Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:17 Population is growing exponentially. Food production only grows. Linearally when they cross, we got ourselves a crisis. Hello. Nice to meet you. My name is Thomas malas. I'm an English old demographer. My sad predictions make me quite unpopular. Don't you know, ah, planet will be doomed at this current rate that the population zoom only three things can be done to slow it down wall disease and the plants turn and brown. I'm here to tell
Speaker 2 00:00:47 You, hello. Okay. Squid listeners, and welcome to sustainability. Now that was the Malus catastrophe rap by Jordan White, a human geography and history teacher in Duluth, Georgia. You can find his YouTube channel by going on to YouTube and looking for Jordan White Malian, catastrophe rap. Well, you're listening to sustainability now, a biweekly case, good radio show focused on environment sustainability and social justice in the Monterey bay region, California and the world. I'm your host. Lipshitz abortion is in the news. And nowadays one's political affiliation is often a clue to one's position on abortion and vice versa, although not in Kansas, but this was not always the case. During the 1950s and into the 1970s, Republicans were often supporters of abortion as a form of family planning, especially in developing countries, but the United States too. And they were at the time allies of many environmentalists who were worried about the so-called population explosion.
Speaker 2 00:01:51 My guest today is Dr. Carolyn Tracy, who I believe recently received her PhD in geography from UC Berkeley will check with her on that. On June 18th, she published an essay in the San Francisco Chronicle with a title, how my Republican grandfather helped legalize abortion in the article. She recounted the relationship more than 50 years ago, amongst Republicans and environmentalists and abortion. While there's a tendency to regard those Republicans such as Nelson Rockefeller. For those of you who might remember him as moderates or even liberals, they were strongly influenced by fears of communism, the so-called population explosion, and a, what they saw feared was a looming shortage of food worldwide. Now, communism did not exist in 1798 when the Reverend Thomas Robert Malis first published his essay on the principle of population, which was what that introductory song was about. Yet those Republicans and others were committed to his arguments about the poor and population increases. And those beliefs and arguments continued 225 years later to infuse political discourse. Well, Carolyn, Tracy, are you there?
Speaker 3 00:03:02 I am. Can you hear me?
Speaker 2 00:03:03 I can hear you welcome to sustainability. Now it's a timely topic to say the least, but not well known to the general public.
Speaker 3 00:03:10 Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 00:03:12 You're quite welcome. So why don't you start by telling us something about yourself? Are you a newly minted, Berkeley PhD and in what field?
Speaker 3 00:03:20 Yes, I am. Um, it's only been a few times that I've been referred to as Dr. Caroline Tracy. So it's a little bit thrilling. I finished my PhD in human geography this spring in may. And, um, I wrote my thesis actually about deportation and return migration and, um, how people make lives in Mexico after return migrating were being deported. Um, so my focus was on the border and migration and, um, the geography of American west and the ways that it plays into those dynamics.
Speaker 2 00:03:54 And well, what are you doing now? Are you, are you still in California or have you departed for other parts?
Speaker 3 00:04:01 I now live in Tucson and I work as a journalist. So I work four days a week at the high country news, which is a magazine that covers the us west. Yes. And I specifically cover climate justice. And then on a sort of more part-time basis, I work at Zocalo public square, which is where my essay initially appeared. And then it was reprinted in the San Francisco Chronicle, like you mentioned. Yeah. And there, we, we focus on, uh, kind of a marketplace of ideas about bringing, bringing lots of new research and, uh, innovative thinking to a general audience.
Speaker 2 00:04:35 Well, I can't say I read the, the Zocalo public square every, every Sunday morning while I'm having coffee. Um, and the high country news is a pretty, uh, impressive place to be. So what prompted you to write the piece? Maybe you can also tell us what was in it. Okay.
Speaker 3 00:04:51 Absolutely. Yeah. The essay is one that I had thought about writing a few years ago when my grandfather died, because as a result of studying geography, I had learned, um, some things that had helped me answer a question that I had had for a long time, which was why did my grandfather, who was a Republican environmentalist, essentially, that was his career path, um, in the state legislature, in Colorado. Why was this, um, thing that seemed unusual in his path, which was having helped legalize abortion and make Colorado the first state to do so, why was that part of, how did that make sense in his career trajectory? And I started to learn about the ways that the ideas of Thomas Malis, um, had had recurred in the United States in the 20th century. And so what's in the essay is, um, first about what my grandfather's role in Colorado politics was. And then what were the intellectual ideas that shaped him? So a, a big influence for him was Paul E the population bomb. Yeah. And that came out in the sixties. Mm-hmm <affirmative> um, and it was part of a big zeitgeist of, of thinking and concern about global population growth that, uh, some scholars have characterized as, as Neo Malus Neo Malthusian, which I guess we can get into here. Yep.
