problem through the efforts of people who were deeply concerned with
managing a range of issues: “socially undesirable” traits like criminal
tendencies, alcoholism, mental illnesses, cognitive delays, unwed
pregnancies, and dependence on welfare; global geopolitical instability and
armed conflict; immigration; economic development in newly independent
former colonies; and the balance between human consumption of natural
resources and the earth’s capacity to regenerate those resources. A closely
related set of concerns focused on the roles of technology and
modernization in addressing these questions. The taken-for-granted idea
that population growth is a threat to nature and the environment does not in
fact reflect an essential, immutable biological reality. Instead it reflects
long-standing debates among scientists, activists, academics, and
policymakers working to define population problems, their impacts, and
how to solve them.
What those problems are, and the strategies designed to solve them, have
changed significantly over time. For example, at the start of the twentieth
century, scientists and politicians—including environmentalists—were
quite concerned about population decline, and were focused on increasing
the population of the white, U.S.-born middle class. As this example
suggests, while population itself has long been a fraught topic in the United
States, there was not a singular or essential twentieth-century “population
problem,” but instead a set of diverse and sometimes competing ideas
making up a field of population problems. These problems were at the heart
of complicated struggles and debates that engaged questions of
policymaking, resource use, ecological stability, international relations,
geopolitical stability, race, and gender. Throughout these debates, struggles
have centered on women: whether and which women should have more
children or fewer, and how to bring that about through clinical
interventions, laws, social policies, or moral exhortations. These are also
racialized struggles. In the U.S., whiteness in particular has been central to
populationist ideas about natural resources, national identity, and global
geopolitical security.
This chapter is about the twentieth-century history of population science.
It offers a critical feminist reading of the scientific ideas, theories, and
concepts that have produced knowledge of population as an object of
inquiry, building it over time as a problem of nature and the environment.
Traversing the late 1700s to the 1970s, when the core theories of population
science were produced, the chapter explores several questions: how did
population become an environmental problem? What are the relationships
between science, politics, and policy concerns in population-environment
arguments? How did the logic of population problems come to be known as
common sense? And a central, related question: how do race, gender, and
class inform these debates? I trace these questions through a primary focus
on three conceptual/paradigmatic and historical moments: the development
of eugenic theories and nationalist discourses in the 1900s–1920s;
modernization and demographic transition theory in the 1930s–1950s; and
the concept of carrying capacity as developed and disseminated by
environmentalists in the 1940s through the 1970s.

Defining the Problem: The Emergence of Population


From the earliest days of population being perceived as a bounded subject
and area of inquiry, it was situated within the context of political concerns,
namely questions of state and territory governance, international security,
and the need for an optimal balance of land-based resources to meet the
basic needs of individual members of society. These questions emerged in
Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as part of efforts to
identify the basic blueprint of the ideal state.1 The question of ideal
population size was the subject of intense debate, reflecting contrasting
views across Europe. Fears of overpopulation and the ill effects of high
population density began to flourish in England and Germany, while writers
in Italy and France argued in favor of abundant populations as a source of
political stability.
Views on the significance of large populations varied widely among
European thinkers; they were characterized both as providing benefits for
state strength, sovereignty, and security, as well as draining resources and
driving state decline. A broad change in the approach to population began to
develop in England as a result of the rather sudden growth of the poor—a
transformation that arose from both an absolute growth in human numbers,
as well as sudden increases in capitalist-driven inflation and enclosures of
previously common agricultural lands, which left farmers devastated.2
Hunger became a state of daily life for the newly poor, a class that swelled
dramatically, seemingly overnight. It was in this context that British state
authorities began to identify poverty, crime, and “overpopulation” as the
prevailing national problems of the day, leading to the institutionalization of
the Elizabethan Poor Law in 1601. The law provided money, food, and
clothing to the settled poor, who were temporarily out of work. Amid
heightened population anxiety in England, European writers elsewhere
continued to argue that a robust and sizable population was the source and
symbol of strength of a country’s international leadership. Contrasting
views dominated population thinking throughout the seventeenth century:
while some authors associated large populations with idleness, waste,
poverty, and potential criminal tendencies, others argued that large
populations were a necessary source of labor for state projects.3
In the eighteenth century, a total revolution in population thinking
occurred with the appearance of Malthusianism. British cleric and political
economist Thomas Robert Malthus wrote the first book of his six-draft
Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, theorizing that there were two
basic forces that operated to create and sustain life: human sexuality, or “the
passion between the sexes”—a necessary and vital component of human
nature—and food production (“production in the earth”).4 These two forces
were unequal, and subject to the laws of nature, which were fixed,
predictable, and determined by God. In this schema, population grows
exponentially while food production proceeds at a much slower pace; as a
result, the great law of nature was required to impose natural limits on
population growth. These limits, or checks, included misery, which he
defined as starvation, disease, and death. Without this fixed law of nature,
unchecked human population growth would inevitably exceed the earth’s
capacity to produce adequate food for human survival. Malthus put forth
these arguments as fundamental laws of a nature that binds all living things
(plants, animals, and humans) together in the same set of natural limits. In
his framework, famine is nature’s resource, causing premature death to
intervene when the power of population surpasses that of subsistence.
Although Malthus was not the first to make these arguments, he was the
first to synthesize political and scientific arguments about population into
one coherent theory. In addition to making arguments about the laws of
nature, he argued that state welfare programs like the British Poor Laws
prevented the poor from adopting the responsibility required for a strong
work ethic and artificially prevented what nature intended: human
starvation. He claimed that the Poor Laws directly facilitated population
growth by removing nature’s limits—misery, starvation, and death—
thereby inciting the poor to reproduce. Natural limits were also intended to
impose moral boundaries on human kind: man’s highest moral and social
potential could only be achieved through hard work and responsibility,
which state intervention made impossible. In other words, social policies
improving the welfare of the poor prevented nature from keeping human
growth and food resources in balance, and kept the poor from contributing
effectively to society through hard work.
Malthusian theory was groundbreaking. Population was no longer an
arena of abstract theorizing; it was now an object of quantitative inquiry.
Future population growth, and its effect on food resources, could be
projected by analyzing and developing theories about current population
trends. Malthusian theory also irrevocably influenced the development of
scientific thinking, directly shaping the expansion of scientific theories and
methods in the fields of eugenics, demography, and the ecological theory of
carrying capacity.

Operationalizing Malthusianism: Eugenics, Conservation, and


the New Nationalism
Malthusian ideas had a direct impact on the development of genetic science
through the controversial field of eugenics. Charles Darwin was heavily
influenced by Malthus as he developed his theory of natural selection,
writing in his autobiography, “I happened to read for amusement Malthus
on Population and, being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for
existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of
the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these
circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved and
unfavourable ones destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of
new species.”5 Several decades after Darwin published Origin of Species in
1859, his cousin Sir Francis Galton, a British anthropologist, read the book
and became interested in studying human heredity. Based on Darwin’s
ideas, Galton postulated that “innate moral and intellectual faculties,” which
are “so closely bound up with the physical ones,” could be selectively
encouraged through human breeding, thereby producing people of superior
stock.6 In other words, Galton thought that these characteristics were
genetically grounded and transmitted from one generation to the next via
DNA.
In 1883, Galton coined the term “eugenics,” which he drew from the
Greek word “eugenes,” meaning good or well born, defining it as “the
science of improving stock.”7 His theories were grounded in the idea that
traits like intellectual and physical prowess, moral fiber, personality, and
criminal tendencies were traits received at birth through genetic inheritance.
Galton also viewed human traits and characteristics as biologically rooted
in race and transmitted through heredity, arguing that the most desirable
traits were possessed by races of superior stock—namely, European races.
While he communicated his ideas in scientific terms, eugenics was initially
conceived as both a scientific and a political enterprise; Galton advocated
state policies such as encouraging early marriage between those deemed
socially superior, while refusing state welfare to those whose children
displayed “inferior qualities.”8
Galton’s eugenic ideas reflected broader concerns about biological and
social deterioration, concerns that informed much of the research that was
produced over the next century in Europe and North America on questions
of race, sexuality, reproduction, nature, and environment. American eugenic
ideas were also applied to natural landscapes and conservationist thinking.
In California, for example, the landscape was profoundly shaped by
eugenicists, many of whom were prominent conservationists. The Save-the-
Redwoods League was founded in 1918 by three California men who were
key actors in the American eugenics movement: Madison Grant, Henry
Fairfield Osborn, and John C. Merriam. Madison Grant wrote The Passing
of the Great Race, a polemic railing against the rising populations of
nonwhites and immigrants, and the impending extinction of the “great race”
of white Protestant Americans. The League’s board was made up of wealthy
white men, many of whom were landscape architects, engineers, and natural
scientists. Charles Matthias Goethe, a long-term member and supporter of
the League who was hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle in 1966 as
“America’s Grand Old Man of the Conservation Movement” following his
death, was a widely renowned conservationist, member of the Sierra Club
and Audubon Society, financial supporter of plant biology and genetics
research, natural scientist, and eugenicist. Goethe’s memoir compared the
European American migrants who settled in the West to cacti and other
hardy plants that were able to thrive in rugged conditions, describing
westward expansion in terms of the natural selection of hardier human
“stocks” and elimination of “weaklings.”9 Many of the League’s members
were either members of national eugenics organizations or explicitly
endorsed eugenic immigration policies and ideas of Aryan and Nordic
supremacy.
Eugenicists in early-twentieth-century California drew symbolic
associations between natural landscapes, redwoods in particular, and the
white race. Endangered redwood trees became emblematic of imperiled
human genetic stock, specifically that of Anglo-Nordic people, who these
eugenicists saw as superior. They entwined narratives of colonial westward
expansion and survival on the harsh landscape with the survival of trees in
the midst of encroaching human, plant, and genetic threats. In this register,
genetic stock became a way of talking about both trees and people in terms
of survival, conservation, protectionism, greatness, and the threat of
encroachment by inferior stock.10 People like Osborn and Grant in the 1920s
applied eugenic arguments to immigration, casting it as a threat to the
integrity of vital plant and animal species, as well as conservation more
broadly. Their target was southern Europeans, and their language was every
bit as racist as that which would follow decades down the line. In their
schema, genetically inferior people threatened to overwhelm native-born
whites through immigration, and in tandem, to overrun and overwhelm
wilderness. They also saw the immigrant masses as representative of cities
encroaching on wilderness areas.11
These ideas were front and center in American politics and in the nascent
conservation movement in the early twentieth century. President Theodore
Roosevelt, a major proponent of eugenics and conservation, convened the
first national conservation conference in 1908, bringing together members
of Congress, scientists, governors, members of the Supreme Court,
journalists, and leaders of environmental organizations. It was an
unprecedented meeting. Roosevelt argued against rampant timber logging
and deforestation, lamenting the impacts it had on soil erosion and sullied
waterways. The two central priority areas of the conference were the need
to “keep waterways free for commerce,” and to conserve natural resources,
both of which he linked to the future of the nation itself. The conference
pushed forward the point that “the nation needed to manage its forests with
more foresight and wisdom, not just so that future Americans would have
trees to use but so that the future of the entire nation would be bright.”12
Conservation, or “wise use” of natural resources, was, in Roosevelt’s eyes,
“the great material question” of the day.13
These ideas were central to the new nationalism of the time, which
focused on individual opportunity combined with civic engagement and
good citizenship, in protection of what Roosevelt saw as the American
ideal: self-advancement and increasing wealth and prosperity for American
families working on their own land. Roosevelt’s vision, however, was
reserved exclusively for white Protestant Americans. He was an ardent
eugenicist who saw race and nationalism as deeply intertwined, and he
perceived a racial threat in the form of immigrants from east and southern
Europe—one that threatened the very existence of white Protestants. In an
October 18, 1902 letter, he wrote of “what is fundamentally infinitely more
important than any other question in this country—that is, the question of
race suicide, complete or partial.” The solution he proposed was to build
robust families centered on marriage and abundant children, arguing that it
amounted to a moral and national duty: “The man or woman who
deliberately avoids marriage, and has a heart so cold as to know no passion
and a brain so shallow and selfish as to dislike having children, is in effect a
criminal against the race, and should be an object of contemptuous
abhorrence by all healthy people.”14
The duty Roosevelt described was primarily a gendered one centered on
white women. In subsequent speeches, he outlined women’s special
embodied role, arguing that they bore a particular responsibility to the
nation: that of bearing children to build and strengthen the race. In his
speech to the National Congress of Mothers, he outlined these ideas as
follows:

No piled-up wealth, no splendor of material growth, no


brilliance of artistic development, will permanently avail any
people unless . . . the average woman is a good wife, a good
mother, able and willing to perform the first and greatest
duty of womanhood, able and willing to bear, and to bring
up as they should be brought up, healthy children, sound in
body, mind, and character, and numerous enough so that the
race shall increase and not decrease . . . If the average
family in which there are children contained but two children
the nation as a whole would decrease in population so
rapidly that in two or three generations it would very
deservedly be on the point of extinction, so that the people
who had acted on this base and selfish doctrine would be
giving place to others with braver and more robust ideals.
Nor would such a result be in any way regrettable; for a race
that practised such doctrine—that is, a race that practised
race suicide—would thereby conclusively show that it was
unfit to exist, and that it had better give place to people who
had not forgotten the primary laws of their being.15 (emphasis
added)

Roosevelt’s racial ideas were deeply entwined with his conservationist


values. He established the United States Forest Service in 1905, and used
the American Antiquities Act of 1906 to establish national forests, bird
reserves, game preserves, national parks, and other monuments. But these
resources were created for the enjoyment of white Protestant Americans.
Dispossessing Native Americans of their lands—known as “Indian
Removal” at the time—was central to the project of designating national
parks and other wilderness areas as recreation sites for whites. National
parks were living Edens, places to experience sublime nature in the form of
beautiful scenery, animals, trees, flowers, mountains, lakes, and streams.
Designated wilderness areas were carefully managed to remove encounters
with “wild” Indians. Early environmentalists like John Muir, a
preservationist and founder of the Sierra Club who was a close friend to
Roosevelt, saw the project of removing and resettling Native Americans
onto reservations as necessary to the conservation of wilderness. Muir, who
described Native Americans as dirty, gross, grim, and degraded in his travel
journals, contrasted their “uncleanliness” with the pristine beauty of
nature.16
Conservationists promoted eugenics as vital to the optimization of both
nature and humans. In a 1909 report for the National Conservation
Commission (appointed by Roosevelt), Yale economist Irving Fisher wrote
that “there is every reason to believe that human beings are as amenable to
cultivation as other animals and plants,” and concluded that “the problem of
the conservation of our natural resources is therefore not a series of
independent problems, but a coherent all-embracing whole. If our nation
cares to make any provision for its grandchildren and its grandchildren’s
grandchildren, this provision must include conservation in all its branches
—but above all, the conservation of the racial stock itself.”17 At the
conclusion of his report, Fisher made ten comprehensive recommendations
to promote this conservation, the final one of which was eugenics, which he
defined as “hygiene for future generations,” in order to prevent marriage
between the “unfit,” as well as ensuring the “unsexing,” or compulsory
sterilization, of rapists, criminals, “idiots,” and “degenerates generally.”18
Despite its early associations with scientific racism, eugenics was
actually a somewhat diverse field, divided into two main areas of inquiry:
positive eugenics—encouraging the childbearing of those deemed to be of
better stock—and negative eugenics, which focused on strategies to limit
the procreation of the unfit. As Alexandra Minna Stern’s study of twentieth-
century American eugenics argues, prevailing narratives of eugenics today
often misunderstand, and therefore misrepresent, the field’s complexity and
its legacy, assuming that eugenics disappeared in the U.S. after Nazism and
WWII due to its association with scientific racism. This was far from the
case. Eugenics researchers simply redirected their efforts into new research
agendas, moving in two key directions. The first direction primarily focused
on individual genetics counseling for couples hoping to have children. The
second was that of international population control, where eugenic ideas
about improved population quality were integrated with modernization
theory and development interventions in international family planning.19

Making Modern Subjects: Demographic Science and


Development
Greene’s study of the role of Malthusianism in shaping U.S. domestic and
foreign population interventions describes population as a governing
apparatus, functioning to “invent, circulate, and regulate public problems.”20
This apparatus makes the “population crisis” intelligible, so that it is
possible to define and solve population problems. It also makes modern
subjects possible through fertility regulation. Malthusianism translates
reproducing bodies and populations into problems that can be solved
through modernizing tools and technologies, including demographic and
other scientific study, modernizing discourses, and interventions such as
family planning and contraceptive use. In creating his theories, Malthus
“helped make visible the reproductive practices of the working classes as an
object open to change. In other words, he pulled procreation out of the
realm of the natural and into the realm of the governable.”21 This cannot be
overstated: what was previously understood to be natural—procreation—
was now reframed as something that could be artificially regulated through
study and intervention.
Malthusian ideas became grounded in the quantitative sciences through
demography, a field that emerged as the “offspring of mixed parentage and
stormy unions” between activists, ideologues, biologists, and policymakers,
among others.22 The first meeting of what would eventually become the
Population Association of America (PAA), the largest society of
demographers in the U.S., convened in 1930. Birth control advocates,
eugenicists, immigration control advocates, a population biologist,
agricultural economists, and statistics gatherers from government, industry,
and academia came together, the activists far outnumbering the scientists, to
decide how population studies would be defined, and how population
knowledge would be applied to social concerns.
At the time, “biological Malthusianism,” which incorporated social
Darwinism and racist ideas, dominated the discussions. This new approach
recast the smaller families of the middle and upper classes—which Malthus
had lauded as economically beneficial for the state—as dangerous, a sign of
“selfishness” and “excessive materialism.”23 Biological Malthusians also
saw feminism as part of the problem, as most of the adherents to the birth
control movement at the time were educated, U.S.-born, white women,
precisely those who population scientists wanted to see reproducing. There
were divergent goals among the group: birth controllers concerned about
freedom for white women and improved living standards saw declining
populations among native-born whites as a good sign, whereas biological
Malthusians were pessimistic and sought to intervene and increase birth
rates of native-born whites. A third, growing group of “population
scientists” emphasized compiling population statistics to make questions of
population change more empirical in basis.
These statisticians were the earliest demographers, along with biologists,
eugenicists, economists, and sociologists, and their work was directed
toward institutionalizing demography as an academic field of study through
universities in the 1920s and 1930s. Although demography became an
institutionalized science through the academy, quantitative analysts did not
reject more ideological positioning. As Hodgson notes, the “work of these
empirically minded population scientists is distinguishable from those who
wrote on population themes as movement advocates . . . [However,] belief
in the empiricist tradition did not preclude ideological commitment. During
the first third of this century, population scientists largely accepted the
precepts of biological Malthusianism.”24 For example, when the PAA was
formed in 1931, its first president was Henry Fairchild, a “nativist with
clear eugenicist leanings who had an academic post teaching courses in
population studies.”25
A central figure in demography was Frank Notestein, who articulated the
theory of demographic transition in 1945. The theory outlined a normative
four-stage model of demographic transition from high-fertility, high-
mortality population trends, to a pattern characterized by low fertility and
low mortality, based on historical population trends that began in Europe in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the first stage of the transition,
mortality is decreased via improvements in agriculture, industrial
production, and improving human health and life expectancy. Notestein
summed up these innovations up as encompassing modernization. Stating
that more than half the world had not begun the demographic transition, he
argued that this transition could be brought on through Western
intervention, such that Global South countries could effectively follow the
European model. Notestein’s concept of demographic transition was
grounded in capitalist development, based on the logic that only a
significant increase in economic production could bring the improvements
in social conditions, health status, and overall social welfare necessary to
reduce fertility for the world’s poor. These concerns had by this time
become a core component of U.S.-led international development projects,
which dovetailed over time with neo-Malthusian population arguments.26
Demographic transition has alternately been described as a theory, a
historical model, a predictive model, and a descriptive term. It is also a tool
of policy-oriented science. As Szreter notes, “The idea of demographic
transition was itself the product of a particular conception of social science
as a guide for policy, a science employing a positivistic methodology that
was simultaneously investigative and predictive.”27 Moreover, demographic
transition was predicated on modernization theory: “The theory held that
fertility would only fall as a result of the cumulative mutually reinforcing
spectrum of effects consequent on full-scale industrialization and
modernization: enhanced survival; a growing culture of individualism;
rising consumer aspirations; emergence of huge and socially mobile urban
populations; loss of various functions of the family to the factory and the
school; and decline of fatalistic in favor of conative habits of thought.”28
Scholars have discovered abundant historical evidence to refute the
empirical basis and analytic value of the demographic transition; however,
the concept continues to dominate both demography and international
family planning policy and programming. Demographic transition was
developed to describe a historically contingent set of events, not a stable,
static, or universal set of trends. It has endured in part because of its
ideological pull: by the early 1960s, “many demographers, including many
illustrious figures of the discipline, decided that their task was not just to
interpret the world but to change it”29 (emphasis added).
Demographic transition theory is based on a set of observations of
fertility and mortality change over time across Europe over a period of
more than two hundred years. Early supporters of the theory did not
presume that these shifts were uniform across the region, nor that the rate at
which these shifts occur could be the same across regions, given that they
were precipitated by urbanization, delayed marriage, improved sanitation
and hygiene systems, modern health practices, and disease control.
However, there was general pressure at the time for a policy solution to
rapid population growth in the Third World. Birth control advocates had
long argued that modern birth control methods could be used to intervene
on high fertility rates; social scientists increasingly began to adopt this view
as well. By the end of the 1950s, demographers were advocating the
position that individual changes in attitude and behavior could shift the
broader demographic landscape—a reversal of the majority position from a
decade earlier.30
As an applied science, demography was designed to influence policy.
These policy linkages became formalized in the 1940s and 1950s through a
dramatic increase in network-building between government economic
planners, foreign policy experts, professional demographers, corporate
leaders, and directors of philanthropic organizations, who shared the goal of
“re-working . . . demographic knowledge to make it more ‘user friendly’ to
policymakers.”31 To address this concern, they adopted a three-pronged
approach to build and widely disseminate demographic knowledge: data-
collecting missions to Global South countries; institutionalizing
professional demography as academic and policy science via university-
based population centers; and influencing professional demographers to
shift their academic paradigm, the demographic transition theory, to better
support prevailing political goals of the day.
At the urging of John D. Rockefeller III, who had long been interested in
funding contraceptive programs, the Rockefeller Foundation funded a
research mission to Asia after World War II to study the demographic
context in Japan, Korea, Indonesia, and Taiwan. The delegation included
Fred Notestein and Irene Taeuber, prominent American demographers at the
Princeton University Office of Population Research, who produced a report
making recommendations for foundation support for population
interventions in the area. Despite its scholarly tone, the conclusions were
clear: Asia’s growing populations presented an imminent crisis for the
region. The document was distributed beyond the foundation, to academics
and policymakers, other foundations, and military officials. This pilot set
the blueprint for future demographic missions to the Third World
throughout the 1950s, in which delegations led by prominent demographers
would produce reports for the Washington foreign policy community.
Through these missions, demographic knowledge became increasingly
international, and more closely and formally linked to U.S. foreign policy.32
Demography became institutionalized in the U.S. at university research
centers, with the support of the Ford Foundation and Population Council.
Funders also provided support to train elite foreign scholars in demography
at American universities, who would then return to their countries and work
in demographic research centers or government agencies. Thus, American
demographic theory and methods were spread around the world, facilitated
by private philanthropic organizations. This model continued through the
1960s, with the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller funding policy-directed
independent policy research centers and other scientific programs.
Demographic transition theory and the quantitative demographic studies
produced on the basis of the theory were also central to race-making
projects. Studies conducted in Puerto Rico were utilized to define
reproductive difference in ways that made colonization both possible and
necessary, in order to modernize families. Targeted interventions into
venereal disease, prostitution, and “immoral sexual relations” became
central to the U.S. colonial project there via public health programs.33 By
constructing sexual and reproductive differences as pathological, this work
also served to construct and solidify ideas of racial difference.
Further, McCann has argued that demographic analyses contributed to
hegemonic gender norms in the twentieth century. For example,
demographic quantification focuses on aggregation, an approach that takes
the so-called average man or woman in a society as its main unit of
analysis. But the ideal subjects put forth in this model were fictional: men
who based their reproductive decisions on market logic and economic self-
assessments, and women who only entered the picture as dependent wives,
despite the fact that their bodies were the terrain on which measurements of
birth rates, contraceptive use, and marriage rates were made. This
construction of average, ideal men and women, operationalized through
demographic transition and deployed through development interventions,
served to homogenize a national “us” and highlight contrasts with (as well
as make for easy comparisons to) racialized others whose reproductive,
marriage, and kinship practices did not fit the model.34
Much of the demand for demographic models and statistical analyses has
come from institutions with action agendas, including governments,
foundations, and international agencies. To receive funding and the basic
data to analyze, demographers have had to tailor their work to be policy-
relevant and responsive to the applied interests of their clients. Thus, the
field has continuously had to contend with two central dilemmas: first,
making and doing science, in order to establish itself as a scientific field
separate from policy and politics; and working closely with politically
oriented actors. These practice-based realities have created a context in
which, as Greenhalgh notes, the field has at times had to develop and
promote theories created to meet the standards of its supporters—even
when this conflicts with scholarly standards of empirical accuracy.35

