Capable of Making a Difference
Robin Maynard has tremendous faith that the young people of the world have both tremendous power and growing awareness and interest in getting humanity back onto a sustainable path. Our guest, the director of Population Matters, shares his thinking about human overpopulation and talks about the organization's goals, strategies, and tactics.
Like World Population Balance, his organization is working hard at "shifting those amplifiers in society who really could reach so many people and talk in a rational, humane and compassionate way about population." There is still a perplexing guilt, awkwardness and hesitation to talk about population, among both the general public and even among leaders of environmental organizations. The good news is people ARE becoming a little less cautious in discussing the subject.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Audio Clip 00:03
Zombie infestation, now seven billion strong, is spreading throughout the planet. Once an imaginary threat, they have now become the dominant species on Earth.
Dave Gardner 00:14
I have met the zombies, and they are us. That's a brief moment from a fun halloween video produced by the impressive UK nonprofit, Population Matters, a few years ago to bring attention to human overpopulation. On this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast, we'll visit with the director of Population Matters, Robin Maynard. I'm Dave Gardner, Executive Director of World Population Balance and host of the Overpopulation Podcast. You can learn more about overpopulation and how we can solve it at worldpopulationbalance.org. Robin, thanks so much for joining me today.
Robin Maynard 00:54
Thank you for asking.
Dave Gardner 00:56
Let me ask you, does it make you feel good to know that organizations like Population Matters are a dime a dozen? Every environmental group and dozens upon dozens of sustainable population organizations have our society laser focused on the problem of human overpopulation and what we can do to solve it?
Robin Maynard 01:14
Oh my God, if only that were true. I think we're a small and threatened species of environmentalists and conservationists and and people who actually care about people and the planet who do talk about population. I think you probably know only too well, Dave, that the word population has been something of a taboo subject and issue for I don't know, twenty, thirty years, and my fellows in the environment movement have been particularly resistant to wanting to talk about population. They'll always mention the C word - consumption. But when it comes to human numbers and the impact of our numbers and the growth of our numbers, they go strangely silent.
Dave Gardner 02:02
Yeah, that's so interesting. And I think you're in a pretty unique position to, to offer some perspective about that. Because before you took the helm of Population Matters, you did an interesting project for the organization. Would you care to share with us a little bit about that project that you did to gauge and perhaps even change the commitment of UK environment and conservation organizations to address this issue?
Robin Maynard 02:25
Yes, sure. It was back in 2012, when there's a rather august body here in the UK called The Royal Society, and it's a formal body of of leading scientists from across the disciplines. And the Royal Society, much really to our surprise, those of us who, who cared about the population issue, produced this report called People and the Planet. And in that they they came up with, in simple terms, the statement that we needed to talk about both population and consumption when we were considering the environment. And it had been always, it had always been the sort of case, and certainly in the UK, that environmentalists and conservationists were very happy to talk about consumption. And, and really relate that as the key sort of cause of the of the woes facing our environment, but weren't prepared to talk about population. So it was really amazing to have that sort of body of scientists sort of break that taboo and bring those two together. So myself working with my former boss at Friends of the Earth, a guy called Jonathan Porritt, he's a much more better known environmentalist than I am. But he and I decided to work together to try and get the other NGOs, many of whom we'd sort of worked for and had colleagues in and knew people within over the years to actually say, "Look, this body of scientists is talking about it, isn't it time you guys started talking about it?" It seemed a great sort of springboard and platform. So indeed, we launched this initiative on the back of that report, and contacted the chief execs of all the main conservation organizations here in the UK, some of which your listeners will be familiar with: the World Wide Fund for Nature, which is an international organization, Greenpeace, which is an international organization for NGOs, which is too but much more sort of focused in in Europe and the UK, although founded in the US, and the Royal Society of the Protection of Birds, blardy blardy, blar. A load of those, those well known public bodies that are meant to be, and are in many cases, doing great things for conservation and environment. And it was really interesting, the reaction we had. So first of all, we just sent them an email and sent them a letter politely. And we, you know, received a deafening silence, no response. And these are people, you know, these people are my colleagues! And, and in Jonathan's case, you know, he'd been the director of their organizations or was on their advisory council or a trustee, so it was quite telling that they just put out a sort of, sort of sound wall against us, and it was, you know, hands over ears or over eyes. The classic of the three monkeys in a see, speak, hear no, no facts about population. So we thought we'd better sort of up the game a bit. So we then produced a series of pamphlets, if you like, where we wrote these documents from the perspective of those organizations. So the issues that they stated they were concerned about and worked on and said, "Look, if you were to take up the population issue, this is how it relates to your agenda." And be a little bit cheeky, we produced those, just by a sort of local printing press, but we produced them with their logo on the front. And, and with their name on it, and said, "Well here, you know, if you were to produce a leaflet for your members and your supporters about population, this is what it might look like." That really got a reaction.
Dave Gardner 05:51
Yeah you got their attention.
