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Population Quotes

[Barry] Commoner states that the only remedy for the world population crisis, which is the outcome of the abuse of poor nations by rich ones, is "returning to the poor countries enough of the wealth taken from them to give their peoples both the reason and the resources voluntarily to limit their own fertility".
His conclusion is that poverty is the main cause of the population crisis. If the reason behind overpopulation in poor nations is the exploitation by rich nations made rich by that very exploitation, then the only way to end it is to "redistribute [the wealth], among nations and within them".
(Wikipedia, accessed 8 December 2020)

Malthusian & eco-fascist arguments making the rounds is getting tiresome. Problem is over-consumption by the wealthy at the expense of the many. It’s about unequal power relations, maldistribution, class/race/gender inequities, etc.
(Professor Farhana Sultana, 15 November 2020 tweet)

It needs no more than a few figures to see something is not right - almost one billion people go to sleep hungry every night. At the same time, the world produces more than enough food to feed all seven billion of us. Around one billion people are overweight or obese. A staggering 30% of the world’s food is wasted. Our problem today is not one of producing more food, but producing food where it is most needed and in a way that respects nature. The current industrial agriculture system fails to deliver this.
(Ecological Farming - The seven principles of a food system that has people at its heart, Greenpeace, dated May 2015, accessed 17 December 2020)

Group of silhouetted people beneath a blurred image of Earth, and patterned with spots of light

Population debates are sexist (control women’s bodies), racist (white anxieties of brown planet), colonial (control again), fetishize growth & consumption (capitalist) + SO MUCH MORE! (Professor Farhana Sultana, 15 November 2020 tweet)

It's remarkable how much overlap there is between the racist toxicity of the over-population movement and the racist toxicity of the under-population movement.
(Ketan Joshi, 7 December 2022 tweet)

Overpopulation does not threaten the Earth. Greed does. Stop blaming the poor.
(Seen on the internet)

The power elite all over the world are all too aware of the effects of climate change. But they are all waiting for a ‘Malthusian correction’; to put it bluntly, they are waiting for millions of people to die. They think they will not be affected by it. They believe others will pay the price and only the poor will be affected. They are of course completely wrong.
(Amitav Ghosh, quoted in National Herald, posted 16 October 2022, accessed 17 October 2022)

Half the world's population will die as a result of Climate Change in our children's lifetime. (Gail Bradbrook cited in Extinction Rebellion UK 8 December 2020 tweet)

Diverse gathering of many-coloured silhouetted people, with an Earth map background

Overpopulation is racist dogwhistle. (Survival International, 11 July 2021 tweet) [In politics, to dogwhistle is to please your voters - only heard by them - without alienating others.]

We are not going to escape the demographic time bomb by moving to outer space, not just because that is impossible, as there is not anywhere near enough to usefully get to, but because – there is no demographic time bomb. There never was a demographic time bomb. (Danny Dorling, New Internationalist, posted 10 June 2020, accessed 29 April 2021)

Remember the fuss about the global population passing 8 billion last year?
Well, at about the same time, something more significant happened. The growth *rate* fell below 1%: an astonishing reduction. Population is among the very few environmental metrics that's plateauing.
(George Monbiot, 8 February 2023 adapted tweet)

QuestIon: The world is going to have a population close to 10 billion people by the mid-point of this century and those who support the intensification of monocultural farming say this will be the only way to feed this number of people. What is your response to that?
Mark Bittman: No one’s asking us to feed them. In many cases, people are just asking us to leave them alone. So that, in a way, is a PR ploy for big ag: “We need to increase yield forever, so that we can feed the world.” But the world does not want us to feed them. The world wants us to stop stealing their land and stop poisoning them and so on.
(The Guardian adaptation, posted 25 April 2021, accessed 17 April 2022)

Three hands - black, brown and white - are flat on a world map, overlapping

The concept of “overpopulation” is ideological and fundamentally racist, especially when it’s blamed for being one of the major causes of the world’s environmental problems. The term is almost always used in relation to the idea of growing populations of people of color in Africa and Asia (and not of white people). Very often it is used to deflect blame away from those most responsible for the climate and biodiversity crises and to criminalize those who contribute least to them and suffer their consequences more cruelly (Indigenous peoples and other local communities). The real cause of biodiversity loss, pollution and climate change is not the increasing number of people in the Global South, but the exploitation of resources for profit and growing overconsumption led by the North. Narratives of the “too many” can have horrific consequences: in several countries, including the US, both Indigenous and Black women have been specifically targeted for forced sterilizations against their will and even without their knowledge. WWF ran birth control programs, including sterilizations, in Asia and Africa through their Population, Health, and Environment (PHE) projects, sponsored by Johnson & Johnson and USAID, claiming that “We consider that this approach offers considerable potential for achieving greater conservation results in an innovative way”.
(Survival International, A guide to decolonize language in conservation, 2022, p.23; also here)

When people tell me population is the number one environmental problem we face today, I always respond that population is by no means primary. It’s not even secondary or tertiary. First, there’s the question of resource consumption […]. Second is the failure to accept limits, of which overpopulation and overconsumption are merely two linked symptoms.
(Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization, 2006)

We think ‘too many people’ leads to war. But it is just a very small number of men who start wars, and sadly it takes many people and usually the loss of many lives to stop wars.
(Danny Dorling, New Internationalist, posted 10 June 2020, accessed 29 April 2021)

A pair of hands has the global map painted on them. In the background is the sky and clouds. Many white doves of peace flutter around.

Recent estimates of Earth's carrying capacity run between two billion and four billion people, depending on how optimistic researchers are about international cooperation to solve collective action problems. (Wikipedia, accessed 17 August 2024) [How we live matters the most, but population size matters too. George Monbiot explains it well.]

It’s possible to provide decent lives for 8.5 billion people with only 30% of our current global material and energy use.
(Jason Hickel, quoted at Bluesky, posted and accessed 5 February 2025)

As the historian Alison Bashford points out, concerns about overpopulation are often not really about there being too many people but too many of the wrong kind of people. Ethnonationalists in Europe and North America see the disparities in birthrates as an existential threat to “western civilisation”. They worry about their countries being indelibly changed by mass migration. But the cold hard truth is that in a few decades our shrinking, ageing societies will desperately need these newcomers to pay taxes and work in healthcare and social care. This vision of the future may be unsettling for some, but the alternative is much worse.
(Jonathan Kennedy, The Guardian, posted and accessed 31 May 2025)

Also see:-

Population Control

Environment articles

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