Misdiagnosing Climate Change: Exploring the Interplay of Overpopulation and Overconsumption—Shashi Singh 

Last year, in the month of July, the actor and BJP MP Ravi Kishan proposed a bill to bring India’s population under control. Kishan argued that the way India’s population was rising, we were headed towards an explosion. Many were quick to discover the irony here, as Kishan himself is father to four children: three daughters, followed by a son. For the uninitiated, Kishan’s arguments may seem innocuous, for, after all, such rhetoric is common in the public sphere. Sometimes, this rhetoric is deployed to attack the Muslim community in India. The Hindu nationalist leader Sakshi Maharaj had once asserted, using dubious data, that the Muslim population was growing at an unprecedented rate, and that this would be detrimental for the country. My biology teacher in school once posed a very ‘thought-provoking’ question: Why should a father of two children pay taxes for the benefit of someone who has twenty? As a young, impressionable student, I had fully subscribed to the views of my teacher and, by logical extension, attributed all the problems that plagued India to overpopulation. For India to achieve the much-fetishized status of the ‘Vishwa Guru’ — which it allegedly had in an ancient, mythical past — it is imperative that it should bring its population under control. Furthermore, the concerns regarding overpopulation are not limited to how it hampers the development of a country. They also extend to the question of environmental degradation and climate change. It is argued that a growing population places immense stress on natural resources, leading to deforestation, the destruction of biodiversity, and increased greenhouse gas emissions.

These arguments about the perils of overpopulation have their origin in the theories of Thomas Malthus, an English economist and cleric. In his book An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798, he argued: ‘The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.’ In other words, an increase in population is irreconcilable with the resources available to sustain that population, whereas population tends to rise geometrically, resources grow at an arithmetic rate.

Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx had categorically denounced Malthus for his unscientific analysis of the relationship between population growth and the resources required to sustain it. He had even accused Malthus of ‘fiddling with figures’ in order to arrive at this conclusion. For Marx, the proposition that population growth was incompatible with resources was not a scientific truth but a lie ‘invented’ to pacify the poor with the knowledge that nothing could be done to ameliorate their living conditions. H. M. Drucker, ruminating on the Marxian concept of ideology, writes that Marx believed that every class needed a theory that would orient it to its world. Having failed to find a scientific basis to bolster its claims and justify its actions, the dominant class would patch up a theory and exalt it as truth to manufacture consent among the masses for its actions. It is from this vantage point that Marx characterised Malthus’ theory as nothing but crass ideological propaganda. The reason why it gained currency, contended Marx, was because it said what the new ascendant class of the bourgeoisie wanted to hear and disseminate.

After Marx, there have been a plethora of studies that have rejected the narrative of overpopulation. Despite evidence to the contrary, the Malthusian Spectre — the proposition that unchecked population growth can hamper development, resulting in severe forms of suffering — continues to haunt discourses surrounding climate change. Underlying the anxiety about overpopulation is the assumption that the human population grows at such a rate that the demand for food — and other necessities of life — always exceeds the supply. These ideologically-motivated, unscientific claims are used as a pretext to fuel xenophobia against immigrants. Even refugees are denied access to the country on the ground that they would be straining the resources of the host country. This unsubstantiated claim obscures the complex relationship between population growth and the availability of resources. 

The Global North tends to push the ball to the court of the Global South by putting the blame of all climate-related problems on their large populations. This very narrative of overpopulation — which has been called ‘ecofascism’ — is used as a pretext to deflect attention from the real causes that degrade the climate, such as overconsumption and accumulation of resources by the wealthy few, the production of industrial waste, and imperialist warmaking. Overpopulation in the Global South would pose a serious threat to the climate only if their living standards were akin to those in the Global North. Countries in the capitalist West, such as the United States, run on the ideology of overconsumption and surplus accumulation. Many climate-related issues can be attributed to their patterns of overconsumption. From closets teeming with unworn clothes to redundant gadgets stored in garages, homes have essentially been turned into storehouses for the superfluous. This excessive consumption has a direct and substantial impact on the climate as it initiates large-scale production, along with high levels of waste generation, a large part of which are non-biodegradable. In the absence of easily available, ecologically-sustainable waste management systems, incineration produces large amounts of greenhouse gases.

While the detrimental consequences of overconsumption must be acknowledged, one should not be tempted into unduly apportioning the blame for this to individuals alone. We should also consider the relentless onslaught of advertisements in manufacturing desire and artificial needs, and by extension, creating a culture where both demand and supply are exponentially increased. Contrary to the dominant view that increased production is only a response to people’s increasing needs, production and consumption are mutually reinforcing. In order to continue amassing wealth, the producers must cultivate willing consumers for their products. A perpetually-ready consumer base is ensured by closely tying the well-being and happiness of individuals to consumption. Thus, the more they consume, the happier they purportedly become. Essentially therefore, overconsumption should also be treated as an ideology — an ideology that seeks to obfuscate the role of capitalism in perpetuating a vicious cycle that leads to endless accumulation of wealth for a select few by pinning the blame on individuals. 

