Should ‘population’ be on the climate justice agenda?

Scan page 10

The fight to save the planet as a viable home to our species will require the most powerful social move­ ment ever organized. Necessarily central to that proj­ ect is solidarity and collaboration with those who are most immediately vulnerable to the dire effects of the capitalist carbon-fueled economy.

An international movement that fails to inspire and articulate the needs of the vast majority of the world’s population—made up of poor small farmers, fisherpeople, rural dwellers, and indigenous popula­ tions—will be completely ineffective. An internation­ al movement that fails to recognize the rights and au­ tonomy of the women who are, at minimum, integral to these economies—and more often than not, the prime movers of these economies—is doomed to fail.

Unfortunately, the notion that “overpopulation” is contributing to climate change is leading to a new acceptance of old and reactionary ideas and policies promoting coercive family-planning programs in the underdeveloped world. Sensitive to a world public opinion that finds eugenic ideas loathsome, these family-planning programs are cloaked in language about the health and rights of women and children.

Upon examination, it turns out that they are overtly motivated by neo-Malthusian arguments and ignore the basic principles honed by feminist activists at­ tempting to completely bury the legacy of the racist, sexist, and anti-working-class legacy of the popula­ tion control and eugenicist movements of the past.

The term neo-Malthusian is often used to refer to ideas that bear some of the political characteristics of the famous “Essay on the Principle of Population,”

written by Thomas Robert Malthus in 1798. This book played an important ideological role for the Eu­ ... Waterways (continued from page 4: “Waterways and oceans face catastrophe”) of what can happen.

Acid-mine drainage from hard-rock mining of both ferrous and non-ferrous metals from sulfur ores is ev­ erywhere throughout the American West. Rivers have turned yellow with sulfuric acid, rendering the water undrinkable and the aquatic environment unlivable. Northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan ’s Upper Peninsula are threatened with acid-mine drainage in perpetuity if more mining is allowed there.

Added to this is an array of heavy-metal contaminants. Mercury, not only from coal-fired power plants but iron mining too, is transformed into methylmercury by bac­ teria in aquatic environments and bioaccumulates up the food chain.

All of our aquatic ecosystems are in trouble. Acid pre­ cipitation from sulfur and nitrous oxides has created dead lakes. Invasive species released with the dumping of bilge water from foreign vessels has completely al­ tered the Great Lakes ecosystem.

As human beings have attempted to hammer Nature into submission, our waterways have been grossly over10 SOCIALIST ACTION AUGUST 2014 ropean ruling classes in the wake of the Great French Revolution. It blamed poverty on a supposed “natural law” that said that the poor would reproduce faster than the food supply.

Thus, Malthus argued, poverty, disease, and early death of the majority of the working population was not the result of the nature of the economic system (human-made and therefore, changeable) but part of the natural order of things. Today, those who think that the size of the human population is the cause, or a major cause, of poverty and ecological destruc­ tion—called “populationists”—disagree with many of Malthus’ basic postulates, but the association sticks because they continue to blame the activity and reproduction of the poor for the climate crisis.

One of the most troubling initiatives based on these ideas is the global “Family Planning” project of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Others include a category of conservation programs referred to as “Population-Environment” or “PE”projects. Many of these are funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), an agency notorious for as­ sisting U.S. imperialist aims abroad.

The danger to the moral and political authority of the climate justice movement posed by PE projects has been explored deeply by James Oldham, the founder of Las Lianas Resource Center, an organiza­ tion that supports indigenous communities in the Amazon region. In a paper called “Rethinking the Link” and supported by the feminist Population and Development Center of Hampshire College, he dis­ covered the ways in which Malthusian arguments re­ garding environmental degradation were being used to disrupt peasant economies and associate conser­ vation with overt efforts at population control.

In many cases, these population control programs engineered, with the straightening, dredging, and dam­ ming of rivers for navigation, electricity, and flood con­ trol and the deliberate draining of wetlands for cropland and urban development. Because of levees, rivers are no longer allowed to overflow onto their flood plains and deposit silt that renews the land. Wetlands no lon­ ger absorb excess precipitation, often making flooding worse, and wildlife habitat has been obliterated.

Damming prevents fish such as salmon from spawn­ ing, and many of our salmon runs have died out. Res­ ervoirs, the creation of which has destroyed millions of acres of forests and habitat, silt up and emit methane. This reshaping of the landscape impedes the natural hydrological fluxes and flows required by healthy eco­ systems to function.

The sanctity of the commons is being violated daily by the drive for private profit, and we are left with a compendium of water woes. Like the planet, our bodies are 70% water, and our brains 90%. When we become dehydrated, our ability to think and cope with stress is undermined. Water is the Essence of Life. Therefore, it must be protected. The onslaught against this vital re­ source must end now if we are to survive in a world be­ ing swiftly transformed by climate change.

Socialist Action is for System Change, Not Climate Change. We can cope with the magnitude of the prob­ the cost of building a real medical infrastructure to take care of the diseases that actually increase mor­ tality. Depo-Provera often produces devastating side effects, including loss of libido and dangerously brit­ tle bones (osteoporosis), in very young women.

The long-acting impact and side-effects of DepoProvera mean that it is used disproportionately, in circumstances likely to be coercive, on women of color. (In 2011, seventy-two percent of all injectable long-acting contraceptives shipped by USAID went to Africa.) In addition, a 2012 Lancet report indicated that the drug might double the risk of HIV transmis­ sion. Yet, it is being pushed as an alternative to other birth-control methods that require international and national commitments to real health care, to say noth­ ing of support to movements capable of challenging the imperialist economic order and the poverty and sexism it fosters.

If the climate movement in the United States be­ comes associated with the coercion, racism, and ar­ rogance of the population projects pushed by USAID and the Gates Foundation, we will be cutting our­ selves off from some of the most important allies for the struggle ahead.

Again and again, the working poor and farmers of the underdeveloped world have risen up to challenge the U.S. and Europe and demanded another kind of world based on human needs. Today, the interna­ tional movements against GMOs, for food sovereign­ ty, against the privatization of water, etc., are led by women from the underdeveloped world, whose em­ powerment and autonomy is critical to our struggle.

Part of building a global movement to stop warm­ ing is educating ourselves and other activists about the dangers that the “populationists” pose—to wom­ en, to those under the imperialist boot, to working people, and to true climate justice. For a wealth of information and curricula on these issues, visit the website of Pop/Dev: For People, For Justice, For the Environment.

To help build a climate justice movement that plac­ es women and international solidarity at the center, consider joining Socialist Action. n lem through a democratically organized and collective effort. To start, a powerful mass movement must be built to bring down the limitless-growth economy that exploits Mother Earth as a mine for raw materials and a dump for wastes and replace it with an egalitarian, cooperative society that exists in complete harmony with Nature, while allowing it to regain its once healthy state.

To that end, we must:

• Stop all government subsidies to the Carbon Barons.

• Tax corporate polluters to the hilt.

• Nationalize the energy industry.

• End all fossil fuel combustion and biomass burning.

• Replace fossil fuels with renewable wind, solar, and geothermal energy to draw down carbon to a safe 325 ppm with zero GHG emissions.

• Decommission all nuclear power plants.

• Retool for green manufacturing & chemistry.

• Ensure a just transition for all workers.

• Ditch Big Pharma and return to natural healing.

• Launch public works for restoration and remedia­ tion of ecosystems & rewild our urban areas.

• Switch to chemical-free, organic farming & perma­ culture.

• Glean and recover materials from landfills; reduce, restore, reuse, and recycle for zero waste. n