Robin Maynard 05:53
Well it got their attention, and it was meant to be a sort of positive provocation, and it certainly provoked them. So from a couple of them, we got letters back, which simply said, "You've used our logo without our permission. You may see us in court, we will we take this very seriously, we ask you to with-" Said they would not talk about the issue, and you thought my God, you're threatening us with lawyers, you know, this is just extraordinary. Anyway, they sort of calm down a bit. We say, "Okay, well, we won't use your logo." So we then produced the same leaflets, took the, stripped the logo off and just put a picture of the planet on it instead, the famous, you know, NASA picture of the Earth from space. And they were a bit grumpy about that, didn't like it. But we said, "Look, you've got, you really need to talk about this. Engage in dialogue with us." They still were very resistant. So then we went sort of slightly round the back door and approached their local organizations their, you know, associate offices and regional regional groups and local groups, as we call them here in the UK. And really interestingly, at that sort of grassroots level, people were much more open and said, "Yeah, we would really like to talk about population, we would really like it that our organization started taking up this issue. It make sense to us. There's no reason we can see why you shouldn't talk about it." But at that sort of senior level, and I guess, it would sort of fall into the same category as I am. You know, a white, middle-aged, middle class male in the UK - that's where the sort of main band of directors or senior managers were in the majority of environmental conservation organizations in the UK. And there seemed to be a sort of collective, I don't know, vestigial guilt or awkwardness or hesitation to want to talk about population at that level. And they just blanked it off and held to the old mantra that I'd been sort of taught when I started off at Friends of the Earth back in the early 1980s. You know, here in the UK, in the developed world were 20% of the world's population, but we're responsible for 80% of the world's consumption, and therefore, it's only consumption that we concentrate upon. But of course, that equation has changed quite a lot over the past decades. So we really got that sort of pushback. But oh, but once we started talking to their local groups, then, and their local sort of chapters, and I think you might call them in the States, we started to get a bit more engagement from them and, and a sort of reluctant, begrudging, slight shift in their policy positions. But it really was an interesting exercise, and sort of brought home the challenges of organizations such as yourselves and us in shifting those amplifiers in society who really could reach so many people and talk in a rational, humane, and compassionate way about population. But there just seems to be that sort of psychological, cultural resistance.
Dave Gardner 08:56
Now I imagine though that the people you were speaking with at the local level were probably pretty similar demographic to the people who are running those organizations. Why do you think the agenda would be different?
Robin Maynard 09:10
Yeah, that's a good one. I'm not entirely sure. Except that I think there is a sort of, there's a tendency of all of us as we find ourselves in positions of, of responsibility or having a sort of title and, and, and some sort of status within an organization that we can become a bit more conservative. I mean, I don't know about you, but when I started off as an environmentalist, you know, and I don't think we even had the term then, we were just a bunch of sort of radical semi-hippie hippie greenies who were trying to challenge the system. You know, and anything anything wet, you know, anything you could do was was a bonus. We sort of dropped non-returnable bottles outside the headquarters of Schweppes. We stuck banners all over the place. You know, we tie ourselves to things, etc., etc., etc. We'd do anything to try and get attention. But that, I think in some ways, as the movement has matured and as it's become a bit more mainstream, people have perhaps become, they've they found themselves accepted in the corridors of power rather than being outside the doors shouting at people or holding up placards. And there is a slight tendency in all of us that we can become a bit more cautious and a bit more conservative. And the irony is, of course, that's not where the likes are, you know, the founders of organizations like Friends of the Earth, Dave Brower and people who started off with the Sierra Club, I seem to remember, and then that hacked off of them. You know, but people were more radical. And certainly Greenpeace was pretty damn radical and would put itself in harm's way, you know, between the harpoons and the whales.
Dave Gardner 10:46
Yes.
Robin Maynard 10:46
I think we became a bit more mainstream and perhaps a bit more cautious. I think we need to, you know, given the state of the planet and what we know about what's happening in terms of climate change and species decline and the real onset of the sixth mass extinction, I think we've got to get radical again and start speaking the truth. But at the same time, we have to work out how to communicate to people that they will listen and not just put their hands over their ears.
Dave Gardner 11:18
Have you given up on getting overpopulation onto the agendas of these organizations?
Robin Maynard 11:26
No, I haven't actually. And it's, I suppose over those four years since we had that first attempt at the the NGOs, the big nongovernmental organizations here in the UK, I think there's been a really interesting, discernible shift - that people are starting to, despite what I've just said, become a bit less cautious about talking about population. We have, I was really fortunate. I came into the job of Director at Population Matters, in sort of January 2017, and took up the reins, you know, with my colleagues and began to get more embedded in the issue. And then the first sort of big event that we sort of were involved in was around the marking of World Population Day in the sort of second week of July, I think it's eleventh of July 2017. And we launched our, our little campaign around trying to draw people's attention to the Anthropocene by producing this sculpture of a new human species called Bigfoot. He's, he's made out of a matrix of, of steel babies, sounds a little bit controversial, but you know, there are eleven thousand or so more of us added to the planet every hour. So that seemed quite a good way of, of representing that. And he's standing on a planet, which is being squashed. And he's looking down at one of his feet, which is squished a whole load of, of biodiversity. And he has oversized feet, hence called Bigfoot. So we tried to get that across. And we thought, okay, that's going to be, let's try and sort of provoke some publicity out of this. And we went outside the big London Natural History Museum, very famous natural history museum, the equivalent of your sort of Smithsonian I guess. And, you know, talk to people and so forth. But what was really interesting, in that week, and we hadn't predicted this, and it wasn't really our initiative that caused it. But there were three articles run in The Guardian newspaper, which is the sort of main environmentally-focused, tinged mainstream newspaper in the UK. And that newspaper has to date been absolutely resistant to talking about population. There have been a number of, of their key correspondents, fantastic environment correspondents, but never wanting to talk about population and only want to talk about consumption. But in that week, we saw three articles, one of which was related to us, but the other one was covering the research done by various scientists, but including Paul Ehrlich and others in the US, which basically said, "The sixth mass extinction is underway. Welcome to the Anthropocene." And that perhaps tied in with what we were doing. And then there was another piece of work done by Lund University in Sweden, which came out with the statistics which suggested that if you wanted to reduce your carbon budget, the most effective action you could take would be to have one less child. And that was to be like, between twenty-five to fifty times more effective than any other of the sort of eco-actions you might consider from flying less, getting rid of your car, etc., etc., etc. And those all landed in that same week, and I thought this, something has shifted. That The Guardian, of all newspapers, is prepared to publicize these and mainstream it, and we're on a podcast now, and it then led to the Guardian say, "Hey, we got such a reaction from our viewers, that sort of sleeping line of the grassroots people and their readers who actually really are concerned about this issue, but who haven't sort of penetrated through the higher levels where there's been a resistance." And so I do think there are some, some real changes, and I think it's this issue is beginning to get the coverage and interest that it so long has deserved.
