In all of the news surrounding Vladimir Putin, it might have been easy to overlook that he had recently revived a Soviet-era policy called the “Mother Heroine” award, which goes to women who bear 10 or more children, offering financial incentives and other benefits in a bid to spur population growth. He is not alone, with a host of men who perch atop pyramids of power—from Elon Musk, to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to Hungary’s strongman Victor Orban—pushing women to have children as a means of growing the base of those power pyramids and further elevating the men at the top.
Corporations in the U.S., through targeted media, push for the same by sensationalizing the idea of an economic “baby bust” that threatens the nation. Contrast the scant media coverage of studies showing the massive impact a universal ethic of smaller families would have on the climate crisis, with the ubiquitous and not-so-stealthy advertising we see across popular media platforms. The rhetoric of the constant need for more workers, consumers, and taxpayers goes beyond just pushing women to have children and supports recent successful moves to ban contraception and abortions.
It does not help that civil society organizations that purport to protect children, equity, animals, the environment, and human rights and democracy often ignore these issues, fearing the ugly framing of population issues from the past rather than pivoting towards the existential justice of socially and ecologically regenerative family reforms. In each one of these areas of need, progress is being undone by growth, especially as the climate crisis deepens.
Putin’s and others’ push for constant growth—and the silence of many nonprofits around the issue—reveals the lie at the base of the climate crisis: that population growth and the expansion of the Anthropocene is sustainable, or even desirable.
That lie is fundamental because it is existential, preceding more practical questions like how to limit emissions. The lie (and the growth it enables) is undoing attempts to limit emissions as growth takes over. The lie encompasses an existential worldview that sees Earth as a human resource, children deserving of no particular level of welfare at birth (like those conditions that the United Nations Children’s Convention purports to provide), treats being born crushingly poor or ultra-rich as an act of god rather than a product of inequitable family planning policy, and treats democracy as more of an abstract concept that an actual process whereby people meaningfully influence the rules under which they are forced to live.
That population growth is not sustainable should be painfully obvious now, as the population-driven climate crisis unfolds, killing people worldwide in unprecedented heat waves.
Some push back on the connection between population growth and the climate crisis, but these analyses mistake population growth as simply a matter of numbers. Population growth entails exacerbating the unjust power relations described above—between parents and their children, between rich and poor, between people and their political leaders, etc.—in which power flows top-down, rather than bottom-up, as truly participatory human rights and democracy actually require. Population growth entails relatively few extracting wealth and power from the majority—again something that should be obvious as the ecological costs of our economic growth are slated to fall on the vulnerable majority: future generations.
Is growth, in and of itself, desirable?
Growth is enabled by not ensuring, through things like family planning incentives, that all children have minimum levels of welfare. Is that desirable? Growth is enabled by not ensuring children equal opportunities in life. Is that desirable? Growth is enabled by ignoring the value of participatory democracy and scrapping any minimum level of connection between democratic “representatives” and the people subject to their rules. Is that desirable?
The alternative to Putin’s and others’ pyramids—in which a few are empowered by disempowering the majority—involves reversing the flow of power, first and foremost by making family planning universally a child-centric process. That move makes us—in the most basic way—truly other-regarding, and changes the direction of power so that would-be parents are not lording over future generations and the ecologies of our planet, but working together to ensure all children are born in social and ecological conditions that satisfy the requirements of the Children’s Convention. That act—of becoming fundamentally other-regarding—enables us to physically constitute future communities as free and equal people, the ideal of consensual governance that many theorists have envisioned but rarely achieved.
Child-centric planning is the epitome of shifting the flow of power from the powerful down upon the vulnerable—which enables exploitation—towards a flow from the vulnerable up to the powerful, aligning children’s interests in conditions of birth and development in which they will thrive, with women’s interest in the elimination of life-hobbling pronatalism, with the average person’s interest in more equal opportunities in life as well as smaller and more functional democracies where the average person is actually empowered, with nonhumans’ interest in the restoration of nonhuman habitat, restorative environmentalism, and more empathetic persons inclined to treat animals well (what nonhumans value most of all).