The Roots of Carrying Capacity


At the same time that the field of demography was being established,
biological and ecological scientists were hard at work on their own search
for quantitative explanations of the world. The history of carrying capacity
and its application to the population problem is one of a search for numbers:
a number, calculation, or equation that can quantify the correct number of
people to limit population to, in order to achieve balance with natural
resources and prevent or reduce environmental degradation. Such a number
has never been found; however, the quest to find it has never waned. The
reasons for this are complex. The language of mathematics, which is highly
structured and rule-bound, projects a sense of uniformity and rigor. This
language is easily transportable across vast distances of geography and
culture, minimizing the need for intimate knowledge of locality and
community. Moreover, the discourse of mathematics helps to “produce
knowledge independent of the particular people who make it.”36
Quantification, and its close identification with scientific objectivity, is
often taken to signify a “set of strategies for dealing with distance and
distrust,” a universalizing technology for representing truths in ways that
minimize complexity and erase the position of the person producing the
knowledge.37
Demography lent strong tools to this quest through projections, models,
and statistical methods. As the previous section demonstrated, both
demography and eugenics also produced ideas of the centrality of racial
difference relative to population size, growth, and reproductive behavior
across racial, cultural, and geographic lines. Environmentalists would carry
this notion further, embedding it in arguments about earthly limits and the
need for a raced and classed lens for population interventions. Unlike
interventions developed to address public health, carrying capacity
arguments would be used as a basis for arguing against the optimization of
human health, and for a cold calculus in determining the relative value of
lives—particularly those deemed environmentally destructive.
Population biology and population ecology have relied heavily on the
logistic growth curve, a model developed by American zoologist Raymond
Pearl. Working with statistician Lowell Reed and heavily influenced by the
ideas of mathematician Pierre Verhulst, Pearl was the central figure
responsible for circulating the idea of the logistical growth curve as a
natural law of population growth. Pearl was an editor of the Journal of
Heredity, where he oversaw the publication of articles arguing that the
communities with the highest birth rates were the least wealthy and
educated, and that “the old stock had been overrun.”38 He studied yeast and
fruit flies bred in glass jars, extrapolating from these results to argue that
human population growth follows a strikingly similar pattern to that of
other organisms in nature, one that fits into a smooth “S” pattern known as
the logistic curve.39
In this model, population grows exponentially until reaching a limit
defined by the environment, at which time it begins to decelerate and
decline. Pearl argued that this process is biological, asserting that “all the
complexities of human behavior, social organization, economic structure,
and political activity, seem to alter much less than would have been
expected the results of the operation of those biological forces which
basically determine the course of the growth of populations of men, as well
as those of yeast cells and . . . flies.”40 In other words, he assigned biology
explanatory power as the determining force in population growth and,
ultimately, its limits.
Pearl was the first to take population from an abstract object of concern
to a scientific object to be studied and manipulated through direct
intervention. Unlike Malthus, who viewed food production and population
growth as fixed rates such that population would inevitably overwhelm
food production, Pearl saw these rates as adjustable based on interventions
through state policies and technologies. He was concerned about global
resource limits and was an early critic of human patterns of resource
consumption, arguing that “the volume and the surface of the planet on
which we live are strictly fixed quantities. This fact sets a limit.”41 However,
the logistic growth curve was widely rejected by economists and
demographic statisticians at the time that Pearl promoted it. The model did
not fit much of the existing data on population trends in many countries
around the world, and was thus ineffective in predicting future population
trends.42 Yet, over the next two decades, it became incorporated into
measures and formulas tracking population growth in both population
biology and population ecology, fields that heavily influenced the
development of human demography.
Why did this happen? One explanation is provided through Pearl’s
personal efforts, including mounting a massive public relations campaign
among his natural scientist peers, publishing numerous papers, articles, and
books attesting to the validity of the logistic curve model. In one, he laid
out three principles outlining what he saw as the biological basis for the
behavior of all organisms: the drive for personal survival, the urge to
reproduce, and genetic and somatic variability. To them, he added a fourth,
determining factor: the environment. “In considering the biology of
populations, one aspect of the environment is of particular importance, both
theoretical and practical,” he argued. “This is available space. The number
of organisms in the population taken in relation to available space
determines density, a major factor of significance in population biology.”43
Pearl’s goal was to produce a model that could make standard predictions
about future population growth at regional and global levels. What initially
emerged as an intuitive, a priori perspective that was initially discredited
had become grounded as central to understanding the biological basis of
population growth and decline. It was also incorporated decades later into
theories of carrying capacity when they were applied to human population
growth.44
While Pearl was working to promote his theory of the logistic curve,
efforts were underway to organize the first international union of population
scientists (the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of
Population), whose priority concerns were soil productivity and political
borders. Early conveners were also concerned with optimal population
density, carrying capacity, and migration laws. These were simultaneously
scientific questions as well as geopolitical concerns and questions of earthly
and spatial phenomena, centered on population size and distribution in
relation to land. Malthusians, economists, geographers, and early
demographers involved in the union all shared the belief that the question of
population density, and the differences of these densities between nations
and regions of the world, was central to international relations. A key
question of international relations, then, had to be that of how to resolve the
problem of uneven population distribution.45
Many of these scientists looked to the then-recent history of World War I
to argue that growth and uneven distribution of populations was a likely
cause of war. As a result, they posited a better distribution of global
populations, based on optimum density, as a necessary solution. Bashford’s
analysis of thousands of publications on world population from the 1920s
and 1930s reveals that the most common statement found in these
documents was that “overpopulation, understood in terms of comparative
density, caused war.”46 Land wasn’t the only concern, at least not in itself;
the scientists were primarily focused on food production. Their concerns
about fertility were just as much about soil fertility as they were about
women’s reproductive fertility. Many early conservationists and population
scientists at the time were first concerned about solving problems of land
and food distribution; managing women’s fertility was simply the most
expedient means to that end.
Carrying capacity has become one of the single most important scientific
concepts in neo-Malthusian arguments about population growth and
environmental limits. It is centrally concerned with the question of limits—
the idea of people around the globe sharing a limited living space
characterized by constraint and crowdedness.47 Ironically, the phrase itself
did not originate with Malthus, nor with studies of population. Rather, the
term “carrying capacity” was first coined in 1845 as a reference to the
tonnage, or storage capacity, of ships, and was mainly invoked in
discussions of international trade disputes. It was later applied to animals
and rangeland management. Aldo Leopold was a prominent and vocal
supporter of this model. In the 1930s, Leopold took up the concept in his
analysis of a population crash among Kaibab deer, creating a theory of
carrying capacity that would allow game managers to increase or decrease
populations of game by manipulating factors like environmental habitats,
controlling populations of predators, and relocating animals or releasing the
captive bred into the wild. He defined carrying capacity as the number of
livestock a given area of land could support without the land degrading.
There was significant debate over the concept; many range scientists of the
time rejected carrying capacity outright. However, some scientists forged
ahead with using the term, and by the 1940s, they applied it to people. In a
1941 speech entitled “Ecology and Politics,” Leopold argued that “every
environment carries not only characteristic kinds of animals, but
characteristic numbers of each . . . that number is the carrying capacity of
that land for that species,”48 and extrapolated these ideas from animals to
humans: “Perhaps the present world-revolution is the sign that we have
exceeded that limit, or that we have approached it too rapidly.”49
Carrying capacity later emerged as an expression of state power and
control through selective application by state authorities. Because of its
development and circulation through scientific discourses, carrying capacity
became so embedded in population sciences that “even when carrying
capacities proved illusory, they provided an appearance of objectivity,
rationality, and precision to policies that might otherwise have been
revealed as politically or economically motivated.”50 Following World War
II, concerns about population, resources, and international conflict exploded
among American researchers and policymakers, refracted through the lens
of environmentalism. In 1948, William Vogt published Road to Survival,
the first tract articulating a global neo-Malthusian carrying capacity: “The
lot of each . . . is completely dependent on his or her global environment,
and each one of them in greater or less degree influences that environment.
One common denominator controls their lives: the ratio between human
populations and the supply of natural resources, with which they live, such
as soil, water, plants, and animals.”51 He concluded that carrying capacity
was a result of the ratio between biotic and environmental factors, an
equation that “every minute of every day touch[ed] the life of every man,
woman and child on the face of the globe.”52
While drawing scientific conclusions, Vogt interpreted and
communicated them in political terms—the apocalyptic language of war,
chaos, and death. He argued that if state leaders ignored the relationships
described in his equation, death and destruction were inevitable: “There is
little probability that mankind can long escape the searing downpour of
war’s death from the skies,” leading to a state of global chaos in which “at
least three-quarters of the human race will be wiped out.”53 His book was
written as a polemic, one directed at the poor: in it, he railed against doctors
for keeping poor colonial populations alive and able to multiply; he
excoriated the poor for reducing and degrading land and soil quality,
pushing it to the limits of its productivity; and he advocated harsh policing
of the threat posed by growing populations in Asia. Among the solutions he
advocated, controlling human population growth through contraception was
primary. Vogt recommended that the Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO) integrate population control into its conservation and food
production programs, including denying food aid to India and China, since
with such aid one would “keep alive ten million Indians and Chinese this
year, so that fifty million may die five years hence.”54 Although he argued
that contraceptive use should be voluntary, Vogt supported providing
financial bonuses to individuals who agreed to be permanently sterilized.
Road to Survival was a runaway success, and three years later, Vogt was
appointed national director of the Planned Parenthood Association of
America, a position which he occupied for the next thirty years on an
agenda favoring the distribution of cheap contraceptives, strategies to
increase contraceptive demand, and linking food aid to population control.55
In 1953, Fairfield Osborn authored The Limits of the Earth, where he
argued that the world is “under the control of the eternal equation—the
relationship between our resources and the numbers as well as the needs of
our people.”56 This relationship could be expressed in a simple ratio dividing
the earth’s resources by the number of people on it, and scarcities were
provoked by the finite nature of the planet. Beyond their arguments about
natural limits, both Osborn and Vogt claimed that resource scarcities and
environmental degradation were direct causes of war, and had spurred
World Wars I and II. They were concerned about overconsumption of
resources and the exporting of American consumerist values in the postwar
period, arguing that American standards of living, if spread around the
world, would have disastrous effects. Their arguments about consumption
and population were inseparable: both were problems that needed to be
managed and reduced in order to ensure not only ecological, but also
geopolitical, stability.57 These ideas would be taken up on a national scale a
little over a decade later, facilitated by widespread attention to a rapidly
growing movement: the mainstream American environmental movement.

Voluntarism, Coercion, and Carrying Capacity as Public Policy


Beginning in the late 1960s, prominent environmentalists turned to a focus
on “overpopulation-induced poverty and war combined with new ecological
models” to bring about new ways of thinking, talking about, and advocating
for environmental issues in the U.S.58 The independence of formerly
colonized nations in the Global South and the Cold War struggle over third-
world resources led many Americans to worry about population growth in
the Global South as a potential threat to U.S. national security. For others, it
was a planetary problem that could bridge regional divides. American
scientists Garrett Hardin and Paul Ehrlich were two of the most prominent
voices who linked carrying capacity ideas to human population control,
arguing that earthly limits, and the ecological crises they produced, made it
necessary to foreground population control over development, public
health, and voluntary management of one’s own fertility. They also publicly
returned the population conversation to race and class by including white
Americans and the middle class in their notions of shared population
responsibility, even as they indirectly invoked the role of race and culture in
producing unsustainable population growth in the Global South. While
many of their writings supported coercive population control policies, to a
limited extent they also promoted advocacy for women-centered
reproductive health interventions. In doing so, Hardin and Ehrlich laid the
groundwork for current manifestations of sexual stewardship.
In 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin wrote a well-known article, “The
Tragedy of the Commons,” in which he described his ideas about the
dangers of overpopulation by using the metaphor of a common pasture
available to all to graze their herds. His argument was that each person
using the commons would graze as many cattle as possible, acting out of
self-interest and seeking to achieve maximum possible gains from the land.
This, he argued, would ultimately lead to destruction of the land and peril
for humans: “Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each
pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of
the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”59 The commons he
described symbolized the earth and natural resources; the metaphor of
grazing cattle represented population growth. Hardin’s aim was to apply the
concept of carrying capacity literally, and he concluded that there is no
technical solution available; instead, the population problem was one that
required moral solutions. This conclusion sprang “directly from biological
facts”60; he was concerned with identifying the optimum population size, the
central problem-question of carrying capacity.
The article was a “philosophical defense of coercion so influential,
especially in environmental circles, that it was called the ‘Magna Carta’ of
compulsory population control.”61 The tragedy of the commons as he
conceived it is actually the tragedy of the welfare state: Hardin argued that
if families only depended on their own resources and the children of
“improvident” parents starved to death, there would be “no public interest
in controlling the breeding of families.”62 His solution to the problem? A
sense of moral responsibility through “mutual coercion, mutually agreed
upon” by the majority of affected people, but particularly focused on
women.63 Hardin was concerned that technical solutions to the population
problem would not work, because they did not impact people’s values. The
freedom to reproduce, or breed, as he termed it, would bring ruin to all—as
such, coercive population control was a necessary strategy to save
everyone.
Moreover, Hardin’s ideas actually arose from virulent anti-immigrant
sentiment. These politics came to the forefront in his 1974 essay “Living on
a Lifeboat,” in which he argued that the problems of the tragedy of the
commons were no longer simply urgent, they were now a matter of human
survival. Likening the regions of the world to lifeboats on a hostile and
dangerous sea, Hardin described the rich populations of the Global North
living in lifeboats surrounded by dangerous waters. The poor, living on their
own, far more crowded boats, were constantly falling overboard and hoping
to be taken in and saved by the people on the rich boats, which were limited
in capacity. Hardin argued that admitting impoverished “others” to the
wealthy boats, knowing the boats’ limits, would capsize the boat and kill
everyone on board—an unethical and unacceptable solution. As a remedy,
he proposed the ethics of the lifeboat, to “admit no more to the boat and
preserve the small safety factor. Survival of the people in the lifeboat is then
possible (though we shall have to be on our guard against boarding
parties).”64
This neo-Darwinian argument formed the basis of several population
control policies Hardin proposed, which included cutting food aid to less
developed countries and severely restricting immigration to the U.S. He
also brought women under the banner of his population control agenda in
contradictory ways, alternately arguing a need to control women’s
childbearing, and for an expansion of their access to reproductive services.
Hardin wrote, “The Women’s Liberation movement may not like it, but
control must be exerted through females” because divorce and remarriage
constrained the responsibilities of couples and men.65 At the same time,
Hardin was the first to invoke the term “abortion on demand,” a phrase
which would later become a rallying cry for reproductive rights groups.66
Hardin’s contemporary, biologist Paul Ehrlich, argued similarly that
starving populations in the Global South were beyond the scope of concern
of wealthier nations, doomed as they were to an inevitable destiny of
starvation based on rampant population growth. His well-known text, The
Population Bomb, opens thus:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970’s the


world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people
are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs
embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a
substantial increase in the world death rate, although many
lives could be saved through dramatic programs to ‘stretch’
the carrying capacity of the earth by increasing food
production. But these programs will only provide a stay of
execution unless they are accompanied by determined and
successful efforts at population control. Population control is
the conscious regulation of the numbers of human beings to
meet the needs, not just of individual families, but of society
as a whole.67

Ehrlich strongly advocated for the U.S. and other industrialized countries to
cut food aid to poor countries that were deemed “beyond help,” unless they
adopted national population policies predicated on universal use of
contraceptives. He also advocated population control in the U.S., “hopefully
through changes in our value system, but by compulsion if voluntary
methods fail,”68 in addition to exhorting Americans to change their lifestyles
and consumption practices to lessen their impact on the world’s resources.
Using both an intellectual lens and an emotional one, he appealed
specifically to a white, middle-class American audience, stoking their fears
of the growing global presence of dark-skinned others. This emotional lens
was refracted through his description of a family trip to India, on a
“stinking hot night in Delhi,” which he famously described through his
visceral reaction to the surroundings. As their ancient, “flea infested” taxi
crawled through the streets, the Ehrlichs entered a slum area where the
streets were “alive with people. People eating, people washing, people
sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their
hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating.
People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people,
people.”69 The scene felt to him like hell; he and his family were frightened
of the endless swell of bodies all around them. This was a sign of the hell
that could afflict Americans if overpopulation were allowed to proceed
unchecked.
Unlike others before him, Ehrlich also argued that the U.S. and other
“overdeveloped” countries are also overpopulated because they cannot
produce adequate resources to maintain their populations’ affluent lifestyles
of resource consumption and technology use. All nations of the earth were
overpopulated, according to Ehrlich, and in need of population control; the
kind of overpopulation was divided along the lines of resource shortage and
population boom versus overconsumption of resources by small and
affluent populations.
Further, Ehrlich actually challenged the family planning solutions
proposed by development actors and demographers, arguing that these
approaches failed to fully resolve the environmental problems created by
population growth. He broke with demographers over the issue of
modernization and technology: modernizers looked for technological
solutions to what they saw as cultural problems, whereas Ehrlich saw those
problems as biological and thus not amenable to technological changes.
Ehrlich was a complicated figure—just as he emphasized the
“frightening” growth of poor, racialized populations overseas, he also
turned the lens back on the white middle and upper classes in the U.S. As a
strong antinatalist, he critiqued the reproductive and consumption practices
of whites, as well as critiquing racial injustice and race-based justifications
for population control in the U.S. Just three years after publishing The
Population Bomb, Ehrlich and his co-author Richard Harriman wrote a
book titled How to be a Survivor: A Plan to Save Spaceship Earth, in which
they laid out their arguments in terms of race and civil rights. First and
foremost, they proclaimed, white middle class and wealthy Americans
should be the primary targets of population control efforts, and the
government should offer maximum incentives and minimal coercion unless
the incentives proved unsuccessful, in which case more coercive measures
should be undertaken. More to the point, these interventions were not meant
to target marginalized communities: “Above all, no effort should be made
to single out the poor, people on welfare, or nonwhites as special targets for
population control . . . it is among the middle class and the wealthy
population that population growth presents the most serious problems.”70
Why did Ehrlich and Harriman take this stance? For them, despite the
fact that population growth rates were higher among nonwhites and the
poor, it was affluence-based resource consumption in the U.S. that was
destroying the environment. Further, they argued that affluence-based
consumption is directly connected to the environmental burdens of the
poor: higher body burdens of DDT and other pesticides are attributable to
overuse and misuse of these chemicals by commercial agriculture and other
industries, as well as the lower quality, nutrient-deficient foods available in
low-income communities.
Ehrlich and Harriman also thought of focusing on middle and upper class
whites as a strategic way of minimizing racial tensions and controversies,
arguing that “the best way to avoid any hint of genocide is to control the
population of the dominant group.”71 They were concerned about black
communities’ anxieties about coercion in contraceptive and abortion clinics
in “ghettos”; thus, they proposed that reproductive health services be
administered locally and voluntarily by community members: “Black
women in a ghetto should have access to contraception and safe abortion if
they want it. But they should not have to seek such services from white men
or women. Let black women run the clinics.”72 Further, their propositions on
race included increasing living standards for the poor as a way of
addressing white racism. For example, they argued that contraceptives and
abortion should be made freely available to all American women, and that
those whites who were uncomfortable with the thought of a rising black
population should do their best to support increasing affluence among
blacks, since affluent blacks tend to have fewer children than affluent
whites. Of course, Ehrlich’s positions on population policy were complex
and contradictory: he advocated coercive state-based proposals (taxes on
child-related necessities, sterilizing all males with three children or more in
high-growth nations, adding sterilizing chemicals to the U.S. public water
supply) that would have had disproportionately impacted people of color
and the poor.73
While producing their social agenda on population, Ehrlich and his
contemporaries were also steeped in the production of scientific models and
mathematical equations, attempting to ground their dire environmental
predictions and socio-political advocacy in cold, hard facts. In 1971,
Ehrlich and John Holdren developed an equation, I=PAT, which they
claimed demonstrated the ways population interacts with affluence, or
resource consumption, and technology use to produce a range of negative
environmental impacts. In this equation, I (Impacts) are the direct result of
the product of P (Population), A (Affluence), and T (Technology), a model
that reduces a host of uneven and complex social, political, and economic
factors determining population trends and resource use into a rather extreme
level of simplicity. These elements did not represent equal relationships to
environmental impacts; rather, the authors argued that population growth
“causes a disproportionate negative impact on the environment,”74 a factor
that they promoted as a clear, scientific basis for advocating population
control. Moreover, the I=PAT model was intended to represent a universal
set of relationships, with a one-size-fits-all approach focused on population
control, changing systems of technology distribution, restricted resource
use, and poverty alleviation at a global level.
The twentieth-century proliferation of carrying capacity and planetary
limits discourses, as well as the quantification of political arguments about
population growth, culminated in the Club of Rome–commissioned project,
The Limits to Growth. This book drew on system dynamics theory to
produce a series of computer-generated models projecting how the
exponential growth of population, food production, and consumption
patterns would interact with resources such as petroleum, gold, iron, and
chromium over a period of two hundred years. The computer models rather
predictably indicated that eventually population growth would overshoot
available resources and a collapse in food production would occur, leading
to the Club’s conclusion that human population growth and resource use far
exceed the carrying capacity of the earth’s finite resources. The book’s
arguments were focused on resource shortages and scarcity—their
conclusions were that governments would divert resources to managing
scarcity such that overall quality of life for many people would decline in
the twenty-first century. Like Hardin and Ehrlich, theirs was a clear
carrying capacity argument; however, it was buttressed by the
technologically advanced strategy of extending predictions into the near and
distant future through scenario modeling (see chapter 3). In an updated
version published thirty years later, the authors repeated their dire
prediction: “Sadly, we believe the world will experience overshoot and
collapse in global resource use and emissions much the same as the dot.com
bubble—though on a much longer time scale.”75
Their proposed solution to overshoot and collapse was sustainability,
defined as the conditions that allow societies to persist over generations.
Unlike neo-Malthusians before them, they argued for a modicum of social
equality; their notion of sustainability required keeping exponential growth
in check through providing universal, adequate standards of living and fair
distribution of resources. They advocated limited growth focused on
supporting important social goals and enhancing sustainability, and
exhorted societies to eventually stop pursuing this growth once their
specific goals were met. This was not necessarily zero growth, but rather a
strategy based on qualitative assessments of who and what development is
for, who would benefit, what the costs would be, how long it would last,
and whether the earth could accommodate it. In this model, sustainable
societies are also societies that address and overcome poverty,
unemployment, and unmet nonmaterial needs.

Conclusion
As this chapter has demonstrated, population has been constructed over
time as a scientific, social, political, and economic problem. Throughout the
twentieth century, ideas of national identity, geopolitical stability, natural
resource security, and living with limits have preoccupied various scientists
and policymakers, directly influencing their ideas about how these scientific
ideas should be applied. The next chapter turns to these questions in more
depth. It explores the close linking of science and politics in knowledge
production on population growth and climate change, and demonstrates
how this relationship entangles and embeds questions of power and
privilege operating from behind the scenes. Moreover, it explores and raises
questions about the role of policy concerns in scientific research that not
only projects, but produces, the future.
3

Scientists, Donors, and the Politics of Anticipating


the Future
Most of us are interested in knowing the future. We want to know the future in order to
control it. We want to control the future in order to benefit from it, or to mitigate or
avoid harms that we would otherwise suffer.
—Dale Jamieson, 1998

Anticipating the future has always been central to population-environment


knowledge, activism, and policymaking. As Adams, Murphy, and Clarke
note, “Anticipation is not just betting on the future; it is a moral economy in
which the future sets the conditions of possibility for action in the present,
in which the future is inhabited in the present.”1 Anticipation is a form of
affect; it links the tangible present to the possible future by paving the way
for actions that can bring any range of futures into being. For population
advocates, the linked futures of climate change and population growth are
very much in the present, orienting scientific knowledge production, crisis
discourses, and advocacy strategies with long-term implications.
Whether advocating population control or SRHR, environmentalists in
the U.S. have a long tradition of drawing on scientific data to ground their
arguments. Chapter 2 demonstrated the ways that these scientific ideas are
deeply entwined with political, economic, and cultural arguments; in this
chapter, I argue that, while the public face of populationism has been
dominated by scientists and activists, donors have long played a key
advocacy role from behind the scenes. In fact, we cannot actually
understand the paradigms and priorities of scientists without understanding
the institutional funding mandates, political priorities, and personal politics
that shape scientific research paradigms. Exploring the role of donors and
their close, long-standing relationships with scientists offers a means of
understanding how and why science operates as a tool of advocacy. A
central argument of this chapter is that public and private donors in the U.S.
act as agents of change with scientific, social, and political agendas of their
own.2 As this chapter will demonstrate, individuals within donor institutions
act as population-climate policy advocates via grant funding, in which they
create the conditions for researchers and activist groups to shape public
debates. They also play a powerful role in how key actors anticipate,
envision, and encourage others to act on possible climate and population
futures.
Over the course of conducting the research for this book, I discovered
that for some scientists, particularly those working at the intersection of
population growth and global environmental change, their projection
models originate from twinned desires: the desire to produce more
knowledge about planetary conditions, and the desire to intervene on them.
These desires cannot be teased apart; they infuse everything from research
funding, to the kinds of models that are produced, and the policy questions
they lend themselves to. In this chapter, I argue that the combination of
knowledge production and advocacy constitute an anticipatory politics, in
which multiple possible futures are projected for the purpose of opening
possibilities for intervention—intervention that can create some of those
futures and prevent others through policy change.

Population Science, Climate Change, and Development in


Africa
Around the turn of the millennium, scientists began to circulate a small
body of research at the nexus of greenhouse gas emissions (GGEs) and
human numbers. Multiple projects have claimed that slowing future
population growth would make a significant impact on GGEs. A 2001 book
proposed that “in LDCs, policies such as voluntary family planning
programs and investments in girls’ education are not only desirable in their
own right, but also accelerate fertility decline, which may have significant
benefits in the context of climate change.”3 In an earth systems study,
scientists argued that “by the end of the century, the effect of slower
population growth would be . . . significant, reducing total emissions from
fossil fuel use by 37–41%.”4 The study concluded that slowing global
population growth overall can serve as a key climate change mitigation
strategy, reducing carbon emissions by up to one million megatons by 2100.
Other studies published around the same time offered somewhat different
perspectives. For example, biostatisticians Murtaugh and Schlax analyzed
the “carbon legacies” or projected lifetime emissions of individual women
and all of their future progeny, comparing them by country and region.
They found an inverse relationship between individual childbearing and per
capita GGEs; in other words, countries where women bear the fewest
children are most often those with the highest rates of per capita GGEs and
the highest carbon legacies. According to this model, the average American
woman’s carbon legacy is more than 85 times that of an average woman in
Nigeria, a country with a much faster population growth rate than the U.S.5
In another study focused more closely on energy use, an urban development
researcher found that over a fifty-five-year period, nations with rapid
population growth had little GGE growth. Rather, his analysis demonstrated
that GGEs were driven by the growth in consumers and levels of
consumption across world regions.6 A more recent study by economists
confirmed these results, finding that changes in gross domestic product
(GDP) were the closest proximate drivers of carbon emissions. The study
found no relationship between short-term world population growth and
emissions.7
A third perspective has also emerged, one based on using these future-
oriented data to argue for better approaches to development today. Given
that the problem of GGEs is primarily one of resource consumption, not
human numbers alone, and that demographic changes cannot be reversed
overnight through contraceptive distribution, researchers argue that what is
needed is a different approach to development—one in which urban growth
is designed around energy efficiency, reducing emissions, and providing
adequate housing for the poor.8
Some Global South leaders share this approach. In 2001, the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
Conference of Parties established the preparation of National Adaptation
Programmes of Action (NAPAs) as a strategy for the forty-nine least
developed countries (LDCs) to develop plans addressing the adverse effects
of climate change, and to promote adaptation at a national scale. In a 2009
study conducted by Population Action International9 (PAI), forty-one
NAPAS were analyzed for their population and reproductive health content.
While the majority of the plans identified rapid population growth as
exacerbating vulnerability to climate change, only six identified slowing
population growth as a priority adaptation action, instead favoring
development approaches addressing food insecurity, access to clean water,
basic health needs, and education. Nevertheless, PAI concluded its analysis
by arguing that “NAPAs should translate the recognition of population
pressure as a factor related to the ability of countries to adapt to climate
change into relevant project activities.”10
Why would PAI ignore the conclusions outlined by LDC leaders in the
NAPAs? One clear answer is that the conclusions did not align with PAI’s
projected vision of the future. At the 2010 COP 16 meetings in Cancun, PAI
launched a new digital project, Mapping Population and Climate Change
Hotspots.11 The project produced a set of interactive global maps depicting
population dynamics, including growth rates and unmet need for family
planning, which could then be layered with elements such as “projected
changes in agricultural production,” “water scarce or water stressed
countries,” or “resilience to climate change” to produce a visual
representation of climate “hotspots.” The model defined hotspots as
countries or regions with high rates of population growth, high projected
declines in agricultural production, and low resilience to climate change.
The maps offered a visual narrative of the link between family planning and
climate change, with stark, colorful contrasts depicting hotspots both now
and in the future. Moreover, all of the countries depicted as hotspots were in
sub-Saharan Africa. Was Africa the only region facing high population
growth and climate change vulnerability? Why was the narrative in the
maps built on what appeared to be African exceptionalism?
One answer emerged in a special PAI report from 2012, Population
Dynamics, Climate Change, and Sustainable Development in Africa, which
opens with the following:

SSA’s population is growing more rapidly than other regions


of the world. Rapid population growth and climate change
are speeding up the region’s environmental degradation. This
makes people more vulnerable to climate change impacts
and undermines sustainable development on the continent.
Development efforts in several countries in SSA are harmed
by a combination of high rates of population growth, high
projected declines in agricultural production and low
resilience to climate change. We classify such countries as
population and climate hotspots. In these hotspots,
addressing population challenges will help increase
resilience to climate change, and contribute to development
goals such as better food and water security.12

The report depicts a continent in which high population growth and


increasing urbanization render populations vulnerable to the intersections of
poverty and exposure to the increasing effects of climate change. Sea level
rise, flooding, increasing storm activity, food insecurity due to drought,
reduced crop yields, and climate-induced water scarcity were all framed as
heightening the continent’s vulnerability in a region already acknowledged
to be the least resilient to climate change. The proffered solution was, of
course, family planning: “Given the strong links between population and
climate change, tackling the issues jointly at the policy and program levels
makes sense. Looking at rapid population growth and climate change risks
together would help identify groups of people who are vulnerable to these
twin challenges and illuminate how to help them adapt.”13
Designating African countries as hotspots in need of immediate
population-climate interventions is reminiscent of what Hartmann refers to
as the Malthusian Anticipatory Regime for Africa, or MARA.14 She argues
that discourses constructing Africa’s singularity as an impending population
and climate disaster make a case for population interventions, while
American and European defense interests identify the region as a site of
concern for future climate-driven conflict. MARA then not only legitimates
but necessitates a range of militarized interventions to respond to the
urgency of the continent’s population and climate crises, while securing
geopolitical stability for the region and the world.
MARA and similar kinds of discourses play on old racialized fears of the
impoverished, dark-skinned, rural poor migrating to the industrialized
north, driven by environmental scarcity and conflict. Climate conflict and
climate refugee discourses draw heavily from the work of Canadian
political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon, whose work joined neo-
Malthusian arguments with systems theory to produce theories of violent
conflict, political instability, and large-scale population migration resulting
from resource scarcities. These arguments have historically been just as
influential in informing neo-Malthusian family planning advocacy as
women-centered arguments have; in fact, despite the strong emphasis on
women’s reproductive rights and empowerment in the Cairo Consensus,
environmental security debates played a prominent role in guiding some of
the discussions held at the ICPD.15
Climate scarcity and conflict framings are effective in mobilizing
development narratives because they are rendered through the lens of
possible, and undesirable, futures. As the introduction chapter discussed,
individual childbearing has been declining across the continent, though
unevenly, for decades. The rate of decline is slower than other regions of
the world, leaving Africa an outlier in terms of population growth rates.
However, annual GGEs on the continent are among the lowest on the
planet. Given this context, it is strange that Africa would be prioritized for
population-climate interventions—unless one is focused on the future. In
projection models, the continent’s future signals the dystopian narratives of
war, unrest, and mass migration. However, these projections not only model
the future: given their power to mobilize human and financial resources for
contraceptive and military interventions, they are making futures.