Dave Gardner 15:15
Well, I'm glad to hear that. Because that's, that's my perception to that. I think this I've read this on your website that the population taboo is, I'm not sure what the word was you used, but it's beginning to erode. It's fading. Dissolving.
Robin Maynard 15:31
Yeah, it is, it is, but there's still resistance. And there's still, I mean, I think, you know, as a species, we are, you know, there's, there's an absolute, you know, we all have brilliant examples of how proactive human beings can be in terms of caring for each other and caring for the planet. And I sort of grew up as a teenager in the, in the early days of the sort of Save the Whale campaign. And it always struck me how, how it was possible to, to stimulate empathy amongst people who had never seen a whale and were never likely to see a whale, but could project their imagination out into those sort of Arctic waters and go, "Hang on a minute, this shouldn't be happening. We should not be killing these huge, wonderful mammals, and just turning them into, you know, unnecessary and ridiculous products just because it's cheaper and easier for us." You know, so. Things like that really, really gave me you know, hope. But at the same time, we're very good at denying stuff as well. So there's been a quite a good study by an academic here in the UK called Professor Diane Coole is at one of the London universities, and she came up with this notion of, she calls them Five Silencing Discourses About Population. Hopefully, I can remember them all. But the first one is she calls population shaming, so that anybody who talks about population really must have roots in the old nasty, and indeed, Nazi sort of links to eugenics and, and colonialism, and really dark stuff about, you know, and being deemed xenophobic and anti-humanity. So there's a sort of nervousness about even talking about population, because people think you're something like that, which I can promise you I'm not, and I know you're not, and most of my colleagues that I've ever talked about population certainly aren't.
Dave Gardner 17:32
But we've all been accused of that.
Robin Maynard 17:33
I bet, I bet. And, you know, it's, it's an old stereotype that hangs on, which is very convenient to those who don't want to talk about it. And then there's a sort of skepticism. Like, "Well it's not really a problem, is it? I mean, isn't isn't population just going to stabilize at ten billion? Isn't that what all the experts saying is sort of going to be okay?" And that sort of enables people to sort of push the problem off and think there's nothing really we can do about it. Which of course, is not true, because the UN population projections are a range of projections from a low to a medium to a high. And none of those are sort of cast fatalistically. We could do things to reach the lower and avoid the higher. And it certainly would make things a lot easier if we achieved that. And then I think there are also ways of decomposing the argument as Diane Coole calls it, in that rather than talking about human numbers and population numbers, you talk about the rights issue or empowering access to family planning - all of which is absolutely essential and important. But if you don't talk about the numbers, then you don't have to talk about the numbers and you don't have to talk about the big picture. You sort of break it down. So I'm sure you you've seen it, but it'd be worth your listeners just checking out Diane Coole's work on the on the Five Silencing Discourses because it really explains and it takes us back to your question around the NGOs. It really resonated for me as to why my otherwise highly intelligent, courageous, active colleagues at Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace and elsewhere, found it so difficult to talk about population. Because they were, they were sort of writhing in sort of awkward anxiety and agony about these, these different sort of discourses they didn't want to be involved in and how they could excuse themselves from having to face some inconvenient truth and inconvenient facts. And I think one of the most powerful reasons why population has been so difficult to talk about has been because we've had some brilliant presenters, if you like, on the other side, who sort of told people not to worry about it. So we've the likes of the late Hans Rosling, who's a fantastic presenter, but his great hope and holding on to the grand narrative of demographic transition theory that go every country will see their fertility rate falling, and in the end, we will reach the stable population and countries will develop and progress and everything will be well in the world is an extremely attractive proposition and one we all want to believe in. Unfortunately, it isn't entirely true or universally manifested. But people have held on to that. And I think that's the sort of human instinct that we have to overcome, not not to denigrate Rosling, because I think his instincts were good, but to show where the where the flaws and failings were in that grand progressive narrative. And you know only too well in your own country that what was a hopeful sort of progressive narrative has been slightly, you know, hit a bump in the road of late. I'm sorry, I made no comment about your your politics.
Dave Gardner 20:39
It's hard to avoid these days. We've kind of backed into it, so I want to kind of circle back and start where people might have expected us to start and that is with this organization that you've been the director of for about a year, Population Matters. People can explore your very impressive website at populationmatters.org. So let's talk just a little bit about the organization, what is your primary mission?
