“10” in “Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth”
10
Overpopulation
The Human as Inhuman
Timothy Clark
The Earth now carries an extraordinary and overwhelming number of human beings—toward eight billion and rising. Humans account for about 36 percent of the biomass of all mammals, with their domesticated livestock making up another 60 percent, leaving a mere 4 percent of biomass accounted for by mammals in the wild.1 Despite global fertility rates declining, human numbers are already set to rise toward ten billion by midcentury, before perhaps slowing.2
“Population, to be meaningful, must be modelled,”3 and the fraught topic of overpopulation has always tended toward modes of gothic representation. To think in terms of very large numbers necessarily conjures gothic tropes: the human as inhuman, a dynamic perceived in statistical projections as a kind of remorseless growth, an impersonal algorithm, the faceless mass, and so on. Thus, like other global environmental problems, concepts of overpopulation tend toward images of zombification, as in the crude video Zombie Overpopulation (2015),4 released by the charity Population Matters, filmed in a mock-documentary style and featuring zombies blundering around destroying their environment. As this chapter will argue, gothic tropes are particularly suited to representing a crucial feature of overpopulation pressure, of the human become other by dint of sheer numbers. At the same time, to celebrate the gothic as a cognitive resource for representing the Anthropocene may also be problematic. First, however, before turning to questions of representation, we need to outline the broad context of debate about overpopulation and the environment.
That overpopulation is a crucial environmental issue seems at first utterly obvious—more people means increased human impact, more displacement and destruction of nonhuman life, more pollution from human activity. At the same time, as soon as accounts of overpopulation are analyzed with a view to countermeasures, they emerge as morally and politically intractable, liable to brutal simplifications, hidden moral dilemmas, undesirable implications, and implicit kinds of discrimination, and, finally, ugly debates about immigration—especially given that population growth is now overwhelmingly concentrated in the poorer Global South. The relative absence of overpopulation from green literary criticism may have less to do with disputing the reality of the issue than with the deeply unpalatable nature of the questions it raises.5
For many Malthusians and neo-Malthusians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, engagement with issues of population restraint were driven by the desire to eradicate global poverty.6 But it is also hard to forget the repellent forms of biopolitics with which claims of “overpopulation” have been linked, such as the mass-sterilization programs of India’s Emergency Period (1975–77).7 Whenever a birth control policy is instituted solely for economic or demographic reasons, as opposed to issues of women’s rights, it has too easily become a form of coercive pressure on more vulnerable women.
In the 1960s and 1970s the so-called population bomb was a central focus of alarm about the future, anticipating features of the current debate about a so-called Anthropocene. Yet this debate now appears simplistic in retrospect. One may ask, what is the prime agent of the Anthropocene?8 It is not humanity per se but the interaction or contamination of human behavior (primarily but not solely that of a wealthier and exploitative minority), technology, and multiple natural processes acting together in often unpredictable ways on the working of Earth’s natural systems. The agent of change is a hybrid and self-conflicted material/intentional entity, inhabiting the increasingly chaotic realm of its own interference effects, as these now precipitate both social deprivation and the extinction of other forms of life. Accordingly, even the most die-hard “population bomb” activist must concede that global human overpopulation is not in itself the agent of an Anthropocene. However, it is, as it were, a decisive catalyst, one that renders dangerously potent all the other factors in planetary change. (Catalyst: “A substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change” [Oxford Online Dictionary]).9 For instance, to the commonplace objection that population is not “the real problem,” but that overconsumption is, must come the retort that if such iniquitous consumption were limited to only a few million people, instead of being a matter of several billions, then there would still be injustice but no threat to the Earth System itself and to the viability of much life on Earth, and no “Anthropocene” debate.
Fatalism is another factor in the relative silence on the population question: why debate something about which one can do next to nothing? A vast population is already “gothic” in the sense of embodying the oppressive overshadowing of the present by the past, a pervasive if usually merely assumed or even unperceived context of day-to-day life. Fertility rates are such slow factors of change, and human numbers already so vast, that even a current rate not much above the replacement level must still mean the pressures of vast, increasing numbers of people.
