In a recent article for The Atlantic, Alex Trembath and Vijaya Ramachandran claim that the modern environmental movement is once again warming to Thomas Malthus (Trembath and Ramachandran 2023). This idea has been boosted by a wide variety of pundits from Fox to the Washington Post to Jacobin, think tanks like CATO, and business elites like Elon Musk and Marc Andreeson (Ingraham 2022; Bunch 2019; Follett 2020; Ongweso 2022). It’s a frightening idea, and one with some recent exposure: celebrities like Prince Harry and Bill Nye, and even, unfortunately, Jane Goodall have endorsed the idea that coercive population control is necessary for planetary sustainability (Elliott 2020; Nye 2017; Mountbatten-Windsor 2019). Though a fringe view among serious environmentalists, the perception that neo-Malthusianism is an emerging hegemony is widespread. Fortunately, even the more radical climate activist groups have eschewed Malthus. Accusations of neo-Malthusianism should be understood as just that—accusations—and read as a rhetorical tactic wielded by opponents of radical climate action rather than an accurate description of activist demands.

Thomas Malthus was a cleric and economist whose work on population trends in the 18th and 19th centuries laid the groundwork for atrocities at enormous scale. He believed that humans inevitably multiplied past the carrying capacity of their environments, leading to periods of famine and population crash; during the Irish Potato Famine, English policies of exploitation were justified by the Malthusian claim that charity would only prolong the population’s suffering. These ideas were inherited by a wide cast of ideologies, from conservationists to eugenicists to the Nazi Party and its drive for lebensraum. After the Second World War discredited the latter two, the mantle was picked up again by Western environmentalists like Paul Ehrlich and his colleagues in the Sierra Club and Club of Rome. The neo-Malthusians applied Malthus’s theory at a global scale, making outrageous claims about impending famine and environmental collapse, many of them heavily racialized. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb opens on what he describes as a crowded, stinking Delhi, in his mind already doomed to mass starvation—ignoring the fact that New York already had five times Delhi's population (Ehrlich 1968, 1). Authoritarians in China and India took Ehrlich and the Club of Rome’s report, The Limits to Growth, seriously, and instituted draconian sterilization programs affecting hundreds of millions of women.

Today, despite populations exploding into the billions, India and China are radically wealthier per capita than they were in 1968. Eduardo Galeano correctly noted in 1970 “Most Latin American countries [had] no real surplus of people; on the contrary, they [had] too few,” and the same was evidently true on the other continents that had been depopulated by colonial violence (Galleano 1997, 6). Malthus and his heirs did not account for the ability of technological advances to boost the carrying capacity of an environment much faster than populations could grow, and the Green Revolution has ensured that food is both cheaper and more plentiful even as the world moves past 8 billion people. Ehrlich is still touting the same ideas, but history has not treated them kindly.

However, the eruption of climate activism over the last two decades could have brought with them another Malthusian resurgence. Movements launched by protests like the one over the Keystone XL Pipeline have coalesced into and around a variety of formal groups, many of which have embraced an ascetic inclination. One development in the modern climate movement—a movement that, having succeeded Occupy, is closely associated with anti-capitalism—is a push for degrowth, the intentional slowing of economic development in exchange for faster emissions reductions. Regardless of the merits of degrowth, it would seem to require a reexamination of population controls: an orchestrated decline in living standards paired with unchecked population growth is a recipe for famine. However, the data I found did not bear this out.

As measured through Google Trends data, a Malthusian revival has not manifested (see Fig. 1 for one example, although this is borne out across a variety of terms.) In published literature, as measured by Google's Ngram viewer, there has been a slight uptick in references to Ehrlich's book—but many of them are, presumably, negative (Fig. 2.) Center-left pundits at newspapers and magazines like the New York Times and Vox have been skeptical of degrowth, but they have pushed back even more vigorously against neo-Malthusianism, often giving it more attention than activists themselves (Piper 2019; The New York Times channel 2015). Sunrise Movement, one of the most radical and youth-centered climate organizations, has no mention of overpopulation on its website, and the Sierra Club, the very group that published The Population Bomb, explicitly condemns it. Extinction Rebellion, a non-hierarchical European climate group that focuses on public demonstrations and civil disobedience, explicitly warns new recruits not to discuss overpopulation (Extinction Rebellion Boston 2020; Nugent 2020). Trembath and Ramachandran present very little evidence of neo-Malthusianist revival beyond a few think pieces and Ehrlich’s own perennial crusade.

