Chris Packham: 7.7 Billion People and Counting - A review
Alexandra Jellicoe
Dr Alexandra Jellicoe is a Public Health Engineer and Scientist. She has carried out research for the United Nations and worked with various aid agencies mitigating the effects of climate change on vulnerable populations. She has lived and worked with remote indigenous tribes and small island developing states, communities whose homes have been lost or are currently under considerable threat.
Chris Packham is conservation’s bad-boy. The outspoken punk is relentless in his pursuit of wild justice and his environmental advocacy is to be greatly admired but his latest obsession with overpopulation should concern us all.
In his recent documentary, 7.7 Billion People and Counting, Packham makes the case that overpopulation along with fossil fuels and consumption are the primary causes of climate and ecological breakdown. Whilst it was encouraging to see the issues around consumerism continually raised throughout the program, the narrative was largely framed around overpopulation as an environmental crisis.
Packham is joined by Jane Goodall and David Attenborough as public advocates of population control measures and recently Jane used her platform at Davos to raise the issue again. All three are patrons of Population Matters, a charity that promotes small families. This may seem like a fairly benign ambition at first but the charity masquerades behind women’s rights issues. Disturbingly, it has prided itself on influencing government policy to prevent Syrian Child Refugees entering the country, elevating the issue of migration in the public discourse which influenced the BREXIT decision and eliminating benefits for low income families with more than two children. They present an acceptable face of hard-right policies with a campaign goal of increasing the proportion of British aid to international family planning projects, which themselves have been used in recent years for sterilisation programmes for people in the global South. Population Matters have recently tidied up their image but their ‘Population Offsets’ campaign allowed people to ‘offset’ their carbon emissions by purchasing dubious family planning measures in poorer, populous nations. The richest 1% emit 30 times more than the poorest 50%, and 175 times more than the poorest 10% so one wonders exactly how many brown babies did Population Matters believe it would take to offset wealthy consumerist lifestyles? The charity are proudly non-progressive and that should immediately raise concerns that they are politically rather than environmentally motivated.
Packham’s wide-eyed plea for women to stop having so many babies has been met with accusations of misogyny and racism. In an interview with GMTV, author of What Women Want, Ella Wheelan, commented that ‘in a lot of the population control argument, there's a malthusian element to it, there's a misanthropic element to it and there's a deeply immoral element to it which raises questions about differing values of society.’ Packham retorted, ‘I have to be really clear, there is not a racist cell in my body and I am not asking anyone in the world, whether they're in Africa or the USA, to not have children.’ But what then is motivating him to use his huge platform to frame the environmental crisis in terms of overpopulation? He wants ‘to spark a conversation about one of the biggest issues our planet faces – overpopulation' and is keen to use his influence to make change. In this context that means people having less babies whether he’s directly asking or not.
Population management has been a politically toxic subject since the 1970s. Alarmist writings such as The Population Bomb and The Limits to Growth inspired population programmes that lead to the forced sterilisation of six million people in India, and China’s one child policy that resulted in a surge of female infanticide and forced abortions.
Mainly targeting poor women, these programs were designed to drive down birth rates as rapidly and cheaply as possible, with coercion often a matter of course. In the war on population growth, birth control was deployed as a weapon, rather than as a tool of reproductive choice.
‘If you were to rub a lamp and give me a wish,’ said Packham, ‘it would be the immediate emancipation of women all over the planet. In every example looked at, it significantly reduced the birth rate and improved the quality of life for both the woman and the family.’ However, global democracy is in sharp decline and we have the most far-right government the UK has ever seen in power. They have already shown an interest in hard right family planning policies so perhaps Packham’s alarmism has created an opportunity here to do the very opposite of his intention. Which is why environmental journalists never talk about population.