Speaker 2 00:06:22 Oh, okay. Well, um, go ahead and tell us what Neo Malthusian means.
Speaker 3 00:06:26 Sure. Um, I guess maybe it would be useful to start with what is Malus. Um, well maybe can I, should I start there?
Speaker 2 00:06:34 I mean, you could even start with who was Thomas Malus, although I can fill that one in too.
Speaker 3 00:06:38 Yeah. Well, I can tell you what I know you might, you might have more to fill in. Um, Malus was a English professor of political economy, uh, in the late 18th century, early 19th century. And he published a book called an essay on the principle of population, uh, initially in 1798, but there were six, six editions in his lifetime. So he revised it, I guess, obsessively. It sounds like mm-hmm <affirmative> and the book had two, he called them postal ladder. Uh, one, one is that food is necessary for existence. And the other is that reproduction is necessary or, or reproduction is inevitable. Passion is inevitable. In fact, and the, the problem that he saw is that population grows geometrically. It grows exponentially and food can only grow. According to him, arithmetically, you can just add more land, but you can't increase the productivity of the land. And of course he couldn't anticipate the green revolution or many of the technological advances in, in crop science that we live with today. Um, but he, because of those, Posta believed that there would be checks on the population growth that as, as humans continued to reproduce, uh, famine would, would necessarily stop that growth. Uh, that was naturally growing geometrically.
Speaker 2 00:08:10 My, my sort of recollection of this is, um, is that he was writing sort of looking out his window and seeing poor people wandering about the neighborhood. Um, D do you know anything about that?
Speaker 3 00:08:24 Yeah, that's my understanding as well, that, you know, there wasn't really demographic data at that time. That was something that was new in the 20th century. And so he was really responding to an increased visibility of the poor. And, and that came from, I think, mainly from changes in the economy, uh, from new urbanization and industrialization that also in Britain had enclosure as of land. So the denial of, of public or communal farming grounds, uh, kicked a lot of people out of their livelihoods. And so they were pushed into slums that were in the service of new industrializing cities and, um, were, were sort of proto industrializing cities and, and suddenly the poor were more visible, whereas maybe they had been farmers before or peasants.
Speaker 2 00:09:18 Well, I, some number of them had, I believe been involved in the putting out system, which was basically they were doing weaving and, you know, whatever it is whatever's required to make cloth, um, at doing that at home and with industrialization and factories, all of that could be centralized. So, so they either had to migrate to where the factories were, or they had to find another way to make a living, but, but it was that they were looking for work. Um, and it was the first, I think, example of a phenomenon, sorry, I'm lecturing about this. But, um, uh, people migrating from rural areas where there was no work to urban areas where there, there was hopefully employment. Um, so I mean, he, you know, he sort of got it wrong in the sense of, he thought that the poor were just simply reproducing uncontrollably, and that was why so many people were wandering around. Um, he wrote in your article that historian Thomas Robertson argued that the origins of the us environmental movement lie, not in Rachel Carson silence spring, but in a revival and reinvention of the ideas of Thomas Malus. So how were his ideas reinvented and by whom
Speaker 3 00:10:34 Yeah, this, um, book that I referenced, I think, uh, at length in my, in my essay was really interesting to me and really helpful in, in thinking about the problem that I mentioned before, about how do you square this environmentalism with, uh, helping pass abortion legislation. And so he argues like that quotation says that rather than focusing on silent spring and DDT and chemicals as the origins of the American environmental movement, actually earlier than that, people were worried about population growth and they were making environmental arguments about population growth. And so he, and, and some other scholars as well, uh, have, have argued that basically at the early 20th century, when they do have demographic data. And also there is also a renewed sort of visibility of population in the form of the world wars and concerns that, uh, overpopulation was a factor in starting these wars.
