THE PREDICAMENT
Our Human Footprint
Population and consumption explosion
Overconsumption has brought us climate change, biodiversity destruction, depletion of soils and material resources, desertification, and growing scarcities of freshwater across the globe.
It is humans, at this point eight billion of us, who are doing that consuming.
It should not be a controversial statement that our profound state of ecological overshoot, in which we are consuming 75% percent more than Earth can provide sustainably, is a product of both our population and our consumption.
What is controversial is the way that the population issue has been framed, seemingly placing the blame for environmental destruction on high-fertility regions in the Global South whose per-capita consumption is a fraction of that in wealthy countries. This framing has become obsolete. The global middle class has been growing in leaps and bounds for decades, making overconsumption a global trend that is hugely magnified by an enormous and growing human population.
At Population Balance, we are committed to changing the conversation on human population.
Political theorist, Diana Coole unpacks the history of the toxification of the population discourse over the last 30 years and the dire social and ecological consequences that this silencing has unleashed.
The growth-driven systems of oppression that have underwritten population growth depend on the subjugation of girls, women, and vulnerable people, along with the domination and exploitation of animals and the natural world.
At Population Balance we recognize these common forces of domination and we seek to go beyond the false “population versus consumption” dichotomy, to find real solutions to the global social and ecological polycrisis.
The standard juxtaposition of consumption and population as distinct variables of human impact is a pseudo conundrum. It asks people to choose which one is the problem. Understandably, many choose to castigate excessive consumption while claiming population size and growth are nonissues. This contrastive register has been muddying the waters for decades. Excessive consumption is absolutely the problem—and numbers of people are a significant variable spiraling consumption upward and out of bounds.
The burden of our footprint
Our growing human footprint is driving the host of cascading environmental and social crises posing a threat to all complex life on Earth. The discovery of fossil fuels 200 years ago enabled not only a 100-fold increase in consumption in the developed world, but also the exponential increase of our global population. These concurrent explosions have fed climate change, growing resource and materials scarcities, worsening inequality, and the collapse of the rich tapestry of biodiversity that supports and sustains us.
A paradigm shift is needed
This historical juncture, in which human expansionism is consuming the biophysical foundation of our existence and extinguishing and exploiting lifeforms mindlessly, is not sustainable. It is an anomaly fueled by fossil power, an energy source that is both finite and unparalleled in concentration. As we approach the limits of that finite resource, those of us in the developed world must also come to terms with the end of this extraordinary period of lavish consumption, gross inequality, and unlimited growth. We must begin to embrace a vision of abundance that values simplicity over excess, connection instead of domination, relationships rather than commodities.
To do so, we must confront and move beyond the ideologies at the root of the polycrisis: the patriarchy that reduces women and girls to vessels of procreation and the ideology of human supremacy that separates us from our birthright of interconnectedness with all beings. When we move beyond these deceptions, we recognize that a thriving natural environment, underpinned by abundant biodiversity, is our ultimate safety net and ground of being. In order to protect the ground of our existence, we must live within its embrace rather than at its expense. We can accomplish this by shrinking our fertility, reducing our extractive, productive, and consumption activities, and limiting the spread of the technosphere (that is, the human constructed world).