Meehan: You are listening to the LRB podcast. I'm Meehan Crist, and welcome to the third episode in a special four-part series exploring the intersection of climate, chaos, and reproductive justice. In our last episode, I spoke with evolutionary biologist and feminist scholar Banu Subramaniam about the intersections of science, culture, and feminist thought, as well as the dangers of biological determinism. Today I'm joined by writer and historian Alison Bashford, Laureate Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. She's Director of the Laureate Centre for History & Population, as well as founding co-director of the New Earth Histories Research Program. Throughout her career, most notably in her book Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth, she has traced the ways thinking about population has transformed from the 18th to the 20th centuries. Most relevant to today's conversation, she has written about the rise of international efforts to control global population, from the work of 18th-century political economist Thomas Malthus, who argued that the relationship between food production and population makes poverty inevitable, through the panic associated with the bestselling 1968 book The Population Bomb, written by Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich and his uncredited wife Anne, which predicted mass famines in the 1970s because of overpopulation. She's currently interested in the question, how do we think about population in the Anthropocene? For some, this is not a question we should be asking at all, and is one that is loaded with historical trauma. For others, questions about population are still relevant and bear rigorous investigation. Alison has been awarded the Royal Society of New South Wales, History and Philosophy of Science Medal for transformative historical studies of the biomedical and environmental sciences, as well as the Dan David Prise for her scholarship in the history of medicine. Her books include The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus, and most recently, An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family. It's a pleasure and an honour to have her as our guest today. Alison, welcome to the LRB Podcast.
Alison: Thank you very much, a pleasure to be talking with you.
Meehan: So you were one of the first people I thought of for this series because I've been tracking this resurgence of population discourse in science and the media, and your work has been central to how I think about the history of not just efforts to control population, but also the intellectual history of how and why people have thought about population as they do. So I thought we'd start with your work on ideas about population as they emerged in the 20th century. And as your work has shown, historically thinking about population was about women's reproduction and sexuality, but in the early 20th century, population was also perceived as a problem of density, right? Of crowding and land use. So it was also about things like food and soil and nitrogen cycles. Could you talk a bit about the earth systems politics—if we can call it that—that was standard for earlier generations of demographers and economists and the population establishment more generally?
Alison: So our generation's plural concept of population, I think, is first and foremost one about reproduction, as you say, and bodies and birth control—and so it should be. Population can never not be about any of those questions. But when I first started thinking about writing a large book on population, what took me a bit by surprise was the extent to which that formulation of population—let's call it the ‘reproductive’ or what historians and sociologists would call the ‘biopolitics of population,’ all the questions about human bodies and the life science understandings of human bodies and how we can affect that—that that was one strand of what earlier population lobbyists and interest groups and scientists understood to make up the question. Behind and around that, and probably more than understanding population as a biopolitical question, was this sense in which population was spatial. It was about density, and most importantly, it was automatically for earlier generations about food. And once you have something to be a question of food, then it's always a question of land yield, fertility of soil, as much as fertility of women. And there's another element that I learned very early on when I did my research for the book, which I called Global Population. And that is to say that population for earlier generations in the 19th and 20th centuries was an economic question about standards of living, about how big or small a population should be to achieve, for example, maximum employment rates. So population was probably first and foremost a question that economists raised, and that is why so many political economists in the early 19th century took up the population question. So there's a kind of a way in which by the time you get to, let's say 1927, between the two World Wars, which is when the very first World Population Conference was undertaken in Geneva—most of the people who came to speak at that conference were not doctors of reproductive medicine or of the new endocrinology or certainly not the very active birth control lobbyists of that era. They were more likely to be agricultural scientists, geographers interested in density, international lawyers dealing with how do we move people across the globe to kind of even up the different densities of populations, and mainly economists. One of the things that makes me kind of stick with this question of population is not only its primary significance—now in the 21st century, and therefore the need to understand the history—but the fact that the history itself is often far more surprising and involves far greater a range of expertise than I think is commonly realised.
Meehan: One of the things I find most fascinating about this 20th century history of efforts to control global population is the involvement of people who were deeply committed to anti-colonialist or other leftist projects, right? So the movement's leader in the US Senate, for example, was Ernest Gruening. He was a Democrat from Alaska who was an expert on Latin American affairs and a member of the NAACP, as well as a former writer for The Nation, who was known as an anti-imperialist activist and leader in the struggle eventually against the Vietnam War. How does the involvement of people like Gruening complicate your understanding of population or the history of the population movement?