In a debate between two philosophers entitled – ‘As Environmental Catastrophe Looms, is it ethical to have children?’ – Rebecca Kukla said, ‘pretty much every aspect of monitoring reproduction ends up falling on women’s bodies, and what that’s actually going to mean is putting pressure on women to have smaller families and disciplining and surveilling women in yet new ways if they don’t. So, it’s hard for me to imagine policies that wouldn’t turn out to disproportionately burden women. The incredibly sad irony is that poor women are also the ones who have less sexual autonomy and less ability to actually fully control when they are and aren’t reproducing. They’re the ones who are going to be held responsible, and they’re also the ones who are least in a position to live up to these norms. Wealthy, white, normative, traditional-looking families are going to get more of a pass.’
Despite the social, cultural and political concerns in raising population control as a core issue in the environmental crisis, is Packham’s emphasis on population also misplaced?
This infographic shows climate choices (widely shared on social media). Credit: Seth Wynes/Kimberly Nicholas, Environmental Research Letters, 2017
The BBC documentary and Population Matters cite research paper ‘The Climate Mitigation Gap’ by Wynes and Nicholas, that produced a widely shared diagram showing that the best way to reduce your environmental impact would be to have one less child. This sparked the ‘barnskam’ or ‘child-shame' debate in Sweden. But attributing children’s emissions to their parents is unworkable.
“‘The fastest way to cut emissions today is for those of us who are currently high emitters to reduce our own emissions. Our study showed that the three high-impact choices that can reduce emissions today are to live meat, car, and flight-free.’”
In Basshuysen and Brandstedt's response to the Wynes and Nicholas paper they argue that the attribution and calculation of responsibility for reproductive choices is more complicated than Wynes and Nicholas assume. In other words, the assumption is that all our future generations will behave as their parents with the same problematic technologies and consumption patterns that are causing the current climate and ecological breakdown. It is an over-simplification that has raised the issue of double counting carbon emissions and is not an immediate solution to a very urgent problem. Flying less, living car free and eating less meat reduce emissions immediately, choosing not to have a child does not.
Wynes and Nicholas’s child carbon legacy statistics were based on the three most populous high-emitting countries – USA, Japan and Russia - and compared to various other countries use of cars, flights and energy consumption but is not generic global guidance.
More broadly, the interpretation of this research has been an issue for the authors themselves. When asked about the most effective methods to prevent the climate crisis, Kimberly directed me to a publication she’d written where she states that ‘the latest science from IPCC tells us that to avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change, we need to cut today’s climate pollution in half in the next decade,’ and that ‘the fastest way to cut emissions today is for those of us who are currently high emitters to reduce our own emissions. Our study showed that the three high-impact choices that can reduce emissions today are to eat less meat, live car free and flight-free.’
If we are to stay under the 1.5 degrees of warming that scientists fear will lead to climate breakdown we need to reduce emissions by 15% every year for the next eight years. Therefore, it’s essential that the focus is on big impact decisions that divest the planet from fossil fuels and individual action that cuts emissions and changes land use immediately.
Eric Brandstedt, a researcher at Lund University has interests in a just transition to a low carbon future and whether population policies can be justified as a means of meeting the Sustainable Development Goals. He is working on an interdisciplinary project of demographers, political theorists and philosophers to consider the ethics of people that have the intention of affecting others decisions about whether or not to have children which could range to political policies or cultural influencers of which I would include Packham, Goodall and Attenborough.
‘[The focus on population] distracts from the action that really needs to be taken.’ Brandstedt said. ‘It’s not clear that a child contributes to additional greenhouse gas emissions before they are adults and begin to earn and spend their own money… the consumption comes from their family’s budgets which otherwise would be spent on other things. Having children will not do anything about the pace of transition in the next couple of decades.’
The Original Graph with Country data shown - Seth Wynes and Kimberly A Nicholas 2017 Environ. Res. Lett. 12 074024
Packham’s documentary highlighted that education was key in persuading women to have less children if combined with reduced infant mortality and that access to safe and sufficient water is a key driver in reducing death rates in the under-fives.
Hans Rosling (now deceased) was Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute and his research revealed that when child survival is still only at 70–80% families will have six children and whilst only four may survive the overall population is still climbing rapidly. Child survival of 90% is needed to reduce population. Child survival is the new green.