We might be inclined to resist such radical reforms because the majority of people alive today would support them, and there are good reasons to defer to the majority. Given that the majority of persons are actually those vulnerable-to-us people who will live in the future, and this work would be saving them from the tyrannical minority that is those people alive today inflicting harm on the future, you should think the opposite.
We can do this work because being free, in terms of who we are, precedes being free in terms of what we do—including forming governments to assign property to wealth that was made by externalizing costs, by not giving mothers and kids what they need.
Free people will fundamentally limit and decentralize the power (including subtle power like climate emissions and the impact of bad parenting on communities) others have over them through Fair Start family reforms like climate restoration and #birthequity baby bonds to physically constitute democracy and consensual governance where people are actually empowered to make the ultimate rules under which all must live. And there is only really one way to do that: Parental readiness policies that avoid things like parents torturing their children to death, birth equity redistribution of wealth to ensure true equality of opportunity, and a universal ethic and default of smaller families.
Changing the flow of power in this way is fundamental, or existential, justice in action. It is the antithesis of Putin’s move to grow and centralize Russian power by exploiting future generations (or the move Musk, Khamenei, or others are trying to make) and instead takes our most basic values and uses them to structure power relations for the future majority, ensuring that we begin to orient from a just and genuinely inclusive place.
Putin’s policy shows us the lie, that growth is sustainable and desirable, at the base of the climate and so many other crises. The lie hides top-down power over the most vulnerable and has created the crises we face today. Let’s unlearn that lie and reverse the flow.
Author Bio: Carter Dillard is the policy adviser for the Fair Start Movement. He served as an Honors Program attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and also served with a national security law agency before developing a comprehensive account of reforming family planning for the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal.
Source: Independent Media Institute
Credit Line: This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Basic problem with the world population is that the volume of wealth held on this planet is not large enough to deliver sufficient, (and most importantly) continuing prosperity to the 8 billion.
Cut the cake into 8 billion slices and poverty will still be prevalent. There are 6 billion too many humans and planet earth is reacting like she will always do. Kill the parasite. No matter what climate action the naive humans take to try and “control” planet earth. There will be only one winner.
The question of who has the power is mute. For as soon as the flow of power changes new cliques will form to naively try and control the flow of power. Give power to the families and another Putin will rise to lead a mafia like “family”.
Humans have a need to be controlled (or ruled) by a matriarchy or patriarchy leader. This is why New Zealander’s love Ardern (we do dont we?).
We give power away easily’ to be led. Why communism and communes don’t work. For they are soon corralled by the “leaders” to morph away, from the peoples collective, their perceived independence.
So called “Western” democracies are no better. Ruled by elites whom the people pretend to elect but actually have no control over (think 5 waters). Why do our “elected” leaders need to belong and listen to the WEF?
Gerrit your cake is stale.
I agree with the authors sentiments on progressive initiatives for women and children and I’m also sympathetic to their antagonism to the perpetual growth model. However they have completely failed to comment on the current state of demographics, especially in developed countries.
As Hans Rosling pointed out about a decade ago, improving health, wealth and women’s education tends to lead to family size decline. Indeed in the developed world, industrialisation and urbanisation has been so successful in achieving this (as a side effect) that most developed nations are well below replacement rate, with the consequence of ageing populations to be followed by declining populations (without significant immigration).
Russia’s population has been decimated in the last century. two world wars, urbanisation, economic stagnation and then a collapse of the Soviet Union which halved the birthrate and doubled the death rate. Now tens of thousands of young men are being fed into the meat grinder of War in Ukraine. Russia is facing a demographic bomb, Putin’s push is not for perpetual growth it is for Russia’s continued existence.
China too, due to the one child policy and despite changes in law to allow 2 and then 3 children per family, larger families even if desired, are unaffordable to most especially urban centres. Whatever reactive policies and incentives the CCP rolls out is too little too late. Whoever thinks the CCP plans long term is not paying attention.