Alison: I think that our generations receive the population question quite rightly as a highly problematic question—that we receive a history, which is true. This is fact not interpretation. We receive a history of attempts to manage fertility increasing or decreasing that is attached to coercive measures, highly problematic measures, to say the least. It's a history of unwilling intervention into individual people's lives, and that what we receive also in our generations is a very fine and very strong critique of that—as we should—and a very successful one, and actually a very familiar one. In the success of that critique, if I can put it that way—and we might want to undo this a little bit more—inside and behind and before that is strangely a less recognised history of the connection of progressives, the left, and probably the most difficult to understand is, as you say, a string of very important anti-colonial figures who are also deeply invested in and put a lot of their life effort into managing fertility. And that's the hard one to understand, but there's a whole string of people who do this and we might take for example—or your instance is a very good one—another instance is a British doctor, John Boyd or Lord Boyd Orr as he came to be known, and he was very involved in the earliest immediate post-war late World War II UN movements in population, but also in agriculture. And he was, for example, a medical doctor who became very involved in policy around nutrition in the interwar period in Britain. And his entire politics in Britain in that interwar period was concerned with how often very poor people in urban and also remote parts of Britain were children, were undernourished, and living lives that were too short. And we need to remember that even in Britain, there really was great poverty over the 19th and early 20th century, and in his own backyard, as it were, John Boyd Orr was trying to close that health gap. And after the war, he implemented that actually across the global stage when the new UN Agricultural Organisation and the WHO were able to give him a platform to really put on the political agenda. Again, you know, people already knew this of course, but he was able to operate in that new international sphere to think about how food and population were linked to put on the political agenda. As he put it, the question of population and population growth always meant in his view that there were people who lived with an improper standard of living, who didn't get enough nutrition, and in his view, population growth, if that could be managed, people's health via better nutrition would be improved. Now, we may disagree with that, and we may also disagree with the measures through which that was implemented—although himself he was deeply opposed to anything coercive. Nonetheless, I think that in that instance, and in many others, there's this long history of connecting what came to be called ‘population control’ or ‘fertility control’ that was implemented by people whose politics can be a little surprising. So it's not, well—it is a history of fascism in the 20th century, but what also needs to be recognised is that it's also part of the history of anti-colonialism and the critique of the former, the critique of the history and fascism, is so strong and right that this history of—and I realise this will be a very unpopular thing to say—the history of the connection between anti-colonialism and population control has slid to one side, and it's not the only strand, but it's certainly a strand of the history of population that I'm quite interested in.
Meehan: It’s interesting to me—you repeatedly, I've heard you speak and talk about things that you feel might not be received well. And you say that you come from a training in medical history and the history of women's health in the context of a 1990s feminist post-colonialism. So that's sort of your base, I guess. But you've also described your approach to doing history as agnostic. I'm thinking here in particular of your approach to writing about Paul Ehrlich, who is today widely reviled on the left, and particularly on the feminist left. Could you describe this agnostic approach, perhaps using your work on Ehrlich as an example? What were you able to see or understand about him that you think you might have missed if you had approached his life or his work with a leftist or feminist critique?
Alison: Thank you and thank you for such close reading. That's how I perceive that question—my statement—of agnosticism, which I made when I wrote the Global Population book, which I think was 2014. And here we are nearly 10 years on. So it is absolutely the case—and I think it's really important, this is what enables my agnosticism, so to say—that I was trained as a historian in the 1990s, which was a really remarkable, fabulous moment in which to be asked to absorb as a training historian, a really high moment of feminist critique, a really high moment of post-colonial scholarship. And in the place where I was trained—which is within Australian conversation in the 1990s—those two things came together incredibly strongly. So I'm always grateful for the happenstance of my intellectual training, which made my foundation not just history, but a very important moment of a combination of feminism and post-colonialism. And so really, I was trained into a generation of historians for whom critique was the point and for whom critical history was the point. And I did that for better or worse, for many decades, and through many books. And for whatever reason, for me, it became—I don't want to say too easy. Critique is never easy. But for me personally, it became something near predictable. So in other words, I would see a highly problematic historical problem, and the capacity or the argument about that—to be understood through some combination of feminism and postcolonialism—became not personally predictable, but for the whole field, something that we all did all the time. And so in a way that one's argument could become quite straightforward, I suppose. So when I sat down to write the Global Population book, I thought, well, I could write, you know, 150,000 words, which again, told us the problems of population, but I thought, we already know that. I already know that. Partly because the work had been done so well by so many colleagues and to some extent my own small part in it. And then came my—the word I used then was being ‘agnostic.’ I didn't want to be, and actually remain, un-positioned about managing fertility in different contexts and over time, except obviously for the question of coercion and willingness. I mean, I take that as red, but I remain un-positioned—and was then—about whether it was a good or bad thing and whether we can agree or disagree with the players. It became much more important to me not to just push that line, but to stand back and read my historical players and actors and sources at their own word. That's what I tried. So instead of just presuming that I would be laying over my own predictable critique on top of what they were saying or doing, it became a private method in the first instance, if I can put it that way, of agnosticism. It's like—suspend that. Just read their work for what they're saying and see what else can arise. And for myself, I learned much more that way. So I learned with respect to Ehrlich to pay attention to his—less his population politics or what he was insisting be done about it, and more the ecological training, for example. So it made me think, okay, what's his early expertise? How does he think about, you know, the number of insects in his experiments? What's his training in thinking about ecology of insects in his experiments, fertility, and mortality, and the food that they don't or do get. What was he reading as a young person? How does he get to the question of population? And reading Ehrlich, and to be honest, many others, including one of my personal favourites, the extraordinary Indian economist, then ecologist, Radhakamal Mukherjee, who also takes on 1920s and ‘30s ecological training. And so, in a way, suspending my critique of Paul Ehrlich let me become much more interested in his work as a scientist, his ecological training. That led to, for me, the revelatory question then, now standard understanding, that insect ecology, plant ecology, biological ecology—and I mean that in the technical sense, not ‘ecology’ as it stands for environmentalism, ecology as in the kind of new 1890s to 1920s discipline of how do we think about number of organisms in space and what affects that, and the space can be anything from a glass jar in the laboratory to the planet—how do we think about density, number of humans, what affects fertility or mortality? It's that whole discipline in my view of ecology that became the common factor in the 1930s, let's say, that produced the catastrophic population experts like Ehrlich in the 1950s and ‘60s and ‘70s. So that's an instance for me of how—let's call it agnosticism—not coming to Ehrlich's work, or especially Mukherjee’s work, through the critique, but instead just reading the words on the page, seeing what else was raised and learning in the Global Population book that economy and ecology were deeply, deeply linked. And for me, that gave me another strand of intellectual history through which I could understand what happened in the kind of Ehrlich 1968-onwards population bomb moment.