Modeling and Making the Future


Future-based projection models are foundational to how we understand both
population and climate change. Probabilistic projections are just that:
projections of probabilities. They depict in visual form where global
population or GGEs could be if certain conditions are met—conditions like
specific fertility rates or life expectancies at birth, or use of high-carbon
energy sources. They are visual representations of “if-then” statements; if
certain assumed conditions are met, then these are likely outcomes. As a
result, the projections are usually depicted in a range of possible outcomes,
rather than settling on one solid figure.
Beginning in 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC)—the scientific research arm of the leading international climate
change treaty organization, the UNFCCC—has produced a series of reports
covering technical, social, and socio-economic information underpinning
human-driven climate change. After collecting and analyzing data from
thousands of published climate-related studies around the world, the IPCC
prepares Assessment Reports reflecting the current state of knowledge on
climate change. The data are used to produce projections of GGEs into the
future; as with population projections, the year 2100 is a commonly
modeled target date. In fact, since the year 2000, the IPCC projections have
not only been similar to population projections—they have included
population projections in their scenarios.
In 2000, the IPCC produced its Third Assessment Report (TAR) on
global climate change. It was the first time that the TAR included a new
Special Report on Emissions Scenarios—scenarios being defined as
“projections of a potential future”—in which four narrative storylines
depicting “different demographic, social, economic, technological, and
environmental developments that diverge in increasingly irreversible ways”
could be explored.16 The first two storylines, A1 and A2, depicted either a
world of rapid developments in economic growth and technology, and peak
population in 2050, or a world of continuously growing global population
and slow, inconsistent economic growth. The B1 and B2 storylines mapped
onto the A storylines in terms of population, but with different economic
structures. B1 depicted the same population trends as in A1, but with a
focus on a service and information economy and clean technology; B2
reflected continuously increasing population, and a global focus on local
environmental, economic, and social sustainability solutions.17 In the
projection models, the growth curves of population and emissions mapped
neatly onto each other; the visual narrative seemed to say that population
and emissions grow in tandem.
Are these models a prediction of the future? Do they offer a blueprint or
road map to the potential solutions that can prevent social, economic, and
ecological disaster? In a sense, it would appear that they could. Models
such as these provide a particular way of understanding the future by
visualizing it. Once it is visualized, mapped onto the smooth lines of a
computer graph model, it appears intervenable, something that can be
controlled. The host of complex factors, elements, data, not to mention vast
uncertainty, that go into producing these images are smoothed into clean
lines and curvilinear graphs. However, projections are not predictions. A
prediction is a “statement that something will happen in the future based on
what is known today,” whereas a projection is a “statement that it is
possible that something will happen in the future if certain conditions
develop.”18 This chapter is concerned with the latter. The focus on
population growth and climate change is based on a focus on possible
futures, brought into being through the production of scientific scenarios.
However, these futures are not simply the vision of the scientists who
model them: they are the result of complex relations between scientists, the
donors who fund them, and the advocates who drive policymaking.
Climate change mobilizes a constellation of future-oriented practices:
political activism, scenario modeling, and exhortations to change energy-
using behaviors, among others. Current actions take on a sense of urgency,
suggesting multiple possible futures ranging from the optimistic to the
profoundly dystopian. This is not a new way of understanding
environmental problems or population trends: as chapter 2 demonstrated,
many American scientists studying population and the environment
throughout the twentieth century were motivated by concerns with resource
consumption, depletion, and scarcity. They were focused on dystopian
environmental futures, which framed their understandings of global
population growth, as well as resource use. While the hyperbolic language
found in population-environment writings of decades past has been muted,
scientists working at this nexus today are still somewhat driven by a focus
on dystopian possibilities—and these narratives drive the production of
policy-oriented science, a necessary resource for mobilizing alternative
outcomes.

Anticipatory Politics
In April 2010, an Earth Systems scientist gave a research presentation and
public webinar on population and climate change at the Woodrow Wilson
Center in Washington, DC. The convening was organized to brief members
of the international development policy community on the results of an
innovative multi-year research project in the arena of demographic
projections and GGEs. Sitting at the nexus of climate science and
demography, the project was somewhat unique in engaging tools and
methods from both disciplines, as well as offering recommendations for
policy actors outside of the climate arena—specifically, those working in
the field of population and family planning.
The scientist began by describing demographic factors like population
growth and size, age and urbanization, as well as less traditional
demographic categories such as educational attainment and population
health, as key determinants of GGEs and human impacts of climate change.
His work was based on a projection model based on the IPCC Special
Report on Emissions Scenarios, integrated with recent population
projections from the United Nations, and disaggregated by world regions
and major emitting countries. When integrated, the model formed a smooth
visual image of possible population and emission futures, ranging from the
lowest to the highest possible projected human numbers and emissions.
The model’s visual appeal belied the interpretive challenges it offered to
non-specialists; however, the scientist cut quickly to the chase, stating that
over the next hundred years or so, human population growth in countries of
the Global South would become a significant source of GGEs, thus
requiring a prioritization of population interventions in the present:

If I could take a leap and summarize the conclusions here in


a sentence, it would be that if you did slow population
growth, it would likely reduce greenhouse gas emissions
significantly in the long term. Also, slower population
growth would ease adaptation to climate change as well.
Therefore from a policy perspective . . . policies that have
the effect of leading to lower fertility and to slower
population growth can be considered win-win from the
climate point of view. The first win is that there are plenty of
good reasons for those policies that have nothing to do with
climate or environment that have multiple benefits in their
own right. But because through slowing population growth,
they would likely make the climate problem easier to solve,
there’s a double benefit. This hasn’t caught on and gained
traction in either the policy or research worlds.

His study argued that slowing population growth overall in the long run
would reduce emissions and ease the path to adaptation, while growing
urbanization throughout the Global South mitigated against this reduction.
In summing up his presentation, the scientist interjected a bit of nuance: he
was careful to note that demography is not the sole nor the most important
element that impacts emissions; rather, technology is. He argued that slower
population growth could contribute significantly to lowering emissions, but
would not solve the problem, “nor is it a main factor. You can’t force fit that
into a model.”
The audience, however, was less interested in technological change than
in new ways of communicating populationist urgency. During the Q&A
following the presentation, it was clear that anticipatory politics were at the
forefront of the development crowd’s reflections on the science:

Q: The issue hasn’t gained much traction. You’ve been at this for a
while; are we gaining traction? And at what levels? If not, what
needs to be done?
A: I have less experience with this on the policy side. I’m guessing
that if there were a more solid and sophisticated and comprehensive
basis on the science side for drawing conclusions about what the
possible effects might be, that might facilitate the policy process, but
I don’t know. There might be other priorities. Population is a
sensitive issue and I don’t think one study or even ten is going to
change that. I hope that there will eventually be a better
conservation about this. I do think that’s changing. Before you
couldn’t even raise the issue because it was so sensitive. So I’m
hoping that this kind of work can inform things and say probably as
best we can tell, it would help solve the problem. However, just
because something can help solve the problem doesn’t make it a
good idea. The policy debate needs to take a lot of things into
account, including value systems.
Q: Do you feel comfortable with population advocates using your
results to make a case for increased funding for family planning?
A: Yes. But I’m also comfortable with others making the alternative
case and saying that it’s . . . not enough.

While this particular scientist would not draw heavy-handed conclusions


from projection models, some population-climate studies have been more
direct about communicating a need to take immediate action. In late 2009, a
British charity and think tank known as the Optimum Population Trust
(OPT) launched a now-defunct project named PopOffsets, proclaiming
itself the world’s first project that provided individuals and organizations
the means to offset their carbon footprint via financial support to family
planning projects. According to their calculations, contributing seven U.S.
dollars through their website would provide family planning services to
women; through providing the contraceptives, fewer babies would be born,
and less consumers would use carbon-emitting resources. As the project
website claimed, addressing the unmet need for contraceptives was “the
lowest cost way of reducing CO2 emissions and climate change . . . without
any environmental downsides.”19
PopOffsets’s project was based on the concept of carbon offsets, a
strategy to manage greenhouse gases by compensating for emissions in one
area through reductions in another. The basic logic behind it is that
investing in projects that reduce greenhouse gases elsewhere, in this case
through family planning and the prevention of new births, would be
“cheaper, easier, and faster than domestic reductions, providing greater
benefits to the atmosphere as well as to sustainable development, especially
when offsets involve projects in the developing world.”20 These assertions
arose from an OPT report released several months earlier, in which the
author conducted a cost-benefit analysis linking population reductions and
CO2 emissions, and assessed the cost effectiveness of universal
contraceptive access on carbon emissions reductions between 2010 and
2050. The rather simplistic conclusion was that “fewer people will emit
fewer tonnes of carbon dioxide.”21 The author of the report reached this
conclusion through basic math: he estimated the cost of providing
contraceptive access to all women who had an unmet need for
contraceptives, and analyzed the results against projection models of
population trends and carbon emissions. From these models, the author
concluded that for each $7 spent on family planning provision, you could
reduce future greenhouse gas emissions by more than one ton (assuming all
unmet need was met between 2010 and 2050). In contrast, the cost of a one-
ton reduction achieved through the use of low-carbon technologies was
estimated at a minimum of $32, a $25 increase over the cost of similar
reductions achieved through family planning.
This was based on a particular calculus assigning values to human lives,
contraceptives, and tons of carbon, and asserting a symbolic equivalency
between them. Carbon offsets were developed as part of the international
climate treaty of 1997, the Kyoto Protocol, which established a mechanism
for industrialized nations to invest in clean energy projects, such as
reforestation and biofuels plantation projects, as a means of trading carbon
credits. These mechanisms are predicated upon a particular
commodification of nature—one in which isolated and abstracted elements
of nature become valued and tradable in relation to other isolated and
abstracted elements, as a proxy for carbon emissions. In the PopOffsets
project, human lives became part of the calculus, not through existing life,
but through an assessment of the carbon-emitting value of lives that can be
averted. The value of averted lives is calculated, assessed, and offered to
Northern consumers as a means of offsetting their polluting behaviors. This
logic transforms humans into potential humans, potentially averted humans,
and ultimately potentially averted emissions.
The logic of averted-humans-as-averted-emissions raises a host of
questions about the power dynamics of how value in human life is assigned,
to whom, and at what scale. Historically, science has been complicit in
schemes to assign value to life in ways that “calibrate and then exploit the
differential worth of human life” for economic aims.22 To borrow a phrase
from Murphy, this reflects strategies of the economization of life, in which
some lives are deemed investable and others are expendable and avertable.
This discourse of averted-lives-as-averted-emissions appeared on the
world stage at the 2009 COP15 in Copenhagen when a Chinese delegate,
the Vice Minister of the National Population and Family Planning
Commission, stated that “dealing with climate change is not simply an issue
of CO2 emission reduction but a comprehensive challenge involving
political, economic, social, cultural and ecological issues, and the
population concern fits right into the picture.”23 Referring to China’s one-
child policy,24 the Minister argued that 400 million births had been averted
in China, which she estimated as having saved 1.8 billion tons of CO2 each
year. Claiming a moral authority on the basis of national policies leading to
averted emissions, the Minister argued that China’s population policy had
provided benefits across sectors, and at a global scale. In this case, a state
which has long been critiqued for its coercive national population policy
was able to use the calculus in human lives to position itself as an
environmentally responsible global actor. The appeal to the averted-
humans-as-averted-emissions calculus facilitated an avoidance of the moral
and ethical questions and human rights abuses under the one-child rule.
Instead, even coercive population control could emerge as an example of
ethical environmental practice.
As the China example demonstrates, the calculus in human lives
potentially makes ethically untenable practices possible by reducing human
lives into a set of calculable values and rendering them avertable in the
service of broader environmental goals. The power dynamics of calculation
—who is able to calculate, who is calculated, and ultimately whose lives are
deemed avertable—are at the heart of population interventions and
advocacy.25 Again, these calculations rest on quantified projections of the
future, projections that arise both from scientific inquiry and from the donor
institutions that make their work possible. The remainder of the chapter
explores these dynamics through the in-depth treatment of one case in
which donor advocacy and scientific innovation combine to produce new
possible population futures.

Steering the Ship: Donor Advocacy


In May 1998, the manager of a population-environment program at a
Washington NGO sent a ten-page letter to Pamela,26 a former donor at a
small, private philanthropic foundation in the Silicon Valley who funded his
program. His letter outlined what he described as a crisis of legitimacy in
the field of population-environment advocacy and intervention, and he
proposed that she and other population donors rectify the problem through
funding more science. The letter read, “The greatest need may be to identify
ways to fund careful, accurate research, worthy of the widest dissemination,
which is at least not hostile to the linkage between population dynamics and
environmental problems.” He claimed this would aid in countering the
existing “contrarian bias” on the part of critical academic scholars, which
seemed to be directed toward the purposes of “shatter[ing] ‘shibboleths’
about population and the environment [rather] than . . . clarify[ing] the
precise nature of the linkage.”
As the writer saw it, advancing new scientific knowledge would facilitate
“developing new ways to reach the public with an enhanced and respectable
presentation of the population-environment linkage,” which would then
bolster advocacy efforts by attracting environmental journalists and other
writers to take an interest in population issues. This would in turn help to
confer a sense of scientific legitimacy on population-environment activism.
He called upon Pamela and other donors to support academic research that
was “at least open to the hypothesis that population dynamics are decisive
in the expansion and worsening of environmental problems,” noting that a
number of scientific academies had previously issued similar statements. Of
note, he observed that these statements were not based on consensus
approaches, nor on actual research findings, but rather “on the
commonsense understanding of scientists of various disciplines.”
The conundrum he laid out was clear: population-environment advocates
in environmental organizations needed more solid scientific ground from
which to make their case for population advocacy. Rather than waiting for
scientists to produce this research on their own, he identified foundations,
with their autonomous access to private funds and freedom from public
scrutiny, as the most appropriate solution to the problem. At the same time,
the heart of the request was clear: in order to produce the kinds of scientific
results he was soliciting, Pamela would need to engage in donor advocacy
by supporting value-driven science.27 To address this challenge, the writer
suggested a simple solution: the “selection of institutional homes and
individual researchers known to be of the highest academic and intellectual
caliber combined with the courage to challenge conventional scholarly
views,” thus providing a stronger evidence base linking population growth
and environmental degradation, while grounding one’s arguments in
academic and institutional legitimacy.
Pamela was listening. A long-time proponent of global population
stabilization, particularly in Africa and Asia, Pamela was trained in ecology,
and had long been concerned about strengthening the scientific argument
linking population growth to environmental degradation in the Global
South. The letter’s request also dovetailed with an ongoing quest in the
population-environment donor community to strengthen the scientific and
political bases for population-environment advocacy, particularly in the
context of declining public funding for integrated approaches.28
Several years later, Pamela had the opportunity to fulfill the request. She
contacted a senior demographer at the Population Council, one of the
largest population research organizations in the U.S., asking him to
recommend a scientist who could conduct the kind of research that would
not only make a strong scientific case linking Global South population
growth to GGEs and climate change, but that would also provide a
justifying framework for advocacy work. The demographer had just the
person: a modeler with a long-term research agenda focused on modeling
the impacts of population growth on future GGEs. In a subsequent e-mail to
the scientist, Pamela described her foundation’s commitment to population
and environment issues, as well as outlining the potential interest in funding
population-climate change research:

The Foundation . . . has a long-standing interest in both


environment and population issues, including the
interrelationships that exist between these two fields.
Climate change is one of our current environmental areas of
interest, and increasing resources for international family
planning and reproductive health services is a major focus of
our population program . . . I am writing to inquire about
whether [your forthcoming report] will include any mention
of population growth, or any recommendations for
increasing funding for reproductive health services in the
LDC’s [Least Developed Countries] as part of a strategy for
adapting to climate change. If so, we might be quite
interested in supporting efforts aimed at the broadest
possible public dissemination and discussion of that portion
of the report.

Her offer message was well received; the scientist responded the next day
with a detailed list of several nascent projects that he was pursuing, work
that could immediately be expanded with her foundation’s support. With
that, a new donor-grantee relationship was born.
These interactions shed light on the everyday, behind-the-scenes
processes in which powerful actors co-produce scientific knowledge and
policy-oriented practice. Pamela had been searching for a way to bring a
scientific grounding to a long-standing interest of hers: a possible set of
relationships between population growth in low-emitting countries in the
Global South and future climate change. Without projection-based research,
the relationship between high population growth and GGEs could not be
established. But for Pamela, personal interest, established institutional
priorities, and access to private money entwined to drive population-climate
linkages forward. In an interview, she described her role as facilitating
scientific innovation:

We were a very, very early funder in this area. We identified


it [the impact of population growth on greenhouse gas
emissions] as a potential interest 2.5–3 years ago and we
looked for who would be the right scientists to fund to
demonstrate whether or not it did matter whether the
population grew in terms of impacts on climate change. The
accepted perspective at the time was that 95% of growth
would happen in the poorest countries of the world, and that
those folks didn’t have cars and their carbon emissions were
very small. We weren’t sure that was true; we wanted the
science to know more.

I visited Pamela in her office in early 2010. The bookcases lining the walls
were filled with books on conservation, global environmental politics,
women’s sexual and reproductive health, climate change, and international
development. Her file folders spilled over with scientific articles and
research briefings, project reports, funding strategy documents, and
historical material on the foundation’s early population projects focused on
reducing immigration from Mexico. Talking with Pamela was a study in
contrasts. Her mild-mannered demeanor belied what others described as a
relentless, even zealous, focus on population and global environmental
catastrophe. Yet, as she and I spoke, it became clear that Pamela situated
population-environment linkages in the contexts of both scientific fact and
strategic opportunity.
When Pamela described her effort to engage the scientist, it was clear
that she did not see herself as engaging in personal or policy advocacy, per
se. Rather, she saw herself as engaging in scientific advocacy—utilizing her
access to financial resources to bring forward innovative research that
would have otherwise not been produced. She also served as a conduit for
the scientist to access other sources of private funding when he wanted to
expand his research:
We made a grant to him to determine whether or not you
could determine whether it made a difference to greenhouse
gases if the population was 8 or 10 or 12 billion. He reported
that it did make a difference, and that the difference was
measurable. But he felt that the report would take longer and
require more money to really produce definitive conclusions.
So we introduced him to another, much larger and better
funded foundation, and they funded him. The research will
be out soon; it’s compelling and interesting. This puts us way
ahead of the curve of foundations.

Private foundations are uniquely positioned to fund research in ways public


agencies cannot. A former donor from the Office of Population and
Reproductive Health (OPRH) at the United States Agency for International
Development (USAID), who considered himself to be a strong proponent of
population-climate interventions on scientific grounds, expressed deep
skepticism over whether population-climate interventions will ever receive
public funding, due to a general lack of scientific knowledge in the
American public. He argued that the general public is unaware,
scientifically illiterate, and guided by emotion rather than reason, which
makes for policy shortcomings: “So I think the weakness of our system is
inability to use science to set policy . . . An overarching issue is emotion
and politics more so than clear thinking based on our best science.”
As a result, he argued, only private foundations can support the scientific
knowledge production that many in the American public, to their own peril,
refuse to view as important. Foundations have a long history of filling this
role in order to facilitate policymaking. Greenhalgh argues that population
policies would be untenable without population science: “In policies aimed
at governing populations, science-based logics play an especially critical
role because population is a biological entity . . . and science claims to be
the sole authority on “nature”, to which biology belongs. It would be
difficult to govern population—or to govern it well—without a science of
population.”29 She further argues that “science serves to legitimize both the
exercise of power through policy and the authority of the policy makers.”30
The opposite is also true: powerful policy actors exercise a tremendous
amount of power in determining what comes to be known as scientific
knowledge. We cannot understand the science of population, nor NGO
advocacy practices, without the policy-oriented donor context that
facilitates their development.
The American philanthropic sector grew dramatically over the course of
the twentieth century, from just eighteen foundations before the year 1910,
to approximately 50,000 private, corporate, and community foundations by
the year 2000.31 As a result, nonprofits, international NGOs, and
community-based organizations have come to be increasingly dependent
over the past century on an expanding group of private funding
organizations whose scientific, political, and strategic objectives are often
closely guarded. In the context of population-environment projects, the
process of securing funding from these organizations is somewhat obscure,
despite public representations of the grant-making process.
Perusing the websites of the handful of private foundations that operate
population programs yields a standard picture of the grant solicitation,
application, and funding process. Step 1 involves becoming familiar with
the projects that are typically funded by that particular funding agency,
including researching grant-making programs, goals and strategies, and
geographic specifications. Foundation websites also publish information on
recently awarded grants, including the funding amounts that have
previously been allocated to grantees across programs so that potential
grantees may tailor potential funding requests to fit a set of parameters that
will likely yield a successful grant application. This information is also
meant to weed out potential grantees that are not likely to be funded,
whether due to the amount of the funding request, or because they engage
in projects that do not suit the donors’ priorities, strategies, or conceptual
frameworks.
After a potential grantee has become familiarized with the zones of
possibility in grant funding, they initiate step 2: writing a Letter of Inquiry
(LOI). At this phase, grant seekers enter into somewhat of a courtship with
their potential donors, as they attempt to assess exactly the right phrasing,
funding amount, and description of program activities that would achieve
the objectives supported by the donor. As one Program Officer I
interviewed noted, this process can be a frustrating one for donors in the
sense that often grant seekers tailor their LOIs, and later proposals, to what
they anticipate to be a successful grant, rather than keeping with their
organization’s goals and objectives. In step 3, having reviewed LOIs and
selected those that appear to best fit the foundation objectives, the
foundation solicits full proposals. Only under invitation from the foundation
are grant seekers allowed to submit full proposals; those who deviate from
this regulation by submitting full proposals outside of these tightly
regulated guidelines are disciplined with a refusal of funding. Proposals are
made to fit within a set of parameters with respect to length, content,
format, and style. Of them, a select number are included in a docket, or a
list of funding proposals that are then given final approval by the
foundation’s board of directors. In this regard, all foundations are different
in that smaller organizations have heavy board involvement in funding
allocations and docket approval. Larger foundations with multi-million-
dollar dockets often have less oversight, and program funding areas are
approved as single dockets. After approval of the docket, successful
grantees receive a formal letter outlining the terms and stipulations of the
award.
I explore the intricacies of the typical process of soliciting and receiving
awards from private foundations because a significant portion of private
foundation funding for population-environment grant-making has
historically deviated from this norm. Population grant-making has followed
such a unique trajectory that it can be described as defining a new norm of
creative donor financing. As I discovered over the course of numerous
interviews, Pamela’s actions as an active recruiter of grantees hardly make
her an exception to the norms of private donor practice within foundations,
particularly in the context of population-environment science and advocacy.
Although private foundations are institutions designed to carry out the
mandates of their governing boards, individual leadership, personal
priorities, and larger political trends may have a significant influence over
the direction of particular funding portfolios.
For example, staff members at private foundations are often able to
translate their personal interests into advocacy programming through the
strategic use of program funds. A donor at a private foundation noted that
this personal interest can be central to setting grant-making portfolio
agendas: “In the longer term, when [our founder] set up the Foundation,
what drove interest in the population field was the environment and the
links they saw there. More recently, it was a personal interest of mine,
something I was interested in pursuing. It coincided with a former
Environment Program Director who has since left. He had approached me
and said that there were some clear links between our projects, and that we
should think about doing some joint work. It just made sense. So, I came up
with our population and climate change work . . .”
Over many years, a number of private foundations, including Hewlett,
Packard, Goldman, Compton, Pew, and Summit have approached
environmental organizations and offered them sums of money, ranging from
the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands, to develop population
projects.32 Many donors see their funding efforts as innovative development
work, particularly in the context of cross-cutting or multi-sectoral work,
given the fact that most donor funding is siloed into single-issue grants. A
former donor at a small Washington, DC, foundation told me that private
money allows some donors the flexibility to create new synergies between
different program streams:

I ran an experimental initiative to do cross cutting grant-


making. I created that program, which centered on creating
grassroots programs linking women’s reproductive health
with conservation and the environment. I also worked on
grants that went toward organizational work. My SOW
[scope of work] was to do experimental grant-making. But
my background was on the role of women in environmental
development. The main population strategy at the time was
family planning service delivery; the conservation strategy
was biodiversity. My question was can we pursue both goals
in a synergistic way that meets the needs of both. I wanted to
convince people that it could be done, to prove the
hypothesis.

Private donor advocacy is dependent on available financial resources,


which fluctuate on the basis of factors ranging from board approval to the
overall resource base of the foundation. Following the Silicon Valley
dot.com bust, private foundations in the region were financially devastated.
This was particularly significant for population-environment funding.33
Overall funding allocations to these programs have declined by nearly 40%
since 1997, and as a result some funders see the immediacy and popularity
of attention to climate change as an opportunity to bring attention back to
the population sector.34 Regardless of the arrangements through which
donors and grantees connect, the power ultimately rests with the donor—the
power to create and eliminate programs, the power to support particular
strategies and reject others, and, as the history of private foundations and
population science suggests, the power to shape scientific knowledge
production and the basis for related advocacy. For populationist donors,
winning hearts and minds for population advocacy rests on the ability to
convince stakeholders that population is always an imminent threat—one
that is best conveyed through the scientific specter of the possible dystopian
future.

Conclusion
As this chapter has demonstrated, private donors play a significant role in
shaping population science from behind the scenes. I am not arguing that
this is bad science; all funded scientific research is inflected in some way
with the priorities of its financial supporters. However, in the particular
context of population-climate science, scientific and policy-related
priorities are deeply entangled, and these entanglements have a hand in
shaping what is known and knowable about the future. The next chapters
depart from the emphasis on knowledge-making to focus more explicitly on
how policy advocates take up and circulate knowledge. Chapter 4 follows
NGOs and the young people they train, exploring the everyday ways
activists become advocates, experts, and development leaders of the future.
4

The Role of Youth in Population-Environment


Advocacy
The previous chapter explored scientific knowledge production at the
intersection of population growth and climate change, and the donors who
creatively foster its growth. As noted, the research is predicated on
projecting possible futures; it does not reflect the now, but the potential
tomorrow, next year, or next century. It also offers a roadmap or blueprint
for potential action, the kinds of actions that advocates can take to bring
about what they see as the best possible future for women and for the
planet. This chapter is about one such group of advocates: youth. Drawing
on knowledge gleaned from the kinds of studies discussed in chapter 3,
youth take up this information and carry it forward through their advocacy
to influence the international family planning policy funding landscape.
They also use it to produce their own futures as leaders on a global scale.