Speaker 3 00:11:36 Um, there are everyone from, uh, you know, politicians to population biologists or, or ecologists, lots of ecologists, I guess, um, start to be concerned that these concepts apply to human population growth and, and the global population, I think, you know, mouth is didn't have the, the ability to think at a global scale in the same way, once they have data and once they have a more interconnected world. So that's one of the big changes from Malus to neoism is that it becomes a concern about not England, but the whole world and the resources of the whole world. And then the other is that there's this concept of carrying capacity that gets added. And that's something that I think gets largely developed in the United States.
Speaker 2 00:12:26 Uh, well, can you say more about that one,
Speaker 3 00:12:29 For sure? Yeah. Um, I, I guess caring capacity is a concept that I was taught about for the first time in biology in ninth grade. So maybe some, some other people were as well. And, uh, what I, what I remember from that class is that the teacher drew a curve on the, on the board, which was sort of, you have a population of a, you know, an animal. Uh, and, and then it grows because like mouth says it grows exponentially and it, and it reaches a point where it has no more resources, it's consumed all the resources and then it plunges and, and it, it plummets to a very low level. And, and then it comes, it comes back and stabilizes, but at a lower level. And so the, the argument, you know, the, the way I was taught was there had been a, a previous carrying capacity, sort of like a dotted line of the, the, the level at which the population could be stable.
Speaker 3 00:13:26 They had surpassed it. That was why they had plummeted. And then they stabilized at a new carrying capacity, which was lower because they sort of ruined the ecosystem and it couldn't support as many species. And, and so that, that idea is what these biologists and others who are writing books in the 1950s and 1960s. Well, really the 1940s through the 1960s are, are referring to, but they're referring to it on a, on a global human scale in a way that doesn't have a lot of empirical basis. And, um, in the, in the essay, I, I talked about an article that, that Nathan, Sarah, who was actually my PhD advisor at, at Berkeley wrote, um, which is about the history of this concept, which again, it was sort of a revelatory article for me because caring capacity was something that I had learned about, uh, in my education.
Speaker 3 00:14:17 And it was really fascinating to see it historize. And, um, and so he argues that it, it emerges as a way to measure how much cargo ships can carry. And then in the 1920s, it becomes used by wildlife biologists in the us. So famously Aldo Le hold, who mm-hmm <affirmative>, um, may be familiar, I guess, to, to some, um, he's working in New Mexico, there's, there's a, an isolated Mesa and, and there's a big elk die off because in, in fact, the elk do consume all the resources on this isolated Mesa. And this curve that I was taught about in ninth grade biology basically comes out of that, that elk die off. Um, and, and, but then there's a very quick jump, um, by, by some of these population biologists in the 1940s and 1950s to, to applying it to, um, human population on a global scale. So I believe that, uh, the book road to survival by William vote 19 in which comes out in 1948, I believe that's, that's one of the, the most famous ones where, where that link is made and he's an ornithologist, but he's writing about human population on a global scale.
Speaker 2 00:15:38 I wanted to, to pursue that population biology notion, because of course, um, part of the reason that you get population growth in the species is that there's a lot of food. And of course food varies seasonally depending on weather and rain and all those kinds of things. Um, and so it's not a kind of, uh, necessarily inevitable outcome. I think it's, it's just what was observed by elder Leopold and other population biologists. And it's, it is interesting that the scientists who were the advocates of this particular perspective, um, none of them actually knew very much about us human, social, uh, affairs and relationships.
Speaker 3 00:16:24 Yeah, I agree. I think it's, it's very interesting. And, you know, one telling trajectory is that William VO, who I was just mentioning publishes a book in 1948 and three years later, he's get, gets appointed as the national director of planned parenthood. And so you see this political coming together of population biology and, and, uh, reproductive politics in a very clear way. I think, in his, in his professional trajectory.
Speaker 2 00:16:51 I mean, I should note of course, that in the aftermath of, of world war II and the, uh, you know, the victory over Japan with atomic bombings, scientists had very, very high credibility, which is something that seems to be an issue nowadays. But, but basically, um, someone like him, would've been appointed, you know, head of planned parenthood because of his visibility and authority. Um, but I wanted to go back for a moment because, um, there is also a connection here with, with eugenic movement, I think back in, at the, at the, you know, beginning in the, the turn of the 20th century and then, uh, probably through the beginning of world war one. Do, do you know anything about that?