Meehan: So you then have in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, in that population bomb moment, you have people like biologist and social ecologist Barry Commoner, or the anarchist scholar, Murray Bookchin, really pushing back against Ehrlich and the population establishment, questioning what they saw as the Malthusian underpinnings of the population bomb logics. They argued that it's just too simple to frame population as the driver of social problems when you're talking about humans inside social systems. You know, ecological devastation cannot be reduced to numbers of humans, and they really argued against reaching for population as a solution to complex social problems. I wonder how you see those critiques, those later critiques, bringing in more complexity to the biological ecological view, calling into question some of those earlier earth systems politics.
Alison: Yes. The first thing I want to say is that the realisation of the complexity there is not new either. This is why I continue to love as a historian the population problem—it’s that all the way through the 19th century, and even earlier actually, this multi-variable question is something that is alive in everybody's thoughts, you know? So it's very few people who understand population as a singular solution or a problem that is created by a single variable. So that complication doesn't just appear in the 1960s generation, although they often thought it did. And we might actually say that for our current discussion as well, you know, that it's imagined that we're the first to see population as having multiple variables. But you know, it is a really important moment, that ‘60s and ‘70s moment when earth system scientists come on board. And it is a really, really important moment when the early environmentalism, that you are starting to talk about there, picks up the population question and puts it alongside other variables, you know? And therein lies the lesson for us now, in fact. But I think that the crucial thing about us understanding that population bomb moment—and then the immediate complicating of the population bomb thesis—is that it becomes tied up with a planetary politics. The earth system scientists are there inside that conversation. Ours is not the first generation to put earth system science and planetary catastrophe and human action and inaction together. In my view, that has already been rehearsed or given to us as important experience. And environmentalists now—and also population critics—don't want to understand that moment as part of our own and their own history. But in my view, that's a matter of fact, not interpretation. So we may not like to link, let's say, a left-oriented environmentalism now to that particular debate in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but in my view, it's absolutely a key precursor.
Meehan: And even earlier, right? In the 1920s and ‘30s, there was kind of an earlier moment of population panic that all of the sort of early establishment was responding to. And then it was more a question—they thought the solution—was more a question of migration, right? We'll move bodies around the earth and we'll get the right number of people in the right places so that they can take advantage of food resources. Over time, of course, it all has this very top-down managerial kind of like we—quote, unquote ‘we’—are going to control population to everyone's benefit as we can imagine it. We are at another one of these moments, and for myself in looking at the present tense, I am struck mostly by how we just seem to be asking the same questions over and over and over. And the context is different each time, but we do seem to be at a moment of asking these questions again and perhaps failing to make the connections throughout history and look at the ways that we have asked and failed to answer them before. I think this question of how to think about population in the Anthropocene in particular is one I don't think people have grappled with fully. And given the resurgent discourse around population in the context of climate chaos, this grappling seems increasingly urgent. How should we think about population in the Anthropocene? What is it that you don't know and what would you most like to understand?
Alison: I am completely fascinated with how we think about population in the Anthropocene. This is a very live question for me, and there's several ways of asking that question. One is, how do we think about population in the Anthropocene? And another one is, how should we? And they're two very different questions. And in a way, how should we think about population in the Anthropocene is not my expertise. You know, for me, that's the expertise of ecological economists who can put the population variable alongside many others. How do we think about population in the Anthropocene is something that as a social scientist, I can begin to answer. And it really interests me this question—how do we think about the population in the Anthropocene? In the academic world, in the academic sphere, we know that books and studies on the Anthropocene quite rightly emerge constantly. The idea has caught so many of us in earth sciences as in human and life sciences. You know, it's conceptually the richest zone and the most critical zone, actually, for a lot of academic thought at the moment. But what I can say is that the population question, however we understand it, is often side-lined. And that interests me for a start. So under the question—how do we think about population in the Anthropocene?—one thing that I would say is: with a very tentative approach, if not a side-lining or sidestepping approach. And all people who think about the Anthropocene won't think quite clearly, won't think about population at all, or won't enter that into the conversation. So for a start, that interests me.
Meehan: Do you think that this is a result of the power of the critique that emerged in the nineties around the population establishment that the feminist critique of the 20th century efforts?
Alison: I do. And that really interests me. So why isn't population—I'm not saying it’s agnostic again or that it should be or even how it should be—but why it isn't in constant discussion now, certainly in the way it was for the previous moment of planetary catastrophe? And of course the terms should be in the light of lessons from there. But why it isn't definitely interests me. And I think that is, as you say, because of the great success of the critique of the 1960s and ‘70s moment. And that's something that happened over the 1980s, over the 1990s and into the current century. And long may that be so—so everybody listening should understand that I am not agnostic at all about the need for that critique, about the arguments of that critique. And I’m especially celebratory of the power of that critique—I was part of it. Nonetheless, I think that it has been so successful—in a way, it's an example of one of the most successful social science critiques ever. That it has kind of put the population question—even the desire or the need or the capacity or the will to think about fertility changes or mortality changes or longevity, or even the question of ultra-low fertility, which we are moving into now. That, in a way, all of that has gone off the agenda. And I don't think it should be; I think it should be on the agenda. Why do I think that? Not because I've got a position on whether, you know, fertility in a net way across the world should be higher or lower. I don't. I don't even have the expertise to say why that would be the case. But I think fertility, mortality, longevity, and migration, which was always the third element—that all of that goes up to make what I'm very happy to call still the ‘population question,’ and that that should be somehow feeding into our Anthropocene discussion. What I do want to add there, the reason why I feel that so strongly is that there's this blind spot. No—there's a gap. I think it’s better put as a gap between earth system scientists and historians and the social scientists who gave us the thesis of the great acceleration. And that is scholarship that came out—it’s probably 10 years old now, a bit more.