Given the industrialization of agriculture (the “Green Revolution”), the issue with population has become less the demographic constraint of limited resources than environmental side effects in terms of greenhouse gases, loss of biodiversity, and such. This green focus also highlights a blind spot in much official demography, even beyond the issue of acknowledging the vast difference in resource impacts and responsibility between privileged and impoverished human groups. The dominant framework for debates about population scenarios, “carrying capacities” for instance, as exemplified in collections like Is the Planet Full? (2014)10 is a strikingly immoral one, for it simply assumes an unquestioned and exclusive human entitlement to all the resources of the planet, making no reference to the claims of nonhuman life. The only nonhuman creatures mentioned in Goldin’s Introduction to Is the Planet Full? are bacteria as related to human diseases and to animals as “meats.”11 The same immorality structures this whole collection of expert essays in demography. Without this frightening discounting of all nonhuman life, however, the concept of “overpopulation” at once becomes far more elusive. Whose lives are counted in the “population” at issue? What is the intrinsic value of nonhuman lives, and how would that feed into demographic accounting and definitions of the over in overpopulation?12
Questions of Representation
Like climate change, global human overpopulation is never perceptible as such, for population elsewhere in the world, or on the Earth overall, is not to be sensed from any one place. Its apparent partial manifestations can be deceptive—the impact of human overpopulation on the planet is already pronounced, yet large areas of the earth remain almost deserted, while a crowded city in Ethiopia may well have less environmental impact than a small town in Australia. Both overpopulation and climate change are what Karin Kuhlemann describes as an “unsexy” risk factor for catastrophe:
The creeping nature of unsexy risks obscures the extent and momentum of accumulated and latent damage to collective goods, while shifting baselines tend to go unnoticed, misleadingly resetting our perception of what is normal. Even where we recognise that something is a problem, we may still not recognise the underlying, catastrophic trendline, or just how much damage is already baked into states of affairs that we come to regard as normal.13
Being seemingly impersonal, statistical, and dispersed over large space and time scales, overpopulation does not have a human face. Individual people may well be rational, but viewed en masse, humanity is not behaving as a rational entity, even in the limited sense of observing calculations of future self-interest.
Climate change and overpopulation represent seemingly comparable challenges of literary representation. As is now much discussed, including in the Introduction to this volume, climate change resists conventional narration because its causes are multiple, sometimes opaque, and widely dispersed in time and space, all of which resists any clearly grasped story line in terms of a series of actions unfolding in a definite sequence to a determinable end. Nevertheless, climate change is now provoking new kinds of inventiveness and formal experimentation in literature. Yet, what is striking about representations of overpopulation here is that, overwhelmingly, the literary tendency for decades has been in the very opposite direction, toward plots of cartoonish simplicity and crude and even ludicrous dystopian scenarios.
Samantha Morgan summarizes the nature of a large number of overpopulation dystopias thus:
Time and again, the image of teeming and violent metropolis, its inhabitants crammed into tiny apartments, subsisting on vat-grown meat or processed algae, became standard in the futures imagined in the second half of the twentieth century. Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel (1954), Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! (1966), and John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968), as well as short stories by Kurt Vonnegut and J. G. Ballard take place in cities where civil unrest increases as the availability of space, food, and water decreases.14
Much fiction on overpopulation still seems covered by these clichés, a kind of limited overpopulation gothic—as with Paolo Bacigalupi’s more recent, trite “Pop Squad” (2008), which depicts illegal babies being tracked and shot in the head, in the context of a society in which the privileged no longer age.15 All of these scenarios are basically evasive, for they jump over the issue of overpopulation as a challenge in the present in order to represent its extreme extrapolation in the future.
Henri Bergson famously described the nature of humor and jokes as arising often from when “a person gives the impression of being a thing.”16 The algorithmic dynamics of demography give a corresponding sinister, bad-joke quality to many literary dystopias about overpopulation, such as “Billenium” by J. G. Ballard.17 In this short story, a city is depicted as having so many people that road traffic is now a thing of the past, as roads are now just streams of people on foot. There are so many that “people jams” at the junctions can last more than a day, and it can take hours to cross the street just to buy lunch. Ballard’s main plot follows a simple dynamic: each person is strictly rationed to a tiny in-house space, but the central protagonist and his friend discover that their house has a whole, previously hidden room. Once the new room is taken, it is soon then subdivided to give space to two women friends, then further subdivided for parents, so that soon the initial situation of extreme confinement has merely repeated itself like an underlying law of life. In this, the “bad joke” structure lies in the reduction of human behavior and character to the simplicity of an algorithmic process, a kind of zombification. The attempt to represent demographic pressure in so direct and heightened a way pushes realism into the realm of the surreal, the fantastic, or the merely absurd.