The Marxist philosopher Mark Fisher coined the term ‘magical voluntarism’ to describe the undue emphasis assigned to individual decisions as a means to deflect attention from addressing systemic questions. For him, magical voluntarism is “the dominant ideology and the unofficial religion of contemporary capitalist societies.” In order to properly grasp the nuances of the politics of climate change, it must be understood as a complex interplay of individual agency and broader systemic forces. Individual decisions by themselves cannot properly address the structural problems embedded in capitalist societies today. Moreover, this is not as simple as raising public awareness about ecological concerns. When a fossil fuel company encourages awareness campaigns through advertisements that foreground the individual responsibility to save the planet, it is at best hypocritical and deflectionary.

The history of climate degradation is closely tied with the history of colonialism. The burden of the environmental repercussions of the excessive greenhouse-gas emissions by the Global North ultimately falls on the shoulders of the erstwhile colonised countries in the Global South. Climate Change-induced rise in mean sea levels, increasing salinity of soil, flash floods, and irregular rainfall patterns inflict more misery upon the people of the Global South. In most cases, problems of the present day have deep historical roots. For instance, in the eighteenth century, British colonists, after invading the lands of Aboriginal Australians, persecuted and dispossessed the indigenous populace. Today, climate change activists and researchers have been able to correlate the wide-scale prevalence of bushfires with the colonial displacement of Aboriginals, who protected these forests through their sophisticated knowledge of sustainable fire-management techniques. The colonists had banned this old practice of controlled burning in order to tax the population more effectively. Now, we have ample data to demonstrate that the indigenous fire-management techniques enhanced biodiversity by getting rid of thick, inflammable layers of dry vegetation. Frequent flooding in Pakistan is another example: Pakistani scholars and journalists have attributed the devastating floods of 2022 to the legacy of colonialism. They argue that the hydrological infrastructure built by Western imperialists and allied local elites has exacerbated the scale of flooding in their country. 

Of late, many scholars and activists have begun to challenge what they call climate coloniality. In this context, the works of Franz Fanon on colonialism continue to provide invaluable counsel. Drawing on his work, Farhana Sultana argues that the violence of climate coloniality is as much epistemological as it is material. To be colonised, therefore, entails being told what is true and what is not. There is a subsequent dehumanisation through what Franz Fanon calls the ‘epidermalization of inferiority’. Deploying this provocative phrase, Fanon was indicting the process of the internalisation of the beliefs and values of colonisers by the colonised. The discourse on overpopulation in the previously colonised countries pertaining to climate change buttresses the point Fanon was making. The mind-spaces of the previously colonised peoples are occupied, through systematic pedagogical mechanisms, by the myth of overpopulation being the root cause of all their woes.

Asad Rehman, a climate justice activist based in the UK, made very evocative remarks at the closing of COP26: “The rich have refused to do their fair share with more empty words on climate finance. You have turned your backs on the poorest, who face a crisis of COVID and economic and climate apartheid because of the actions of the richest.” Farhana Sultana contends that COP26 constitutes a curious space. Predominantly driven by the big corporations, elites and powerful governments, it proves to be the theatre of climate colonialism. Whereas, the presence of young students, academicians and activists makes it a decolonial site for anti-racist and feminist politics at the same time. However, sadly, the issue of climate change is reduced to a purely technocratic problem. Its inherent linkages with exploitative systems like capitalism and imperialism are left untouched.

An incorrect diagnosis leads to an incorrect treatment. Climate-related policies are formulated by experts, and the people who would be directly affected are rarely involved in the processes. Concomitant with the hollow technocratic depoliticization is obscene capitalist accumulation. The apolitical, technocratic approach to tackling climate change can also be analysed by invoking the concept of ‘magical voluntarism’ proffered by Mark Fisher. By depoliticizing an issue that is so thoroughly political, attention is diverted away from the real problems. The ideology of climate coloniality makes people internalise the looming ghosts of the scientifically incorrect Malthusian beliefs, thereby deterring them from questioning the endless fossil-fuel mongering and vulgar consumerism of capitalist societies, both of which have a significantly more detrimental impact on the climate.

Climate change is a complex and multifaceted issue. The intersection of racialized capitalism, colonial dispossession, climate debts, and imperialism in causing climate change must be acknowledged in order to make any amends. To treat overpopulation as the sole cause for climate degradation and disproportionately blame individuals for it is simply sinister. More often than not, what initially appears to us as individual decisions can, in reality, be manoeuvred by institutions like the state. That is why the approach to tackling climate change cannot be technocratic, for it is not a technical issue. It is deeply rooted in the social and economic structures of capitalism. Even a space like COP26, which speaks for the rich, also provides room for dialogue. If only it acknowledges its own privileges and limitations, it could be modified for the better. To ask questions to those in power, and to strive together for a sustainable world, the only way forward is more mass-politics, not less. Contrary to what the neoliberal ideology would have us believe, the dream of a better future is pivoted upon renewed South-South solidarities based on the experiences of collective suffering.