Meehan: And for listeners who might not be familiar with the term, ‘the great acceleration’ refers to this dramatic surge in both human and earth systems indicators, including things like human population, water use, food production, financialisation, direct foreign investment, international tourism, I think shrimp aquaculture is in there. And then things like ocean acidification, tropical forest loss, and greenhouse gases, right? All of these kinds of things that continues to this day. This surge is continuing. So you know, to peruse the catalogues of graphs spiking skyward is sobering because it's not just how much, but how fast—the staggering rates of change across these indicators are almost unprecedented.
Alison: So in the graphs which are readily available for anybody to see—just put in ‘great acceleration’—in the graphic illustrations of the many variables which go up to make the Anthropocene, the first variable, the first graph that is usually depicted, is population growth. And it is an interesting question actually, why it's first. They put it first, I think, because it's the most familiar and most recognisable, not causative. But when that thesis then transfers into Anthropocene discussion of various kinds, that variable disappears. And the reason it disappears is, as you say, the power of the critique, but also the massive difficulty in considering population politically. Because arguments about population and fertility can be taken up by the far left, by the far right, by neoliberalism, by individual control, by critique of coercion, by socialist states historically, by fascist states historically, by liberal governments historically. Arguments for fertility control, in fact, have a full range of politics, and mapping that politics is incredibly, incredibly hard. So the capacity for one’s statements to be taken up and misunderstood here, or taken up and misunderstood there, is very, very high. And of course for all of us in that field, the concern about being misunderstood is also very high. But there's also the case that, you know, there's parts of one's career where concern about being misunderstood has higher stakes than, frankly, later in one's career. The concern about being misunderstood for me anyway disappears and is replaced by fascination with actually laying all the things out. So, you know, to kind of shorten that answer: For me it is—again, agnostically, empirically, just at the letter of, as a matter of fact, not interpretation—important to take that first variable, which the great acceleration thesis exponent, absolutely always put first and put that into the Anthropocene discussion, not sidestep it or ignore it.
Meehan: So I saw a presentation that you gave about a year ago at Columbia where you talked about your interest in moving past that critique and sort of bringing population back into the conversation. And one of the other guests on this podcast series, Banu Subramaniam, was in attendance and she voiced a pretty strong objection. And she raised her concern very much in the spirit of feminist disagreement without, as she put it, ‘being fractious or being malicious, because these are intellectual ideas we need to really reconcile with given climate change.’ And I asked both of you if it would be all right for me to raise Banu’s objection here, because I think it gets at the heart of something very knotty and unresolved where the stakes are potentially very high. So Banu said to you, ‘I've been such a fan of your work for so long, and I will say, I'm so disappointed by this talk. I see the idea of population as a symptom rather than the focus of a problem. So that for me, population coheres as an issue around which lots of other issues cohere—questions of demography, questions of poverty, questions of inequality, and part of the issue of our response to population has been to take it as the central problem, which becomes a problem of women's sexuality and therefore curtailing women's sexuality with all the horrendous eugenic consequences that has taken on. ‘And so,’ she says, ‘I'm just a little surprised that you've gone to a different place, and I'm interested in why you've gone to a different place than I feel your writings have taken us.’ That was a year ago. So I'm guessing your thinking has evolved since then. So I'd like to offer you an opportunity to respond to this objection, which I think might be coming up in listener's minds, and it's one that I know you do indeed expect to arise.
Alison: Yes, I certainly expect it to rise, but I think that there's a misunderstanding that I've gone to a different place, actually. Because a close reading of my Global Population book and the introduction to that will actually reveal what I then called agnosticism, as you picked up. You know, that was not a positioned book. That was not a study, as I said earlier, which repeated the valid feminist critique of the population question. It was a book which took that as part of what was going on and historicise that. And so in a way, it's not a different place. It's a continuation of the same complex history that I tried to write. So I actually disagree that I've changed. I think I might have strengthened that interest. I might now have attached to what I used to call agnosticism, the literature on post-critique, which is a reason since then. I'd say that's the case, but it's certainly no shift from my feminist or post-colonial personal politics, that's for sure. But actually as a scholar, and as a historian, and a historian of the development of particular ideas, it's not a different place to what I presented then at all. I completely understand where the critique comes from. I'm quite interested in continuing to show—I understand—unpopular and uneasy and difficult anti-colonial politics, that the population question and population actors in the past of all kinds of national and regional origins. I continue to be interested in the connection between anti-colonialism and the population question. I was in the Global Population book. In fact, that it was one of my main arguments. So in a way I think it's a little bit of a misreading of that original statement. And it might have been a critique, actually, was a critique made then. But I don't back away from that, and I think that a few people have asked, how can we even use the term population without it connecting to eugenics or colonialism or coercion and so forth? And I understand the connection to all of those things because I've been, if I may say so, one of the main historians of the connections to all of those things. But I've also for many, many years, including that 2014 book, been a historian of the connection between being historically some kind of population lobbyist or activist—including for birth control—and being one of the 20th century’s more important anti-racists, for example. And that's why I continue to be interested in the instance of Julian Huxley, because someone like Julian Huxley—this is my interest, you know—it’s a matter of fact that Julian Huxley was quite an important lobbyist for birth control. He was quite an important anti-racist. No question about it. He was also president of the British Eugenics Society. So for me, as a historian and a thinker, how you explain those three things together is actually quite important. And it doesn't undo the feminist critique of—I mean, obviously—the feminist critique of the connection between population and eugenics, but it does start to explain it. And in a way, I think that that's been continuous for me, not a right-hand or a left-hand turn away. If anything, increasingly I see myself as a historian as an explainer of those very knotty problems. How someone is a birth control lobbyist, a eugenicist, and an anti-racist at the same time in the 1950s is something that takes quite a lot of experience to understand. And I'm much more interested in just facing that than in setting it aside and say, putting him in the eugenics category. The same goes for someone like Margaret Sanger. How you explain her interest is something that I feel is my expertise. I know the 1920s and ‘30s very well. I know her. Am I saying in any sense that we should not bring a critique of her eugenics? Absolutely not. I'm one of the historians who has put the critique on the table. But for me, that's not the end of the historical story. For me, a much more interesting, possibly more important thing is to understand how in past times those seemingly competing politics in fact sit together, if for no other reason than to show how that may also be happening in our own generation. We're hardly a generation of pure thinkers or pure lobbyists or pure politicians, if I can put it that way. There's always something that, you know, complicates or undoes our positions, and at the most surface level, having some understanding of how people in the past imagined themselves as progressive and in fact were progressive, and also enacted a kind of an anti-colonialism that was flawed, is something that I think is in the domain of a historian to do. And for me that's, you know, modestly important, but also sits in a domain as far more interesting to be frank, now, than simply laying over a critique that we already know.