Anthony Burgess’s novel The Wanting Seed (1962)18 presents one of the more incongruous versions of an overpopulation dystopia out of a seeming desire to shock. Overpopulation in the future is seen as leading to new forms of social discrimination. The main protagonist, Tristram, is disadvantaged for a possible promotion at work because he comes from a family of four children.19 It is a world in which lack of space and restrictions on family size lead to a glorification of homosexuality, on the bizarre, homophobic assumption that same-sex couples do not want children, while Tristram adopts the mincing, “effeminate” manner of gay male stereotypes of the day. As social order disintegrates, cannibalism arises and is depicted as a ghastly version of the Roman Catholic Mass. Whereas Harry Harrison’s novel Make Room! Make Room! (1966)20 makes some plausible sense as a noir image of a future, vastly overcrowded New York of social degradation and basic shortages, its much-revised film version, Soylent Green of 1973,21 caters to a more extreme taste as its central detective protagonist unearths the grim truth that soylent, a government-sponsored food, is actually made from reprocessed human flesh. Since the peak of concern in the 1960s and 1970s with overpopulation, the issue has hardly gone away but has become a standard, if underanalyzed, background feature of innumerable fictional dystopias since, in literature, cinema, comics, and computer games.
In the overpopulation dystopias by Burgess, Harrison, Bacigalupi, Ballard, and numerous others, the scenarios are often so grotesquely extreme as to risk disarming in advance any chance of being taken seriously in relation to overpopulation in a contemporary context, even when this is how they present themselves.22 However, instead of simply dismissing all these texts as “bad” writing or sensationalism, it may be useful to consider why it is that depicting overpopulation seems to slide so easily into caricature. It is as if the more directly a text tries to home in on depicting increasing human numbers, the more simplistic it risks becoming. Thus it is that the more interesting fictions about overpopulation treat it indirectly, as one environmental factor among others. Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968),23 for instance, even though it features in Morgan’s list of cliché overpopulation dystopias, also “resists unicausal explanations of environmental disaster, focusing on multiple social and governmental culprits.”24 Lionel Shriver’s Game Control (1994)25 (discussed later) engages overpopulation primarily in offering a subtle and humorous study of the language, psychology, and culture of demographers. The relatively simplistic nature of the other texts could be said to reinforce the fact that overpopulation is not, in itself, the agent of an Anthropocene but a catalyst whose force depends on its implication in other economic and social realities, such as overconsumption in some areas or the pressures of poverty in others.
The often crass nature of so many overpopulation dystopias suggests two thoughts. The first is that the plethora of absurd scenarios underlines the fact that to depict overpopulation as the decisive environmental problem is a serious misreading, and this is what becomes highlighted in these cartoonish extrapolations of planetary overcrowding. A second, more disturbing conclusion follows: that while human overpopulation is indeed a powerful catalyst of environmental violence, it is also, insidiously, of a nature to resist credible representation singly, as a force by itself. For how can you know or represent the nature of a catalyst considered on its own? This is the elusive nature of overpopulation as an object of environmental debate—such that a voice of hasty objection will always arise in the discomfort of discussing it, with the pertinent but only partly true retort “but the real problem is . . .”
Overpopulation and an Anthropocene Gothic?