Robin Maynard 21:05
Well, our primary mission has been to raise awareness about the population issue amongst the general public policymakers and the media, because I think that's still a real challenge for us, you know, it is something which people do not want to talk about. So there is still a campaign simply to get people to start talking about population. And it's also to show that it's possible to take positive actions to achieve a smaller population than than than some people fatalistically project. And that achieving that is not by coercive controlling, sort of one-child policies such as China, but actually about simple positive choices that each of us individually can take and make, and we have the power to take and make. But there are still a lot of people in the world, particularly women in the world, who have an unmet need and the inability to access the family planning that they wish, so they can take control of their own fertility and choose how many children they have. So there are some really positive things we can do to achieve a more sustainable population which will make every other environmental issue that we face in the world easier to contend with. So we're trying to raise those, promote that awareness and those positive solutions and that optimism that something we can we can do about it. And I think more importantly, to overcome the old stereotypes, and show that the work we're doing, that you're doing and I'm trying to do here and my my team is trying to do is a really pro-human agenda. It's not an anti-human, you know, I'm not - I love human beings, you know, I'm married, I have a have a daughter I love to bits, I wouldn't be without. So it's not about being sort of, you know, some sort of in a very negative miscasting, we're not sort of miserable Malthusians walking around with a placard over our shoulder saying the end of the world is nigh. We're seeking to achieve and sustain this planet in a way that provides the beauty, the biodiversity, and the opportunity for our children and our children's children, and not actually head in a direction which will really foreclose on so many of those options if we are not alert to them.
Dave Gardner 23:31
Well, that seems, all seems so obvious to me. But as you know, it's work to kind of cut through those misconceptions out there to to get that point across. Is your work focused on doing this just in the UK or do you see yourselves as a global organization?
Robin Maynard 23:49
We want to be more global. And so it's great to be talking to you. And and particularly, we started off in the UK. So we we have a sort of a, if you like, a sort of base and a foothold in the UK, but our supporter base is, is more international. And thank goodness for the for the internet and the web, and so forth, because that that really enables us to reach out beyond these little narrow shores. But I think we certainly have a job to do to, to show that that, and I think particularly in terms of some of those false stereotypes that apply to anybody talks about population, we're not pointing our finger at other people and saying, "You must do this." We're pointing the finger at ourselves here in a developed country, which has a unsustainable population as it is. Here in the UK, we, we account for, in in terms of our consumption rates, about 2.9 to three Earth's worth of resources each year. So so we are clearly overconsuming and taking our unfair share of the Earth's resources. So we have to, we have to sort of look at our own domestic situation. But it is absolutely essential for us to have contacts and links and friends in in countries all around In the world, and particularly in countries which are currently facing very challenging growth rates and population pressure pressures, such as Africa, and India and parts of the Middle East. So we have partnerships with organizations in Africa, where we are supporting family planning projects which are also linked conservation projects. And this is something which is, you know, requested, required, and asked for by the Indigenous populations on the ground, it's not something we're imposing. So we really want it to operate internationally as well as as as having that sort of national or regional base.
Dave Gardner 25:37
Well, you touched on this excellently and that is this idea that, certainly there are a lot of population NGOs around the world. And I think it's probably fair to say that most of them really are focusing their efforts in areas of high fertility, which would not be the United States, Canada, Australia, the UK, most of Europe, or all of Europe, really. But places like Sub-Saharan Africa. And so a lot of people tend to assume well, that's where we need to be doing the work to solve overpopulation. So you're one of a handful, like World Population Balance here in the United States, who are not doing what you said you're not doing. We're not saying, "You do this," but you're saying, "Let's do this." Maybe you can explain for somebody who might be kind of new to this thinking, well why are we talking to people in the United Kingdom and North America about overpopulation? What is there to be done?
Robin Maynard 26:41
Yeah, I mean, it's, I mean, particularly because I think that's where the consumption equation is still, you know, absolutely relevant. You know, so although as countries rightly develop and their affluence increases, so they become consumers equivalent to those of us in the UK or the US who are pretty high level consumers, even when we're trying to be green and reduce our impacts. And so the, it's certainly not true to say that all consumers are sort of based in just the US and the UK, even if we if we're pretty good at it. But you know, there's a massive increase of consumers in India and China. And, you know, I think the latest figures are sort of set to rise from 3.2 billion, sort of high level consumers globally, to five billion over the next sort of thirty, forty years. And most of those will be in India and Africa, particularly. So there's that old argument of contraction and convergence. We need to contract our consumption rates in, in the developed world, and enable others in countries which have had far less access or recourse to resources to increase their consumption and balance that out. Now, that's a hell of a challenge. But we have to communicate that to, to our sort of home base here, because we know that, you know, currently a consumer in the UK, in terms of his or her climate change, gas emissions, and general sort of resource use is, you know, several tenfolds more demanding on the Earth's resources than somebody, you know, born in Ethiopia, or Indonesia, or wherever else, you know, of the developing countries. So we know from excellent organizations such as Global Footprint Network, we can see different countries and different continents, current per capita resource use and consumption. But there is also the tragedy associated with some developing countries where their populations are burgeoning at such a rate that even though their individual demands on the earth, so what people call their, their sort of global footprints, are quite modest, if not tiny, compared to some in the US or UK as a collective population because there's such a large number of people and there's a growing number of people - their overall footprint may be very big indeed. So I mean, Africa, I think, individually, their footprint has gone down per capita over the past thirty years, but as a continent, it's tripled because the population growth is so high. So we both have to look at how we work with individuals and organizations in the countries with very high birth rates, high fertility rates currently, to just help them manage their populations and not go down the same route as us as being high-rate consumers, but also look at our own backyards and try and persuade people to consume less and so contract and allow that convergence to happen. But that is a tremendous challenge, which I which I don't underestimate.
Dave Gardner 29:48
Now, I want to give you full and due credit for including reducing consumption in what I call the overdeveloped world, you're referring to it as the developed world currently, kindly.
Robin Maynard 30:00
Yes. Another way of putting it.