Though these are imprecise methods of tracking it, my read is that neo-Malthusianism is not on the rise, regardless of the punditry surrounding it. I would project that the reasons for that, despite increased attention to ecology, are fivefold:

Increased deference to the Global South, the source of most population growth, by Western ecologists and leftists;
Increased awareness and emphasis on women’s reproductive rights, and an acknowledgement of the violence of China and India’s sterilization regimes;
The acknowledgement that global population growth is slowing on its own and that the fastest way to further decelerate is through education and female empowerment;
The rise of China and, to a lesser extent, India, as examples of population growth and economic growth going hand in hand;
New fears in both formerly coercive (i.e. China) and non-coercive (i.e. Japan or Portugal) countries about population decline

This analysis is neither a refutation of the link between degrowth and population control nor a prediction that mainstream environmental groups will not adopt degrowth in the future. Given their roots in the Occupy movement, it can be difficult to identify what the primary ideological drives of non-hierarchical movements are, and this analysis may have missed an emerging or offline grassroots Malthusian revival. Additionally, it brackets the increase in Malthusian rhetoric in right-wing stochastic terrorism, as evidenced by the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto. However, the lack of a strong voice (outside of a few rich celebrities) advocating for neo-Malthusianism should ease the minds of its opponents and deter pundits searching for a hyperbolic angle with which to attack the climate left. Degrowth is vulnerable on its own merits; skeptics need not resort to name-calling to attack it.

Data are from Google Trends and can be accessed at this link: Prospectus Data

Fig. 1

Ngrams 2004-2019:

Data from Google NGram and can be accessed here

Fig. 2

References

Bunch, Sonny. “Opinion: Environmentalists make good movie villains because they want to make your real life worse.” The Washington Post, January 3, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/03/environmentalists-make-good-movie-villains-because-they-want-make-your-real-life-worse/.

Ehrlich, Paul. The Population Bomb. (Sierra Club, 1968).

Elliott, Tom (@tomselliott). “Jane Goodall @ Davos: ‘All these [environmental] things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem if there was the size of population that there was 500 years ago.’ The world population 500 years ago is estimated btwn 420 and 540 million—6.7 billion fewer people than today.” Twitter, January 24, 2020, https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1220696092532187136.

Extinction Rebellion Boston. “Population Growth and Overconsumption of Earth's Resources.” Extinction Rebellion, September 3, 2020, https://xrboston.org/news/population-growth-and-overconsumption-earths-resources/.

Follett, Chelsea. “Neo‐Malthusianism and Coercive Population Control in China and India: Overpopulation Concerns Often Result in Coercion.” Cato Institute, July 21, 2020, https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/neo-malthusianism-coercive-population-control-china-india-overpopulation-concerns.

Galleano, Eduardo. Open Veins of Latin America. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997).

Ingraham, Laura (@IngrahamAngle). “Does the NYT promote a guy who wants humanity to die out? Of course it does.Earth Now Has 8 Billion Humans. This Man Wishes There Were None. - The New York Times.” November 23, 2022, Twitter, https://twitter.com/IngrahamAngle/status/1595439925788295168.

Mountbatten-Windsor, Harry. “Forces for Change: HRH the Duke of Sussex Interviews Dr Jane Goodall for the September Issue.” Vogue, July 30, 2019, https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/prince-harry-jane-goodall-september-2019-issue.

Nugent, Ciara. “A Revolution's Evolution: Inside Extinction Rebellion’s Attempt to Reform Its Climate Activism.” Time, July 9, 2020, https://time.com/5864702/extinction-rebellion-climate-activism/.

Ongweso, Edward. “Why Are Elon Musk and Marc Andreesen Obsessed With Birth Rates?” Vice, July 13, 2022, https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7ge4v/why-are-elon-musk-and-marc-andreesen-obsessed-with-birth-rates.

Perez, Chris. “Bill Nye: Should We Penalize Parents for Having ‘Extra Kids’?” New York Post, April 26, 2017.

Piper, Kelsey. “We’ve worried about overpopulation for centuries. And we’ve always been wrong.” Vox, August 20, 2019, https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/8/20/20802413/overpopulation-demographic-transition-population-explained.

The New York Times channel. “The Population Bomb? The New York Times.” YouTube video, 13:07, June 4, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8XOF3SOu8I.

Trembath, Alex and Vijaya Ramachandran. “The Malthusians Are Back.” The Atlantic, March 22, 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/population-control-movement-climate-malthusian-similarities/673450/.

“The Sierra Club and Population Issues.” Sierra Club, May 21, 2022, https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra-club-and-population-issues.

The Neo-Malthusians Aren’t Back