Tobias Menely and Jessie Oak Taylor, discussing concepts of the Anthropocene as an event “that exceeds narrativization,” write that
the Anthropocene provides an opportunity for literary studies to test and transform its methods by examining how the symbolic domain might, or might not, index a historicity that exceeds the human social relation and encompasses planetary flows of energy and matter.26
The gothic uncanniness of overpopulation lies in the inhuman/human element of the demographic, a dynamic that seems to “exceed the human social relation,” even while being inextricable from it. Questions of population include mathematical effects that escape the human symbolic domain but are nevertheless entirely immanent to human society—the emergent effects, both psychic and material, of sheer large numbers, vulnerability to disease epidemics for instance, or the fact that the more people there are concentrated in a region, the more the probable need for its administration and overview, the greater its organizational complexity, and the higher the probability of restrictions on individuals. It is one side effect of the Covid-19 pandemic that the general public has acquired a new familiarity with the sometimes daunting force and projections of population statistics and alarming multiplier effects.
Why “gothic” in particular? At issue here is an interpretation of the “gothic” different from its once-standard interpretation as a manifestation of a cultural or personal unconscious, of the repressed or the culturally disavowed. Jerrold E. Hogle’s Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (2002) is representative in its reading of gothic as making readers “confront what is psychologically buried in individuals or groups, including their fears of the mental unconscious itself.”27 For example, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the monster made from pieces of dead bodies can be read both as its maker’s fantasy of reembracing his dead mother and as a making manifest of tensions and choices “simmering at the subliminal levels of his culture (in his political unconscious),” such as “the rise of a ‘monstrous’ urban working class.”28 Gothic in this sense informed what became a standard reading of the numerous fictional dystopias on overpopulation from the second half of the twentieth century, texts such as Robert Bloch’s This Crowded Earth (1958),29 Burgess’s The Wanting Seed, Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room!, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Welcome to the Monkey House” (1968),30 Ballard’s “Billenium,” Max Ehrlich’s The Edict (1971),31 Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971),32 and many others. These are plots in which a concern with the proliferation of people is explained by critics as really the manifestation of some more familiar and immediate political anxiety. For instance, in a survey of postwar gothic, Steven Bruhm writes of “the racist representation of vampires as Mexican immigrants in John Carpenter’s 1998 film Vampires” and of “the fear of eastern Europeans in Stoker’s Dracula, which additionally indicates the fear of the unknown ‘foreign’ parts of ourselves, be they sexual or ‘spiritual.’”33
Andreu Domingo deploys a similar cultural diagnostic in his survey of accounts of population-focused dystopias, or “demodystopias.”34 These texts, with their crowds, social breakdown, and so on, can be explained, he argues, as their authors’ fear of a contemporary unrest, of the masses as a “potential source of subversion, as a result of disquiet arising from inequalities and scarcities.”35 The tumultuous and populous cities fortify themselves; their precincts, packed or deserted, have become unsafe. The streets, whether labyrinthine or in the gridlike pattern of the Big Apple, have the same function as the forests of heroic medieval legends, the jungles of adventure novels, or the immensity of outer space in science fiction, transmuted into this sinister, dangerous, and uncontrollable place.
This is a consistent but surely also narrow reading. For Domingo and others, there seems no question that overpopulation, however simplistically fictionalized, might ever itself be taken as a real issue, instead of as a kind of fantasy topic that only reflects anxieties or prejudices about cultural power in its immediate context. While justified in significant ways, to read all these texts solely in terms of another race/class/gender diagnostic also remains inadequate: it is to internalize, in terms that admit of tidy moral accounting, issues that also remain not just a matter of individual or group psychology at all but the impersonal dynamics of large numbers, of an unassimilable exteriority.
Beyond the elements of cultural anxiety and abjection in these texts, the frequent grotesquery of “overpopulation gothic” can be traced to another cause. The distortions, contortions, absurdities, and deformations of much overpopulation fiction enact the strain of representing the broad time and spatial scales of world demography in a narrative form on the immediate human scale. With overpopulation, or climate change, what seems just normal, or discounted, on the day-to-day scale—the slight expansion of a settlement, a new power station, a third child, an academic flying to a conference—becomes part of a dynamic that could appear monstrous at the scale of decades or centuries, and which thus becomes engaged through a reverse literary strategy of depicting the day-to-day scale as a form of the monstrous or fantastic, as in the continually self-dividing rooms of Ballard’s “Billenium.”