Dave Gardner 30:03
So you include that in your messaging. But do you think your, many of your counterparts at Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, for example, might be tempted to believe that in a an overdeveloped nation where the fertility rate is near replacement level or perhaps even a little below replacement level that the population problem in that country is solved and all there is left to work on is overconsumption?
Robin Maynard 30:33
I'm sure they do want to believe that and that's the that's that would be the convenient get out from dealing with the inconvenient fact that we are already overpopulated in those overdeveloped and over-demanding countries. So in the UK, I mean, there's some, you know, powerful statistics, you know, we have something like sixty-five plus million people presently in the UK and we're set to, that's set to grow to that seventy million by the middle of this century. We are already stressing our ecosystems here. So one of the facts people don't realize, and we tend to think of the UK as a green and pleasant land, and, you know, lots of lovely woodlands and countryside and we've got organizations like the National Trust looking after our countryside and some of our heritage areas and so forth. But we are also one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, which is a shocking statistic for a developed country such as ours, who, and with no disrespect to, to my American colleagues and friends, but this was one of the birthplaces of that - I'll rephrase that because there are people like Rachel Carson were the absolute sort of inspirers of the modern environmental movement. In terms of the old conservation movement, the UK was a was a good sort of birthplace for a lot of those organizations. And yet, we have just seen our wildlife declining year in year out. So we are not a success story in any way. And we have this terrible thing in the UK, which you'll be familiar with, of sort of shifting baseline syndrome. So we do the sort of the statistics and say, "Oh yeah, these populations of these butterflies or these birds have declined, you know, gone down over the past ten years." So, but look at it over the past fifty, a hundred years, you know, the populations have halved. There is more wildlife in many parts of urban Britain than there is in the wider countryside because of intensive farming methods. Now, there are some great farmers and there are some great alternative methods which are, which are beginning to reverse that. But overall, we are under a hell of a lot of pressure. And if you wanted to feed the UK from our own resources, you certainly couldn't feed the current population. You know, we import about two thirds of our food from overseas. And in particular, which is the sort of the hidden cost, the intensive livestock we raise, so pigs and poultry, are entirely dependent on animal feed from overseas, and many of them from countries which are struggling to feed their own population. So we are feeding pigs and chickens and the rest of it with produce crops that are grown on land which should properly be growing food for human beings, or should be under biodiverse areas which shouldn't have been cleared for agriculture in the first place. So we're certainly not a sustainable nation. And there was a great study looking at Greater London, which calculated, and this was done by one of the early sort of more progressive London authorities, and it calculated that to feed the population of London on its own, and it's a slightly it's a slightly sort of odd equation, but they basically calculated that it would take more than the entire available agricultural area of the UK. Now, of course, we're importing, you know, wine from France, and Italy and Australia, and great wine from the States as well. So all sorts of things are coming in by trade. But if you look at it in sort of cold terms of what this country could sustain from its own resources, we are way above the sustainability levels. And we are surprisingly water stressed. Anybody of your listeners who've been to the UK think it rains the whole time, and it does rain quite a lot in the southwest where I live. But in the southeast, which is the most developed part of the UK, the Southeast of England, I think it's been calculated that it's one of the most water stressed regions in the world. It's something like a hundred and sixty-first most water stressed regions out of about a hundred and eighty-five. So we have less rainfall around London than you do in the Sudan. So we are slightly deluding ourselves that we can sustain ourselves under the pressures that are coming to bear and they're also coming to bear on the countries upon which we have relied for our imports of food and other resources.
Dave Gardner 35:08
Is it fair to say that even with heroic efforts to reduce consumption levels, if you keep your population at sixty-five million or even let it grow to seventy million, there's no, there's no way you can get to that sustainable equilibrium?
Robin Maynard 35:27
Well, I don't know. I mean, I think we said at the outset of it before we sort of came to live on the podcast, you know, that we both try and retain optimism. And particularly, I've got a young daughter, so I most certainly want to retain optimism and something I wonder if I'm just deluding myself. But I really hope that I'm that I'm wrong on some of the figures that I see and interpret. And I hope that, although I rather doubt it, that many of the research papers and the work of, you know, eminent scientists from around the world may may not be quite as dire as they appear. And I really hope that in that sort of old equation that we sort of population types, quote, which Paul Ehrlich came came up with, the impact on the Earth is a result of the factors of population numbers times affluence, stroke, consumption times technology. I really hope that some of those other factors of technology or affluence, so reducing consumption, may come to bear in such a way that, that it means that, you know, the, the impact of population may not be so great. Or maybe we will manage to persuade people and I, I really think we can, to have smaller families, so then the factor of population is less impacting and therefore the overall equation is, there's more wriggle room given for technology or more wriggle room for reducing consumption. But it's a very, very close run game at the moment. And I guess you'll be familiar with a study that came out from MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last year, which was looking at this notion of techno-optimism, and is technology going to, to enable us to use resources more efficiently and surely, we're heading for the sort of weightless world where we're using less and less stuff. And MIT looked at fifty-seven of the most sort of common resources or services which fuel the modern society in a developed country, and of those fifty-seven resources, they didn't really find any which had gone down in use, apart from government regulated materials such as asbestos, or toxic chemicals, pesticides, radioactive isotopes, and in one sort of rather shocking case, wool from sheep, you know, probably the most sustainable product you could have, renewable product, but substituted by synthetic, you know, manmade fibers. So this notion that technology is really there and going to, you know, we're going to be okay, you know, Elon Musk or somebody else is going to come up with this wonder machine solution, battery, whatever else, and we won't have to worry about population - isn't really borne out by the facts. But I still hope that there are things, you know, where there is there is optimism. You know, we've seen an incredible resurgence in renewable technology and the uptake of solar. So there are positive trends, but it's, it's tight, the equation is tight to get right.