Speaker 3 00:17:34 Yeah, I think it is absolutely a, a, an important factor in people's thinking about the importance of, uh, birth control and reproductive autonomy, but I it's, it's not the area I know the most about. Um, but I, I think it, it, it is absolutely there that, um, that in more or less implicit or explicit, or more or less overt ways, uh, in a lot of these early, especially, uh, population control movements, there's, there are concerns about white supremacy and the loss of what sort of what we would now, is it calling or what are now people calling the replacement theory? I think it's a very similar dynamic and, and also classism, right? That we're, that we're going to be outnumbered by poor people in a same, in a very similar way to what, what mouth is was worried about, uh, or, you know, I think, um, these fears seem to recur politically very often. And I think definitely this early 20th century reproductive politics is, is a moment at which they're recurring.
Speaker 2 00:18:41 And that was that I, I was doing some reading about this and, and it actually came, uh, out of social Darwinism, which was a course, uh, a perversion of Darwin's series, which, which had to do again, uh, with the survival, the notion of the survival of the fittest. And that then was brought into arguments about Europe and Europeans and, um, you know, the role of Europeans and dominating the world. Um, and then the, the, the fear of, of other peoples somehow overthrowing that particular domination. Um, I also recall that, uh, the Rockefeller foundation was rather active before world Wari in this area. Um, unfortunately I don't know any of the details, but, but are, have you, do you know anything about that?
Speaker 3 00:19:35 I guess, you know, I, I don't know that much about the Rockefeller foundation specifically, but I think in sort of the broad stroke trajectory, you start, the new enthusiasm starts, uh, in, in the aftermath of world war I, so in, in the interwar period, as people start to assess, well, what happened and, and why did this happen? And, um, for instance, uh, Robertson in his book talks about how, uh, John Maynard Keens was worried about the, the role of population growth played in these wars and, and sort of major figures or, or also, you know, that's the same period as Margaret Sanger is, is promoting birth control. Um, and, and so people start to think about population in that era, and then it, it really starts to become more mainstream in the late 1940s at the end of world war II. And I guess the Rockefeller foundation, um, gosh, I, I wish I knew more about them specifically, but they're very influential in the green revolution, is that right?
Speaker 2 00:20:39 Yeah, no, they, they were, they were, um, sponsoring the research, right. And the green revolution was the attempt to increase, uh, productivity of grains and cereals mm-hmm <affirmative>, um, right. And again, and I think in response to this fear of food scarcity, which of course was, was driven in part by, um, ideas about population growth, especially in what we at that well came to call the, uh, developing world later on. Right, right.
Speaker 3 00:21:08 Yeah, absolutely. Um,
Speaker 2 00:21:10 But, but I'm, you know, I also have this sort of notion and, and, uh, no, one's here to correct me if I'm wrong, but that they were sponsoring some work on, uh, on birth control, um, at the time. But, you know, that's, that's neither here nor there, so, well, let's get back to the, the post world war II period. Um, why, why were these scientists so concerned? I mean, what was the political environment in which all of this was taking place?
Speaker 3 00:21:41 Yeah, I mean, I think, and I think the Rockefeller foundation is part of this as well, is that after world war II, you transition into the cold war and you start to see population concerns become mainstream as part of anti communism concerns. And, and so poverty in the third world becomes a national security issue. And, and, and I guess for the Rockefeller foundation, right, that's part of the reason that they need to, um, sponsor food and, uh, agricultural technology at the same time as, as they and others, including the us government are sponsoring birth control, both domestically and abroad. And, and also the, you know, the more eugenics type of work that, uh, that we now know about, right? Like forced sterilizations, again, both domestically and abroad. And, um, I think that this concern that poverty is going to make people into communists is, is a big driver of a lot of the activity at this period.
Speaker 2 00:22:47 What you, you, you made this point, how, how is communism gonna make, how is poverty gonna make people into communists?