Meehan: So as a historian, your work is focused on the past, and how we understand the past inevitably shapes our understanding of the present and what we see as possible in the future. So I'm curious what you see as history's lessons for us in terms of acting on population. So has history not taught us that population is the wrong lever for those in power to press in an attempt to address what are essentially social problems—in the case of the climate crisis and ecological breakdown, fossil fuel-driven over consumption, inequality, and the relentless drive for profit under globalised capitalism?
Alison: History has taught us that there is a need for thinking through reproductive justice. It is back to the critique, which I still stand by. History has taught us that population can be picked up anywhere on the political spectrum. Reproduction, health, and population—all three of those domains can be picked up and used, for any kind of politics actually. And that is because reproduction of humans is deeply sexed and gendered in all kinds of obvious ways. That the reproduction of humans is, you know, inescapable core human business that can be attached to all kinds of politics. So that's a lesson that we need to take forward. But that is also to say that it's not picked up by one kind of politics. There is wonderful scholarship at the moment, and I know this partly comes through your series of broadcasts, that connects how we think about reproductive control and reproductive justice and neoliberalism. So there is a politics around the idea of choice itself, and this has been explored in incredibly useful ways, both historically and now, but I think that what the study of history can show us is that in this instance, it's not just a right, a political right, that picks up and uses reproduction, sex, and gender, and turns that into population questions—but it's also a kind of a liberalism, the very idea of freedom. It's not just a good thing. In fact, it's got a politics to it as well that sits with reproduction often. And we can look at instances of that, and the idea of progressive and even anti-colonialism and environmentalism itself has a kind of a connection to picking up this question of the reproduction of humans and how that should or shouldn't happen in the future. So we've got complicated lessons right across the political spectrum that history shows us, but there's also a way in which—you know, I understand and I'm very interested in the critique of the politics of counting humans, and I'm very aware of—and I've done—decades of research on what drives that and what effects that has. Nonetheless, as we think about the future and connect the past to the future, it seems to me disingenuous that counting the biomass of us, the ‘anthro’ in Anthropocene, is somehow set aside. That in fact, our biomass we know is one of—not the, but one of—the variables moving forward in the energy balance that we're all in the middle of thinking through in such important ways. And so actually, I think it's disingenuous to think that, say, the discipline of demography isn't and shouldn't be part of the complicated political economy and ecology of humans on the planet in the past and going forward. And one of the most important things that I think going forward is, if we think about demographic charts, the phenomenon of the decline of fertility. And that is the great change from the time when I wrote my Global Population book to now—that there is this fascinating decline of fertility across the world. And we know, not least because of what the information demographers give us in counting humans, we know that that is uneven across the world. But we also know that across the world as a whole, net fertility has declined. And that is a very, very interesting thing to consider historically, to consider politically, to consider in terms of the Anthropocene. But the politics of fertility decline is also up for grabs, and we know that. We know that the politics of picking up what fertility decline means, whether it should be forced, whether it should be reversed, whether it should be implementable strongly here or there—that in a way that's also in some senses predictable politics. And why do we know that? Because in a way we've been there before, in and around reproductive justice. So linking that past and that very strange present that we are in around fertility decline, and in some places ultra-low fertility, I think as always, has a deep gender politics to it. And that's something that I'm very alert to, and I'm quite interested at the moment in thinking, how do we connect our moment, not just of Anthropocene, but also of fertility decline? And in some places of ultra-low fertility, how we put that together with the previous moment of planetary catastrophe of the 1960s, ‘70s, when problematically, but, influentially, reproduction and population was at the forefront. So what happens over that gap between these two moments of planetary crisis is something that I'm very interested in working through. And that is a matter of putting history, the present, and the Anthropocene future together.
Meehan: I’ve been excited to hear that you've shifted your attention to the period of the 1980s as a historian—the Reagan-Thatcher era—because it does seem there's a real gap in historical accounts of that period and how it has helped bring us to where we are today. To me it seems like a crucial period because that's where we see the rise of neoliberalism, which absolutely impacts discourse around fertility, reproduction, and all of these things that we've been talking about. Could you talk a bit about what interests you about this period in the 1980s?