Dave Gardner 38:41
Well, my editorial comment would be, in my view, the safest and most prudent path would be to, to also work very hard on the population part of that equation.
Robin Maynard 38:52
Absolutely.
Dave Gardner 38:53
Yeah. Yeah.
Robin Maynard 38:54
Because if you take out P, everything else gets harder. And you know, that's what the great David Attenborough says, he's one of our patrons, our sort of main patron really, says, you know, "I can't think of any environmental issue which wouldn't be easier to contend with with fewer people or harder to contend with, with more people." And it's, it's a simple statement. And thank goodness, somebody like him who rises above all the debate which seems to tangle up some of our friends in the NGOs, but he can say those things. And people go, "Yeah, makes sense to me." And so, so people do cut through that. And I think you're absolutely right. If you take out the P factor, everything else becomes much harder. There's less wiggle room.
Dave Gardner 39:33
Yeah, it's great that you have some very outstanding spokespeople helping you with that. You're providing some very interesting references to some studies and I just want to mention that we will endeavor to include links to every study you mentioned in the show notes so that our listeners can can go and explore these because you're sharing some really, really great resources there.
Robin Maynard 39:55
And check whether what I'm saying actually is true. Good. Gotta verify it, you know, we can talk away.
Dave Gardner 40:03
So in addition to trying to raise awareness and to inspire some people to voluntarily choose to have smaller families, you also are advocating the adoption of a national population policy for the United Kingdom, are you not?
Robin Maynard 40:19
We are. And I think that's, I mean, we're starting in the United Kingdom, but I think that's something that every every in any country should have. And it's actually interesting looking back historically, because in the past, various UK policymakers and politicians have talked about the wisdom of having a population policy. But it's sort of fallen off the agenda more more recently. But-
Dave Gardner 40:46
We should quickly say what it's what it's not, shouldn't we? You know, a lot of people, when they when you say population policy might think China one-child policy.
Robin Maynard 40:55
Oh, quite exactly, exactly. You know, you'll see it on on our website. We don't have any or hold any, any sort of any account for coercive controlling, you know, population policies. We simply think it's, it's a factor that needs to, to be considered. And, and particularly in the UK, I don't know, I don't know what it's like in the States, but we have to rely on and we want, you know, we need to rely on data from reliable sources. So we're all very dependent on the UN Population Division stats that come out, and all those the regular reports of, of where their estimates of where world population is going. But here in the UK, we have a really good, small public body called the Office of National Statistics and they crunch the numbers on the data around a whole range of issues and policies, which which government is seeking to work on, but includes the population statistics. But at the moment, the Office of National Statistics or ONS as it's known, just puts out this this data each year, which sort of says where they think the current population levels are and what the fertility rate is, and where we may be going in the next sort of ten, twenty, thirty years. They actually do hundred year projections as well, but they don't publicize those so so much. But that data just sort of goes out into the public domain without anybody really doing anything with it as far as we can work out. There's no government department which has responsibility for it, there's no minister, he or she who considers these figures and starts thinking, "Well, what does this mean for the UK in terms of the various public matters that we're seeking to manage?" So one of the big issues in the UK at the moment, there are two big issues is housing. So there's a lack of affordable housing, particularly for for young people. And that there's various things which impact upon that, such as the various policy things around social and public housing between various governments in the past, the conservatives would have been against it for a time, the labor would have been pro-it and, you know, variations on that. That is a factor. But there are also the factor of the rising population in the UK, which has increased quite dramatically over over the recent decades. And the other great issue is our health service, which the National Health Service which is, is one of the greatly great sort of treasured things in the UK. It was actually sort of focused on at the Olympics here at here in London, it was a there was a great sort of theatrical opening about it - one of the things to celebrate about the UK. But it's, it's very, it's very stretched, partly because people are living longer, and so there's there's an aging population coming into hospitals, but there's always that we need more money in the NHS, need the money. But nobody ever says, "So we've we've actually got more people and so all of these things, whether it's housing, or public health, or education, schools, etc. the factor of population is actually critical to that, and surely we should be planning about this." Surely we should be talking about this rather than you know, we're doing a sort of, I don't know, what you call it? It's like a sort of Red Queen type game where you're sort of running to catch up the whole time, like, you know, like the white, the white rabbit running around in Alice in Wonderland, keep putting more money in it or see if we can, you know, stretch the resources a bit, or make the doctors work harder. It's like can we constantly keep going? You know, it is the old economic growth factor, you know, growth, only growth is good, you know, and, and therefore oh we'll have to somehow keep coming up with the money which means taking away from somewhere else, oh we'll have to keep building houses. But we need a policy which just looks at this country as a whole and goes, "How can we sustain ourselves in a civil and civilized society, meeting the cultural and educational and health needs and wellbeing needs of the people without it bankrupting us." And we have to make some tough decisions. And we have to think about communicating what is a viable family size. I mean, I suppose one of the norms we'd like to achieve at Population Matters is that having one or two kids is fantastic. And it's something we can, we can really enjoy. And we can really manage in our, in our world and in our in our country. But having four or five kids and a big four by four is perhaps not the sort of cultural norm we wish to encourage, you know, we need people to start changing their their sort of mindset. So just as it's now here in the UK nobody would think of not recycling, whereas it was regarded as complete hippie nonsense, you know, thirty years ago when I started. It's a cultural norm. Yeah, actually, two kids is cool, you know, and we're not anti-children. We're not, we're not coercing people. But we want to sort of nudge people in the direction of thinking what is a sustainable human family size, given everything else this world can produce and provide for us, but also for other species upon which we are ultimately dependent. It's not just nice to have, you know, what ants or termites do this in a distant forest or Savanna has an impact upon the climate, and upon the diversity of ecosystems and the health of ecosystems upon which we ultimately depend. We're not immune in merely to urban, synthetic existence. We absolutely depend on nature. I mean, I know I'm sort of revealing my rather sort of ecological roots, but I'm a great sort of fan of the likes of of E.O. Wilson and others who show that that we as a species are very much a biological species within the living organism of the Earth. We're not something separate from it.