Leadership from the Ground Up


In Spring 2010, I walked the halls of Congress with a small group of
college students looking for representatives to talk to about global
population issues. We were in Washington, DC, for the One Voice:
Reproductive Health and Population Summit, a youth advocacy workshop
co-sponsored by the Sierra Club, Advocates for Youth, SIECUS, and
Americans for Informed Democracy. Over the previous four days, the
interactive training workshop had incorporated issue forum sessions on sex
education, global SRHR, toxins in the environment, population-
environment linkages (listed in the program as “sex, justice, and
sustainability”), and skills-building sessions on media and messaging,
community organizing, and the nuts and bolts of advocacy.
The training centered on building advocacy skills for use with
congressional legislators. After learning these skills during the workshop,
we would be divided into small constituency groups and sent to Capitol Hill
to speak to representatives, drawing on what we had learned over the days
prior. To prepare, we engaged in role-playing sessions and learned how to
carefully craft messages to win sympathy from legislative audiences,
drawing from both scientific data and a personal approach. In a thick packet
of workshop materials, one of the handouts instructed us in the salient
points of policy advocacy and lobbying: be flexible; do your homework; be
prompt; be prepared; be gracious; and be professional. Using this guide and
the notes we took during role plays, we sat in small groups, crafting and
testing short messages that included global population growth rates and
facts and figures on climate change, deforestation, species loss, and global
hunger and food security; we then tied these messages to figures on
contraceptive access around the world. From there, we paired up and made
our pitches to members of our group, asking the pretend-policymaker in
front of us to support foreign policy bills funding women’s access to
contraception, thereby providing a “win-win” solution that would
simultaneously empower women by supporting their reproductive health
and rights, while safeguarding global environmental resources and helping
slow the relentless pace of climate change. We offered them handouts filled
with statistics along with our winning smiles, and concluded with promises
to let others in our communities know of their support for progressive
issues. After several run-throughs, we were confident that we would
convince at least one legislator to hear our message and consider our “ask.”
Off to the Hill we went.
However, our visits on the Hill did not quite follow the script. While we
were scheduled to meet with four representatives, on the day of the visits
two were absent, and in one office, a Legislative Aide met us at the door
and asked us to simply leave the materials we had brought, thanking us for
coming and promising that the representative would read them. Our
facilitators had told us that they tried to match us with representatives who
they knew to be sympathetic to either women’s reproductive health or
environmental issues, or both, but that even those who were less
sympathetic to the legislative issues would offer an opportunity to practice
our pitch and learn what the common responses and challenges would be.
That, of course, depended on getting into the room with a representative
—which finally happened as we headed toward the lobby to leave the
building, when we spotted a congresswoman known as a champion for
women’s issues. As she walked through the lobby, she stopped and spoke
with us for a few minutes, recounting a recent trip overseas where she had
learned about obstetric fistula, and expressed her horror at the practice. An
outspoken member of our group—who also happened to be the youngest—
seized the opportunity to share her personal passion for alternative
menstrual products, and pressed literature on these products into the
congresswoman’s hands. This was not the plan. Not only was she off
message, but we had been warned that we would have two minutes at best
to make our pitch as a group, and the time was rapidly dwindling. Soon,
another member of our group began to launch into the 30-second version of
her population-environment pitch—referred to as the “elevator pitch,”
designed to be the kind of short, pithy, information-packed speech one
could give in an elevator—when an aide appeared and spirited the
congresswoman away. As she left, she congratulated our group on being
politically engaged at such a young age (in my early thirties, I was by far
the oldest member of the group), and expressed her delight at our maturity
and articulate way of communicating the issues. With that, she departed
with a warm smile.
We walked outside and looked at each other, deflated. Was this why we
had spent the past three days furiously scribbling notes, looking at
PowerPoint presentations, reading through a thick packet of handouts and
brochures, and watching and participating in endless role plays? Where was
our victorious moment? We never had a chance to make our policy ask.
When would we have our chance to make a difference for women’s SRHR?
Although it seemed to be a moment of failure at the time, what we’d
experienced was in fact a demonstration of what youth-oriented population-
advocacy trainings were designed to do: train and promote young people as
capable leaders, able to educate and lobby a wide range of audiences on the
issues that matter most to them. Of course, the issues that were supposed to
matter most in this context were family planning, population growth, and
the environment, issues that were at the heart of our learning and advocacy
training throughout the summit. Yet, when the first trainee redirected the
conversation to her pitch about menstrual products, it was the first moment
in which she was able to move from a place of personal interest to broader
legislative concern, and her first opportunity to translate her own personal
passion into a formal policy agenda and a clear ask. In those few short
moments in a congressional lobby, she transformed from an activist to a
leader and policy advocate.
Population-environment advocacy serves as the basis for new leadership
opportunities for young people, not just locally, but in global context.
Training workshops produce knowledgeable young people who can speak
with confidence and authority about global problems, using their
knowledge to claim expertise and suggest development solutions. This
knowledge—specialized in global problems and solutions—is a form of
development expertise, and harnessing it to develop leadership skills is
particularly attractive to young people who are determined to make a
difference in the world as advocates.
Activism, or campaigning for social change, is different from advocacy,
which is more often oriented toward directing public support to a cause or
policy. The difference is subtle, but important. Advocacy requires public
engagement, using one’s energies toward achieving specific goals or
outcomes on social issues and policies. Population-environment advocacy
in particular focuses on influencing U.S. foreign policy, specifically funding
appropriations for international family planning. Whether through online
education campaigns, writing op-eds, lobbying members of Congress, or
organizing street demonstrations, this form of advocacy takes activist
dreams about safeguarding the environment and women’s reproductive
rights, and transforms them so that they are directed toward instrumental
goals. The process for doing so requires assuming a certain type of
expertise in representing global issues and problems—in this case,
population growth and climate change—with authority. For the young
people I studied in this project, the catalyst for that transformation, from
local activist to international development advocate, expert, and leader, was
the youth advocacy training.
How could this be accomplished over the course of a short weekend?
One key strategy was the emphasis on youth leadership. Though led by
NGOs, the summit was presented as a youth movement, one that would
unleash opportunities for activists to engage more fully in social and
political activism. All of the sessions in the training emphasized the
importance of moving quickly from information and raising awareness to
action based on youth organizing—everything from congressional lobbying
actions to online awareness campaigns—and youth ownership of the future.
As one of the speakers told the crowd during the opening plenary session,
“The older generations need us; they need to ask for our input. The global
movement is turning international development on its head, including those
most affected by it in the planning process. This is our civil rights
movement.”
Over a period of nearly two years, I participated in a series of trainings
and workshops organized by the Sierra Club’s Global Population and
Environment Program1 and their partners: various organizations that were
active in some way on population, family planning, and reproductive health.
These organizations included Planned Parenthood, Advocates for Youth, the
Feminist Majority Foundation, Population Action International (PAI),
SIECUS, and the International Women’s Health Coalition. During that time,
I explored the ideas underlying the notion that young Americans could
represent the interests of women at vast geographic, cultural, and economic
distances, that these interests could be encapsulated by a focus on
contraceptives, and that this advocacy was motivated by feminist desire to
empower women. I also investigated how this advocacy was framed, both
by new advocates and those who trained them, as being tightly linked with
notions of social justice.

My Own Location
But first, a personal note. This is a challenging chapter for me to write,
precisely because of my own ambivalence toward the trainings, the
messages they disseminate, and how those messages land with new
advocates. When I conducted this research, I was several years into a PhD
program, was well versed in the history of population control, and had long
since sworn my allegiance to political ecology frameworks (see the
introduction) for an understanding of the causes of environmental problems.
However, I had also worked in international public health organizations for
several years, and I understood the lure of wanting to take concrete action
to impact global problems. Just a decide prior, as a young and energetic
idealist, I joined the Peace Corps, where I served in rural Madagascar as a
Community Health Advisor. There I spent my days talking to young people
about sex and reproduction, life skills, and how to negotiate condom use. I
also taught conversational English, usually on the sexual and reproductive
health topics I was so passionate about. I loved my work, even if I spent
many homesick days longing for the familiarity and comfort of the U.S. But
it wasn’t just the work itself that I loved; it was the sense that I was doing
something that could make a difference, though exactly what kind of
difference was rather murky. The frustration of my undergrad days of
learning about social injustice, deep poverty, and gender inequality across
the Global South, and Africa in particular, finally had an outlet. I was taking
action.
Malkki’s study of Finnish international aid workers is illuminating in this
context. She found that people who are motivated to “help” by becoming
involved with international causes are not necessarily cosmopolitan, global,
or worldly people. Rather, their impulse to help unknown others, thousands
of miles away, is motivated in part by a desire to escape the familiar. In this
way, the “international humanitarian imagination”2 is actually quite
domestic in that it begins at home, in the local, with local histories and
political conditions, and with people’s conceptions of themselves as
members of their own societies. This imagination constructs vulnerable
others as always already in need—of sympathy, of aid, of intervention. But
what of the other need, the “co-present neediness on the other side, the
neediness of the helper, the giver”?3 Insisting on the neediness of the
humanitarian would-be benefactor locates their social and existential
position, bringing them out of the shadows of the unmarked benevolent
actor. This project contributes to that inquiry, interrogating the motivations
and desires of today’s population advocates-from-afar.
In my own case, I realized that my disorganized actions in Peace Corps
were based on vague notions of right and wrong, and predicated on the idea
that, because I had a graduate degree in Public Health, I possessed expert
knowledge that the people around me did not have. My Malagasy
counterparts and friends let me know in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that
my knowledge of statistical data and health campaigns that had worked in
other settings were of little use to them. They did not fit the contours of
their lives. Eventually, I took a step back, began to listen, and recognized
that I had much more to learn from Malagasy girls and women than I could
teach them.
All of this is to say that I understand what motivates young population-
environment advocates. The desire to do good work and make a difference
in the world, particularly in conditions of extreme inequality, is a noble
ideal, even as it is often informed by vaguely colonial notions of
saviorhood. I felt an affinity for the people who conducted and participated
in these trainings; I sensed that, had I been twenty-two years old and not yet
a Peace Corps volunteer, I might have become a population advocacy
trainee too. With that said, given the path I did take, and which ultimately
led me to this project, I was fairly skeptical about this work and what it
sought to do. Were these young people familiar with the history of
population control in the U.S. and globally? Had they studied the
Malthusian-driven science that justified and helped make population control
possible? What made them think they could represent the interests of
women and girls they had never met, whose life conditions were completely
foreign to them? Did they actually understand what, and who, they were
advocating for? And finally—did the quest for leadership and action
outweigh other concerns? In the opening scene of this book, I described a
student art reception linking population and environment issues for a youth
audience. Here, I return to it to illuminate how youth leadership and
advocacy are built, with NGOs operating from behind the scenes.

Advocacy Is Fun!
The invitational flyer announced the “Sex and Sustainability” event as an
opportunity for UC Berkeley students to come together for food, drink, art,
and ideas about global sustainability, women’s rights, and justice. I arrived
to find it in full swing, with over 200 participants in attendance. The walls
were filled with artwork on gender and sustainable development that had
been commissioned for the reception. Peering at the fourteen mixed media
installations scattered throughout the gallery revealed images of faceless
women bent double, babies strapped to their backs while they toiled in the
fields; women’s bodies engulfed in swelling pregnant bellies; and an
emaciated child encircled in a prison of skeletal bones. The images were all
painted in the beige, yellow, and deep brown paint pigments selected to
represent racially recognizable darker skin tones. The caption beneath one
painting read, “Let’s see who dies this time, me or my baby.”4 Each image
was also accompanied by statistics referring to fertility rates (the number of
babies the average woman in a particular country will have in her lifetime),
maternal death rates, childhood illness and death, and hunger. They set a
rather morbid tone.
Walking around the gallery, I overheard a few snippets of conversation;
most students were not discussing the artwork, but rather their classes and
spring break plans. A few snickered at a professor wearing a tie emblazoned
with condoms. As I stood looking at the artwork, another graduate student I
knew approached me, aghast. “What the hell is this?!” she asked, waving at
the paintings. “It’s like, you don’t need to offer any explanation. Look at the
poor darkies, look how depressing life in Africa is.” She rolled her eyes,
finishing her wine and refilling her cup. I vaguely agreed with her, adding
that for most of the students in the room, this was probably their only entry
point into thinking about these issues. We went back and forth for a few
minutes about whether images that present essentialized ideas of women,
motherhood, and poverty are ever useful. While we talked, a young white
woman who worked for the organization co-sponsoring the event overhead
our conversation and interjected. “It sounds like you have strong feelings
about this. You should probably say something to the organizers about it.”
We regarded her silently for a moment, then I asked, “Well, what are your
feelings about it?” She gave me a wry smile, noting that she agreed with us
that the images were simplistic, but said that they work. “We’re just trying
to get people in the door here,” she noted. “After that we can offer more
nuance.”
In her work on the history of gender and environmental policy work at
UN environment conferences, Resurreccion demonstrates that essentialism
played a significant role when feminists in the 1980s were trying to bring
women’s issues to the table. Presenting women’s relationships to nature in
the Global South in homogenous ways provided policymakers with a
shorthand for understanding the basics of gendered environmental roles and
differentiated impacts. At the same time, this practice gave rise to persistent
storylines linking poor, rural women to the environment as both victims of
environmental catastrophes and also agents of change, responsible for
solving environmental problems. These narratives fix women in a static
model: that of an essentialized, universal relationship between women and
nature. As a result, the initial policy attention to women’s environmental
experiences left little room for articulating dynamic, diverse experiences in
ways that resist the victim-agent role.5
The artwork in the gallery was reminiscent of this shorthand, and
reflected other images that are common to population advocacy. The trope
of the singular, unchanging Global South woman appears frequently in
images and texts found in population-related brochures and reports. This
image has changed to the extent that the referents used to describe her have
shifted, from “Third World woman” to “Global South woman,”
“Impoverished woman,” and “Woman in developing countries”; however,
she remains a flat, static image comprised of several characteristics:
poverty, high (above replacement) fertility, and significant barriers to
limiting her childbearing. Whether in Ghana, India, Madagascar, or
Cambodia, this singular trope endures, shaping language used to describe
poor women, the conditions and causes of their fertility and childbearing
practices, and why family planning advocates in the U.S. should care to
advocate on their behalf.
Marisa, then-coordinator of the GPEP, is a cheerleader for population-
environment advocacy. She has an exuberant, infectious smile and
charming demeanor, and the passion she projects for her work is hard to
resist. It is clear that she cares deeply about women’s reproductive health.
In her early 20s, white, and middle class, she swirled effortlessly through
the crowd of other mostly white, young women students wearing a GPEP t-
shirt emblazoned with the slogan “The fate of the world is in your hands . . .
and in your pants.” I asked her what attracted her to this work, and she
replied that she had majored in Sociology in college, and had always been
involved in feminist issues: “I’ve always been attracted to diversity and
feminism. I think this is a really good way to make a difference for
women’s rights,” she noted. Another GPEP coordinator, Leslie, also a white
woman in her early 20s, was also deeply committed to population-
environment advocacy. For her, it was common sense: “Increasing human
numbers are having a huge impact on our world, in every country, not just
in the Global South. The link is simple. More mouths to feed means more
food to be produced and consumed, more land being farmed, more
emissions being generated. But we also have to think about poor people and
how they’re impacted. The linkage goes both ways.” Leslie had read The
Population Bomb in college, and initially approached the GPEP with some
trepidation. “When I first heard about the program, I thought controversy,
right away. I knew about the history of population control. But I did some
research on what the program really stood for, and I’m really passionate
about climate change, women’s issues, and women’s health. For me, I’d
never seen any other organizations that were actually doing this work and
addressing the linkages.”
Several months later, I encountered Marisa again at a multi-day GPEP
advocacy training. It was held in Beverly Hills, California, at the Feminist
Majority Foundation (FMF) headquarters, and both FMF and Planned
Parenthood were co-sponsors. Before the meeting started, as I joined a few
women milling around the breakfast table, stirring our coffee and picking
over donuts and bagels, I noted the demographics of the crowd:
approximately 30 women, mostly college age, mostly white, although
several women of color and a small handful of post-retirement-age women
were also there. We sat at tables in the conference room and opened thick
folders filled with the workshop agenda, biographies on our facilitators, and
articles (“Dying in the Backstreets” chronicled the practice of unsafe
abortions in Kenya), fact sheets (on the U.S. government’s woefully
inadequate funding for international family planning), and information
sheets exposing fake women’s health centers operating near college
campuses. The folders also included swag: buttons from Planned
Parenthood (“Love Carefully”) and the Sierra Club (“Pro-Choice; Pro-
Family Planning; Pro-Environment”), as well as green and pink Sierra Club
condoms and stickers, and t-shirts with their youth slogan.
Our resource packets told us that by the end of the workshop, we would
all be able to do the following: 1. Describe the relationships among global-
to-local issues such as sexual and reproductive health and rights, resource
consumption, global warming, population, poverty, and gender equity; and
2. Understand the importance of voluntary family planning and sexual
health education here and abroad. The agenda broke down the schedule for
the two-day training in thirty-minute and hour-long increments, including
sessions on “Global Reproductive Health and the Environment,” “From
Global to Local: Family Planning and Sex Education,” values clarification,
skills building and role-playing exercises, and sessions on action planning
and community outreach. The interplay between information sharing and
action quickly emerged as an important component of the agenda; it was
clear that although this training would share knowledge, the emphasis
would be on building action-oriented advocacy skills. By the end of the
training, we were expected to create action plans that would “make a
difference on your campus and/or in your community (for example, by
hosting an educational event or film showing, contacting a decision-maker,
recruiting other volunteers to get involved with an existing campaign,
etc.).”
Taking my seat, I asked the young woman next to me what brought her
there. She told me that she was primarily concerned about environmental
pollution, loss of wildlife habitats, and environmental justice. She was an
avid hiker and wilderness enthusiast, and felt that people were generally
careless about their environmental practices. “Look at the packaging we use
every day,” she noted. “These water bottles will be on the earth forever.
Forever!” I agreed, and asked how she saw the connections with
reproductive health and family planning in the Global South. She hesitated
for a moment, then said, “Well, I’ve never been outside of the U.S., so I
don’t really know. But if it helps women have access to health care, it’s a
good idea.”
I thought about her statement as the first session got underway. Did we
need to have global experiences or perspectives to advocate for global
population issues? What was required to be a global actor? The answer,
apparently, was data. A session facilitator launched into a dizzying array of
statistical data: global population numbers (6.8 billion at the time), the
number of women who wanted to stop or pause their childbearing but
weren’t using contraceptives (over 200 million), the number of women
dying in childbirth (one per minute, more than half a million each year), and
where these women were located (99% in the Global South). The solutions
to these problems, she claimed, were simple and technological:
contraceptives, safe motherhood kits, and safe abortions. Education was
presented as a simple, technical intervention too: “What’s the number one
factor determining how many children a woman will have in her lifetime?”
the facilitator asked, looking around expectantly. Several participants in the
room were FMF interns, and they mumbled the word “education,” to which
she shouted, “Exactly!” Education, she told us, is a crucial component to
protecting women’s health, preserving lives, and empowering our Global
South sisters. With education, the shocking statistics we’d heard at length
would no longer accurately represent the health status and life chance
scenarios of women around the world.
The room was comprised of a group of relative elites (middle-class,
college-educated people) grappling with how to understand and represent
the life conditions of people who live very far away. This distance is both
literal and figurative. They could not fully wrap their heads around the
concepts of child brides, female genital cutting, and obstetric fistula: “They
all sound really bad,” one participant noted during an open discussion
period. “Women really need education.” And yet, the facilitators never
discussed the more complex, nuanced ways in which poverty, limited
political power, and cultural norms also shape women’s reproductive lives.
They also never discussed the importance of meeting basic needs or having
access to the tools of collective organizing for a voice in political decision-
making. Why? Did they deem it irrelevant, or too complex for the
audience? Or did it simply not meet the needs of the program, to produce
new advocates?
These questions continued to occupy my mind throughout subsequent
training workshops, gaining in complexity as the groups of attendees
around me became more diverse in background and interest, and it became
clear that they were not entirely sure of their own motivations and desires
for population advocacy. Some tension around these questions bubbled over
the following year at the Youth Summit in Washington, DC—the event in
which youth participants trained for lobbying visits on Capitol Hill. Day 2
of the summit included a session on “Sex, Justice, and Sustainability” that
honed in on population and climate change as a unique way for activists to
amplify their voices on a global stage. Organized and led by GPEP and PAI,
the session focused on the central message that global reproductive health
and family planning for women are essential ingredients in promoting
environmental sustainability and advancing climate change mitigation and
adaptation. Representatives of the two NGOs used colorful slides filled with
charts and statistics on GGEs, population growth projections, and
contraceptive access in global context, highlighting the role of advocacy
and raising awareness in linking the three. Their bottom line was that
population, climate change, and contraceptive access were not distinct
issues, nor separate from politics and policy. Rather, what joined them
together was the necessity for activism and policy advocacy to draw the
links to global social justice and women’s empowerment. At the end of the
presentations, one of the panelists added, “It’s such a beautiful story. Giving
women what they need and preserving the environment. It just comes
together in such a beautiful way.”
Looking around the room, I noticed mixed reactions to the presentation.
Of the two dozen participants, most of them young women in college,
approximately half were women of color. Of the women of color, nearly all
were attending the summit to promote sexual and reproductive health,
rights, and justice among marginalized American populations. Their
perspectives and priorities were local, not global, and the strategies, data
points, and languages they were familiar with reflected that. The data on
climate change and environmental sustainability seemed disconnected from
the contexts of contraceptive and abortion access in low-income
communities they discussed in small groups. Many of the young white
women in the room were more concerned with environmental problems,
identifying as environmentalists or climate change activists. The global
preceded the local in importance; their language was peppered with
references to climate change as “everyone’s problem,” an imminent danger
for “all of our lives.”6 As one young white woman stated, “I’ve been an
environmentalist my whole life, I consider myself to be an activist, up on all
of the most important issues, but I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never even
thought about reproductive rights. This is completely new to me.”
These differences became particularly salient during the post-session
Q&A, when a white participant stated that “overpopulation” was a key
threat to environmental sustainability. Others in the room responded
swiftly: panelists and experienced participants encouraged new trainees to
remove terms like overpopulation from their vocabularies in favor of
“population pressure,” “unsustainable growth,” and “rapid population
growth.” Meanwhile, participants of color asked who was considered to be
overpopulating the earth, and which populations would be targeted for
reductions. The mood in the room became uncomfortable as facilitators
attempted to navigate the linguistic and social fault lines that had opened
up, smoothing the moment over by drawing everyone’s attention back to the
central goal of contraceptive access for all women around the world.
Regardless of whether we were primarily concerned about environmental
problems or women’s reproductive autonomy, they reminded us, full and
voluntary contraceptive access was something that we could—and should—
all be on board with, as a starting point for justice across social arenas.
Moments like this would repeat through numerous training workshops I
attended, and while at first they struck me as moments of skillful language
policing, it quickly became clear that something else was at work. These
were moments when population actors were reshaping the language in
which their efforts were understood, and they were repositioning it—
moving it away from the thorniness of controversy, of coercion and human
rights abuses and questions about racial inequality. They were reframing
population as a social justice issue, and in doing so, they linked their efforts
to a similar group of populationist youth who were active several decades
prior. Ironically, that group was an explicitly self-styled population control
organization, but its leaders navigated complex relationships with women’s
rights activists, family planners, and neo-Malthusians. That organization
was known as Zero Population Growth (ZPG), and the movement it created
provided the model for youth population advocacy today.

ZPG and the Roots of Youth Advocacy


One day in 1968, students at Yale University awoke to find the campus
papered with flyers and stickers bearing a rather cryptic message: the letters
ZPG. There was no explanation of what they stood for, and the ubiquitous
and unexplained presence of the materials generated a buzz that spread
rapidly throughout the campus community. Two weeks later, the mysterious
posts were replaced with different materials, this time explaining that ZPG
stood for Zero Population Growth, a new club on campus, and advertising
their first meeting. Within a week the group boasted a membership of 200
students, and over the following year and a half, Yale became one of the
leading campus chapters of the club.7 Meanwhile, ZPG was growing rapidly
nationwide: in the two years from the time of its founding in 1968 to 1970,
the organization grew to 102 chapters in thirty states, and was adding five
hundred new members each week, many of whom were college students
and other youth. By that time, ZPG had also hired a Washington, DC,
lobbyist, and—in California—its leaders initiated efforts to set up a state
commission on population and environment.8 ZPG had gone from a young
people’s social movement to a formal NGO (it continues in this capacity
today, under the name Population Connection).
Both the organization’s message and its strategies—using bumper
stickers, buttons, and flyers with catchy phrases and slogans—were
successful in drawing attention from large numbers of people in a short
period of time. They offered young people a strategy for something they
could do, right here, right now, that was entirely under their control. ZPG
aimed its messages primarily at the white middle class, encouraging them to
participate in global stewardship through responsible management of their
own reproduction. This approach fit well with feminist advocacy for
abortion access and legalization of contraception, and in the context of the
Free Love movement, the sexual revolution, and the women’s reproductive
rights movements, it was a time in which talking openly about sex and
gender was becoming increasingly commonplace. ZPG was concerned
primarily with bringing down birth rates in the U.S., particularly among the
white middle class, by restricting their own birthrates to two children or
fewer, connected to outsized global resource use and environmental
impacts. Supporting abortion access, legalized contraception, getting rid of
tax exemptions for children, and welfare reform in the U.S. were also key
goals.9
At the same time, ZPG leaders were split on the issue of voluntarism
versus coercion. Garrett Hardin, an advisor of the group, was a prominent
advocate of coercion, and Richard Bowers, one of ZPG’s co-founders (Paul
Ehrlich was another co-founder), argued that “voluntarism is a farce.”10
Meanwhile, ZPG Executive Director Shirley Radl testified before the
California legislature in 1970 that one of ZPG’s central goals was to create
the conditions for all members of society to voluntarily limit family size,
arguing that all forms of contraception and abortion were necessary to
achieve this goal. Underscoring her point, she declared that “the uterus
should be the concern of the owner and not the state.”11
Radl was not the only activist involved in both the growing
environmental movement and the mainstream women’s liberation
movement, viewing the two struggles as natural allies. Lucinda Cisler, the
Chair of the National Organization for Women’s Taskforce on
Reproduction, was also on the national board of ZPG. Feminist activists
who sought to de-link womanhood from motherhood, arguing that women
had important contributions to make to the world far beyond childbearing,
found ready reception among environmentalists who also argued that
women should have a greater choice of lifestyles and options available to
them. Garrett Hardin pushed strongly for the complete repeal of abortion
restrictions, and helped form the organization National Association for the
Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL).12 At the same time, ZPG leaders lacked
nuance in terms of how the issues unfurled—particularly the issue of
sterilization. In their zeal for full access to all forms of contraception and
abortion, they opposed all legislation limiting access to sterilization, going
so far as to join in a lawsuit with the ACLU on behalf of a group of white
women who pressed for expanded sterilization access. As the next chapter
demonstrates, this was devastating to women of color activists, who were
seeking greater restrictions on the procedure, which had been used
coercively in their communities for decades.
The organization also called for land use planning designed to “determine
the appropriate patterns of distribution of people on the land, and of
migration between states and regions,”13 and overall stabilization in national
energy consumption, as well as immediate reduction in the consumption of
non-renewable energy sources. They saw this as necessarily concurrent with
the achievement of improved access to health care, education, and increased
income levels for all. While they did not use the words, their approach was
rooted in what today’s young advocates might describe as social justice.
The growth of ZPG highlights a key contrast within population-
environment activism that has endured until today. While young people—
particularly college students—formed the bulk of its membership, it was not
only a campus-based club, nor were its founders and leaders “youth.” Paul
Ehrlich, Charles Remington, and Richard Bowers (two professor-scientists
and a lawyer) were well into their professional careers when they founded
ZPG, and the organization became a formal nonprofit organization, not just
a student movement. Today, population-environment activism is similar:
while many of the voices of population advocacy are youth voices, those
leading youth-organizing efforts are employees of organizations like the
Sierra Club.
The Sierra Club is not alone in focusing on youth for their population-
environment efforts. When the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) in
Arizona launched its Endangered Species Condoms campaign in 2010, they
focused one of their early distribution events at the University of Arizona.
They produced 100,000 condoms for their Earth Day launch, which turned
out to be a gross underestimation of demand. According to the then-
program director, student response to the campaign was overwhelming:
expecting to distribute hundreds of condoms at the university, he ended up
disseminating thousands, as students waited in long lines for hours. The
campaign produces and distributes condoms in boxes bearing punny
slogans,14 and when opened, users find the inside of the box printed with
information on endangered animal and insect species, juxtaposed with
statistics on population growth in the U.S. and messages urging the condom
holder to “save panthers, sea turtles, wolves, and countless other
endangered species by choosing to stop overpopulating the planet.” I’ve
shared these condoms with my students in my own classes in hopes of
sparking a critical discussion of the ways environmentalists frame
population issues, but without fail, any sense of critical analysis gives way
to entertainment. Students compare packages, laughing at the witty
phrasing, and describe the discussions they have with their partners when
negotiating condom use (which, to date, have never included saving beetles,
jaguars, or any of the other animal and insect species found on Endangered
Species Condoms). While the packages are successful at reviving students’
flagging attention during class, they don’t necessarily inspire serious
thought about the relationships between population growth, contraceptive
use, and the environment.
Nonetheless, they were wildly popular with young people from the very
beginning. CBD distributes the condoms for free through volunteer
distributors, and while the campaign has never been limited to a youth
audience, young people quickly emerged as a key constituency that was
interested and motivated to distribute condoms to others. The former
program director told me that students often wrote to say that the condoms
were useful to their awareness-raising campaigns on campus. As a result,
when students would request condoms to distribute, he would send up to ten
times the number they requested.
The Sierra Club and its partners have found a way to harness this
youthful energy and attraction to sexy language: by invoking social justice
ideals. A standard message throughout training workshops held that framing
population-environment connections through women’s reproductive health,
rights, and empowerment had never been done before, and that previous
approaches—focused on population control—were a part of the “dark
past,”15 never to return. From there, the focal point of trainings, the strategy
that would firmly move population from the darkness into light, in their
minds, was clear: populationism as a form of social justice.

