population
The real population problem is too many capitalists
Is population control an anti-capitalist policy?
Poor peasants are to blame?
Nature’s matrix: Linking agriculture, conservation and food sovereignty
Nature's Matrix: Linking Agriculture, Conservation and Food Sovereignty
By Ivette Perfecto, John Vandermeer, and Angus Wright
Earthscan, 2009
Review by Ian Angus
October 17, 2012 -- Climate and Capitalism, posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with permission -- In any discussion of biodiversity and species extinction, someone usually insists that overpopulation is the problem. More people equals more farms equals less wilderness equals more extinctions. Life is a zero-sum game: you can have people and farming OR wildlife and biodiversity, but not both.
Barry Commoner, 1917-2012: one of ecosocialism's most important pioneers
For more tributes to Barry Commoner, visit Climate & Capitalism and Climate Change Social Change.
By Ian Angus
October 2, 2012 -- Climate & Capitalism, posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with permission -- Barry Commoner died on September 30, at the age of 95 in New York. He never called himself an ecosocialist, but he was one of our most important precursors.
He was a founder of the modern environmental movement, an anti-war activist and a powerful critic of capitalism. His 1971 book, The Closing Circle, was a pioneering analysis of the economic and social causes of environmental destruction. At a time when most writers were blaming individual behaviour or overpopulation for pollution, Commoner exposed the role of capitalism and profit.
Ian Angus: The return of the population bombers
Earth Day 1970 poster. People are the enemy.
Royal Society’s tunnel vision on population and poverty
People and the Planet
Royal Society Science Policy Centre Report
April 2012
Review by Ian Angus
May 23, 2012 -- Climate and Capitalism, posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with the Ian Angus' permission -- The radical ecologist Murray Bookchin once compared populationism to a phoenix, the mythical bird that periodically burns up and is reborn from its own ashes. No matter how often the “too many people” argument is refuted, it always returns, making the same claim that people are breeding too much and consuming too much, devouring the Earth like a plague of locusts.[1]
Anti-immigration groups organise against book that exposes population myths
By Ian Angus
January 31, 2012 -- Climate and Capitalism -- Simon Butler and I wrote Too Many People? Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis to promote discussion among environmental activists about two questions:
- Is population growth a significant cause of the global environmental crisis?
- Should the environmental movement support population reduction programs as solutions to environmental problems?
Since the book was published in September 2011, we’ve been very pleased by the eagerness of activists around the world to join in that discussion. Some readers are convinced by our arguments, some are not – in either case we look forward to continuing discussions while we work together to build a global movement against ecocide and for environmental justice. We expected such debates, and will continue to welcome them.