Speaker 3 00:22:55 I guess the logic was that, you know, if people are going to bed hungry, they're gonna want revolution. Um, and, and so the best thing that could be done for them was, was to improve their quality of life in a more capitalist society. I'm I, that's my interpretation of the logic at least. Um,
Speaker 2 00:23:15 Well, you know, of course, yeah. Well, of course the, uh, the, the policy makers had the example of the Russian revolution, uh, to look at, right. And which, um, there was, because it was in the middle of world war, I, there were all kinds of, of issues of, you know, provision of basic needs. And I imagine it was an easy jump to say, well, the people rose up and over through the empire because they, they lack those basic necessities. Right? So if you, you, if you have sufficiently inspirational leaders who are promising you, uh, pie in the sky, or, or a better future, right, if you, if you adopt or support socialism and communism, that's a, a very attractive proposition. The, the thing is, of course, is that poor people rarely have time to engage in revolution. Um, but that's neither here nor there. Uh, so let's, let's go from, go from there then. So what then was the, uh, the connection that the, these people drew between that notion of countries going communist and, you know, access to basic needs and, and resources, a access global access to resources?
Speaker 3 00:24:38 Yeah, I mean, I think that there was this concern about the poor becoming communists on a global scale at the same time, as there were domestic changes, right? There was the, the civil rights movement was happening. So you have the same phenomenon that, uh, of that mouth was seeing, right. Of a real restructuring of society and, and, and some reactionary fears there. Um, you see the, you know, in 1965, also the rewrite, uh, immigration law in the us. So you're seeing a lot of societal changes as well as I think in, you know, what I, what I see as the really distinctly Western element here about why is this happening and in Colorado, and then in California, um, is that you're also seeing a lot of population growth, regional shifts in population in the us. And so mm-hmm, <affirmative>, I think that these, these sort of fears become very present and people don't fully know what to do with them.
Speaker 3 00:25:38 And, uh, and they're in large part reacting to visibility of, of more people and poorer people or more people and people taking advantage of social services or needing them. And, and there are these quick leaps that aren't fully thought out between the poor abroad and the needs domestically. And, um, I think family planning becomes kind of considered a panacea like that. It's something that could solve a lot of problems. Uh, at least that becomes the political vision of what could happen. So you see in the sixties, I think from 1965 to 1968, there are congressional hearings about population and what to do about it. And after that, you see both, um, the us becomes the largest supplier of birth control in the world. So it's, it's in many countries in the world, as well as a, a large increase from around 9 million per year of a budget for domestic family planning, to a sudden jump to 56 million mm-hmm <affirmative>. Um, and, and I think it's, it's a, both a reaction to these global cold war years and to changes domestically.
Speaker 2 00:26:49 Um, one of the things I wanted to sort of point out was that, uh, of course in 1949, uh, the Chinese communist party won the civil war. And, um, that was a big, you know, big chunk of the world's population suddenly becoming communist. Um, and then, and then later, uh, only a few years later, the president Truman appointed a blue ribbon commission to look into the problem of, of resource supplies, minerals, and other kinds of things. And it was, it was sort of characterized as, uh, scarcity, because supplies would diminish as they were consumed. But the flip side of that was that growing volumes of these minerals were coming from abroad. And so you had on the one hand, the sort of Malian argument about, about, uh, you know, scarcity, and on the other hand, the fear that communist regimes might cut off supplies in order to blackmail the United States and, and Europe. And of course it happened to some degree, but it wasn't because of communists. Um, so, uh, how did this all connect to early environmentalism by this? I mean, you know, 1960s.
Speaker 3 00:28:04 Yeah. Well, I think that in Colorado, you see in, in microcosm, some of the dynamics that are playing out at the national political scale. So for instance, um, the democratic representative that sponsored the bill that, um, I write about in my essay that liberalized the Colorado abortion laws is Dick lamb. Um, he was a young and new representative and, uh, one of the things that he pointed to throughout his life, uh, as, as inspiring him to support abortion legislation was that he and his wife traveled to Peru and they saw, they saw a lot of women in a hospital, um, that were there because they had had botched abortions. And so I think this sort of bringing the third world home, uh, had had a, had a role in Colorado state politics as well, not only the way that they were playing out in the congressional level.
Speaker 3 00:29:04 So that's, that's, I think one important, uh, factor here. But I think also what I was mentioning before about the visibility of population growth in Colorado, um, and, and across the west, because also you see in California, a lot of concerns about population growth and the environment, but in the Denver area, right in the, in the 1950s, Denver doubles in population. And so there's, there are these close at hand fears of population growth. And again, I think it's that the, the legislature legislatures didn't fully know what to do with their concerns about the way the, the world was changing. Um, and they start to coincide with demands that other groups are making women's groups, even religious groups, right. Um, about the need for fam family planning and specifically for abortion on top of that, mm-hmm <affirmative>, um, in my grandfather's case, uh, he was, I think pretty inspired by the book, the population bomb, the Paul LIC book, uh, which itself was inspired by, you know, a trip to the third world, like a trip to India, seeing poverty, um, the visibility of poverty.