(Re)Framing Social Justice


In 2010, A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice, and The Environmental
Challenge16 outlined the new concept of population justice. The book is an
edited volume that describes the state of the world as occupying a pivotal
moment both environmentally and demographically, driven in part by “the
largest generation of young people in human history”17 coming of age and
holding the reins of the future in their hands through their decisions about
sexuality and childbearing. The book offers a solution: population justice.
Described as an ethical framework for addressing population and the
environment, population justice draws on reproductive and environmental
justice to contextualize reproductive and environmental behaviors and
constraints, with a “nuanced understanding of the relationship between
human numbers and environmental harm.”18 Population justice is rooted in
the Cairo approach to women’s human rights and bodily integrity. It is also,
notably, committed to the Cairo Consensus’s emphasis on individual
responsibility: “If our basic rights are secured (a big ‘if’ for many people in
the world), then we have an obligation to ask what impact our choices have
on others, including future generations. In the context of an unfolding
environmental crisis, the question is an urgent one.”19
The book situates population growth and environmental change within
broader political and economic conditions, and it advocates access to health
care, education, and sustainable development; at the same time, the
solutions it offers all come back, in one way or another, to family planning.
Moreover, it depicts contraceptive access as a social solution, rather than a
technological one, arguing that “if our goal is to create a world that is
sustainable and just, population-environment policies must serve those
ends.”20 How this notion of justice is defined is rather vague; it is up to the
reader to interpret its meaning (note that several chapters in the edited
volume focus on addressing human numbers in arguably neo-Malthusian
ways). Yet, the ideas behind the book served as the inspiration for a central
pillar of the GPEP program: its youth leadership program, known as the
Population Justice Environment (PJE) Challenge. In an interview with
Marisa, she argued that GPEP understood the justice framework from the
book in strategic terms, particularly for GPEP recruitment efforts:

JS: Why focus on justice? What do SRHR and justice have to do


with global population and environment?
Marisa: We’ve got our program into a place where the message is
really good. We found A Pivotal Moment and went to the first book
strategy meeting in January of 2008 and I think that’s really where
the idea sort of sparked around what does population justice really
mean, and how does sort of adding the word justice not just sort of
make people feel comfortable with these issues, but also to help
them question their values, on these complicated issues. We brought
it in strategically at every stage. We had her speak at our One Voice
summit last year, you know, and she really framed the whole
conference in that frame of justice and equity, and I think the youth
really appreciated it and appreciated the issues. And the millennium
generation is really craving synergies. They see how these issues
overlap, and that sort of messaging goes really well into bringing
issues together and also uniting environmental groups with women’s
groups, women’s health and rights groups, which environmentalists
haven’t always had the best relationships with.

This notion of social justice grounds the concept of youth leadership within
GPEP. It coheres around a concept of self-appointed responsibility to take
action to turn the tide of population. Unlike the ZPG programs it indirectly
emerged from, this form of youth leadership moves beyond a duty toward
reproductive self-management, and simultaneously positions young
advocates to argue for Global South others to do the same. At the same
time, it fits with a narrative among population-environment advocates that
they are doing the work of social justice. However, their own descriptions
of social justice and how it is embodied in their advocacy work were vague
at best.
This aligns with what seems to be a rising trend among young people
nationally. Among the many things I’ve learned from my students in the
classroom over the past ten years, one thing is abidingly clear: they were,
and are, deeply interested in social justice. This frequently comes up in
class discussions, most often in reference to national politics, but also
pertaining to national and local social movements. Our classroom
discussions revolve around a diverse range of issues and topics: police
brutality, Black Lives Matter, food deserts, rape culture, immigration
politics, the Occupy Movement, climate change, and toxins in food, air,
water, and cosmetics. In each case, more often than not, the conversation
would come back to social justice; not how it is defined or what it means in
practical terms, but rather how to achieve it based on taken-for-granted
assumptions of a shared starting point and common values around equality
and rejection of “oppression.”
Through many of these conversations, and particularly in the context of
studying young activists, I came to realize that the concept of social justice
was losing its significance, as it was buried under an avalanche of
assumptions of the “right” causes to rally around. As Reisch notes,
moralizing language is never far behind, in ways that make it ever more
challenging to parse out the meanings of social justice and its adherents:
“As desirable social and political goals are depicted in starkly different
forms, labels like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ become interchangeable and the
meaning of social justice becomes obscured . . . If liberals and
conservatives, religious fundamentalists, and radical secularists all regard
their causes as socially just, how can we develop a common meaning of the
term?”21
This watering down of the concept helps youth-oriented programs like
GPEP draw in activists with simplistic messaging focused on action. GPEP
program documents argue that engaging youth activists is a necessary
strategy for changing U.S. policies that impact youth around the world, and
that “young people must have a voice and a seat at the decision-making
table when it comes to ensuring the health of their own bodies, and the
planet!” Marisa reflected some of this approach during an interview,
arguing that the issues GPEP advocated would primarily affect youth in the
long run, and therefore it made sense to support and foster the leadership
potential of youth during training efforts. After all, “half the world’s
population hasn’t entered their reproductive health years yet . . . and given
the political environment today, we have engaged youth and it would be a
pity not to maximize their potential,” she stated. GPEP also recognized that
they had a prime opportunity to draw on young people’s access to
technology and social media to disseminate messages and mobilize
advocacy efforts quickly. Another GPEP employee agreed: “Classes and the
web make information available in ways that it hasn’t been before. The
world is so different from when I was a college student. Technology has
advanced rapidly, and the approach is very different . . . I think technology
has an important role; we’re getting exposure, and the media is so different
than it used to be. In the digital age, in some regards, people get exposed to
things differently. When we talk about water being an issue, they [youth]
can immediately go and look up images. So we have to draw on their
strengths and maximize them.”
Through interviews and training activities, youth advocates expressed a
desire to make a difference on a global scale, specifically by improving the
lives and health of others and the planet, based on social justice ideals. And
while the arguments linking population and the environment may have been
new for some, they resonated deeply because they are, as I was told time
and time again, a matter of common sense. When I asked one young
woman, a campus environmental justice activist, why she had become
involved in population advocacy, she responded, “It just made sense. I want
to work to create solutions that affect everyone based on justice. All people
are affected by sex and sexuality, and all people are affected by the
environment . . . Also, women work to get natural resources their families
depend on. I think that choosing how they want to have and raise families is
one of the things that can most improve women’s status in a society. It can’t
come from outside; we need to support women to do it locally within their
own societies. And if women have less children, it benefits all of us.”
A former manager at the Sierra Club, who has had a long career in
population-environment advocacy work, explained that meeting youth
where they are and building on the issues that are most interesting to them
is a key part of the organization’s strategic approach to engaging young
activists. “Within the Sierra Club, youth activists self-define not as
environmental activists, but as climate change activists, and are interested
in justice and a rights-based approach,” he noted.
But this focus had its frustrations, particularly for trainees. While Sierra
Club youth trainees may have seen climate change as a main priority, their
interests were not necessarily shared among their friends, particularly when
it came to population. A long-time youth population advocate expressed
frustration with the challenges of getting other young people on board: “It’s
a hard issue for a lot of people to care about and understand. In the
environmental world, it’s not a sexy issue, it’s one that people want to shy
away from, especially environmental groups that don’t want to get involved
with population control. With young people, I don’t see much growth on the
issue. They’ll say they’re interested but they end up working on other issues
instead. Within climate activism, there are trends and people end up
working on one issue or another but this one isn’t sexy, even though it’s
about sex.”
At the same time, other youth advocates saw more opportunities to
connect population-environment issues to other arenas of life, where the
audiences they wanted to reach were more likely to be concerned. One
South Asian graduate student I interviewed approached the issue through a
public health lens, based on her reproductive health background, and had
attended a Sierra Club event linking the issues to the environment. That
event marked the first time that she ever connected environmental issues to
reproduction: “So my focus on environment came from Sierra Club, when I
was interested in population issues. They connected it to environment, I
didn’t. And they gave me money to do an advocacy event based around
population and environment stuff. And, so when I went to their training,
they introduced all the connectivity between the environmental issues and
the population issues, which were sort of in the back of my mind I guess,
but they brought them out into the forefront.”
She also expressed ambivalence and concern about exactly how the
linkages are made, but argued that it was necessary to frame population in
new ways to attract broader support for family planning. At one point
during our interview, she confided that at times she was hesitant to talk
about population and environment because there were more compelling
issues to discuss than the environment, but that focusing on the
environment created more opportunities to talk about reproduction:
“Generally I think that the reason why population, rapid population growth
is coming up as an issue is because it’s connected with the environment. It
wouldn’t be coming up so much if it wasn’t for the environment. I think
environmental issues are pulling it up out of the dredges of things that you
can’t talk about.”
Another interview with Marisa revealed that intense polarization on
population offers deep challenges to framing and circulating messages,
regardless of the politics of the listener:

JS: Are population-environment linkages still controversial today?


Or has that changed?
Marisa: My friend has a great quote which is, “Population is one of
those issues where you’re attacked from the left and from the right”
[laughs], which I think sums it up so well. It’s really polarized. The
further you go out to the poles whether it’s women’s health and
rights, resource distribution and conservation, the pope, the
demographic lens, the further you go out to those poles, the more
controversial the issues become. But in the middle, broadly
speaking, if you talk to Joe Schmoe on the street, I don’t think that
these issues are that controversial. You know, I think that generally
people acknowledge that yes, there’s a connection, and yes, we live
on a finite planet, and yes we should support women’s health and
rights. Just a simple set of solutions that are really important to
support, but I think the international coalition on family planning
did a poll that said that something like 80% of people support
international family planning. And I really want the PJE Challenge
to have that basic support because I think these issues become
heated based on the audience.
JS: Who takes issue with it? Are there certain groups who are more
likely to be opposed to this kind of work?
Marisa: It’s both the left and the right. I was attacked two years ago
by Fox News; I was giving Sex and Environment presentations, and
they did this big article saying sex can also cause global warming. It
was hilarious. That you would expect from conservative groups who
aren’t about foreign aid or family planning. Then there’s also these
feminist groups that just sort of flat out believe that environmental
organizations have no claim in talking about population. They say
it’s just an issue about women’s health and rights, and gender
equality, and just . . . there should be no connection between
women’s fertility and environmental resource use. That’s definitely
an attack from the left who are so pro human rights to the extent that
they ignore the biological fact that we live on a planet with finite
resources, and also looking at any country that has escaped poverty
has slowed their population growth. It’s almost an argument that’s
too academic, or too rooted in trying to be progressive.

A former GPEP employee, Nicole, saw the main issue as one of developing
strategic communication and build effectiveness while minimizing
controversy, and it quickly became clear to her during the early GPEP days
that situating population as an international problem outside of the U.S. was
a way to do so. This is in part due to the fact that domestic population issues
are linked to immigration and population growth rates among different
racial and ethnic groups. Given the Sierra Club’s own history of
controversy on this issue,22 it became clear that avoiding the issue played a
major role in framing their population work’s Global South focus:

JS: Why focus on population issues overseas?


Nicole: Sierra Club has addressed population growth since the ’70s,
and has had a history of controversy around the issue. There are
segments of the membership that feel that population is the most
pressing environmental issue, but if they want to break it down into
finding solutions, it’s “yes, let’s increase access to services, but let’s
also decrease the number of people on the planet, and let’s close our
borders.” For an organization like Sierra Club that’s really trying,
like I’d say big, white environmental organizations, having a
program that works on immigration reform, it’s just gonna burn a lot
of bridges. And for the many reasons why Sierra Club doesn’t work
on it politically, it would make sense for the organization to address
it on many levels. Throughout my history there it was always an
issue and we had to be very clear in how we spoke to the public and
the opposition. It’s always going to come up. When talking about
demographics or population issues, immigration is a part of the
challenge.
JS: What about the argument that says we must address US
population growth first, since we’re a leading emitter of greenhouse
gases?
Nicole: This is an area where justice and human rights have to come
first. It’s not about control or limiting choices or implementing
culturally insensitive policies. I was very aware that you had to
articulate these issues from a point of focusing on equality. I think
the climate change issue is a slippery slope. We at GPEP would talk
about how a growing population impacts the ways we use resources
and etcetera. And of course we couldn’t talk only about population
growth in the developing world when we’re the biggest emitters and
polluters. But ask me where the sound bite or talking point is, and I
couldn’t tell you.
JS: Is there a correct way to talk about population and climate
change?
Nicole: It’s very challenging on climate change. Sierra Club is the
one environmental organization right now that is tackling population
issues. Is family planning the solution? Absolutely not. It’s a piece
of the puzzle when looking at the broader issue of looking at issues
of sustainability. Wealthy nations all play a role in a way that we
consume resources. But if we look collectively at the world, since
there are no boundaries with climate change, we still need to look at
realistic growth. That’s not the cause, but in looking at the future of
sustainability, it has to be a part of the conversation.

Again, youth population advocates have multiple objectives, leadership and


taking action primary among them. Minimizing controversy is seen as an
important way to push past the difficult and complex issues youth advocates
see as a barrier to accomplishing their goals—and situating their work as
globally necessary often emerges as a useful way to do it. For example,
when a small group of youth advocates, several of them GPEP trainees,
drafted an updated policy document on population growth, family planning,
and climate change for an international climate change conference, they
foregrounded their own sense of responsibility and leadership as leaders.
They also conveyed a sense of global connectedness to other young people
around the world.
The policy piece, COP16 Policy Statement—Global Youth Support
Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) for a Just and
Sustainable World23, is a comprehensive document that sums up SRHR and
climate change through a central framework of collective youth leadership.
It opens with a statement of the unique role young people can play in
addressing climate change: “Collectively, we as young people have a
critical role to play in adapting to climate change, helping mitigate climate
change, holding our governments accountable to targets set in Cancun, and
shaping a just and sustainable world.” From there, it addresses the gendered
livelihood impacts of climate change—the intensification of women’s roles
with respect to agriculture, fuel and water collection, as well as the
disproportionate gendered impacts of natural disasters—alongside the
reproductive health challenges facing young women on a global scale,
including the unmet need for contraceptives, complications of early
pregnancy, and overall low access to quality reproductive health services.
Grounding these problems in poor political leadership and young people’s
disenfranchisement, the policy statement describes young people, alongside
political leaders, as uniquely positioned to intervene and transform global
conditions through their own actions: “There is growing evidence that
addressing SRHR solutions can increase resilience to climate change and
slow population trends that exacerbate poverty and climate change impacts,
empower young people to exercise their rights and contribute to achieving a
more just world. Governments have committed to delivering these services
through a number of international agreements. What we need now is
action.”
This language communicates two key ideas: first, that young people bear
unique climate and reproductive health burdens due to woefully inadequate
leadership from older generations, and second, that they are the right people
to solve these problems through their advocacy. The remainder of the
document lists seven areas of government action, which it advocates
strongly for world governments, particularly UNFCCC member state
leaders, to take. These include: funding and supporting the least developed
countries’ climate change plans, investing in youth-friendly SRH education
and services, ensuring girls’ and women’s access to education worldwide,
and providing universal, voluntary access to family planning, with young
people participating fully in program development and planning.
I spoke with one of the architects of the statement, Julie, a GPEP training
alumnus and outspoken advocate on population and environment issues.
She indicated that she and other advocates were motivated to draft the
document based on a sense of frustration with the limitations of older
activists’ thinking. Julie argued that the SHRH community has come late to
the climate change table, and that young activists were needed to fill the
void; thus, they wrote the statement to show others how to integrate climate
change within existing SHRH advocacy. When they went to the COP15
meetings in Copenhagen and circulated an earlier version of the statement
among gender and health activists, they were initially met with pushback,
particularly from older feminists in the daily gender caucus meetings. Julie
recounted one particularly contentious encounter: “We got really strong
emotions generated from older feminists when raising the issue, before they
read the statement. The gender caucus included people from all over the
world; those expressing concern were from both developed and developing
countries. There was a strong passionate response of, ‘we don’t want to
impose programs, tell women what to do, or blame them.’ It was useful for
me to realize that people with those backgrounds . . . you have to start by
acknowledging the bad part, show that we know the history and talk about
the approach now.”
Despite the tension, Julie and her partners counted it a success because
they had taken the opportunity to assert leadership and to push for what
they saw as an innovative approach. At the COP meetings, youth voices are
recognized as the future of climate activism, so much so that young people
operate their own informal conference just prior to the larger, official
proceedings. Asserting leadership by circulating and gaining support for the
policy documents, sharing the message with older activists, and adopting an
authoritative tone as leaders of a global youth movement all served to
bolster their own sense of being global actors who can move forward
international policies where older people lag behind. Although
organizations like the Sierra Club play a key role in the development of
their ideas, they fully assert that they are at the reins of pushing this work
forward.

Conclusion
This chapter explored the ways young people transform from environmental
or reproductive health activists into population-environment advocates.
Along the way, this transformation opens up new possibilities for them to
assert a unique role as leaders of a global movement, and allows them to
speak with authority on global development problems and solutions. At the
same time, key moments emerged when it became clear that advocates were
ambivalent or uncertain about the discourses underpinning population-
environment linkages and family planning solutions. This uncertainty often
heightened even further when discussing the issues of race and reproductive
justice. The next chapter explores how populationists deploy the language
of reproductive justice, through an investigation of the striking absence of
race in their discourse. Specifically, it engages questions about the absence
of analysis of race and class issues in population advocacy, and how this
erasure is central to populationists’ self-defined social justice agenda.
5

Co-Opting Reproductive Justice


The reproductive justice legacy in the field is a strong positive one for most people, and
therefore it’s a good train to get on.
—Pamela, private foundation donor
Anything done about us, without us, is not for us.
—Loretta Ross, former National Coordinator, Sistersong Reproductive Justice
Collective

Reproductive Justice (RJ) is an American social movement led by feminist


women of color activists. In 1994, having returned from the ICPD in Cairo
where they organized and collaborated with Global South feminists,
reproductive rights activists of color began to outline an organizing
structure based on applying the human rights framework invoked in Cairo
to American reproductive politics.1 At the heart of their politics was a
response to, and rejection of, the long history of reproductive oppression in
the U.S. based on race, gender, and poverty. Racist population control,
asserted in the form of coerced sterilization, surveillance, and governance
of low-income women on welfare, and discourses and narratives that
rendered women of color’s fertility, childbearing, and motherhood
problematic, even criminal, have been central components of reproductive
politics in this country. Within this history, it is abundantly clear that the
discourses of private, individual choice and decision-making that dominate
the narrative of mainstream reproductive rights are far more complex than
they appear in that they are not, nor have they ever been, available to all
women. As a result, the founders of the RJ movement de-center individual,
private choice, abortion, and contraceptive access in their activism,
replacing them with a comprehensive focus on the social, political,
economic, and cultural contexts that shape women’s reproductive lives.2
Within this comprehensive focus, RJ activists frame the movement around
the centrality of the right to have children as well as the right not to have
them, and to raise them with the necessary social resources to do so. They
also declare an anti-Malthusian position, given its long history of justifying
coercive human rights abuses against women of color around the world.3
This chapter foregrounds these foundations in order to contrast the
central tenets and commitments of the RJ movement with how the
framework has been taken up by the Sierra Club and their partners through
GPEP trainings. GPEP staff and volunteers frequently presented themselves
as RJ activists. They described their RJ commitments through language
supporting women’s rights to bodily autonomy and freedom from coercion,
even as they espoused the contradictory populationist view that the fertility
and childbearing of the poor is a driver of environmental problems. In my
interviews of GPEP staff and observations of their trainings, what clearly
emerged was that the Sierra Club’s use of RJ co-opts the language of the
framework, while sidestepping the uncomfortable racial politics at the
center of the social movement. However, this is not the focus of this
chapter. The chapter is concerned with the work that this co-optation
accomplished in the minds of GPEP leaders and partners. My argument
here is that using RJ operates as shorthand signifying progressive politics
among populationists in ways that help them navigate thorny racial politics
without addressing them directly. In other words, the Sierra Club and its
partners use RJ as what Cornwall and Brock refer to as a development
buzzword.
Cornwall and Brock trace an increasing trend in international
development toward using seductive “buzzwords” that “promise an entirely
different way of doing business” and that “speak to an agenda for
transformation that combines no-nonsense pragmatism with almost
unimpeachable moral authority.”4 Key words like poverty reduction,
participation, and empowerment are seductive precisely because they
invoke a sense of optimism and an alignment of development mission,
policy, and action that creates positive change. They also invoke a moral
goodness central to “conferring on their users that goodness and rightness
that development agencies crave and assert in order to assume the
legitimacy to intervene in the lives of others.”5 Reproductive justice has
become one of these key terms—it is used frequently in population
advocacy materials and in advocacy trainings. The myth about development
buzzwords is that they can transcend context and politics and have a sense
of universal meaning—which is precisely why they operate successfully.
This chapter exposes this myth in the context of populationist framings of
RJ, analyzing the ways proponents use the framework to represent their
work as progressive, even as they express ambivalent perspectives on RJ
behind the scenes.
The chapter is organized as follows. First, I explore how RJ language has
been deployed within the GPEP, as compared with RJ organizations, and
the contradictions and confusions this produces. Following that, I explore
the history of reproductive politics giving rise to the RJ movement, and the
tensions and fault lines that opened up between mainstream, white-led
women’s reproductive health organizations and those led by women of
color. Last, I analyze some of the ambivalence population advocates
express about RJ behind the scenes, even as they invoke its language in
attempts to build coalitions and to secure a progressive framework for their
efforts.

Making Population-RJ Activists?


Nora, an African American woman in her mid-20s, had been volunteering
as a GPEP training facilitator for several years. She was one of very few
African Americans involved with this kind of advocacy, which she felt
acutely when talking to women of color activists, as well as when dealing
with other members of the population-environment network. At a certain
point, her sense of isolation and conflicted thoughts about race, RJ, and
population activism led her to consider leaving the work altogether:

Last year I was having my own existential crisis about


organizing around population issues and I got to the point
where I was like, I don’t want to talk about this. I want to
talk about other things. It’s been hard for me. Like if anyone
was to ask me, then I’d say that I’m a reproductive justice
activist first. My struggle last year was, I was getting more
involved with RJ activism, and kind of learning more about
people of color activism, and was recognizing that it has this
horrible history, that population, like what people want to do
about it and how they want to talk about it. So it was an
existential crisis for me. I think a lot of people think about
that horrible stuff from the past and they’re like, “well we’re
just not going to talk about it at all,” that’s like when people
feel that because the US has a horrible history with racism,
they often don’t want to talk about it, but I feel that’s all the
more reason to talk about it. So I’m still on the side of, “let’s
have a conversation about population that’s a culturally
competent and intelligent conversation.”

Nora considered herself to be a sexual and reproductive health activist first,


and she often found that when she went to women’s health events and spoke
about population issues, others in the room made assumptions about her, or
wouldn’t talk to her at all. The assumption that she was a neo-Malthusian
sympathizer particularly stung. A year or so prior, Nora had attended an
annual young women’s reproductive justice gathering at Hampshire College
known as the Civil Liberties and Public Policy, or CLPP, conference. CLPP
has a strong radical feminist vibe; unlike Sierra Club events, it is very
racially diverse, and race and class critiques of reproductive politics are
high on the agenda. While attending CLPP, Nora was brought face-to-face
with the political stakes of what she was doing:

I went to the most recent CLPP conference at Hampshire


College, and to be honest that’s when I started to think that,
kind of, I felt that existential crisis. Because I went there and
I saw the reception that people got from talking about the
Sierra Club and talking about reproductive rights. There was
a woman there with an organization that talks about human
rights and about population, and I was just really wanting to
talk to her and thank her for being there, because the
hostility coming from some of the people on the panel with
her, you know, can you really have a conversation about
population? Of course they were cordial and polite, but they
were not really into what she was saying, so, that really put
me off. And so it was a tense situation and it wasn’t really
positive.

Her sense of racial isolation and confusion raised deep questions for Nora
over where she stood with respect to population, reproductive health, and
RJ. Could she have conversations about global population without aligning
herself with population controllers? Would she always be isolated from
other black women in RJ spaces? Given that mainstream environmental
organizations like the Sierra Club are often dominated by white leadership
and membership, her sense of racial isolation was complicated by a sense of
hyper-visibility when she attempted to address racial issues with her fellow
population advocates: “The conflict over history and the bad things that
happened is not over, and people are still having conversations that don’t
acknowledge race. So it’s still a struggle, and it’s something that I don’t feel
like I should have to bring to the table, but I do think that people kind of
expect me to be the one.”
Briana, another young African American population advocate, echoed
Nora’s sense of racial isolation in environmentalist spaces, which only
increased when population issues came up:

At the [One Voice] summit, they asked, “How many people


are here to address these issues through environment?” I was
the only Black girl there raising my hand. Most other Black
girls there didn’t raise their hands, and when I asked about it
they said they’d never thought about it . . . Learning
environmental studies is depressing sometimes. Depending
on who talks about environmental issues, like if it’s an old
white guy, I’m skeptical. But if they’re talking about sexual
health, etcetera, then I’m like yeah. When I’ve gone to Sierra
Club events, they’re all white. I’m always the only person of
color.