An instance of this literary strategy is an early scene in Burgess’s The Wanting Seed. There, a Dr. Acheson cheerfully consoles the main protagonist, Tristram, and his wife, Beatrice-Joanna, on the death of their infant son from meningitis. In this scene a mode of thinking that might seem rational or defensible when the topic is demographic statistics (“‘We do care about human life,’ said Dr Acheson, stern. ‘We care about stability. We care about not letting the earth get overrun.’”) becomes shocking and inappropriate when transposed into an individual attitude in an individual case (“‘You’ve had your recommended ration. No more motherhood for you. Try to stop feeling like a mother.’ He patted her again”).36 Likewise, a fact normally expressed en masse as a statistic about mortality rates is personified, as it were, in one doctor’s statement about the death of one child, and the demographic focus on resource use is being extrapolated and caricatured in the image of the child’s body as a source of recycled phosphorus pentoxide: “Think of this in national terms, in global terms. One mouth less to feed. One more half-kilo of phosphorus pentoxide to nourish the earth, in a sense, you know, Mr Foxe, you’ll be getting your son back again.”37
In effect, the grotesque in such texts can be read as a scalar disjunction made sensuous. It enacts a kind of scalar interference between representational frames. Other than being normalized as the internal/psychic made sensuous and external, such gothic tropes or plots would express external contexts whose force is precisely their resistance to being accountable or internalizable as matters of attitude or cultural politics alone, the effects of an impersonal scalar dynamic, the emergent effects merely of very large numbers.
Burgess’s monstrous/comic scene encapsulates the basic rhetorical strategy of many of these texts and a resulting sense of the incongruous in many of them. In the most thoughtful of fictions on overpopulation, Lionel Shriver’s Game Control (1994), set in a fast “developing” Kenya, the demographic expert and dangerously charismatic antihero Calvin Piper, with his pet monkey called “Malthus,” is a villain in the gothic tradition of the deranged scientist, plotting a culling of the human species. The novel’s main protagonist, Eleanor, is engaged in benevolent, noncoercive programs of social aid, including dispensing contraceptives, and she repeatedly irritates Piper with her sense of individual compassion and social conscience. She is his critic at first but later becomes a convert to his extreme, latently racist, and appalling views. Piper’s statements gain their sense of horror by dramatizing at the immediate personal scale issues whose import and significance (or otherwise) could be apparent only on a time scale of generations. Shriver’s grotesque comedy pivots around Piper’s seeming plan to save humanity by developing a drug that will selectively cull one-third of the world population:38
“In public we refer to our enterprise as the NAADP: New Angles on Active Demographic Prophylaxis. But that’s not what it really stands for.”
“Which is?”
Calvin grinned. “The National Association for the Advancement of Dead People.”39
Demographic expertise seems to demand a drug that will affect only certain parts of the population (i.e., the issue of target groups that renders population talk often so unethical):
“We have discussed designing an alternative pathogen for industrialized nations, with their below-replacement fertility rates. The North is threatened by an ageing population. Shrinking labour pools will force it to accept immigration, transforming the cultural complexion of these countries. The old are economically unproductive and burdensome to social systems. We recommend an agent that hits geriatric targets and leaves the juvenile cohort largely intact.”
Eleanor squirmed. She liked her grandmother.40
Likewise, in an exchange on HIV:
“You find high infection rates optimistic?”
“Threadgill is browned off with me. HIV—he thinks I invented it.”
“That’s preposterous!”
“Not really. And I was honoured.”41
Piper queries what, taking a very long-term view, it is to be “kind” or “generous” in relation to day-to-day life. He objects to Eleanor’s programs of humanitarian aid:
“You would be far more generous to launch into [the town of] Mathare with a machine gun.”
“I don’t think that kind of joke is very funny.”