The West is also in trouble, South Korea, Japan and most of Europe are facing the similar problems due low birthrates. The decline will not be linear it will be precipitous.
That is not to carry water for Putin, Orban, Khamenei or even Musk, except to note that it is completely disingenuous to lump them together. Their motivations and rationale and objectives are different. I’m not even saying that our societies ‘should’ have more children. I am pointing out that the author’s anxiety is completely misplaced as demographic decline and a post-growth world is already baked in for developed nations.
‘Global’ population may continue to grow, the slight of hand in this discussion is around developed/industrialised nations vs rest of the world. As Bjørn Lomborg and other have pointed out the way to get global population under control is to lift families out of poverty and educate women. I have little confidence this will happen. The best and brightest of poorer nations will migrate to the developed world thus buffering population decline there. In addition geopolitical tensions, the break down of neoliberal economics, rising cost of capital with consequent conflict, disruption of trade routes, food and fertiliser supply compounded by localised corruption etc is likely to lead to famine for tens if not hundreds of millions in the next few years. Poorer nations will bear the brunt.
As for the core of author’s anti-growth argument. This is the paradox of solved problems. We do not need to “unlearn that lie and reverse the flow.” it’s coming whether we like it or not. Now (for developed nations) is the time to figure out how to adapt to ageing populations and a post-growth world.
The climate crisis is not driven by population but by capitalism.
Marx said of ‘population’ in the Grundrisse:
(3) The Method of Political Economy
When we consider a given country politico-economically, we begin with its population, its distribution among classes, town, country, the coast, the different branches of production, export and import, annual production and consumption, commodity prices etc.
It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price etc. Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations.
https://www.marxists.org/subject/dialectics/marx-engels/grundisse.htm
DB, keep it simple. Consumerism is driven by population (demand) and manipulation (marketing).
I vaguely recall a study some years ago that had been conducted back in the 1970’s which had concluded that the world could comfortably contain between fifteen billion people and twenty-two billion people. Although, this is without, I gather, the pressures of climate change which we are experiencing today. So we could probably therefore have a cap of around ten billion people to twelve billion people on our global population.
I believe in contraceptive measures and in the right of women to choose abortion but I do believe that in many countries, especially western countries, there is a surplus of couples who are willing to adopt, and I also believe that this option isn’t being promoted enough, especially not when compared to abortion.
We have millions of displaced people, homeless people, starving people, including babies, toddlers & children in this world who could take up refugee status and become immigrants and yet how often does that happen these days? Children are dying in impoverished countries because of the selfishness of their governments and also the governments in Western countries, of whom are NOT working together, NOT keeping the door of immigration open, and NOT pushing for adoption. The attitude is like adoption was a fad back in the 2000’s and not a serious option in 2022.
UI like to know a bit about people putting their ideas forward. Are they famous in their own backyard for….? So:
Carter Dillard
Animal Law Conference ·
https://www.animallawconference.org › …
Carter is the founder of the organization Having Kids, which has developed a human rights-based, child-centric and “zero baseline” family planning model with ..
Kids and Animals – nice. I found myself wishing I was a cat yesterday. Is that wrong?
Re “democracy”
Any alleged expert who talks about democracies AS IF a real democracy ACTUALLY EXISTS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD (or has existed at any time) is evidently living mindlessly and blindly in the propaganda world fed to them since a kid and/or is part of the (unconscious, ignorant, naive, willful) crowd who disseminates this total lie — see “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room” … https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html
“All experts serve the state and the media and only in that way do they achieve their status. Every expert follows his master, for all former possibilities for independence have been gradually reduced to nil by present society’s mode of organization. The most useful expert, of course, is the one who can lie. With their different motives, those who need experts are falsifiers and fools. Whenever individuals lose the capacity to see things for themselves, the expert is there to offer an absolute reassurance.” —Guy Debord
Isn’t it about time for anyone to wake up to the ULTIMATE DEPTH of the human rabbit hole — rather than remain blissfully willfully ignorant in a fantasy land and play victim like a little child?
“Separate what you know from what you THINK you know.” — Unknown
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