Nora’s and Briana’s comments raise a question that plagued me throughout


the project: the question of positionality. The stakes of population politics
are high; as many advocates told me over and over, population advocates
often feel that they are being attacked by people on the political left and the
right. Leftists make charges of racism and neo-Malthusianism; those on the
right reject their stance on universal access to contraceptives and abortion. I
also found, over the course of this project, that any proximity to population
work—even in the context of research—leads to assumptions and questions
about one’s position on the issue. On many occasions, population advocates
assumed that my goals and priorities aligned with theirs simply because I
was in the room. When I spoke to fierce critics of populationism, they
assumed that most populationist advocates actually support population
control, while advocating women’s SRHR. Of course the truth is a bit more
complicated than that. The majority of populationists I interviewed
identified as feminists; they saw family planning as a necessary tool to give
women the freedom to make a range of choices in their lives, predicated on
being freed from the burden of unwanted childbearing. At the same time,
they expressed these views in a neoliberal framework, whereby
reproductive decisions are privately made at the individual level, chosen
freely, and based on access to contraceptive technology. While they
acknowledged the constraints of poverty, they saw this constraint as
primarily preventing access to tools and services, rather than structuring the
conditions of women’s reproductive lives.
Many of the youth advocates I spoke to were uncertain about what RJ
truly meant; they were also confused or uncomfortable with the racial
history of population control, and what that said about their advocacy work.
However, its positive connotations were able to smooth over some of these
concerns. One young South Asian woman stated that while she was
uncertain what RJ actually meant, she was certain that it was a good thing:

I think fundamentally, everybody should have a right to . . .


access to contraceptives, and everyone should have the right
to have as many kids as they want, and control over their
fertility. Reproductive health justice or reproductive justice, I
don’t know what it is exactly, it has, I think, a lot more
popular, uh, more people know about it and understand what
it means. To be talking about reproductive health. I think at
least in my world health disparities is so well known and
well understood. When you say something like reproductive
health justice I think it automatically makes people
understand . . . reproductive justice, in terms of like
reproductive health care for everyone.

Other youth advocates expressed similar confusion during interviews,


despite using the terms “reproductive justice” and “reproductive health”
frequently and interchangeably at advocacy events. This is perhaps because
in GPEP trainings, participants were expected to openly take a stand on the
issues through interactive activities and discussions. Through role playing
and values clarification exercises, marking out one’s position was a
requirement of being in the room. It was, at times, an uncomfortable place
to be, but also a necessary component for thinking through how to craft a
clear and specific message later. Over and over, during these exercises and
the conversations that arose afterward, the type of discomfort Nora and
Briana expressed came to the fore.

Taking a Stand
On a hazy June morning in San Francisco, another advocacy training
workshop was getting under way at the Sierra Club headquarters. This time
the goal was to bring together activists across a range of age groups, based
on a GPEP leader’s desire to engage adult activists who were already
involved with the Sierra Club, or who had a previous interest in either
environmental or reproductive health and justice issues. As she mentioned
in an e-mail, “One thing that our program is working towards in the coming
year is increasing our visibility amongst the environmental and specifically
Sierra Club community, and this training will help us move towards that
goal.”
Entering the conference room, I took note of the crowd: approximately
thirty people, predominantly white and female, seven or eight visibly
people of color. Half the crowd appeared to be in their twenties; of the rest,
many were over fifty. The day’s session was co-presented by a facilitator
from a national women’s reproductive health organization. Facilitators laid
out the goals of the training, as they had in the many GPEP workshops I had
attended before. This time, however, population control was mentioned
briefly as a component of RJ debates, an element of the “dark past” that
must be addressed in order to make sure that today everyone can exercise
their full capacity to determine when, where, and how to reproduce.
Immediately following, though, the facilitator moved on, saying, “I don’t
want to spend too much time on that because we have a lot to do today.”
She then launched into a description of the reason we were there: to learn
about international family planning. She introduced family planning as a
comprehensive set of services, not just contraception and abortion, but also
maternal and infant health care, full reproductive and sexual health, and
STD and HIV/AIDS prevention. The main issue, we were told, is access:
choosing whether and how to reproduce or even seek services, tools, and
technologies. Individual access, more than anything else, was the crux of
the issue.
From there, we moved directly into a values exercise, in which a
facilitator read a list of statements and instructed participants to line up in
various places in the room to indicate agreement, disagreement, or a middle
position—“in between”—in response to the statements. At the first
statement, “U.S. actions cause the most global ecological degradation, thus
people in the Global North should not address population issues,” most
participants moved to indicate their disagreement. On other statements,
such as “All environmentalists should work to address issues of
reproductive health and rights” and “All reproductive health and rights
activists should work to address environmental issues,” the majority of
participants moved to indicate that they agreed.
Despite the earlier facilitator’s description, in these statements,
reproductive health and rights were framed to indicate access to
contraceptives alone. Broader issues or services related to maternal and
child health, prevention and treatment of sexually transmitted infections
(STIs), prenatal and postnatal care, and fertility services were curiously left
out—and there was very little commentary. When the facilitator asked
whether there were questions or reactions after each values statement was
read, participants were generally quiet. The mood in the room was polite
and muted. During the exercise, several participants held side conversations
with those who moved to the same side of the room as them, but these
whispered asides were not shared with the larger group.
This shifted slightly when a participant broached the topic of race. The
facilitator read a statement: “Everyone on Earth has the right to live at the
same standard as how people live in the U.S.” Most people moved to the
“in between” position; when asked, several people told the facilitator that
even people in the U.S. shouldn’t live at U.S. standards. In the midst of
these comments, one of the few African American women in the room
stated that she didn’t know what a U.S. standard of living is, because many
poor African Americans live at the standard of people in developing
countries. This was met with chilly silence. No one responded; the
awkwardness of the silence was palpable. We moved through the remaining
values statements, ended the exercise, and returned to the table.
In a side conversation later in the afternoon, a participant mentioned to
me that she would not return the next day. “I’m not into this stuff, telling
poor women they shouldn’t have children.” She was in her fifties, white,
and a longtime reproductive health activist. I asked what prompted her to
attend the training. “I thought I’d learn something new. And I’m interested
in the environment, and new ways to connect it to reproductive health. But
this stuff? This isn’t new. This stuff is really old. We used to hear this stuff
all the time in the seventies. I can’t believe they’re still trotting these ideas
out today.” I thought about her comments as I returned to the next session,
where the presenter focused on contextualizing women’s reproductive
health and rights as barometers for measuring progress on social issues—
particularly in a globally interdependent society. Like the earlier presenter,
she referenced population control briefly, but brushed it aside, citing time
constraints. For the rest of the afternoon, she led a session emphasizing
“basic rights” as universally important and beneficial, arguing that
achieving these rights would move us forward on reproductive health,
environmental sustainability, poverty alleviation, and economic
development in the Global South. Focusing firmly on universal language of
shared goals and benefits, she told us to keep the notion of global
interdependence in the forefront of our agendas, along with a desire to keep
in account all issues that impact others. Questions of justice were tabled for
the day, and for the rest of the training, they did not reappear.

Foregrounding Race and Rights


The ways race was—and was not—addressed in the session were
particularly striking when compared to an RJ conference I had attended
several months earlier in Washington, DC. It was an annual membership
meeting and advocacy event organized by the Sistersong Collective for
Reproductive Justice. Emerging from the Union Station train stop and
joining several small clusters of African American and Latina women, I
rushed toward the hotel ballroom, conference tote bag, folder, and handout
materials in tow. We entered the space to find over four hundred people,
mainly women, and although I had attended multiple reproductive health
advocacy events at that point, this was the first comprised predominantly of
women of color. The energy in the room was warm, vibrant, and informal.
Participants received an ebullient welcome from the stage, to which they
responded with frequent bursts of applause and cheers. Looking around, I
noticed women of all ages, from late teens to mid-seventies. I also noted
that not one member of the population-environment network that I had
spent so much time with over the prior year was in attendance, despite
repeatedly expressing their commitment to RJ.
Despite the festive vibe, I had begun to feel some level of conference
fatigue. This was the fifth SRH-related advocacy event I’d attended in a six-
month period, and after a while some of the messages and vocabulary began
to run together. Contraceptive access, abortion rights, women’s autonomy
and empowerment, justice, the centrality of policy, and the importance of
congressional lobbying are all emphasized in Sierra Club trainings and
other population-environment advocacy events, just as they were by
Sistersong. Hearing this language over and over, witnessing the whipping
up of activist fervor around recent small-scale policy victories and the
moans of despair at congressional votes on women’s health services
legislation, after a certain point began to feel scripted. After all, regardless
of thematic focus, conferences organized around women’s SRH share a
common parlance, and a common sense of urgency: women’s rights are
under threat, must be expanded and protected, and we, the women in the
room, must work at the forefront of protecting our and other women’s
access to high-quality reproductive health services.
However, this was where the similarity ended. Unlike the population-
environment meetings I’d attended, the Sistersong conference emphasized
articulating RJ concepts through intersectionality6 and resistance to
racialized reproductive oppression. Race, class, and gender were at the heart
of Sistersong’s analyses, along with critiques of intra-movement dynamics
within SRHR advocacy, particularly the differences in approach between
mainstream organizations and those led by women of color. During a
lunchtime keynote speech, the speaker articulated the ways reproductive
justice (movement building), reproductive rights (legal advocacy), and
reproductive health (service delivery) were inextricably linked. As the
speaker emphasized again and again, RJ is predicated on the
interrelationship of all three approaches, including the direct rejection of all
attempts to erode the rights of women, particularly women of color and the
poor. In a powerful moment, she shared a personal experience of coerced
sterilization, arguing that population control is alive and well in the lives of
women of color and low-income women today. In a context in which the
ability to give birth and parent children is not assured, she argued,
contraceptive access and abortion rights are not the primary issues for RJ
activists—instead, the center of the movement is the ability to make
autonomous decisions based on a foundation of human rights.
In a conversation later that week, it was clear that a GPEP manager at the
Sierra Club was confused about the distinctions between reproductive
health and RJ, and used the terms interchangeably:

Some people don’t want to take a more nuanced approach,


but with them, we emphasize effectiveness. We say that the
reason to be passionate about a cause is because you want
something to change. We tell them that feeling passion for
this issue, making a difference, gaining traction with
environmentalists, policymakers, reproductive health
activists, the reproductive justice community, you have to
think about things in a nuanced way in terms of making
change in the world . . . I interact daily with environmental
justice and reproductive justice groups like Planned
Parenthood and Choice USA. Partnerships are really
important. We wanted to bring broader perspectives through
this training and through campus tours. We always partner in
our activities with organizations that do RJ work.

I mentioned this confusion to a longtime feminist critic of reproductive


politics, who was unsurprised at the jumbled use of terms, noting that the
realities of funding constraints in women’s reproductive health often lead
organizations to take what seems to be the most expedient path. She stated
further:

There’s a somewhat naïve belief that you can have your cake
and eat it too, that you can be pro-reproductive justice and
anti-population growth. Reproductive justice is getting
watered down and substituted for reproductive rights, it’s a
watering down of language. I don’t believe that they’re
cynical, I think the more radical meaning of reproductive
justice calls into question the linking of reproductive justice
and population. The purpose of some of these programs is to
increase funding for international family planning but
sometimes I don’t think they believe what they’re saying. It’s
just strategic. The rhetoric ebbs and flows according to the
fads of the times.

How could such a radical departure in language and framing be


accomplished, particularly given the RJ movement’s critical anti-
populationist roots? Is this just a cynical use of development buzzwords?
Buzzwords may be symbolic, but their use has material effects; they are
closely linked to policy-shaping strategies. This is because they frame
problems in ways that define particular paths of action, or intervention. As a
result, buzzwords have increasingly become necessary components of how
development projects define and shape their work: “Nobody trying to be
influential can afford to neglect the fine art of buzzwords . . . Images
conveyed by simple terms are taken as reality, and words are increasingly
loaded with ideological symbolism and political correctness. It may seem
innocuous. It surely is not. Why make a fuss? The reason is that the terms
we use help to shape the policy agenda . . . The linguistic crisis is real, and
is not going to go away.”7
In a field like population and family planning, which has had a
controversial history, RJ operates nicely as a buzzword, conveying a
positive connotation and keeping population discussions from being mired
in the ugliness of racism and coercion. It also helps that advocates relegate
population control to the past—the “dark past,” in the parlance of advocacy
trainings. And yet, these historical foundations are rarely, if ever, explored
in trainings. Racial politics in the U.S. never entered the discussion during
GPEP activities, with the exception of the moment when a training
participant raised them, whether because they would be seen as irrelevant to
international policy, or because the Sierra Club itself has its own history of
racial controversy.8 However, an understanding of the context from which
RJ arose is necessary to understanding how it operates alongside
mainstream reproductive health and rights activism today, and why the
differences in approaches are deeper than semantics and policy focus. They
are, in fact, centered on the differential histories of reproductive politics in
the U.S., and how those politics have been heavily shaped by race and class.

Reproductive Justice in Historical Context


In the U.S., family planning has played a prominent role in the mainstream
political debates over women’s sexual and reproductive health in that
contraceptive research and access, and secure legal rights to abortion, have
been central issues at the heart of feminist organizing. At the same time that
hard-won reproductive rights were being achieved for many white women
in the U.S., those same rights were being eroded for American women of
color, and those in Global South countries, under the same banner of birth
control.9 For middle-class, white American women, birth control access was
expanded in the name of opening up increased social freedoms for women.
For poor women, women of color, and those in the Global South, this
access was often expanded and coercively imposed under an agenda of
population control.
Rather than occupying a shared ground for women’s organizing across
social groups, the topic of birth control has served as a site for social and
political fracturing within the women’s movement in the U.S., primarily
along race and class lines. Advocacy for “voluntary motherhood” in the late
1800s radically challenged what had been seen as men’s right to have their
sexual and reproductive urges fulfilled by their wives at all times.10 A
century later, calls for access to safe, effective contraceptive methods and
legal abortions were no less politically contentious; however, they had
gained broader ground within feminist organizing, such that access to birth
control, including abortion, had become a central issue in mainstream
women’s rights organizing. At the same time, the focus on birth control
exposed deep tensions and hostilities within the women’s movement,
exposing the racial, religious, and class-based fault lines around which birth
control debates have historically been organized.
Issues of sex, pregnancy, childbearing, and motherhood—what Solinger
refers to as reproductive capacity—have always carried different meanings
for women and girls in the U.S., based on race, class, and historical
moment.11 The history of reproductive politics in this country is one in
which policies, laws, and other programs designed to intervene on
reproductive capacity have been shaped by concerns about how to solve
broader social, political, and economic problems facing the country—
whether the problem was to increase the labor force, as in under slavery, or
to decrease the number of people accessing public financial resources (i.e.
welfare). Women’s reproductive capacity has historically been viewed as a
national resource that could strengthen the nation or weaken it. Black
women’s history in particular has been marked by the “systematic,
institutionalized denial of reproductive freedom,” from slavery to the
present.12 The very notion of reproductive freedom in the U.S. is constituted
by notions of race, along with the individualized notion of reproductive
choice.
Roberts notes several examples of how black women’s fertility and
childbearing have been criminalized in the U.S. In 1989, police began
arresting drug-addicted pregnant women, targeting and arresting those in
poor neighborhoods, as well as staking out maternity wards and taking
women to jail immediately after giving birth. During the operation, close to
fifty women were arrested; all but one were black. The following year, an
editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “Poverty and Norplant—Can
Contraception Reduce the Underclass?,” argued that the primary reason for
black childhood poverty is that “the people having the most children are the
ones least capable of supporting them,” and recommended coercively
implanting women with long-acting reversible contraceptives to prevent
pregnancy.13
This is not to suggest that birth control is not an important component of
women’s bodily and reproductive autonomy. However, leaders of the birth
control movement in the U.S. have historically overlooked the needs of
lower income women, many of them women of color, as well as playing
into racist constructs. As Davis so cogently explains, in the 1960s and ’70s,
women of color were frequently absent from mainstream abortion rights
organizing efforts, not because they were unaware of or uncommitted to the
issues, but because of classist ideologies embedded within the birth control
movement itself. For example, the movement often blurred the distinction
between the right to legally access a safe abortion and the abortion itself.
Abortion occurs within a matrix of social and economic conditions that
facilitate or mitigate against the viability of bearing and raising children.
These conditions are often the conditions of poverty, and having abortions
alone does not lead to having a decent job with steady income, quality
health care, safe housing, good schools, etc. Focusing on abortion alone
obscures the context within which it has been necessary for so many
women—and without which they may have chosen to have more children.14
While many white feminists attributed women of color’s resistance to
participation to a lack of consciousness, or lack of desire to engage in social
movement organizing across racial lines, in actuality resistance was rooted
in the fact that women of color faced a very different landscape of access
and control. Where middle-class white women were struggling for the right
to limit their fertility, poor women and women of color were fighting forced
sterilization and other imposed means of coercive fertility regulation.15 In
other words, for women of color in the U.S., the struggle for birth control
rights has been a struggle to maintain reproductive autonomy, both in the
context of the right to bear children as well as the right to avoid bearing
them. A narrow focus on controlling and limiting one’s own fertility, long
fought for as a “right” for middle-class white women in the U.S., has
historically been imposed as a duty on women of color.
After abortion was legalized by the Supreme Court via Roe v. Wade, an
immediate backlash followed, giving rise to the Hyde Amendment in 1977,
which mandated withdrawing federal funding from abortion services. Most
states followed suit, causing many low-income women to lose their access
to abortion services. Meanwhile, surgical sterilizations were free on demand
and funded by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, leading
many low-income women of color to choose sterilization. At the same time,
thousands of low-income women of color were sterilized without their
consent. Shocking news reports began to surface, detailing the fact that
doctors and medical students across the country were performing coercive
surgical sterilizations on women of color, many of them on welfare. In one
particularly egregious example, in June 1973, fourteen-year-old Mary Alice
and twelve-year-old Minnie Lee Relf underwent tubal ligation surgeries in
Montgomery, Alabama. Their mother, unable to read and signing her name
with an X, had consented for her daughters to have vaccinations, which she
was told the girls needed for their health. However, the agency that had
recommended the vaccinations also operated a family planning clinic, and it
decided to go a step further by sterilizing the girls. Based on Mrs. Relf’s
written “consent,” the agency performed tubal ligation surgery on Mary
Alice and Minnie Lee. After the Relf case surfaced, and following a public
outcry, news came to light that federally sponsored birth control clinics had
also sterilized at least eighty other minors in a fifteen-month period, mainly
in southern states. The Relfs, like many of the other minors’ families, were
on welfare.16
Between 1964 and 1973, there were documented cases of more than one
thousand poor women, most of them African American, who were
involuntarily sterilized in the U.S.17 Thousands more sterilizations were
carried out across the country throughout the twentieth century under
eugenic sterilization laws, with most of those sterilized marked as either
mentally ill or mentally deficient.18 Yet, the sterilizations of poor women of
color were different from other eugenic sterilizations in that race, poverty,
and being perceived as a drain on state resources were used as primary
reasons to justify the procedures.
Sterilization abuses of Mexican and Chicana women in California were
revealed in an exposé article published by Claudia Dreifus in 1975.19
Dreifus, along with Dr. Bernard Rosenfeld, undertook a series of interviews
with doctors at USC-L.A. County Medical Center, where coerced
sterilizations had occurred. Dreifus did not tell any of the doctors that she
was a reporter or that their words would appear in print—an ironic fact,
given that she and Dr. Rosenfeld were investigating abuses of informed
consent. Nevertheless, what they found was shocking; their major
conclusion was that “forced sterilization is a part of academic training at
more than a few major teaching hospitals around the nation.”20 Dreifus
noted that the doctors they interviewed “seem[ed] to accept coercion as an
everyday fact of medical life—few of them [were] even aware of the moral
significance of what they have witnessed.”21 Of the twenty-three doctors
they spoke to, nearly half had witnessed coercion, or related conditions:
“hard-selling, dispensing of misinformation, approaching women during
labor, offering sterilization at a time of stress, on-the-job racism.” Only four
doctors were able to definitively say that these practices did not occur at the
hospitals where they trained. Doctors told stories of sterilizing black
teenagers in inner cities as young as sixteen years old, patients they
described as having a “low mentality,” whom they would offer tubal
ligations to while they were in labor. If women had three or more children
and were poor, doctors would “sell the operation.” One doctor described
how interns were often motivated by simply wanting to gain more
experience performing the procedure—“That was a big influence in
prompting them to do it—they wanted to get another tubal under their
belt.”22 The doctors revealed that they were more likely to push the
procedure to women with multiple children who were on welfare. In some
interviews, doctors who had done their training in the South (North and
South Carolina and Mississippi) revealed that teenage daughters of welfare
recipient mothers were routinely sterilized.
As these examples demonstrate, the notions of individual choice and
private reproductive decision-making ignore the fact that economic
constraints and politics have placed significant constraints on reproductive
“choices.” The notion of choice in the mainstream reproductive health
movement assumes the kinds of social and racial privileges that offer
freedom from constraining state policies and interventions. Women make
reproductive decisions within the context of specific social, economic,
political, and cultural contexts. These conditions shape and constrain the
ways women envision what is possible, access resources, and are excluded
from them. At the same time, the notion of choice assumes no role for the
state, which history demonstrates has played a major role in regulating the
reproductive lives of women of color in the U.S.
Also in the 1970s, the Indian Health Service sterilized at least 25% of
Native American women between the ages of 15 and 44, in order to close
the gap in birth rates between Native communities and the national median.
Women were not provided full access to information about sterilization, did
not give proper informed consent, and were not given a 72-hour waiting
period between giving consent and having the procedure performed.
Doctors pushed the procedures, threatening women with the removal of
their children and their welfare benefits.23
In addition, Native American women have historically been plagued by
the possibility of forced removal of children from their homes. Beginning in
the seventeenth century, white colonizers began creating Christian schools
that would separate Native people from their communities to give them a
“civilizing” education.24 In the late nineteenth century, however, these
schools were formalized as part of federal policy overseeing the
administration of reservations. The policy mandated that Native children be
taken far from their homes at an early age and educated in Christian
schools; they weren’t returned to their families and communities until early
adulthood. By the late twentieth century, more than 100,000 Native children
and teens were educated in these schools, both on and off the reservations,
where the central ethos was to “kill the Indian and save the man.”25
When women of color activists sounded the alarm about these injustices,
they found that many of the outspoken white women who were
reproductive health activists refused to stand with them, for example
refusing to advocate against sterilization abuse. While women of color were
coercively sterilized, white women had a hard time accessing voluntary
sterilization. After hospitals established restrictive sterilization rules in the
1950s, in keeping with postwar pronatalist sentiment, they adopted
restrictive policies such as the 120 rule, which stated that those whose age
and number of children multiplied together must reach at least 120 in order
to qualify for surgical sterilization.26 Many hospitals adopted a 150 or 175
rule to protect themselves from lawsuits. These policies disproportionately
impacted white women—the group who was targeted for postwar
pronatalist efforts. At the same time, in the 1950s, southern physicians
began to perform unlawful forced sterilizations on healthy women of color.
They also chose not to adopt the same age/parity policies developed in
other regions so that they could continue to forcibly sterilize low-income
black women. As a result, “only white women outside the South
complained that they had been denied voluntary sterilization.”27 White
women’s complaints about lack of access to voluntary sterilization led the
ACLU, ZPG, and the Association for Voluntary Sterilization (AVS—now
known as EngenderHealth) to launch a campaign through lawsuits in 1971
to overturn hospital restrictions. Plaintiffs in all of the lawsuits were white
women.
In order to respond to abuses and to assert agency and leadership, women
of color activists organized formally, on a national scale. In 1992, the
Women of Color Coalition for Reproductive Health Rights (WOCCRHR)
was formed, consisting of six organizations, including Asians and Pacific
Islanders for Choice, National Black Women’s Health Project, National
Latina Health Organization, Latina Roundtable on Health and Reproductive
Rights, National Coalition of 100 Black Women, and Native American
Women’s Health and Education Resource Center. This coalition organized
to play a role in the 1994 ICPD, or Cairo Conference. Members of the
group who participated in the ICPD delegation returned to create the U.S.
Women of Color Delegation Project and issued a statement drawing
linkages between their experiences of reproductive oppression and those of
women in the Global South. The group connected their struggles to
transnational struggles for poverty alleviation and women’s rights, and
asserted that women in the U.S. experienced similar human rights abuses
and population control as women in developing countries. In returning from
Cairo, group members shifted their focus into incorporating a human rights
framework into their efforts, and created a coalition named the Sistersong
Collective for Reproductive Justice.28
They articulated RJ as a way to bring the human rights framework home
from Cairo and apply it to the reproductive abuses experienced in the U.S.
Like other activists at Cairo, they had advocated for women’s human rights,
voluntary access of contraceptives, and comprehensive reproductive health
care, and a rejection of the population control paradigm in international
development. However, they also turned the lens on the U.S., identifying
coerced sterilizations of women of color as human rights abuses and
connecting them to the experiences of women abroad. Since that time, two
central foci have framed the RJ movement: asserting the leadership and
self-determination of women of color; and reinforcing the inextricable links
between the importance of the right to have children as well as to not have
them, and to parent existing children with the necessary resources and
conditions for doing so. Central to this approach is a grounding in human
rights, predicated on the reality that reproductive rights can only be fulfilled
in a context of civil and political rights (including legal recognition in
courts and freedom from forced pregnancy, domestic violence, and
repressive religious codes) as well as economic and social rights (such as
accessible health services, safe nutrition, and contraception).29
Shortly after women of color activists developed the RJ framework,
mainstream women’s organizations began to draw on it, occasionally
integrating RJ language into their own work. For example, the 2004 March
for Women’s Lives, initially organized by Planned Parenthood, Feminist
Majority Foundation, NARAL Pro-Choice America (NARAL), and the
National Organization for Women (NOW), became a coalition-led event
when Sistersong was asked to endorse the event. In negotiating their
participation, Sistersong leaders insisted on steering committee
participation for women of color (none of the mainstream organizations had
women of color in senior leadership, thus there were no women of color on
the steering committee), a broadened framework emphasizing the full
context of women’s reproductive lives, rather than a narrow focus on
abortion rights, and a new name for the march that reflected this
perspective.30 The coalition accepted the shift, and announced it publicly for
the first time in an e-mail from NOW that emphasized the importance of
“demanding political and social justice for women and girls regardless of
their race, economic, religious, ethnic or cultural circumstances,” in an
effort to “move forward with full equality and reproductive justice for
all.”31
Following this event, it was unclear whether mainstream women’s
organizations would continue to support or fully integrate RJ frameworks.
While certain organizations continued to use RJ language, the central tenets
of human rights advocacy and a community-based contextualization of
women’s reproductive lives quickly dropped away from partner
organizations’ websites and materials. More than a decade later, RJ
language continues to be used by mainstream women’s organizations, in
part to attract younger and more diverse supporters, but the linked role of
intersectionality and human rights is often conspicuously absent.32

Reframing RJ?
As mentioned in chapter 4, the GPEP approach to training youth advocates
was based on a justice framework gleaned from a book called A Pivotal
Moment: Population, Justice, and the Environmental Challenge. The book
claims to draw from RJ to frame the concepts of inequality and justice that
drive population growth; however, in an interview with one of the
framework’s authors, when I asked how EJ and RJ groups have responded
to the notion of population justice, she made it clear that she did not have
direct ties to those communities: “Good question. I haven’t done any
outreach to those groups. We had some EJ people at our group, like one
woman in particular who is also working on climate justice, and that’s
certainly a part of the book. One of the authors approaches climate change
from the perspective of, what if everyone on earth had equal access to the
atmosphere? But that’s a good question and I don’t know the answer.”
However, she did not see this as a hindrance from engaging with the
language and politics of RJ. During a panel discussion at a population-
environment workshop, she drilled down on the connections between
population and justice by acknowledging race and class, but failed to make
the connection between RJ and critiques of populationist perspectives like
her own:

The best way to slow population growth is by ensuring the


means and power for people to control their own
childbearing. The reproductive justice movement says that
we must look at the totality of people’s lives, including race,
gender, and economics. Inequalities that limit decision-
making. Poverty has a huge impact on decision-making.
Reproductive justice means that people have real power to
make their own decisions.