“It isn’t a joke.”42
Eleanor gradually comes under his influence, describing the culling of elephants as “an act of love” (“Without culling, all the elephants would have starved. However paradoxically, cropping was an act of love”).43
What is incongruous or absurd or bad-joke-like in the earlier overpopulation dystopias is here artfully transmuted by Shriver into a kind of deliberate and knowing shock tactic. While gothic has always edged toward self-parody, these bizarre quotations from Game Control are not merely mocking or satirical of bigotry: they can also be read, with caveats, as engaging one of the most insidious features of the “Anthropocene,” the discrepancy between the appearance of human to human life at the daily familiar scale and the (most often invisible or merely inferred) emergence of sheer human numbers as a disruptively catalytic force in the workings of the Earth System. An Anthropocene gothic, so to speak, expressing a disjunction between issues of ethics considered at conflicting scales, becomes here a kind of horrific humor. Its force is to be more of a provocation to debate than to offer any palatable solution, with the question of whether issues of right and wrong are invariable, regardless of the spatial and temporal scales at which they are considered. Is shooting an elephant always a wrong to the species, or could it somehow mutate, over a time scale of generations, into a “good” or even “generous” action, “an act of love” even? What happens to terms like good, generous, and love in the process? The provocative wit of Shriver’s villain lies in such dislocations of scale and the disturbing way they torque given ethical terms.
Shriver’s “mad scientist” figure eventually gives himself over to the police, his deadly virus proving in fact harmless and his whole plot effectively a publicity stunt (“It so happens that intellectual courage is the only kind I’ve got”).44 The provocative humor of Piper’s grotesquery (e.g., shooting people seen as a kind of generosity) highlights another aspect of the insidiousness of overpopulation as an issue for literary representation. Does the fact that gothic tropes come so easily and even so inevitably to hand when describing global environmental threats also help make these things objects of psychological evasion, dismissal, or disbelief? For, however seriously discussed “the gothic” may be in the academy, with the general public, gothic remains overwhelmingly an aesthetic category associated with sensationalism and entertainment. Studies of why people enjoy horror, fear, and anxiety in literature or film almost always relate this enjoyment to an accompanying feeling of pleasure received from the implicit or assumed knowledge that, whatever the horrors being represented, its consumers are themselves quite safe (just as it turns out always to have been the case behind Piper’s plans for mass murder).45 To represent the Anthropocene in gothic terms may risk aiding forms of environmental denial, insofar as it deploys material, images, and narratives whose underlying signal of “you are safe” may well be misleading. If overpopulation as a long-term environmental problem resists sensuous representation except in gothic form, this may be disconcertingly close to the statement that such overpopulation cannot be represented except in a form that resists its being taken as seriously as it should be.
The insidious elusiveness of the issue is apparent in other common fictional plots concerning overpopulation. In many texts, the scalar challenge of representing global overpopulation is effectively sidestepped, and the focus is on a single heroine or group depicted as a victim of population measures that have become a form of tyranny. This focus enables the text to realize itself as personal drama or adventure story on the normal individual human scale. We see repeatedly scenarios of a mother hiding her illegal additional child from the persecutions of the “population police,” while in Margaret Peterson Haddix’s young adult Shadow Children series,46 the vicissitudes of an illegal and hidden third child are used to express standard issues of maturation and identity. Alternatively, we read of dystopias in which population politics instantiate a form of brutally intensified and institutionalized misogyny, as in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985).47 Such texts, with their powerful focus on individual lives, engage crucial social questions, but they are not about overpopulation as a current, pressing global issue. The issue of the effect of human numbers over broad time scales is largely evaded by dramatizing issues of obvious individual or social wrong in the future.
Keith Clavin has highlighted the contradictory dynamics of such dystopian scenarios in two recent films, Snowpiercer (2013), directed by Bong Joon-ho, and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), directed by George Miller.48 In Snowpiercer, a seemingly genuine battle against an enemy is revealed as a constructed scenario to keep human numbers down, as in a similarly bizarre episode of Burgess’s The Wanting Seed half a century earlier. In Mad Max: Fury Road, a viciously patriarchal tyranny in a severely resource-depleted world is overthrown by a rising matriarch, but the film ends on her moment of victory without any adequate sense of how this triumph and liberation will address the dearth of resources. Both films, Clavin argues, implicitly correlate measures for a sustainable population with a murderous tyranny, for the villains are always engaged in forms of population management, so that the audience will identify with the humanist and individualist values of those who resist it. Yet this is to evade the question of whether the triumph of issues of social equity can genuinely address those pressures of overpopulation out of which the tyranny arose. In using clichés of overpopulation as a whipping boy for the rather too automatic affirmation of humanist values, Clavin argues, such plots are surreptitiously endorsing modes of thinking that were implicated in the causes of overpopulation in the first place. In sum, it would seem that overpopulation can hardly be represented as an issue for the individual person except in the form of protests against hypothetical measures to engage it. The interest of overpopulation, from a rhetorical or formal point of view, becomes, why does it not seem representable as a serious and worthy environmental issue except in terms that come close to its evasive dismissal or denial? This challenge of its representation, on top of all the other moral issues it raises, renders overpopulation especially insidious as an environmental issue.
