Invariably, the problem is always other people. The man behind the organization that sued UC Berkeley to reduce its enrollment, Phil Bokovoy, told The New Yorker that he opposed building more housing in Berkeley in part because “I don’t think we’ll be able to tackle climate change unless we tackle population growth and rising living standards over a huge part of the world.”
Lest you worry that this is a California-specific brain disease, let me reassure you that this antihuman thinking has permeated discourses all over the nation—and the world.
But population growth is not the problem that so many people seem to think it is, not least because of the global decline in fertility; arguably, declining population growth is the real population-related concern of the century. And even if it were a concern, the policies that NIMBYs support not only fail to create a climate-conscious built environment but actually make fighting climate change more difficult.
Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb, catalyzed overpopulation concerns among the American public. Ehrlich, a Stanford biologist, also served as the first president of the group Zero Population Growth (ZPG). As the historian Keith Woodhouse recounts in his book, The Ecocentrists, “The group’s goal was an end to population growth; the means, troublingly, were not yet specified. Within three years [of its founding in 1970], ZPG had thirty-two thousand members.”
The Population Bomb opens not with a depiction of overconsumption by high-income Westerners but with the author’s memory of a taxi ride with his wife and daughter “one stinking hot night in Delhi.” Ehrlich describes the “crowded slum area” and proceeds to detail, in prose dripping with disgust, the view from his cab window of people just living their lives: “People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging.” This goes on and culminates in the almost-too-on-the-nose admission: “All three of us were, frankly, frightened.”
As Ehrlich’s family gawked at Delhiites, the U.S. was emitting 18.66 tons of carbon per capita to India’s .33, meaning that the average American was emitting 56 times more than the average Indian. If Ehrlich was genuinely concerned about overconsumption, why is the opening image of his book that of poor, brown people and not the suburban car-centric sprawl that characterizes his home country?
The book’s main argument is that an increasing population will run out of resources and if steps aren’t taken to reduce the population, then scarcity will make the world poor. In particular, Ehrlich was concerned about the world running out of food, and he foretold that mass starvation events would mark the waning decades of the 20th century.