Many of the people I encountered in the population-environment network


had limited knowledge of RJ, or were more hesitant to integrate the
framework into their efforts. As previously mentioned, youth activists in
particular expressed uncertainty about what the term meant, although they
viewed it as positive. However, Marisa, the former GPEP manager,
expressed a more ambivalent position. She frequently invoked RJ in her
presentations and advocacy trainings. Yet, behind the scenes she expressed
deep frustration with the framework, arguing that a strict adherence to RJ
principles is actually an impediment to population-environment work. For
example, she referred to Nora, the young woman whose experience opened
this chapter, expressing annoyance at how feminists at the CLPP conference
were unreceptive to her message: “She attended the Amherst group’s
[CLPP] conference . . . she was blown away by how much they attacked the
Sierra Club for addressing these issues. In one of the conferences, they said
you should never get involved with that population program, referring to us.
And our volunteer reported all this back to me, and she said she felt really
uncomfortable and it made her question her values.”
I asked whether she thought that the CLPP conference participants were
focused on addressing histories of reproductive coercion in the U.S. She
thought so, and argued that this framing is limited and unhelpful because it
focuses too much on dispelling population myths: “They’re so focused on
the past but they’re not interested in looking at solutions now. When I
talked with them a few months ago, it was like, well what solutions do you
support? I think that they organizationally support reproductive justice
solutions but from the critical population issue they won’t work with us.
Paul Ehrlich’s message did a lot of damage, but that’s in the past, and where
we’re moving with this campaign is to change the dialogue, to change the
messaging, to move forward in a more progressive way.”
However, population control is not a thing of the past. A 2013 report
revealed that doctors working for the California Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitation sterilized 148 female prisoners via tubal ligations
between 2006 and 2010 without obtaining the required state approval for
the procedures. There were perhaps 100 more similar procedures
performed, dating to the 1990s.33 Doctors appeared to have targeted those
who had been to prison multiple times; one doctor in particular connected
the procedures to state welfare. While denying that he had coerced women
into obtaining the procedure, he argued that the compensation doctors
received for the surgeries was minimal compared to the savings for the
state: “Over a 10-year period, that isn’t a huge amount of money compared
to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children—as they
procreated more.”34 Ironically, another physician described the procedure as
“an empowerment issue” in that offering tubal ligations was a way of
“providing them the same options as women on the outside.”35
Despite the deep tensions and conflicts involved in the struggle over RJ,
its languages and frameworks are continually taken up by groups whose
work does not address race or class. Given the easy adoption of RJ as a
development buzzword, it can easily be used to neatly align with
populationist arguments. As this chapter demonstrates, the meanings and
uses of “reproductive justice,” “social justice,” and “human rights” are
constantly being reworked, negotiated, and at times transformed in
unrecognizable ways by competing actors and narratives.

Conclusion
This chapter has revealed the complicated ways RJ language is deployed in
the contrasting advocacy work of populationist organizations and RJ
organizations. Populationist organizations drew on this language for
strategic reasons, to try to advance their agenda while not being hindered by
racial controversies. And yet, as the history of RJ organizing demonstrates,
critiquing racism in reproductive politics is central to why the movement
was founded. When populationists utilize this language, they not only
accomplish a linguistic sleight of hand, they also co-opt a long legacy of
social activist work done by women of color who have rejected precisely
the kinds of strategies groups like GPEP adopt. Yet, in the outcomes-based
world of policy advocacy, this is perhaps irrelevant. RJ, like women’s
empowerment, has in many ways been offered as a simplified way for
populationists to position themselves as doing progressive work.
Conclusion

Is There a Feminist Way Forward?

Several years ago, multiple online news outlets published an article written
by an American woman who described herself as a GINK: Green
Inclinations, No Kids.1 She argued that the global population problem is a
problem of affluence-based resource use, driven by people like herself:
white, American, and middle class, and she reasoned that she, and others
like her, should consider not having children if they wanted to make a dent
in environmental problems such as climate change. At the time, I thought
that the article offered a fresh perspective in placing global environmental
problems on the shoulders of race- and class-privileged people, while
explicitly decentering narratives blaming people of color, immigrants,
refugees, and populations in the Global South. The author was clear that
much of the population discourse that circulates in the environmental realm
is about blame, and that the blame has been misplaced; she instead adopted
a stance of embodied responsibility for the problem, saying “steer that
blame right over here.” Yet she was still making a populationist argument.
And in doing so, even as she argued against blaming environmental
problems on the reproduction of the poor and marginalized, she still located
the source of the problem in women’s wombs—a framing that is simplistic
and inaccurate. Perhaps we should steer that blame away from women’s
wombs—any women’s wombs.
These are difficult questions to grapple with, particularly for feminists
who care about the environment and about women’s sexual and
reproductive health and autonomy. It is difficult to resist slipping into
populationist logic—how can we not deal with the population question? Is
it enough for feminists to insist on women’s bodily autonomy, or must we
also find a feminist way to grapple with population growth as an
environmental problem? Can feminists be populationists too? There is no
singular answer to this question, but feminists are grappling with it in
increasingly complex ways. In Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the
Chthulucene, Donna Haraway invites critical antiracist feminists to explore
new engagements with the impact of human numbers, despite the fear that
doing so opens the door to racist, classist, modernist, and imperialist
narratives. She argues that simply acknowledging the urgency of population
size and growth offers no specific suggestion for exactly how to address the
impacts of human numbers, but she proposes new ways of thinking about
reproduction, autonomy, and kinship to do so. Insisting that reproductive
freedom “cannot be just a humanist affair, no matter how anti-imperialist,
antiracist, anticlassist, and pro-woman,”2 Haraway envisions new
possibilities for thinking about and forming kinship bonds as a way to both
celebrate low birth rates and personal decision-making, while flourishing in
relationships of caretaking. This would be focused on proliferating “other-
than-natal kin,”3 particularly in wealthy, high consuming countries. In a
related vein, indigenous feminist scholar Kim TallBear’s work on
decolonial love and kin provides some possibilities for rethinking kinship.
TallBear argues for reclaiming indigenous ethical relations in ways that de-
center the colonizing relationship forms—including monogamy, marriage,
private property ownership and nuclear families—that have gone hand in
hand with unequal gender relations, toxic relationships with nonhuman
animals and nature, and the economic and moral pressure to reproduce the
nuclear family unit.
These framings offer important correctives to the limiting narratives that
restrict women’s roles to reproductive ones, and legitimate families to those
defined by blood and lineage. Yet, they are still somewhat vexing. They
don’t offer a way out of the focus on numbers that grounds understandings
of population-environmental problems in biological processes. As this book
hopefully demonstrates, direct environmental impacts driven by human
numbers are nearly impossible to tease out because they are not, and never
have been, simply biological—they are the result of biological, and
political, and economic, and technological, and cultural processes and
practices. We must contextualize populationism’s presents and its futures
through these lenses.
I wrote this book because my own experience with the issue of fertility
and childbearing in the Global South was so different from what I was
hearing from populationists. As an undergraduate participant in a semester
abroad program in Kenya, and later as a Peace Corps Volunteer in
Madagascar, I spent a significant amount of time in African hospital labor
and delivery wards, watching babies being born. Babies, babies
everywhere, delivered in all kinds of circumstances: normal, uneventful
births, breech births, still births, spontaneous miscarriages, precarious births
that happened prematurely. Most of the women who delivered these babies
were living in poverty, whether relative poverty or grinding poverty on a
scale that most readers of this book can’t imagine. During my encounters
with women, I often asked about their babies, and what they meant to them.
The answers were diverse and multifaceted: they told me that babies were
sources of joy, of familial and cultural continuity. For some of the women,
babies would solidify their position within new marriages, satisfying
husbands’ and in-laws’ expectations. For many, they would solidify their
position within the community as mothers, an important status to hold
among other women. And for most, babies were buffers against future
economic precarity. Although they began as extra mouths to feed, they
would later grow to contribute to family well-being, whether as extra pairs
of hands to work the farm, or later, if they were lucky, they would find good
office jobs and bring home nice salaries that would help their parents and
extended family members. Above all, babies symbolized their hopes for the
future.
At the same time, many of the women and adolescents I spoke to
preferred to have fewer babies than their parents had. In Kenya, the young
women I met were more interested in office jobs, cars, and cell phones than
in having large families. The young women I spent my days with in
Madagascar rejected a well-known wedding blessing (“May you have seven
sons and seven daughters”), dreaming instead of having two or three
children and more access to disposable incomes. Adolescent girls in the
small, rural Malagasy town where I lived prioritized school and friends,
boys, sex, and their own futures. They were interested in becoming
mothers, but at a later time, after completing school and establishing
households, and also securing incomes. They wanted to leave their small
town and see more of the country, if not the world. They wanted bold,
bright futures.
I recount these encounters because, when I later participated in
population advocacy trainings, I found that the young African women I had
spent so much time with were the kinds of women who populationist
advocates described through the dualistic lens of victim/agent. The full
richness and contexts of their lives were reduced to statistics, quantified
abstractions far removed from the complexity and robustness of fertility,
reproduction, and childbearing in everyday life. They were described as
victims of poverty and limited choices, of regressive cultural traditions and
gender norms, and of the effects of soil erosion, storm surges, and heat
waves. Yet, they were also described as agents possessing the capacity to
complete their educations, earn their own incomes, and consistently use
contraceptives. This was development-oriented agency, the kind that
reflects a Western model predicated on modernization and neoliberal
economic improvement. It was the kind of agency that would position them
to limit their reproduction, and to save the world.
This development-led agency is particularly common in books and
development programs focused on investing in women and girls. The Girl
Effect, an independent NGO initially created by the Nike Foundation,
describes the model’s ethos on its website:

When a girl has self-belief and is supported by her family


and community; when she’s empowered with skills, ideas
and knowledge; when she has access to services, role models
and other girls; when she is visible and vocal—she can
demand to stay in school, to get healthcare, and to get
married and have children when she chooses.4

The girl described in this model is similar to the sexual steward: a self-
regulating, rational and responsible actor who makes decisions that are in
line with social and economic improvement, along the lines of
development’s modernizing rationale. And the tools required to get her
there operate through an atomized, individual improvement model aimed at
building her self esteem, knowledge, and self-worth through technical
interventions. This neoliberal model of individual self-improvement has
long circulated through gender and development discourses, grounding both
arguments of victimhood and agency, and isolating women’s circumstances
from political and cultural context.
The “girl” described in the Nike Foundation campaign is also an ideal-
type development figure. She first emerged with startling clarity in a 1992
speech by economist Larry Summers as a source of human capital, with
endless potential to provide maximum social and economic benefits to her
family, community, and society—all facilitated through investments in her
formal education. Moreover, she would be able to turn the vicious cycle of
endemic poverty into a virtuous circle of education and health for all:

She has a greater value outside the home and thus has an
entirely different set of choices than she would without
education. She is married at a later age and is able to better
influence family decisions. She has fewer, healthier children
and can insist on the development of all of them, ensuring
that her daughters are given a fair chance. And the education
of her daughters makes it much more likely that the next
generation of girls, as well as of boys, will be educated and
healthy as well. The vicious cycle is thus transformed into a
virtuous circle.5

Ironically, “the girl” was also an ideal-type population figure. Summers’s


speech went on to describe additional gains that could be achieved through
investments in girls’ education—specifically, reductions in birth rates. He
portrayed educating girls as a missing component of economic development
for nations in the Global South, in that it could help delay marriage, leading
to slower birthrates. Calculating that each year of formal education reduces
future fertility rates by 5–10%, Summers concluded that investing in girls
through education is less expensive and provides better returns on
investment than family planning programs, because of additional benefits
such as lower mortality, higher future wages, and higher GDP per capita.
Here, girls replace women as the site for investing in family planning:
education is less expensive and provides greater “return on investment” by
way of fertility reduction, longevity, and higher wages. Girls are thus
positioned as sources of human capital, capable of providing future
economic benefits to their families, societies, and nations. As sources of
human capital, their rates of return are endlessly beneficial; their bodies
become the location for, as Murphy describes it, “an anticipatory, future-
oriented calculation of value.”6
However, as Wilson points out, this “girl” is also a symbol of neoliberal
calls for the intensification of female labor. Not only do these kinds of
models of so-called empowerment avoid questioning the gendered division
of labor, they build on it further by suggesting that investing in girls’
potential future labor yields economic and other dividends for family,
community, and society at large. Neoliberal economic development is
directly implicated in the deep local and regional inequalities that give rise
to global poverty, climate change, and population growth.7 Nevertheless,
discourses describing development figures like that of the girl and the
sexual steward are continually produced anew. In fact, in 2017, shortly
before this writing, a new book was released that described its conclusions
as “the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global
warming.”8 Drawing on quantitative data produced by seventy researchers
in twenty-two countries, the book listed one hundred solutions to climate
change; items #6 and #7 in the list are “family planning” and “educating
girls.” When researchers combined their effects into a single measure and
recalculated, the combined family planning-education solution ranked at #1.
Predictably, the book became a bestseller.
It makes sense to search for simple solutions to complex problems. And
to be clear, accessing education and contraceptives is not always easy for
women and girls around the world. However, the simplicity of instrumental
solutions and technical quick fixes prevents researchers and policymakers,
as well as activists, from truly understanding the full contexts of the
problems they seek to address and finding strategies to address them that
will undo unequal social systems and structures, rather than reproduce their
effects.
This book has explored the various ways in which population-
environment linkages have been articulated by environmental advocates,
paying particular attention to developments in scientific knowledge,
reproductive politics, and shifts in funding priorities. A central theme
operating throughout is that science and political change do not operate in
isolation from each other, progressing along separate, parallel tracks.
Rather, they develop together, simultaneously, through overlapping
entanglements and interactions of actors, funding resources, personal
priorities and institutional agendas. In a context of diminishing resources
overall, funding for population-environment science has increased, leading
to more science-based advocacy.
Despite significant increases in public attention to and writing on
population and climate change, population advocates often feel beleaguered
by what they view as an unreceptive American public. My research
informants often described situations in which they were publicly
challenged, often with open hostility, by people who refused to believe that
global population should be addressed in any way. As a critical researcher, I
experienced just the opposite, particularly during an academic conference
when an irate ecology professor in the audience shouted at me, arguing that
my critiques of the population-pressure-on-resources model promoted
“dangerous” ideas. Regardless of the position, the relationship between
population trends and environmental change remains a highly contentious
issue. Expressing any opinion on global population issues invites potential
backlash from any range of communities, depending on your stance. When
I first began researching this topic in graduate school, I discussed it with a
fellow academic, who shifted uncomfortably in her seat as soon as I began
speaking. “We’re not supposed to talk about population . . . are we?” she
asked. Apparently not, if we express views that are contrary to the
perceived stance of our interlocutor. Unless, that is, we ground our
arguments in science.
As I argued in chapters 1–3, scientific knowledge is widely perceived as
a means of finding neutral support for ideas about population-environment
linkages that are otherwise viewed as political or moral, and thus
controversial. With a stronger scientific grounding, population advocates
find broader perceptions of legitimacy in their messaging work. In turn, this
facilitates the circulation of frameworks linking population reductions and
environmental sustainability through the dual lenses of scientific knowledge
and women’s empowerment. At the same time, the current focus on climate
change within the broader environmental and scientific communities, along
with the proliferation of scientific studies and models projecting both
greenhouse gas emissions and demographic population growth trends,
provide advocates with useful tools for framing these linkages as
scientifically innovative, urgent, and apolitical.
Increasing scientific knowledge linking population growth with future
climate change also facilitates the development of anticipatory politics
strategies. Through these strategies, projection models of what could
potentially happen forty or ninety years from now are dynamically brought
into the present through advocacy messaging, strategically crafted to focus
on the dystopian environmental outcomes that would result if foreign policy
changes were not made. However, advocacy in this context is highly
dynamic and context-driven. Depending on whether the setting is a
population-environment advocacy training or campus-based workshop, a
research briefing, or a high level funders’ network meeting, an advocate can
be anyone from a scientist to a donor, a college student, or a long time
congressional lobbyist. Population advocates occupy all of these positions
and more, as they frequently shift between institutional homes and positions
within a broader network. Over the course of this project, the emergent
dynamics of shifting network politics were less surprising than the
multiplicity of forms advocacy takes, particularly from powerful actors. As
chapter 3 demonstrates, the power wielded by private donors advocating for
population-environment science and policy interventions from behind the
scenes emerged as one of the most important influences on contemporary
strategies in this arena. Private donors draw on individual priorities, use
personal networks, and bear on their ability to direct large sums of capital to
set the agendas of grantees, including scientists and NGO program
managers. As a result, the shifting scientific and political discourses in this
arena can often be traced to the private agendas of philanthropic
organizations whose work is unimpeded by public accountability or
democratic participation.
Over the past four decades, environmental NGOs in the U.S. have ridden
the waves of fluctuations in funding, corporate opposition to environmental
regulation, and disagreements over policy issues within their own
membership. Those organizations that have also made forays into
population programming, through advocacy, research, or program
implementation overseas, have seen a concentration of resistance and
waning financial support. They have also seen strong ambivalence among
both leadership and their membership bases, based on an aversion to
involvement in controversial issues. As my interviews revealed, fear of
being associated with abortion proponents, concern over a perceived sense
of drift from organizational missions and priorities, and the harsh realities
of generally reduced funding for population work have led many
environmental organizations to abandon their previously operating
population programs. The issue of race and controversy in environmental
and population debates has also played an important and contradictory role,
both pushing some organizations away from addressing population, as well
as inspiring efforts among others to shift the terms of the debate by drawing
on social and reproductive justice frameworks.
Some population advocates have identified the social movement
frameworks designed to respond to race and gender inequalities—like
reproductive justice—as opportune for their own projects. In the
contemporary moment, when young activists are concerned with doing
socially just work, and donors are interested in supporting reproductive
justice and environmental justice projects, it makes sense that populationists
would join the bandwagon. But this raises further questions. Social justice
takes on a deeper sense of importance in this context, even as its increasing
invocation appears to be emptied of transformative critique. When young
population advocates hand out flyers and condoms, asking potential
supporters to join their advocacy efforts to fight for justice, it is confusing.
What social justice is this? Are condoms and birth control pills examples of
social justice technologies if nothing shifts in the social worlds of the
people using them? What about family planning services? Are they socially
just, in and of themselves, if they don’t include comprehensive maternal
health care, fertility services, STI prevention and treatment, and
comprehensive sexual health education (not primarily focused on
reproduction)? Where is the social in social justice? Who is it for?
In the advocacy arena, messaging is everything. In order to grapple with
the historical roots and future legacy of their work, populationists must deal
with the racial controversies that have operated throughout much population
thinking and population control policies. However, dealing with the racial
legacy of populationism is a difficult thing to do. It is easier to adopt the
language of a progressive framework and move forward, rather than mine
the critical depths of structural injustices and the role organizational
interventions play in maintaining those structures. It is harder still to
transform the conditions within which their particular corner of
development work is located.
While the future of population advocacy is uncertain, transnational youth
organizing continues to extend in new directions. In efforts that build and
expand on existing organizational frameworks and advocacy approaches,
individual activist youth are making their own population-environment
advocacy networks, drawing on social media and other digital technology
as a basis for transnational organizing. Young people in climate change
conferences, drawing on SRHR messages, climate data, and a sense of
shared global responsibility in producing a better world, assert their
leadership in putting forth the idea that populationism can help support
climate change mitigation and adaptation. While their presentations are
often fairly simplistic, they demonstrate the transnational reach of women’s
empowerment and social justice messages as a linchpin of their messaging.
These messages are, after all, in line with the girl-centered approach of the
future.
Youth advocacy in this arena is still freighted with inequalities in power,
privilege, and access. Regardless of whether emergent youth networks are
transnational, it is still those youth who can harness the power of
development paradigms, networks, and advocacy spaces, that set the terms
of the agenda—and as a result, those who could potentially transform this
arena of policy advocacy are those who hold the tools of privilege. Sadly,
for all of their vibrant enthusiasm, the emergent youth voices I heard at the
COY6 meetings in Cancun articulated a narrow population advocacy
perspective which ignored global structural inequalities, military- and
corporate-led environmental degradation, corporate resource extraction, and
the increasing entrenchment of poverty for women and families around the
world. Population advocates, whether youth or seasoned activists, in the
U.S. or other hemispheres of the world, consistently avoid articulating these
inequalities, because doing so does not lend itself to simple, policy-relevant
solutions. As a result, their efforts will continue to search in vain for
solutions that avoid addressing deep-rooted structural forces, thus keeping
us on a business-as-usual development track and, sadly, foreclosing the
alternative futures they claim to seek.
Acknowledgements

This book has benefitted from the graciousness and generosity of so many
people. My first and deepest thanks to those members of the population
network who invited me into their offices, boardrooms, and other training
and workshop spaces, as well as those who shared their files, reports, and
other documents with me. Thank you to my editors at NYU Press,
particularly Maryam Arain, for infinite patience and good humor. Thank
you to the UC Berkeley faculty who nurtured this project from its infancy,
particularly Nancy Peluso, Louise Fortmann, Carolyn Finney, and
Lawrence Cohen. Special thanks are also due to Adele Clarke, Michael
Watts, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and Kim TallBear. To my first writing group
—Martine Lappe, Rachel Washburn, Katie Hasson, and Theresa MacPhail
—who read nearly every early word and helped me make it better, thank
you. I am most grateful for the intellectual community and friendship of
James Battle, Larisa Kurtovic, Andrew Hao, E. Mara Green, Marcus
Moore, Alysoun Quinby, Elizabeth Farfan-Santos, Mez Baker, Megan
Ybarra, Jason Morris Jung, Bhavna Shamasunder, and Hodari Toure. To the
broader Bay Area community that nurtured me as I nurtured this project, my
infinite thanks: Amy Saxton, Michael Dailey, Jill Bates-Moore, Karen
Moore, and Jason Woodside.
I am grateful for the financial support of the National Science Foundation
and the Ford Foundation, which made this research project possible. I am
also deeply grateful to the rich, robust community of scholars, activists, and
activist-scholars whose work has inspired and broadened and deepened my
thinking over the years. Betsy Hartmann, Banu Subramaniam, Marlene
Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, Rickie Solinger, Michelle Murphy, and Saul
Halfon, thank you for your work. Thank you to Anne Hendrixson, Rajani
Bhatia, and Ellen Foley for the collaborative thinking and the pushes in the
right direction when needed. Much gratitude is owed to my former LMU
colleagues, Stella Oh, Traci Voyles, Linh Hua, and Carla Bittel. Many,
many thanks to my UCR writing group—Chikako Takeshita, Dana
Simmons, and Juliet McMullin—for your close readings and thoughtful
comments. I am grateful to the UCR Science Studies Colloquium for the
thoughtful engagement with what would become chapter 4. Thanks also to
my department colleagues, Jane Ward, Sherine Hafez, Chikako Takeshita,
Margie Waller, Juliann Alison, Katja Guenther, Eric Stanley, Tamara Ho,
Amalia Cabezas, Alicia Arrizon, Anthonia Kalu, and Crystal Baik, as well
as to Donatella Galella, Ademide Adeluyi-Adelusi, Jody Benjamin, and
Derick Fay. I am also immensely grateful to my students, past and present,
who have always taught me so much.
Art sustained me, through to the end. The final months of this project
were spent on the grounds of one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever
been: the Huntington Library and Gardens. Having a readership there gave
me writing space and access to the botanical gardens and art galleries; those
months were infinitely beneficial intellectually, emotionally, and
aesthetically. Thanks also to the musical artists who provided the
soundtrack that accompanied every word, particularly those on the James
Brown, Isley Brothers, and Alice Smith stations of my favorite music
streaming app.
Infinite thanks to my friends and SGI family, who endured hearing the
endless narrative of this book with patience, warmth, and humor. My very
deepest appreciation to my Sasser and McCartha families for being the best
cheerleaders. Uncle Emile, I wish you were here to see it come to fruition.
And finally, to the Sasser four (plus Deanna), this is for you.
Notes

Introduction

Angus and Butler, Too Many People?


