Why we shouldn’t cheer Earth’s growing population

The Guardian published our Letter to the Editor on June 4, 2025 in response to their article Are there billions more people on Earth than we thought? If so, it’s no bad thing.

Jonathan Kennedy raises the tired spectre of “population control” advocates to argue that we should be happy that the world’s population may be undercounted by several billion.

But while acknowledging that coercive measures to reduce population are a thing of the past, he does not mention that, even historically, the majority of these measures were voluntary and based on educating, empowering and providing contraceptive access to women and girls. This works because women choose lower fertility as soon as they are able to. Yet Kennedy ignores the millennia-old history of empires, churches and the military pushing for them to have more children.

He is correct that we should not fear the prospect of immigrants populating rich countries, but wrong that we need them to perform low-wage labour to save us from dire consequences. Alarmist fears of low birthrates are most often spread by the Elon Musks of the world, who have obvious reasons for cheering the cheap labour that comes with population growth. That they are being increasingly parroted by “liberal” outlets shows that we have lost sight of the lowest-hanging fruit towards taking care of our citizens – taxes that make the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share rather than pressures that push women to have babies they don’t want.

In a time of deepening climate change, species extinctions and pollution, and of soaring global inequality where people in high-fertility countries want, and deserve, materially secure lives, we should not be cheering the prospect of billions more humans to add to our already dire ecological and social predicaments.