Notes
“Humans and Big Ag Livestock Now Account for 96 Percent of Mammal Biomass,” Ecowatch, May 23, 2018, https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-animals-2571413930.html.
“Today, the world’s population continues to grow, albeit more slowly than in the recent past. Ten years ago, the global population was growing by 1.24 per cent per year. Today, it is growing by 1.10 per cent per year, yielding an additional 83 million people annually. The world’s population is projected to increase by slightly more than one billion people over the next 13 years, reaching 8.6 billion in 2030, and to increase further to 9.8 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100.” See “World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision Key Findings and Advance Tables,” United Nations, 2017, 2, https://population.un.org/wpp/Publications/Files/WPP2017_KeyFindings.pdf.
“The Stature of Man: Population Bomb on Spaceship Earth,” in Scale in Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Tavel Clarke and David Wittenberg (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 157.
“Zombie Overpopulation,” 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfl3zJA6HbY.
Roy Beck and Leon Kolankiewicz have analyzed how, in the period 1970–98, American environmental groups, such as the Sierra Club, by forming close alliances with and taking up the programs of civil rights groups, gradually came to downplay and eschew questions of overpopulation that had earlier been very prominent in their campaigning work on wilderness protection: “While the agendas of the human rights and environmental groups should not be seen as fundamentally at odds with each other, they nonetheless are not the same. . . . The human rights agenda is by necessity oriented toward the immediate needs of individuals. The environmental agenda has often also dealt with immediate threats but just as often works for goals that are far into the future. . . . Human rights work is about people getting their full share of rights; its ideal is freedom. Environmental work is often about asking or forcing people to restrain their rights and freedoms in order to protect the natural world from human actions, so that people who are not yet born might someday be able to enjoy and prosper in a healthy, undiminished environment. The fact that human rights work and environmental work involve tensions between goals and philosophy does not mean that either of them must be seen as wrong or right.” “The Environmental Movement’s Retreat from Advocating U.S. Population Stabilization (1970–1998): A First Draft of History,” Journal of Policy History 12, no. 1 (2000): 144–45. The paper concludes that the issue of overpopulation was gradually dropped for political reasons, that is, preserving the public status of the environmental community: “By the 1990s, it may be that environmental groups had conceded priority to the human rights groups and at least tacitly had agreed to press for environmental protections only when they did not conflict with the human rights agenda. [Michael] Hanauer wrote that during the 1990s the moral high ground was often yielded to those who gave precedence to human rights over environmental protection” (145).
See Alison Bashford’s Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 41.
See Prajakta R. Gupte, “India: ‘The Emergency’ and the Politics of Mass Sterilization,” Asian Studies 22, no. 3 (2017): 40–44.
I use this rather modish term guardedly, and in the sense defended in my The Value of Ecocriticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 19–22.
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “catalyst,” https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/catalyst.
Ian Goldin, ed., Is the Planet Full? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). In Anthony B. Atkinson’s analysis of what overpopulation is, based on a version of utilitarian economics, we read “the cost of an additional person is equal to what they consume minus what they produce,” an equation that only makes sense in a framework of a kind of human solipsism. Such brutal anthropocentrism is also the unexamined basis for such seemingly reasonable statements in demography as “the world could be ‘overpopulated’ with five billion people with unsustainably high consumption levels whereas over ten billion poor people with low consumption levels would not exhaust the planet’s carrying capacity. This is not to say that poverty is good” (Goldin, 2). Toby Ord weighs the issues of whether increasing population should be considered a benefit, given that each additional human life has its intrinsic, positive value. Such anthropocentricism also underlies the notion of “sustainable development” stemming from the Brundtland Commission Report of 1987 (i.e., the aim of meeting current needs for the world’s human population without compromising the ability of future generations to meet those same needs).