Alison: So neoliberalism, I think, is a very, very important point and historical moment. And my group in the Centre that I direct have kind of landed on the 1980s as a group of historians. You know, I've got a couple of very clever Indian scholars who, like all Indian scholars, are deeply aware of the period from Nehru to The Emergency, and they're deeply aware of—or learned in, I should say—the politics of sex and gender and reproduction and sterilisation in The Emergency period.
Meehan: Just for listeners who might not be familiar with The Emergency period, could you say very briefly what that was?
Alison: Yeah. So it's a period in the mid-1970s when Indira Gandhi, then leading India, set in place a suite of emergency measures, one of which was understanding there to be such a crisis in population growth and therefore the economy. So population and economy are always linked. We need to always remember that—historically, they're always linked. So for her, population growth was something that was stymieing, in a crisis way, economic standards of living amongst other things in India. And so it played out in one version as unusual, and not technically coerced but highly pressured, systems for people to undergo—or have done upon them is probably a better way of putting it—sterilisation. So men and women. And so there were so-called ‘sterilisation camps’ and a whole lot of powers and authorities given to people on the ground, and incentives for people on the ground, for high numbers of people to be sterilised through all kinds of highly problematic, to say the least, measures. So there's this famous Emergency period, and it's linked to sterilisation of both men and women in India, followed up very quickly by a 1980s one-child policy in China. And so that mid-‘70s to ‘80s period in the histories of what states do about population, together along with the prior history of Nazi intervention in reproduction—that those three things over the period from the, let's say, the 1930s to the 1980s, the middle of the 20th century, became the three quintessential state phenomena to be critiqued for all kinds of right and obvious reasons. And in my view, those three things together became the grounds of the highly successful critique in feminist social science circles through the 1980s and ‘90s. That became the instances that made population unspeakable, only there for critique—quite, you know, rightly in these instances, of course—and then led to the kind of unspeakability of it, I think, in our current Anthropocene generation. So in India in the 1970s, this kind of quintessential problem moment of the sterilisation camps and the state that is forcing reproductive outcomes. And so we're all kind of familiar with that turnaround ‘70s, ‘80s moment that becomes a point of no return in the reproductive justice story. But then in our discussions in my Centre, we've kind of come to realise—what happened then? What happened in the 1980s? And even the 1990s in the population state reproduction, feminist economic circles? What happened in thinking about global economy and population and reproduction over that 1980s period? And we know that the 1980s is a moment between, you know, Reagan and Thatcher, when we have neoliberalism, when we have a kind of a discourse of apparent freedom, apparent political freedom, but really given to us through the idea of choice. It's also the moment when assisted reproductive technologies comes on board, and it's also the moment when—this is the connection that we need to think through in the 1980s—in the United States, on the one hand, there's this idea of freedom. On the other hand, Reagan is undoing birth control freedoms, actually. And Reagan's apparent neoliberalism is making abortion and birth control less available, and he's undoing birth control freedoms in various parts of the world to where he's giving aid. So in a way, it's this strange moment where there's this neoliberal, apparent freedom of choice that becomes the 1980s mantra. But at the same time, for Reagan's liberalism especially, it's an undoing of capacity for individuals to manage their own reproductive choices. So really moving forward, what happens in the 1980s is something that—and across the world and in different regions—is something that my group and others are very, very interested in working through. And I think that will start to bridge the gap between that well-known moment of planetary catastrophe, for better or worse, followed up quickly by two states that are just way too powerful and interested in managing people's reproduction, and bridging that gap to the moment when greenhouse gases, then climate change, then Anthropocene becomes the kind of language or reality of planetary crisis. So that late 20th century moment I think is very interesting. In my view, the person who's mapped that the best for us is Diana Coole, a political scientist, then from the London School of Economics, I believe. And I think that her work in mapping the global politics of the 1980s and connecting that to reproductive politics and population arguments, I think, is the foundational work for us to understand this key moment.
Meehan: And it does seem like this neoliberal agenda can be found underpinning many of today's efforts led by organisations, mostly based in the Global North, to increase access to contraception and women's health services in the Global South. This is all now done, you know, with a deep awareness of coercion and still trying to parse what is and is not coercive and how, you know, free choice and the idea of reproductive freedoms map onto the kind of services that these organisations are trying to provide. And many of these programs are providing lifesaving services that local women say that they want, but some of them still include reducing women's fertility, even with specific fertility targets as a goal. And the idea is sort of that with fewer mouths to feed and less care work to perform at home, these women will have more time and more energy and money, and so this lighter economic burden that results from having fewer children, particularly if coupled with more opportunities for women to work outside the home, can help lift families out of poverty. Again, this is an old argument in a new context, and sometimes the context of this is climate change and climate risk, but I'm troubled that the underlying goal is not necessarily women's health or ‘women's empowerment,’ quote unquote, which is a big buzzword in development circles. But rather the goal remains reducing women's fertility. But now the idea is to reduce women's fertility so that they can work longer hours, thus increasing profits for local elites or multinational corporations. And I wonder if, given your understanding of the history of eugenics and population control, I wonder if you think it matters what the goal of such programs are. Does it change their approaches and outcomes in ways that are meaningful for the women that they serve? Or should we just say, well, they're supplying needed reproductive healthcare and contraception and so, you know, let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Alison: Yeah, I mean, it seems to me to be unarguable that it matters what the objective is because that objective shapes what's done and how it's done and perhaps most importantly, to whom things are—in, in big scare, scare quotes—"offered” and delivered. And so the objective should always be sought, or declared, or found, or wondered about. And I think I'm likely to think about it differently to the person on the ground with all kinds of experience, of course, who may answer, ‘give me the materials, give me the funding, and I'll deliver this, what people want,’ or that they would have one answer. My answer would be that, A, we should expect and not be surprised by what I would call a political economy of reproduction and population, where labour and work and women working is always part of the equation. And so in a way to go right back, it's no coincidence that Malthus, Adam Smith, Ricardo—all of these people who put reproduction and population on the table in ways that we may not like, but they certainly did it—that they were political economists for whom labour and wealth and standard of living all went together. So in a way, we should never be surprised, but we should always expect, that reproduction and labour when it comes to a kind of a system or a state level or an organisational level—it will touch questions of work and labour and for that matter efficiency very closely. We should expect it and not be surprised by it and analyse it. And I think that there are instances