Dave Gardner 47:05
Wow.
Robin Maynard 47:07
Sorry, I had too much coffee today probably.
Dave Gardner 47:10
I'm loving it. And I was just thrilled to discover you had such a deep background in all this. I think you're a real win for Population Matters. I want to give you a chance to spotlight some of the great tactics that Population Matters is using to do some of this work and I think one of them that I was particularly impressed with was your new Small Families, Small Planet video. Would you like to tell us a little bit about that?
Robin Maynard 47:38
Yeah, no, it's very nice of you to say we got great tactics. I don't think we have, I don't think I have anything like as, as great tactics as we need. And I think your background is is filmmaking communications. And personally, I believe that 75% of our job is communications, and the facts all exists. They're all there, the data is there. But we know that many people just won't listen to data or facts, however much you present them with it or shouted at them, blah, blah, blah. And I don't think that's successful campaigning. I wrote many a report when I was at Friends of the Earth and they just sort of gathered dust in the basement, you know, and if, if reports and research work, none of us would need to be in this job. So communication is, is absolutely crucial. And it's working out how you can work with people, you know, rather than confronting people. I think they'll just close off. So so we made a small, it's just one little film, but it's it's a video which we wanted to sort of promote the idea of, of smaller families. And, you know, I'm a, I'm a sort of a middle aged old man. So I'm not a target audience. I'm sort of you know, I've made my choices if you like. But the, the people I really have hope for, and I want to communicate to without disregarding old guys like me, but are the young people because they're the future. And they're the ones who who are really going to make choices about how they lead their lives. And they also have that incredible power over how many children they do or they don't have. So we really wanted to talk to young young people. And so we made this video where we got a representative group of young folk and, and I just put some of the facts about population and the impact on the planet currently to them without any sort of judgment and got them to react to them.
Audio Clip 49:28
What do you think would happen if families across the world are bigger by just half a child on average? One more baby for every second family?
Audio Clip 49:37
It was surely plateau off. It can't just keep going up. Heck, it's just getting bigger and bigger, isn't it?
Audio Clip 49:47
Oh man that's, that's nuts.
Audio Clip 49:49
Oh my god.
Audio Clip 49:51
Yeah, that is a scary thought.
Audio Clip 49:55
So what about the other way? If average family size across the world was just a half a child less.
Audio Clip 50:03
Yeah, so if everyone had half child less, yeah, that would have that would have a huge effect. And that would solve the increased population that could help bring resources.
Audio Clip 50:11
It's crazy that just half a child makes that big a difference.
Robin Maynard 50:16
And it was really interesting how they did react and how they wanted to make a difference. And were, you know, didn't feel threatened or negatively challenged, but just like, "Great, thank you for letting us see this and understand this. We didn't know that, right? You know, there's something we can do about it." So we have to sort of go where there are opportunities, I think. And so that was the intention of the of the small families video, and our set of intentions. And, again, it was a bit of an inspiration from our patron, David Attenborough, who said, you know, that actually, he's really heartened, and he's turned ninety this year, but he's heartened by the number of letters he gets from young people who really want to do stuff. And so in terms of us being a sort of pro-people organization, I really have faith in the younger generation being that much ahead of us of realizing what's going on and being capable of making a difference. And we're seeing the sort of darkest hour before the dawn at the moment with the sort of the old neoliberal growth economy and you know, the Putins and the Trumps and the rest of them, who are harking back to an era which is dying out like the dinosaurs. And I think, I really have hope that there's a new generation coming in, which is going to transform things. And I've seen that when we've been sort of student events and freshers fairs at universities. And, you know, groups like the sort of Vegan Society, which has grown tremendously here in the UK. And the young people get it and they say, "Yeah, we want to do something about this."
Dave Gardner 51:52
I could go down so many different avenues of discussion with you and I'm trying to discipline myself since we're really approaching the hour mark already, we may have to do a part two or something like that sometime, perhaps if you're open to that.
Robin Maynard 52:05
Yeah. Well, thank you, Dave. I mean, there's, there's one more thing I would say is that, and I think it's really key to our to our work is is around the optimist, but I would have fun in the job I do. I don't want to be miserable and depressed and, you know, just I'm there being the bearer of ill tidings to people, even if that's pretty challenging, you know, given quite a lot of ill tidings around. But as a campaigner, I've always wanted to, you know, have a sense of mischief and fun, and I think that can really help in our work, you know that, because you then can get the unexpected and you people don't sort of tie you or label you with the stereotypes. And that's what we've tried to do with Bigfoot, this sculpture that we've been taking around. You know, he's, he's potentially quite a depressing figure because he's, he's a steel sculpture made out of all these little blanks of babies and he's squishing the Earth. But people like him, and they come and talk with him. And the kids all sort of look at all the little creatures, he squashed under foot and ask questions. And I think we just got to work out how to engage people in a way that that isn't threatening and isn't always doom-laden, whilst not overly sugaring the pill, and that's a really difficult dance to follow. But I'd love to hear more about your work. So we should definitely do this the other way around at some point.
