How Population Became an Environmental Problem

Chapter 2 explores the history of how population came to be known as an environmental problem, emerging through debates about eugenics, war, geopolitical stability, and land use. I begin the chapter by exploring how population was first identified as a central problem of state-making and security, and its role in the evolution of ecological sciences. Next, I trace the ways the environmental sciences and population politics have entwined and overlapped in subsequent decades. Throughout, I analyze the ways knowledge production linking population to environmental problems moved between political advocacy motivated by concerns about war and geopolitical security, concerns about planetary limits, and a site of scientific knowledge development and struggle.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter turns to the questions and observations that initially motivated this project: the role of women in sub-Saharan Africa, whom population advocates claim to represent. It raises questions about the links between contemporary investment in global South girls, instrumental gender and climate change solutions, and sexual stewardship, demonstrating how development-led concepts of women’s agency elide the contexts of their everyday lives. It concludes, not by offering solutions, but by fretting over the role of youth population advocacy, the politics and possibilities of their engagements with this work, raising questions about whether and how young people can transform populationist ideas into something closer to the social justice they seek.

Scientists, Donors, and the Politics of Anticipating the Future

Chapter 3 explores the close relationships between scientists and their funders as they work together to produce new knowledge as a base from which to advocate for policy. Climate scientists both describe and produce multiple possible futures via climate projection models, thus opening various possibilities for acting on those futures. At the same time, these possible futures are heavily shaped by donors acting as advocates behind the scenes, particularly through the selective funding of scientific studies. In this context, private foundations have played a significant role in the production of policy-driven science that simultaneously models, and produces, particular population and climate futures.

The Population “Crisis” Returns

Chapter 1 traces through current popular framings of population as a secret or hidden issue, even as the volume of writing on the subject increases dramatically. This alternate production of secrecy and high volume writing reflects an international development strategy to restore funding for international family planning. The chapter explores this policy history, charting the twists and turns of population control and its eventual transformation into an emphasis on women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights. It closes by raising questions about the dangers of using climate crisis narratives to bring population “back” to the environmental discussion.

The Role of Youth in Population-Environment Advocacy

Chapter 4 provides an ethnographic exploration of population advocacy training workshops aimed at college-aged youth. This chapter analyzes training micropractices, covering the historical and contemporary ways NGOs engage youth with development knowledge linking narratives and discourses about women’s reproductive lives, empowerment, and environmental problems. In the process of being trained to advocate for global population policies, youth participants transform from campus activists to population advocates, development experts, and self-styled leaders on a global stage.

Introduction

The Introduction lays the groundwork for thinking through the connections between population growth, climate change, and advocacy in the 21st century. It explores the construction of an idealized development subject that I refer to as the sexual steward: a woman who engages in reproductive self management as a form of embodied environmental responsibility. Tracing through the literatures in political ecology, women and gender in development, and international development, the chapter grounds sexual stewardship in longstanding Malthusian narratives, and argues that the redeployment of these narratives threatens to restrict the possibilities of justice-based advocacy today.

Co-Opting Reproductive Justice

Chapter 5 investigates the opportunistic ways that mainstream reproductive health NGOs draw on the language of reproductive justice to frame population advocacy as socially progressive. At the same time, they obscure the intersectional politics that structure the reproductive justice movement’s history and current work. The chapter analyzes the experiences of population advocates of color as they navigate the thorniness and complexity of reproductive justice (RJ) language and frameworks in an advocacy movement that has historically threatened RJ goals. I chart the changing role of racial politics in population-environment advocacy over time, tracing the ways race has moved from being a zone of heated controversy to providing an opening for new representational strategies such as reproductive and “population justice”—despite deep ambivalence toward justice frameworks and activists.