Goldin, 18.
The constitutive anthropocentrism of debates about population appears in a different guise in the rising concern with what is being called “underpopulation.” With falling birthrates, now at less than replacement in the most “developed” countries, there is talk of the damaging effects of “underpopulation”—yet this underpopulation is an alarmingly slanted term. The sense of deficiency at work in the under- is predicated on the numbers needed by the projected demands of a capitalist economy. Whereas the term overpopulation usually describes a condition relating to ecological limits and notions of “carrying capacity,” underpopulation has a primarily economic and political reference only, being a form of pressure on the perpetuation of current (overpopulated) modes of social organization that already doom innumerable kinds of nonhuman life to extinction. In sum, both terms in their very different ways condense within themselves multiple and conflicting assumptions and moral evasions.
Karin Kuhlemann, “Complexity, Creeping Normalcy and Conceit: Sexy and Unsexy Catastrophic Risks,” foresight, March 2018.
Samantha Morgan, “Malthusian Ideas: Sheri S. Tepper’s New Ecological Misery,” ISLE 22, no. 2 (2015): 225.
Paolo Bacigalupi, Pump Six (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2018), 137–62.
Quoted in Simon Critchley, On Humour (London: Routledge, 2002), 55.
J. G. Ballard, The Complete Short Stories (London: Flamingo, 2001), 267–78.
Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed (1962; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 1976).
Burgess, 31.
Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room! (1966; repr., London: Penguin, 2008).
Richard Fleischer, dir., Soylent Green (United States: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1973).
In fact, these twentieth-century overpopulation clichés continue urban gothic tropes established in nineteenth-century literature about overcrowding in vast cities, really a simpler and rather different issue from global overpopulation. For Victorian images of urban population, see Emily Steinlight, Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2018).
John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar (New York: Doubleday, 1968).
Neal Bukeavich, “‘Are We Adopting the Right Measures to Cope?’: Ecocrisis in John Brunner’s ‘Stand on Zanzibar,’” Science Fiction Studies 29 (2002): 56.
Lionel Shriver, Game Control (1994; repr., London: Borough Press, 2015).
Tobias Menely and Jessie Oak Taylor, eds., Anthropocene Reading (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 5.
Jerrold Hogle, ed., Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3.
Hogle, 4.
Robert Bloch, This Crowded Earth (1958; repr., New York: Belmont Books, 1968).
Title story of Welcome to the Monkey House (New York: Delacorte Press, 1968).
Max Ehrlich, The Edict (New York: Doubleday, 1971).
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (New York: Avon Books, 1971).
Steven Bruhm, “The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It,” in Hogle, Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, 271.
Andreu Domingo, “Demodystopias: Prospects of Demographic Hell,” Population and Development Review 34 (2008): 725–45.
Domingo also rightly objects that the disruption depicted in these dystopias is politically evasive, for these are contexts in which “scarcity is not a problem of production and distribution, but a simple consequence of too many people” (731).
Burgess, Seed, 5.
Burgess, 4.
This is a common supervillain plot, repeated for example in Dan Brown’s thriller Inferno (New York: Doubleday, 2013) about a mad-scientist plot to release a drug that would sterilize a third of humanity. As often, overpopulation is not really being engaged as an issue but merely exploited as a handy motive for sensationalized crime.
Shriver, Game Control, 257.
Shriver, 250.
Shriver, 57.
Shriver, 55.
Shriver, 141.
Shriver, 372.
See Mathias Clasen, “Why Horror Is So Popular: And May Even Be Good for Us,” ScienceNordic, January 7, 2018, http://sciencenordic.com/why-horror-so-popular. “Clasen and his team believe that people who seek out and enjoy horror may do so because it helps them feel a sense of control or mastery over their fears.” Chelsea Whyte, “The Benefits of Being Scared,” New Scientist, February 9, 2019, 8.
Shadow Children (boxed set): Among the Hidden; Among the Impostors; Among the Betrayed; Among the Barons (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004).
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1985).
Keith Clavin, “Living Again: Population and Paradox in Recent Cinema,” Oxford Literary Review 38, no.1 (2016): 47–66.
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