Speaker 3 00:30:18 And, and in addition to that, I think he also had pretty strong cultural attachments to the wide open spaces of the west. He had grown up on a ranch in Wyoming and, um, in the, in the essay, I mentioned that I, I tried to send him the article, debunking the idea of carrying capacity, and he wrote back refusing to read it because he said he already knew all about currenting capacity, because that was a concept that had been used on the ranch in the forest service allotments. Um, and, and it was a funny moment for me, uh, in thinking about this, because he made that direct jump between the forest service allotments and the global caring capacity that the article was in fact debunking. Um, but he didn't, you know, he didn't wanna hear it. Uh, and, and so I think that there, you know, he was, he was inspired by AZE Geist, that that was powerful, and that felt very urgent. And that now I think with some hindsight looks rather different and, um, and, and it looks like it was rather classist and somewhat eugenicist. Uh, but I think that it's also true that the, those male legislators lamb and my grandfather, um, by virtue of getting involved in abortion liberalization legislation, they started to learn more and they, and it really, they sort of passed the Baton to the groups that are, uh, involved in thinking about women's rights and bodily sovereignty and, um, and the things that we associate with the abortion movement today.
Speaker 2 00:32:01 Caroline, you, you mentioned that this, um, the support for abortion, uh, that Dick lamb, when he was in the state legislature, uh, pushed and, and your grandfather supported, uh, came out of, I guess, concern about amongst people living in Colorado. What, what was their sort of added, you said Denver doubled in size in the 1950s, what were people thinking?
Speaker 3 00:32:29 Yeah, I think that there are a handful of factors, right. That go into this. Um, but one of the main factors is that you start to see a real population shift toward the American west in the postwar period or during world war II and in the postwar period, um, Colorado, and the front range where Denver is had sort of belated population growth relative to California. So California had really a, a boom in population during the war period. A lot of the war war time factories were there and, and Colorado sees a lot of the federal investment after world war II, right? So you still have a lot of manufacturing that's defense related in col in fact, you have more after the war than you have before. So, um, so Denver increases in size dramatically very fast, right after world war II. And I think that as it had in California, um, that triggers a lot of fears about the loss of things that people hold really dear in the American west, the, the, the wide open spaces and the, the feeling that there is space.
Speaker 3 00:33:37 And so I think that in addition to the global, or, uh, kind of small G global, uh, the Amer the, the discourse about population that's happening all around, um, at this, at, at this time, you also have a very Western concern about population growth and a desire to do something about it. And, um, I think that both of those fears sort of get channeled into concerns about family planning and, um, I it's, but they also don't come out of nowhere. So, um, you know, in my grandfather's case, I can sort of add to the intellectual genealogy that my great-grandmother, so my, my grandmother's mother, um, his mother-in-law had been involved from the start of Rocky mountain planned parenthood. So there was a bit of a, um, also a precedent for, um, that concern that predates at least in my family, the, um, world war II period mm-hmm
Speaker 2 00:34:37 <affirmative>. Um, so it might be useful just to, to remind us then, uh, about how then that this started to intersect with the, you know, merge emerging environmental movement, which is, uh, you know, usually associated with Rachel Carson and as Thomas Robertson argued was not. Um, so what was the connect that the more direct connection?