Dave Gardner 53:25
Yeah, that would be interesting, wouldn't it? Are you seeing some successes with the other NGOs as a result of this Bigfoot campaign?
Robin Maynard 53:36
I think we're seeing some interest. I mean, we particularly focused him on the big institutions in the UK. So places like the Natural History Museum, or London Zoo, or the Eden Project. The places which where there's a big footfall of people who are interested in the natural world. And these organizations are very, very successful communicators in it, far better than I am. They attract millions of visitors each year. So our focus is - these are the amplifiers of our message. If we can get them to start talking about our issue, then we're going to reach far more people far more successfully. And the Natural History Museum has a wonderful evolutionary sort of exhibition of the of the development of, of the modern world and of human beings and the state of the planet. But it sort of pulls its punches when it comes to the end. It doesn't really talk about what the impact of Homo sapiens is now, and it doesn't really talk about the Anthropocene, whereas actually, to your credit, the Smithsonian is, is streets ahead of the Natural History Museum presently. And one of the big German magazine, one of the German museums is also. So we're trying to persuade those big institutions to take our message and if and that's where we're focusing, and if we can see a shift there then I think our campaign will be a success, but it's a bit early days. And we'll probably take it to the BBC as well, because despite the wonderful wildlife programs, the Blue Planet, all the rest of them, the BBC is very cautious. Despite David Attenborough getting his pennies worth in, they really limit him to quite a short space of him giving the hard facts about what's happening to our planet and our potential role in resolving that. And our current role in in causing it.
Dave Gardner 55:29
I suppose a big part of your job at Population Matters and our job at World Population Balance is to provide cover to shift the dialogue and the public awareness far enough that it's not seen as so risky for the BBC, or The Guardian, or these other institutions to start telling the full truth about population.
Robin Maynard 55:52
I think that's a really good point. In a way, it's a sort of invidious job in that, I think, in some ways, people will say, "Oh, well, we're not World Population Balance. We're not Population Matters. But we do think this." So we may exactly that, be giving cover and legitimacy and allowing space for others to say things which, if it came from us, people might not want to listen, I mean, I think that's changing. And I'm certainly I don't want to hide away and, you know, be ashamed of what I do at all. But I think we, it is our job to give space to create the space for ourselves, but also for others, to come out and say the things that actually they will say to you in private, but they won't necessarily say to you publicly at the moment.
Dave Gardner 56:35
Sure, we're a little bit on the cutting edge and that way we can keep moving the cutting edge so that everyone else can kind of be sucked into the vacuum right behind us.
Robin Maynard 56:45
Let's hope.
Dave Gardner 56:46
Any final thoughts before we wrap up?
Robin Maynard 56:51
I think it's just all the time is I worked for Anita Roddick, the founder of the Body Shop for a time. And she was she was a great force. And I went on various trips with her to Central America where they were doing fair trade with with farmers in Nicaragua and elsewhere, supporting their cooperatives, but using their produce and getting the messages across back here here in the UK and Europe. And one of the things she was talking about was taking it personally, and I sometimes I used to not be too sure about that. But I think it is, as campaigners, we have to make sure that we're not overly emotional and that we are rational. But I think if you're always true to your gut instincts, and your personal view of the world that really comes across in the work we do, and, you know, we're not seeking to do anything really in our job for making money, I suspect Dave, I don't know what your salary is, but we're not sort of in the Bill Gates league, that's for sure. But as long as you feel personally fulfilled, and you're you're letting your character come out, then I think you can you stay authentic and you stay, you stay sort of rooted in what it was that motivated you to start off on this campaigning trail. And I've always remembered one of my my great sort of mentors who sadly he died in a rainforest in Madagascar trying to fight Rio Tinto Zinc turning a forests into toothpaste whitener. But he always said to me, "Robin, you know, campaigning is like a ratchet. If you move somebody forward, one cog on the ratchet, they can't go back, they can only go forward. But you won't get them to go round the whole ratchet. But you know, one step forward. That's a success. And you know, just just hold on to that." So that's how I've sort of tried to guide my career such as it is.
Dave Gardner 58:46
Well said. Well, thank you. I've been talking with Robin Maynard, Director of the UK organization Population Matters, actually a global organization doing good work. That's it for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Please visit worldpopulationbalance.org to learn more about how we can solve world overpopulation. Look in the show notes for this particular episode for links to Population Matters and the studies that Robin mentioned during the course of this conversation. Also, at our website you can sign the Sustainable Population Pledge, listen to all our podcasts, get on our email list, and even make a donation to support our work. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter. I'm Dave Gardner, reminding you that overpopulation is solvable. And I'll leave you with the closing moment from Population Matters' Small families, Small Planet video.
Audio Clip 59:39
Not having children means that we're not personally contributing. We're taking some of the pressure off.
Audio Clip 59:45
It's made it very apparent to me the extremity of those things that I wasn't aware of. Facts and figures are very powerful.
Audio Clip 59:51
So I think it's made me want to sort of make other people aware as well, people around me. Not sort of saying, "Don't have children," but as in just sort of saying, "You need to be aware that the impact that when you start your family and the amount of impact that has on everyone else."
Audio Clip 1:00:08
Educating or raising awareness of what the impact a large family has is a much better way to do it because then people will make that choice in a positive manner rather than being restricted.
Audio Clip 1:00:18
I feel that everybody is powerful, and everybody has the opportunity in their lifetime to change something and to make a difference.