But Packham’s documentary about water security in Sao Paulo was misleading and the water crisis there is mostly as a result of deforestation, climate change, excessive water usage, leaking pipes, poor reuse practices, unequal distribution of water between the rich and the poor and middling infrastructure improvements. In Daniel Aldana Cohen’s paper, ‘Water Crisis and Eco-Apartheid in São Paulo,’ he writes about the poorer communities access to water, ‘Eco-apartheid doesn’t result from elites’ cruel intentions, but from their ad hoc measures to maintain their privileges, at whatever cost, in a context of concentrated affluence and climate-worsened scarcity. The tight time of crisis favours the slide toward eco-apartheid.’
Continual access to safe and sufficient water is a privilege of the few and is the primary goal of all development work. ‘Water is the new oil,’ Packham states but water has always been more important than oil for the majority of people living on the planet.
With the onset of global heating, water will be the greatest technical challenge we face. With changing local weather patterns, technologies that have been installed to solve water access issues are rapidly becoming redundant and engineering solutions will struggle to keep pace with prolonged drought followed by devastating floods. Technical and capacity issues to deliver safe water in Africa have always been troublesome and the continent is littered with broken hand pumps installed by well-meaning NGOs. But to design technical solutions with longevity, we need a stable climate and to create a stable climate we need to reduce carbon emissions rapidly in the next decade or so. The most impactful way people in high-carbon economies can help is to drive less, eat less meat and fly less and the urgency of the situation means that this must also include passionate conservationists regardless of their filming commitments. If Packham and Goodall are asking women not to have babies, the very least they can do is not fly. And, as an aside, the very, very, least they can do is not use their huge public platforms to promote flight as in the case of Jane Goodall proudly supporting British Airways, one of the most polluting airlines on the planet.
Women’s rights, reducing infant mortality and family planning in developing countries is complex, difficult work and if carried out poorly can lead to devastating consequences, particularly in patriarchal societies. Women and their babies must never be linked to short timeframes and ecological crisis that is much better tackled in other ways.
Extreme Carbon Inequality - Oxfam 2015
There’s not much to say about the Nigerian segment of the program except that it was a particularly low point in the BBC’s otherwise already poor history of depicting the diverse and abundant people that live in the continent of Africa in a Neo-colonial framework. It successfully ‘othered’ an entire population of people which, in turn, shuts down moral consciousness. If even a fraction of Attenborough’s budget was spent on programming about the people of Africa, their stories and the fact that they’re complex thinking, feeling humans just like we are, we could start to tackle global inequality which is fuelling the climate crisis.
In his closing statement, Brandstedt said, ‘there is a renewed interest in population policies so it’s important to do an ethical evaluation so that we can protect ourselves against demagogues and political leaders that might put forward [population control] measures instead of focusing on developing new technologies and combating the fossil fuel industry.’ Consumerism in its current form is not an evil fate awaiting all developing nations. Leapfrog technologies can enable nations to improve living standards without ever having to rely on fossil fuel technologies. Megacities, dismissed as a problem in the program, are in fact a good solution if designed with sustainability in mind as they release rural areas back to the wild. Progressive post-consumerist economics is also cause for much hope.
Surely, Attenborough, Packham and Goodall should be focusing on the real culprits that are destroying climate and biodiversity? Surely, they should be obsessing about inequality, fossil fuels and the evolution of chemical free, low impact agriculture and promoting plant-based diets so we can restore ecosystems. In his other work Packham promotes a plant-based diet but in this documentary rather than focus on our ability as a species to evolve, in one shocking scene he dismisses damaging agricultural practices as a consequence of overpopulation. ‘The problem is not the habit [of eating meat],’ Packham elicits from a beef farmer, ‘it’s the quantity of people.’
In this time of great crisis, we need radical thinking and the familiar trope of women and people of colour being coerced to solve issues created by a global economic system built for the benefit and convenience of white men needs to end. Policing women’s wombs is not the answer.
Per capita lifestyle consumption emissions in G20 for which data is available - Oxfam 2015