of that—that people do analyse, all over the world. And that we know of course, because of all the decades of work now of fantastic incisive feminist scholarship, that that plays out differently for men and women, that that touches women especially because of the question of reproductive capacity. And so this kind of world of the political economy of reproduction, I think is ongoing. And as you say, the context of that can be very subtly and cleverly changed in different ways. And I think that, in a way, my job as a historian is to also think through how ideas and languages of freedom itself don’t just sit as the wonderful alternative to a coercive political economy of population that can be enjoined and put to use and demonstrated and declared and even believed in. So one of the things that really interests me as a historian of reproduction—and sex and gender and population and feminism—is that in that cluster, there is a super interesting history of the idea of freedom itself. And it’s something that is different intellectual history ground. Because do I like freedom? Yes. Do I want freedom for everybody? Is freedom a very complicated thing? Yes. And in my own work—Nikolas Rose, the great British sociologist, his book Powers of Freedom, that freedom is not just a straightforward good but it has sneaky things inside it. That in a way that's been a very useful thing to bring to the history of reproduction. And that you know, when we take instances of, almost at every turn where you might have a very powerful organisation who wants to give funding—and this happens all the time, historically and now—gives funding to a pharmaceutical company to research or deliver contraceptives, that that can be done under the aegis of a kind of a freedom of women's health and a freedom of giving women access to contraceptives. Are we all for that? Yes. But in the very same act—in the very same idea of the granting of that freedom of access, let's say—is a range of other benefits that benefit the company. Obviously the pharmaceutical company that might then benefit the organisation or the plantation, where those women are working, and they get a very clear benefit in efficiency terms about having a pool of women who are going to keep working—let’s say, on the plantation—not taking however small amount about amount of time off to have children. So there's a way in which we should always expect these things to be part of the complex to be analysed, balanced, judged, called out. And for my very particular, modest input here—to be explained.
So I see, again, my own job and my own interest to be an explainer of those complexes, especially historically, rather than someone whose desire or job is to be in the business of flattening out and simplifying and putting one strand forward in a critique model. So that political economy of labour, women's reproductive choice is always understood to be micro and macro complexes with multiple agendas going on.
Meehan: I want to return very quickly before we end to the context and the question of falling birth rates, right? Because this seems to be one of the really striking developments of the 21st century, that for the first time in human history, if we're looking at a global level, global human population will peak and then begin to decline. And this is because in most places around the world, women are birthing fewer babies than at any other time in human history. This is profoundly interesting , and I think that people have not really begun to think through the implications of what this is going to mean for even the next coming decades. You definitely have governments who now see this as an existential threat, the idea of fertility decline. It's an economic threat, it's a security threat. There's all of these kinds of ways of thinking about it. You recently wrote an article for Unheard Magazine in which you put Elon Musk and the Huxley's into conversation, because I think you were thinking about this question of falling fertility rates and how to imagine it. So I wonder if you would just say a little bit about that article but also how you're thinking about falling fertility as a historical phenomenon and how we can begin to understand it in the present moment.
Alison: Yes, thank you. I did that right on the cusp of the launch of my most recent book, which is about the Huxley family. It is called An Intimate History of Evolution, and really the kind of nexus of that book was trying to come to grips with the Julian Huxley phenomenon of how you are an anti-racist eugenicist and a birth control lobbyist in one, you know. So that made me very interested in the Huxley family. But when I was asked to write a piece about population and reproduction and the Huxley's, I just happened to be receiving over Twitter, Elon Musk again about declaring the great future catastrophe, the current catastrophe, of ultra-low fertility and his line that this is the great crisis for humans and human survival and human economies and human wellbeing as we move forward. And there was just a moment where I couldn't but imagine a dinner table—you know that that enduring game of putting the idea of who you're going to ask at a dinner party together. People historically. And I had the idea of the misunderstanding that would happen if I had my two favourite Huxley's—Aldous Huxley and his brother Julian Huxley—who were great catastrophists around the population question from the 1950s, ‘60s, at a dinner table with Elon Musk. And for the Huxley Brothers, all they wanted to save the future planet—literally to save humans from themselves, to ensure the future of humanity, was a decline in fertility rates. That was for them in the 1950s and ‘60s the core and the bottom of everything. So when Aldous Huxley in the 1960s, I think it was, wrote his book, non-fiction book, New World Revisited after his 1930s book, Brave New World, his whole first chapter, his grounding question, was the problem of human fertility growth and how the most important thing that needed to be done was for that fertility to be reduced. And he and his brother were A-list speakers across the world in that era. And so it was so curious and strange to me that at a couple of generations, you've got this highly influential person to say the least, Elon Musk, arguing the reverse: The great problem in the world and for the planet going forward is, ultra, ultra-low fertility. So at my dinner table, I could see the Huxley brothers from the 1950s, ‘60s, simply not understanding fertility decline as anything but the great saviour of the planet, the great saving mechanism for humans going forward. And simply not being able to understand what Elon Musk and many in fact now see as the great catastrophe of fertility decline. And so the Huxley brothers just wouldn't be able to believe the numbers of fertility decline now—that the fertility rate is below two. And they would immodestly probably think that the world had been very sensible and had listened to them, but it would be a cause for celebration. So again, over that missing decades of the 1980s, 1990s, has also been this change from fertility growth to fertility decline as being the declared crisis. And I think that's really interesting. But it is the case that we also need to understand and recognise that for both problematic reasons and for reasons of—let's call it—freedom and the availability of contraception, fertility rates have dropped across the globe. And this is phenomenally interesting and important, and a world first in long, long human history. And it's connected to infant mortality. It's connected to longevity. It's connected to a vast generational change in what women expect for their lives. It's connected to different kinds of economies. It’s a multifactorial phenomenon—but a phenomenon it is, and it's happened because of the history of contraception. And it's happened because of different labour regimes and a different expectation for women's education. And it's something that we all need to come to terms with, and we don't know yet what the implications are. Listening carefully to demographers is really important in my view. It's one reason why I think thinking both net population and the politics of reproduction and reproduction justice together is really important. I think we need to be gathering up information again from economists of different orders going forward. We need to wonder what this means with respect to human biomass and Anthropocene and climate change mitigation. We need to be on edge and alert and put into top-gear feminist critique of states who are starting to insist again. We've seen that before.