Sasser, “Population, Climate Change, and the Embodiment of Environmental Crisis.”
Engelman, Population, Climate Change, and Women’s Lives, 5.
Ibid., 14.
Unnamed author, “COP16 Policy Statement,” accessed December 1, 2016.
Demographic transition theory refers to a four-stage model of transition from high birth and high
death rates, to low birth rates and low death rates. It is a central theory within the field of
demography, and has been at the heart of international family planning interventions. See chapter 2
for a fuller explanation.
Lee and Mason, “What is the Demographic Dividend?,” accessed November 24, 2017.
Bloom, Canning, and Sevilla, The Demographic Dividend, xi.
Hendrixson, “Beyond Bonus or Bomb.”
0 Dalrymple, “Is the Tea Party a ‘Social Justice’ Movement?” accessed May 26, 2017, at
www.patheos.com; for a discussion of the “social justice for fetuses” argument, see Christopher
Kaczor’s 2011 book The Ethics of Abortion: Women’s Rights, Human Life, and the Question of
Justice. New York: Routledge.
1 World Bank Open Data, 2015, accessed at www.data.worldbank.org; Union of Concerned Scientists,
accessed at ucsusa.org; Global Carbon Atlas, accessed May 26, 2017 at www.globalcarbonatlas.org.
2 United Nations, World Population Prospects, 2015 Revision, accessed May 26, 2017.
3 Unmet need is a concept that arises from demographic surveys and is a central concept in the
women’s empowerment framework as applied to population policy and reproductive decision-
making. It is a measure of the number of women who are sexually active and in a stable union, who
state that they are not currently interested in becoming pregnant, but who are not consistently using
Western methods of contraception. Halfon (2007) describes unmet need as both a “technical object
and a policy pronouncement” (156), closely linked to the notion of “latent demand.” In fact, USAID
developed demographic surveys partly for this very purpose—to have an instrumental measure that
would demonstrate an existing latent demand that could then be translated into an unmet need.
Unmet need is not solely scientific, it is political; policymakers have used it to appeal to a quantified,
scientific version of latent demand. Unmet need is central to justifying population programs, and
“given the centralized regime of data gathering, unmet need discourse helps to maintain a few key
institutions as the locus of program expertise and development” (157).
4 United Nations, World Population Prospects, 2015 Revision, accessed May 26, 2017; Tabutin and
Schoumaker, “The Demography of Sub- Saharan Africa from the 1950s to the 2000s: A Survey of
Changes and a Statistical Assessment”; United Nations, 2003, World Population Prospects, The 2002
Revision (New York: United Nations).
5 Ferguson, Global Shadows, 2.
6 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 2009, TEDGlobal, www.ted.com/talks.
7 Dogra, “The Mixed Metaphor of ‘Third World Woman.’”
8 Win, “Not Very Poor, Powerless, or Pregnant,” 79.
9 Gilens, “How the Poor Became Black.”
0 Dogra, “The Mixed Metaphor of ‘Third World Woman.’”
1 Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 56.
2 Robbins, Political Ecology.
3 Blaikie and Brookfield, Harold, Land Degradation and Society.
4 Harvey, “Population, Resources, and the Ideology of Science.”
5 Watts, Silent Violence; Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts.
6 Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts.
7 Fairhead and Leach, Misreading the African Landscape.
8 Jarosz, “Defining Tropical Deforestation.”
9 Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs; Mamdani, The Myth of Population Control.
0 Hajer, “Discourse Coalitions,” 45.
1 Ibid.
2 Keck and Sikkink, “Transnational Advocacy Networks.”
3 Agarwal, Gender and Green Governance; Rocheleau, Feminist Political Ecology.
4 MacGregor, “‘Gender and Climate Change.’”
5 Leach, “Earth Mother Myths and Other Ecofeminist Fables”; Resurreccion, “Persistent Women and
Environment Linkages.”
6 Ibid.
7 Braidotti, Charkiewicz, Hausler, and Wieringa, Women, the Environment and Sustainable
Development, 78.
8 Ibid.
9 Rathgeber, “WID, WAD, GAD.”
0 Buvinic, “Projects for Women in The Third World.”
1 Moser, Gender Planning and Development, 61.
2 Kabeer, Reversed Realities.
3 Ibid., 224–25.
4 Sen and Batliwala, “Empowering Women for Reproductive Rights,” 17.
5 Sen and Grown, Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions, 19.
6 Ibid.
7 Halfon, The Cairo Consensus.
8 Ibid., 96.
9 Kabeer, Reversed Realities, 224.
0 Foucault, The History of Sexuality.
1 Adams and Pigg, Sex in Development.
2 Jasanoff, States of Knowledge, 17.
3 Ibid., 20.
4 Reardon, Race to the Finish, 8.
5 Kaiser Family Foundation, 2017, “The U.S. Government and International Family Planning &
Reproductive Health Efforts,” www.kff.org.
Chapter 1. The Population “Crisis” Returns

The imagery clearly references the opening scene of Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb, by far
the most well-known population control advocacy book in the U.S. It opens with a famous scene of
Ehrlich and his family in a taxi cab in India, nervously navigating the throng of brown bodies that
surround them on all sides. For Ehrlich, this is the moment when population moves from being an
intellectual issue to a visceral one, based on his family’s frightened reaction to the crowd.
Whitty, “The Last Taboo,” 26.
Verilli and Piscitelli, “Research Findings Report.”
Engelman, “Population & Sustainability.”
See “U.N. Forecasts 10.1 Billion People by Century’s End” and associated blog posts:
www.nytimes.com.
There are many articles on this theme, which tend to proliferate in November and December, around
the time of the IPCC climate change conference. Examples include: Emmott, “Though Climate
Change is a Crisis,” accessed November 1, 2016 ; Los Angeles Times Editorial Board, “Why We
Need to Address Population Growth’s Effects on Global Warming,” accessed November 1, 2016 ;
Plautz, “The Climate-Change Solution No One Will Talk About,” accessed November 1, 2016 ;
Zelman, “World Population Day,” accessed November 1, 2016.
Los Angeles Times Editorial Board. “Why We Need to Address Population Growth’s Effects on
Global Warming.”
Prois, “Voluntary Birth Control.”
IPCC, Climate Change 2014 Synthesis Report Summary for Policymakers, 5.
0 Plautz, “The Climate-Change Solution No One Will Talk About,” accessed April 1, 2015; Goering,
“Family Planning ‘Effective’ but Unpopular Climate Change Solution,” accessed May 20, 2015.
1 Merchant, Prediction and Control.
2 Connelly, Fatal Misconception.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.; Hartmann, Reproductive Rights & Wrongs; Sullivan, Leveraging the Global Agenda for
Progress.
5 Kabeer, Reversed Realities, 189.
6 Connelly, Fatal Misconception, 355.
7 Cock, “The World Women’s Congress.”
8 Various authors, Treaty on Population, Environment and Development, paragraph 1, accessed June
2017.
9 Ibid., paragraph 3.
0 Ibid., 7.
1 Petchesky, Global Prescriptions.
2 United Nations, Programme of Action.
3 Ibid., 64.
4 Hodgson and Cotts Watkins, “Feminists & Neo-Malthusians.”
5 Campbell, “Schools of Thought.”
6 Sasser, “Environmental Organizations and Population Programs.”
7 McCoy, Chand, and Sridhar, “Global Health Funding.”
8 Foley and Hendrixson, “From Population Control to AIDS.”
9 Guttmacher Institute, Just the Numbers, accessed June 2017 at www.guttmacher.org.
0 Anonymous interview. Former staff member at USAID Office of Population and Reproductive
Health. In-person interview, San Francisco, CA. 2010.
1 Anonymous interview. Former staff member of the Compton Foundation. In-person interview,
Menlo Park, CA. 2010.
2 Costello, et al., “Managing the Health Effects of Climate Change.”
3 McKibben, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” accessed June 10, 2016.
4 McKibben, “A World at War,” accessed October 2, 2016.
5 Peet, Robbins, and Watts, Global Political Ecology.
6 Hickey, Rieder, and Earl, “Population Engineering,” 845.
7 Ibid., 855.
8 Ibid., 866.
9 Hartmann, The America Syndrome.
0 Fuller, “Demographics = Mideast Turmoil.”
1 Quoted in Hartmann and Hendrixson, “Pernicious Peasants and Angry Young Men.”
2 Leahy, Engelman, Vogel, Haddock, and Preston, The Shape of Things to Come, 8.
3 Ibid.
4 Hartmann and Hendrixson, “Pernicious Peasants and Angry Young Men.”
5 Potts, “Crisis in the Sahel,” 3.
6 Ibid., 4.
Chapter 2. How Population Became an Environmental
Problem

Jowett, “Plato on Population and the State.”


Federici, Caliban and the Witch.
Hutchinson, The Population Debate.
Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 12.
Darwin, “Darwin to Wallace, 1858,” 465.
Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development.
Ibid., 17.
Galton, “The Possible Improvement of the Human Breed.”
Stern, Eugenic Nation, 135.
0 Ibid.; Wohlforth, “Conservation and Eugenics.”
1 Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring.
2 Warren, Aldo Leopold’s Legacy, 33.
3 Roosevelt, “Opening Address by the President,” 3.
4 As quoted in a book of essays written by two sisters for Everybody’s Magazine, chronicling their
experiences traveling the country and performing “women’s work.” Roosevelt wrote the letter to the
sisters. Van Vorst and Van Vorst, The Woman Who Toils.
5 Roosevelt, “On American Motherhood.”
6 Merchant, “Shades of Darkness,” 382–3.
7 Fisher, Report on National Vitality, Its Wastes and Conservation, 55.
8 Ibid., 129.
9 Stern, Eugenic Nation.
0 Greene, Malthusian Worlds, 3.
1 Ibid., 30.
2 Hodgson, “The Ideological Origins.”
3 Ibid., 5.
4 Ibid., 18.
5 Ibid., 21.
6 Notestein, “Population-The Long View.”
7 Szreter, “The Idea of Demographic Transition,” 660.
8 Ibid., 662.
9 Demeny, “Social Science and Population Policy,” 455.
0 Hodgson, “Demography as Social Science and Policy Science.”
1 Sharpless, “Population Science, Private Foundations, and Development Aid,” 176.
2 Hodgson, “Demography as Social Science and Policy Science.”
3 Briggs, Reproducing Empire, 8.
4 McCann, Figuring the Population Bomb.
5 Ibid.
6 Porter, Trust in Numbers, ix.
7 Ibid.
8 Briggs, Reproducing Empire, 82.
9 Pearl, The Biology of Population Growth; Pearl, “The Growth of Populations.”
0 Pearl, The Biology of Population Growth, 18.
1 Pearl, “The Population Problem,” 640.
2 Höhler, “A ‘Law of Growth.’”
3 Pearl, The Natural History of Population, 2.
4 Kingsland, “The Refractory Model”; Sayre, “The Genesis, History, and Limits of Carrying
Capacity.”
5 Bashford, Global Population.
6 Ibid., 6–7.
7 Höhler, Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age.
8 Leopold, “Ecology and Politics,” 282.
9 Ibid., 284.
0 Sayre, “The Genesis, History, and Limits of Carrying Capacity,” 132.
1 Vogt, Road to Survival, 14.
2 Ibid., 16.
3 Ibid., 17.
4 Ibid., 282.
5 Connelly, Fatal Misconception.
6 Osborn, The Limits of the Earth.
7 Robertson, The Malthusian Moment.
8 Ibid., 8.
9 Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” 1244.
0 Ibid.
1 Robertson, The Malthusian Moment, 153.
2 Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” 1248.
3 Ibid., 1247.
4 Hardin, “Commentary,” 562.
5 Hardin, “Parenthood: Right or Privilege?,” 427.
6 Robertson, The Malthusian Moment, 191.
7 Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 1.
8 Ibid., xii.
9 Ibid., 1.
0 Ehrlich and Harriman, How to be a Survivor, 23.
1 Ibid., 23.
2 Ibid., 26.
3 Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring.
4 Ehrlich and Holdren, “Impact of Population Growth,” 1212.
5 Meadows, Randers, and Meadows, Limits to Growth, xxi.
Chapter 3. Scientists, Donors, and the Politics of Anticipating
the Future

Adams, Murphy, and Clarke, “Anticipation,” 249.


Dowie, American Foundations; Hartmann, “Strategic Scarcity.”
O’Neill, MacKellar, and Lutz, Population and Climate Change, xiii.
O’Neill, Dalton, Fuchs, Jiang, Pachauri, and Zigova, “Global Demographic Trends,” 5.
Murtaugh and Schlax, “Reproduction and the Carbon Legacies of Individuals.”
Satterthwaite, “The Implications of Population Growth.”
Tapia Granados, Ionides, and Carpintero, “Climate Change and the World Economy.”
Martine, “Population Dynamics and Policies.”
Population Action International originated in the same year as Hugh Moore and William Draper’s
Population Crisis Committee (see chapter 1). Today it describes itself as a “global organization
advancing the right to affordable, quality contraception and reproductive health care for every
woman, everywhere.” Population Action International website, “Who We Are,” www.pai.org.
0 Mutunga and Hardee, “Population and Reproductive Health,” 189.
1 The project, and PAI’s climate-related portfolio, has since been discontinued.
2 Mutunga, Zulu, and DeSouza, “Population Dynamics, Climate Change, and Sustainable
Development in Africa,” accessed June 2017.
3 Ibid., 17.
4 Hartmann, “Converging on Disaster.”
5 Hartmann, “Liberal Ends, Illiberal Means.”
6 IPCC Data Distribution Center, “SRES Emissions Scenarios,” accessed April 29, 2017.
7 Nakicenovic et al., Special Report on Emissions Scenarios, 599.
8 McCracken, “Prediction Versus Projection-Forecast Versus Possibility,” accessed March 15, 17.
9 Website previously located at www.popoffsets.org. Accessed March 2016.
0 Bumpus and Liverman, “Carbon Colonialism?,” 204–5.
1 Wire, “Fewer Emitters, Lower Emissions, Less Cost.”
2 Murphy, The Economization of Life, 6.
3 Hull, “China Right to Link Population to Climate.”
4 The one-child policy, which formed the national population planning policy in China, was formally
instituted in 1979, and began to be phased out in 2015. The policy stipulated that urban couples in
densely populated areas have no more than one child, although exceptions were provided for ethnic
minorities and parents whose first child had physical or cognitive disabilities, or if the first child was
a girl.
5 Murphy, The Economization of Life.
6 All names and initials in this book, other than the author’s, are pseudonymous.
7 Kincaid, Dupré, and Wylie, Value-Free Science?
8 Wilson and Kehoe, “Environmental Organizations”; Pielemeier, “Review of Population-Health-
Environment Programs”; Kleinau, Randriamananjara, and Rosensweig, “Healthy People in a Healthy
Environment.”
9 Greenhalgh, Just One Child, 8.
0 Ibid.
1 Dowie, American Foundations.
2 Sasser, “Environmental Organizations and Population Programs.”
3 Pielemeier, “Review of Population-Health-Environment Programs.”
4 Speidel et al., “Making the Case.”
Chapter 4. The Role of Youth in Population-Environment
Advocacy

GPEP has since been phased out; the Sierra Club has subsumed its reproductive health work under a
new program called the Gender, Equity, and Environment program, which focuses on climate policy,
health, and energy access that prioritize women, transgender, and gender nonconforming people. The
new program has a much smaller focus on SRHR and family planning, but still maintains a webpage
on “Contraception and Climate Change,” located at sierraclub.org.
Malkki, The Need to Help, 4.
Ibid., 8.
Greenbaum, “‘Sex and Sustainability’ Event.”
Resurreccion, “Persistent Women and Environment Linkages.”
This was before the Black Lives Matter movement exploded onto the American social movement
scene in 2013.
Population Connection, “30 Years of ZPG: Our History as Written in 1998,” accessed June 2017 at
www.populationconnection.org.
LIFE Magazine, “ZPG.”
ZPG Reporter, “ZPG Goals,” 2.
0 As quoted in Robertson, The Malthusian Moment, 160.
1 Ibid., 160.
2 Ibid.
3 ZPG Reporter, “ZPG Goals.”
4 Examples include: “When you’re feeling tender, think about the Hellbender,” “Wrap with Care . . .
Save the Polar Bear,” and “Fumbling in the Dark? Think of the Monarch.” See
www.endangeredspeciescondoms.com for more.
5 Sasser, “From Darkness Into Light.”
6 Mazur, A Pivotal Moment.
7 Ibid., 1.
8 Ibid., 17. Also see chapter 5 for a critical discussion of how populationists draw on the reproductive
justice framework.
9 Ibid.
0 Ibid., 18.
1 Reisch, “Defining Social Justice,” 343.
2 In the 1990s, Sierra Club members attempted to take over club leadership and institute neo-
Malthusian anti-immigration policy advocacy within the organization. This led to bitter disputes
between the members, and raised significant questions about the role of racism in majority-white
environmental organizations, particularly those that do population work. See Sasser, “From Darkness
Into Light.”
3 Unnamed author, “COP16 Policy Statement,” accessed January 1, 2017.
Chapter 5. Co-Opting Reproductive Justice

Luna, “From Rights to Justice.”


Silliman, Fried, Ross, and Gutierrez, Undivided Rights; Price, “What is Reproductive Justice?”
Silliman and King, Dangerous Intersections.
Cornwall and Brock, “What do Buzzwords do for Development Policy?,” 1.
Ibid., 4.
Intersectionality is a term coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe the ways social
identities intersect and overlap in systems of domination or oppression. It is an explanatory
framework for understanding social injustice based on multiple aspects of identity and categories of
social difference, including race, gender, class, and sexual orientation, among others. See Crenshaw,
“Mapping the Margins.”
Cornwall and Brock, “What do Buzzwords do for Development Policy?,” 1.
Sasser, “From Darkness Into Light.”
Davis, Women, Race, & Class; Roberts, Killing the Black Body.
0 Davis, Women, Race, & Class.
1 Solinger, Pregnancy and Power.
2 Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 4.
3 Ibid., 3.
4 Davis, Women, Race, & Class.
5 Silliman, Fried, Ross, and Gutierrez, Undivided Rights; Nelson, Women of Color.
6 Slater, “Sterilization,” 151.
7 Ibid.
8 Stern, Eugenic Nation.
9 Dreifus, “Sterilizing the Poor.”
0 Ibid., 16.
1 Ibid.
2 Ibid., 8.
3 Lawrence, “The Indian Health Service.”
4 Smith, Conquest.
5 Ibid., 36.
6 Kluchin, Fit to Be Tied.
7 Ibid., 22.
8 Silliman, Fried, Ross, and Gutierrez, Undivided Rights, 42.
9 Turshen, Women’s Health Movements.
0 Luna, “From Rights to Justice.”
1 National Organization for Women, “March News-131 Days Until March for Women’s Lives!,”
December 16, 2003.
2 Luna, “From Rights to Justice.”
3 Johnson, “Female Inmates Sterilized,” accessed May 12, 2017.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.

Conclusion

Hymas, “I Am the Population Problem,” accessed June 2017.


Haraway, Staying With the Trouble.
Ibid., 209.
The Girl Effect, “Our Purpose,” accessed June 2017 at www.girleffect.org.
Summers, “Investing in All the People.”
Murphy, The Economization of Life.
Silliman and King, Dangerous Intersections; see also Peet, Robbins, and Watts, Global Political
Ecology.
Hawken, Drawdown.
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Index

bortion, 27, 36, 38, 40, 72, 74–75, 113–14, 130, 138, 139; Roe v. Wade backlash, 140
ACLU, 114, 143
ctivism: advocacy vs., 102; feminist, 37–40, 113, 126–27; Global South, 19, 39, 126; youth, 5, 6, 8–9,
25–27, 29, 118–19, 146. See also reproductive justice; women of color
dvocacy. See population-environment advocacy
Advocates for Youth, 99, 103
Africa, 11–12, 19, 35, 47, 80, 81–83, 103–4, 106–7, 151. See also Global South
African Americans: media depictions of, 12–14; standard of living of, 133. See also women of color
Americans for Informed Democracy, 99
Angus, Ian, and Simon Butler, 3
anticipatory politics,” 79, 85–90, 155
nti-immigration views, 71–72, 168n22
apolitical ecology,” 15
Audubon Society, 25, 55

irth control. See contraceptives; family planning


Boserup, Ester, 19–20
Bowers, Richard, 113, 114
Braidotti, Rosi, et al., 19
uzzwords. See development

Cairo Consensus. See International Conference on Population and Development


apitalism, 15–16, 23, 61
arbon (CO₂) emissions, 32, 45, 88–89, 93
arbon legacies, 80
arbon offsets, 88–89
arrying capacity theory, 50, 51, 53, 64–71, 72, 75–76
Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), 114–15
Chipko Movement, 19
Choice USA, 136
Civil Liberties and Public Policy (CLPP), 129, 146
limate change: apocalyptic rhetoric of, 43–46; future-oriented practices and, 85; media coverage of,
32, 47–48; pace of, 1, 43–45, 79; resistance to, 1, 43; Sierra Club and, 122–23. See also
environmental problems
Clinton, Hillary, 32
Club of Rome, 75–76
olonialism, 16, 69
Conference of Parties: COP15, 89, 124; COP16, 5, 27, 81; COP16 Policy Statement, 123–25
Conference of Youth (COY6), 27, 158
Connelly, Matthew, 35
onservationism, 55–58
Conservation International, 25
ontraceptives, 2, 4, 6, 8–12, 14–15, 28, 32, 38, 47, 69, 75, 80, 88, 100, 116, 130, 138; Endangered
Species Condoms campaign, 114–15, 168n14; in Global South, 7, 10, 34–35, 73. See also family
planning

Darwin, Charles, 54
Davis, Angela, 139
eforestation, 16, 49, 56
emographic dividend, 7–8
emographic transition theory, 7, 51, 53, 59–64, 65, 66, 86, 161n6
evelopment, 2–7, 10–29, 32–33, 35–36, 39, 59, 61, 83, 152; buzzwords in, 127–28, 137, 147
Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), 39
igital technology, 81, 118–19
iscourse coalitions, 17
onors and funding, 8, 29, 41–43, 63–64, 78–79, 85, 90–98, 136, 156–57
Draper, William, 33
Dreifus, Claudia, 141

ducation, 3, 6, 11, 45, 79, 81, 85, 109–10, 124, 142, 152–54
Ehrlich, Paul, 70, 72–76, 107, 113, 114, 146, 163n1
EngenderHealth (formerly Association for Voluntary Sterilization), 143
ENGOs (environmental non-governmental organizations), 25, 26
nvironmentalism, 1, 9, 40, 49–50, 51, 58, 65, 70, 78, 111, 113
nvironmental justice (EJ), 18, 109, 116, 119, 136, 145
nvironmental problems, non-populationist causes of, 14–16, 24, 37, 50, 81, 150, 158
nvironmental responsibility, 4–5, 116; “green duty,” 18
ssentialism, 13, 17–18, 50, 106
ugenics, 51, 53, 54–59, 65

airchild, Henry, 60
amily planning, 1–7, 10, 14–15, 23, 28, 32–33, 47, 62, 82–83, 87–88, 116, 131, 137–38, 154; access to,
1–2, 11, 38, 72, 100, 132, 139; opposition to, 6, 27–28, 36, 60, 73, 130; U.S. government funding for,
41–42. See also reproductive politics
eminism. See under activism; populationism
eminist Majority Foundation (FMF), 103, 108, 144
ertility, 1, 4, 59, 67; fertility rates, 10–12, 23, 61–62
isher, Irving, 58
ood and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 35, 69
ood production, 3, 52–53, 53, 72, 74, 76
ord Foundation, 63
oucault, Michel, 23
unding. See donors and funding

Galton, Francis, 54
Gandhi, Indira, 34
Gender and Development (GAD), 21
ender inequality, 17–22, 37. See also women and environmental change
GINKs (Green Inclinations, No Kids), 149
Girl Effect, The, 152–53
Global Population Environment Program (GPEP), 1, 8, 103, 107–8, 110, 116–18, 121–23, 145; end of,
168n1; reproductive justice and, 127–28, 131–32, 147
Global South, 7, 10, 12–14, 16, 20, 26, 34–36, 38–39, 86, 109, 134, 143, 153; activism in, 13, 19, 80,
117; bias against, 69–73, 138, 149; demographic transition theory and, 61, 62–63; donor activism for,
91–92; imagery of, 106–7; Sierra Club and, 122; youth bulge theory and, 46–47. See also Africa
Goethe, Charles Matthias, 55
Grant, Madison, 55
Greenbelt Movement, 19
reenhouse gas emissions (GGEs), 10–11, 32, 44–45, 79–80, 83–86, 88, 91–93, 122, 155

Halfon, Saul, 22, 161n13


Haraway, Donna, 150
Hardin, Garrett, 70–72, 76, 113
Hartmann, Betsy, 82
HIV/AIDS, 41, 46, 132
Holdren, John, 75
Homer-Dixon, Thomas, 82

ndian Health Service, 142


nequality, 10, 12, 17, 35–36, 154, 158; inequitable distribution of wealth and resources, 15–16, 76
ntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 32, 83–84, 86
nternational Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), 37, 38–39, 126, 143–44; Cairo
Consensus, 39–42, 47, 83, 116
nternational Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population, 67
nternational Women’s Health Coalition, 103
ntersectionality, 135, 145, 169n6
slamophobia, 47

amieson, Dale, 78
asanoff, Sheila, 24

inship, 64, 150


Kyoto Protocol, 88

LDCs (least-developed counties), 79–80, 92


Leopold, Aldo, 68
imits to Growth, The (Meadows et al.), 75–76

Malthus, Robert (and Malthusianism), 2–3, 24, 52–54, 59–60, 66–67, 105. See also neo-Malthusianism
Mapping Population and Climate Change Hotspots (digital project), 81
McKibben, Bill, 44, 46
Merriam, John C., 55
modernization theory, 20, 23, 59, 61, 73, 152
Mohanty, Chandra, 14
Moore, Hugh, 33–34
motherhood, 13, 14, 20, 113; Roosevelt on, 57
Muir, John, 58

National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs), 80–81


National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), 113–14, 144
ationalism, 56–57
National Organization for Women (NOW), 113, 144
Native Americans, 57–58, 142
eo-liberalism, 4, 7, 9, 29, 131, 152, 153–54
eo-Malthusianism, 2–3, 15–16, 26, 28, 37, 38, 40, 48, 48, 67, 68, 76, 82–83, 116, 129
NGOs (non-governmental organizations), 8, 12, 22, 29, 37, 41, 94, 152, 156; youth advocacy and, 105,
110
Nike Foundation, 152
Notestein, Frank, 60–61, 62–63

Optimum Population Trust, 87–89


Osborn, Henry Fairfield, 55, 69

aris Agreement, 27
earl, Raymond, 65–66
Pivotal Moment, A (ed. Mazur), 116–17, 145
lanned Parenthood Association, 69, 103, 108, 136, 144
olitical ecology, 15–17, 103
opulation Action International (PAI), 33, 46–47, 80–82, 103, 110, 169n9
opulation Association of America (PAA), 59
opulation Connection. See Zero Population Growth
opulation Council, 63, 91
opulation-environment advocacy, 4, 6, 8, 15, 24–26, 28, 40, 42, 87, 102, 130, 145–46, 151–52, 154–
57; role of donors in, 90–97; role of youth in, 99–125, 157–58
opulation control: abuses of, 5–6, 34, 35, 126–27, 139–42, 146–47; China’s one-child policy, 89,
167n24; coercion and, 2, 5–6, 40, 45, 71, 73, 74–75, 114, 126–27, 135; as governable problem, 59;
history of, 33–37, 45–46, 131; “population engineering,” 44–45. See also sterilization
opulation growth, 1–7, 14–15, 23, 37, 44–47, 80, 149; apocalyptic warnings about, 69, 71, 72, 76, 83,
85; “common sense” assumptions about, 49–51, 119; early concerns about, 51–53, 47–58; media
coverage of, 31–32; socially constructed responses to, 12, 50; as U.S. security threat, 7, 33, 70, 73, 82
opulationism, 3, 9, 10, 15, 24, 28–29, 78, 87, 127, 130–31, 145, 157–58; feminism and, 149–50; as
social justice, 115
opulation justice, 116–17, 145–46
opulation Justice Environment (PJE) Challenge, 116, 121
overty, 2, 4, 6, 10–13, 16, 46, 69, 71–72, 74, 139, 146, 151; British poor laws, 52–53

ace, 12, 14, 17, 29, 47, 51, 70, 73–75, 82, 122; eugenics and, 54–58; reproductive justice and, 126,
128–30, 134–44. See also women of color
Radl, Shirley, 113
Reagan, Ronald, 14, 36
Reed, Lowell, 65
Relf family, 140
eligious opposition, 6, 36
eproductive health and rights. See sexual and reproductive health and rights
eproductive justice (RJ), 9–10, 26, 29, 126–47; reproductive health distinction, 135–36
eproductive politics, 10, 126, 129, 136; history of, 128, 137–45
esource consumption, 18, 38, 45, 50, 66, 73–76, 80, 85, 123, 149
Rockefeller, John D., III, 62
Rockefeller Foundation, 62
Roosevelt, Theodore, 56–58
Ross, Loretta, 126

ave-the-Redwoods League, 55
cientific studies, 6, 8–9, 16, 23–24, 32, 43, 78–98, 154–55; “bad science,” 9, 16, 64, 98; history of
population science, 51–77, 85; scientific projection models, 78–90, 155; scientific racism, 58
en, Gita, 21–22
ex and sexuality discourse, 23
exual and reproductive health organizations (SRH), 25, 26, 124
exual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), 2, 3, 5–6, 8–10, 22–23, 28, 29, 37–40, 42, 72, 78,
103, 108, 111, 121, 123–24, 133–35
exual stewardship, 4–5, 152, 154; development of, 8, 14, 37–40, 70
IECUS (Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States), 99, 103
ierra Club, 1, 8, 15, 25, 26, 55, 58, 129–30, 168n1, 168n22; racial controversy and, 137; reproductive
justice and, 127, 146; youth advocacy and, 99, 108, 114, 115, 119–20, 125, 132. See also Global
Population Environment Program
istersong Collective for Reproductive Justice, 134–35, 144
ocial constructivism, 12, 15, 17, 21, 50
ocial Darwinism, 49, 72
ocial justice, 9–10, 112, 114, 115–119, 125, 157–58
terilization, 14, 34, 35, 38, 69, 75, 114, 126, 140–44, 146–47
ummer, Larry, 152–53
ustainability, 76, 123, 134
zreter, Simon, 61

Taeuber, Irene, 62–63


errorism, 46–47
Third World. See Global South
Treaty on Population, Environment and Development, 37–38
Trump, Donald, 27–28

UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), 37


UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 80, 85, 124
United States: security concerns of, 7, 33, 70, 73, 82; standards of living in, 133, 138
nmet need, 11, 41, 88, 123, 161n13
U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), 10, 36, 41–42, 94, 161n13

Verhulst, Pierre, 65
Vogt, William, 68–69
oluntarism, 6, 40, 69–70, 73, 74, 79, 113, 138

Wilson, Kalpana, 153


women and environmental change, 17–19, 37–40
Women, Environment, and Development (WED), 19
Women in Development (WID), 19–21
women of color: activism by, 114, 126, 128, 142, 143; conferences and events participation by, 108,
111, 128, 134, 135, 144; imagery of, 12, 13; population control of, 14, 126–27, 135, 138–144
Women of Color Coalition for Reproductive Health Rights, 143–44
women’s empowerment, 2, 6, 9, 21–22, 37–40, 103, 147, 152–53, 155, 158
Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), 37
women’s liberation movement, 72, 113, 138
Women’s Tent (Planeta Femea), 37, 38
World Food Program, 35
World Population Conferences, 35, 36
Worldwatch Institute, 4–5, 25
World Wide Fund for Nature, 25

oung people. See under activism; population-environment advocacy


outh bulge theory, 7, 46, 116

Zero Population Growth (ZPG), 25, 112–14, 117, 143


About the Author

Jade S. Sasser is Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender and


Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside.

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