Meehan: And when you say insist again, you're speaking of the resurgence of pro-natalism around the world.
Alison: Right. And we see that emerging—we see that idea. It's in some ways a different context now. In other ways, a highly predictable phenomenon—that of say, fascist Italy or fascist Germany, where there's a very well-documented history of pro-natalism that affects, we all know this as matter of fact, affects women and men completely differently.
So we need to be on high alert for that. But again, you know, connecting up proximate and distant histories to this phenomenon, I think is very important. So it is fascinating to me as a historian of how these ideas are connected. That for the people who are my historical actors in the Global Population book now written 10 years ago, and now at that point, density of humans on the planet and the idea of standing room only as it was put for that generation was the mantra over and over and over again. That idea of ‘standing room only’—if we keep at this rate, there will be no land left. You know, we can't just ship people off to Mars actually, as Elon Musk might like. That idea was put to bed, you know, generations ago. This idea of ‘standing room only,’ that phrase, was the title of many books in that earlier generation. And it's fascinating to me now that suddenly the bestseller titles are things like ‘Empty Planet.’ And so that change has actually happened over two, maybe three generations at a stretch. And that's a very, very sudden shift from one kind of crisis to another. And what stays the same, what we can predict in terms of politics, of reproduction, I think, needs to be on the agenda. And that's where I think—I hope—our history is useful. Meehan: And I would also argue the trajectory is not quite so clear. I don't feel like there was the standing room only moment and then it shifted and now we've moved into empty planet. I think both crises are happening at the same time right now in the media, in science, in popular discourse—depending on where you look, you see a different crisis. And to me that's really interesting because it suggests that we're at this potentially very crucial interstitial moment between our understandings of numbers of humans on the planet. And the shift may be happening, but I don't feel like it has quite occurred in any kind of neat way, if that makes sense. Alison: Right. And I think for the uninitiated, for many people, fertility decline and net population decline or are understood to be the same thing, but they're clearly not. And I think that when the fertility decline stats are out there and the data is out there, people imagine a net population decline in this generation or next generation. But, you know, this is why we need demographers. You know, it's very clear that fertility and mortality—mortality and life expectancy—are connected and that you can have a lowering, even a dramatically lowering fertility, and have increasing population even at quite a fast rate. Even if that rate of acceleration is slowing.
Meehan: And this is because fewer babies are being born, but populations are overall larger because people are living longer.
Alison: Because people are living longer. Exactly. And so I think there is that popular reception that fertility decline means population decline. And it doesn't necessarily. But it does raise the question, of course, this other question, which reproduction and population and infant mortality is always about, which is the question of aging. And that is the other new phenomenon of the late 20th century and 21st century—is the question of increasing longevity. Differentially across the globe, of course, and differentially, of course, problematically, within national populations as well. But as a whole, that is the other changing phenomenon of this era. But so these things, you know, reproduction and population and health and infant mortality, which is often the factor that falls away from a lot of reproduction and population conversation. The fact that actually infant mortality has reduced dramatically over the 20th century is something that I think needs to be talked about much more. And you know, those who insist on only presenting a critique of population, often put the dramatic decrease—the good decrease, of course, surely everybody would agree—of infant mortality into the conversation. That's a very common side-stepping actually, and I think needs to be on the agenda far more. This is also why, I think, population and Anthropocene need to be discussed together. And that's not to be taken as me positioned on what should or shouldn't be done about reproduction or population, but it is me positioned on—why wouldn't we talk about population and Anthropocene together? With all the smart work that's been done over the last several generations, when we've got these two unprecedented phenomena happening—one is climate change and the other is ultra-low fertility and fertility decline. That's unprecedented in human history. How are they related? Should we relate them? How does one impact the other? These seem to be unprecedented, very rapid changes in human history, connected to earth systems that I don't know why we wouldn't put them together and get very clever heads to think through whether, how, why should they be connected.
Meehan: Alison, it's been such a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much for joining us on the LRB podcast.
Alison: A great pleasure, and thank you.
Meehan: In the next episode going out two weeks from now, we'll finish up our special four-part series with feminist scholar Jade Sasser, exploring the relationships among the climate crisis and women's reproductive freedoms, health, and activism, and how these relationships are already evolving as we head into an increasingly uncertain future.