Speaker 3 00:35:00 Well, so, yeah, Thomas Robinson, like, like we were mentioning earlier argues that maybe instead of Rachel Carson and the concern about DDT and chemicals in the environment, we should be thinking about the ways that Neoma Neo Malthusians influenced the 20th century, uh, environmental movement. And there's another book that I think also speaks to this in a really interesting way, which is called the bulldozer in the countryside by Adam Rome mm-hmm <affirmative>. And, and that's also about how the American environmental movement was shaped by concerns about population growth and, and how, uh, a, a lot of the legislation that gets passed, especially in California, um, like the creation of the coastal commission and these other types of protections come out of this postwar period where people were really worried about the changes they were seeing and the, um, the rapid development of the suburbs, the, um, yeah, the, you know, probably the increase in traffic, the types of things that people, for instance, in Denver right now, which is undergoing another growth and population love to complain about. And, um, and it sort of evokes fear and sometimes reactionary politics. And, and in this case, I think the, the fears got, like I've said channeled into family planning, which it had a, sort of a mix of both reactionary and forward thinking politics, uh, in, in the, in the form that it took,
Speaker 2 00:36:25 It becomes very difficult to untangle these different, these different strands. Um, well, why, why don't we talk about the present then, you know, how, uh, pop population growth is, is not, um, environmentalists, many environmentalists don't talk about this anymore. Um, and it's now, uh, expressed much more. I, I seems to me on the, on the right, you know, people who are, uh, committed anti environmentalists, but it it's gotten all tied up then in the politics of, of abortion and then women's rights and, and the like, so do we still see this kind of, of discourse about, uh, Malian discourse, Neo Malthusian discourse today?
Speaker 3 00:37:14 Yeah, it's a good question. And it's something that is on my mind, uh, as someone covering climate change, because I think one thing I've noticed is that the way that it does recur is less about population directly. And, and I think there's sort of a Neo neoism to some climate change discourse that, that the ways that it's recured is that we have too many people emitting too much. And, and that population is again, a concern and part of, you know, what I, I mentioned earlier, I've been trying to untangle this question of how abortion and population and environmentalism go together and went together in my grandfather's career. And I think that, um, that some of those connections, uh, are easily are easy to understand why they might be debunked through climate discourse, right. That I think something that was eye opening for me as someone who definitely been schooled by my grandfather politically, and taught to be very concerned about population and its effect on the world was, was learning that in terms of carbon emissions, a very small percentage of people are making almost all the emissions, right.
Speaker 3 00:38:30 You know, it's like something like 97% of the emissions come from the top 3% of consumers and emitters. And, and so population really is not the, the key issue here, uh, and that we need to, to readjust how, how we, how we dispersively and actively, uh, fight climate change. Right. So I think that's, that's one way I see Neoma coming back. Um, and, and I think that, you know, in terms of the debates about abortion in, I guess to my mind, they are happening at a pretty low level. There's like definitely a very powerful culture war that has, uh, consumed the discourse about abortion. That's been hard, um, for those who are in favor of abortion rights to fight successfully, um, is why we're seeing political outcomes. We are, I guess. Um, but I think that one, you know, one way that maybe the neoism comes back again is the, the sort of fears that we're gonna have people consuming social services and, uh, and the visibility of the poor right
Speaker 2 00:39:49 There. There's an interesting, um, tension here between, uh, what I would call statistics or the, the discipline of statistics and, uh, the individualization of rights over the last, you know, 30 or 40 years that that rights have become the property of individuals. Whereas statistics are about large numbers, right? I mean, population biologists are not concerned about individual animals or people they're just looking at, uh, you know, large, large bodies of data, whereas rights, as in the case of abortion rights are very much about, you know, individual control over, over bodies. And so there's a sort of a divergence there, which strikes me as kind of interesting. And, and, and, but you do still see, uh, signs of this, uh, concern about statistics, so to speak among in some of the, the right wing discourse, you mentioned the great replacement theory, right. But there's, there's also a cor corresponding, um, sort of idea that, that abortion is also a way of reducing numbers of minority citizens and residents that it's a, you know, it's a conspiracy by the, the white overlord, so to speak, to, uh, to make that particular form of, of, uh, population control, you know, available.
Speaker 2 00:41:15 Um, so all of these things get really kind of twisted up, uh, together. Um, you're mentioning climate change is, is sort of interesting. Can you expand a little bit on that?
Speaker 3 00:41:27 Sure. Um, yeah, I guess, you know, I think in observations I've had, that's one of the places that concerns about population have recurred, right. That I would say before climate change was part of the mainstream discourse, environmental discourse, at least that I can remember because I'm fairly young and it's been present. Yes. Um, most of my life, I feel like there was a, a feeling of relief that, that we knew that world population was going to go down, that most of these countries were going to achieve a, a two, you know, a zero replacement rate or whatever it's called for fertility rate of two. And, and so there was sort of a calm, and then I think with, with climate change, there's a new concern that, uh, there are too many people and that, you know, there's a discourse that developing countries are going to start emitting at greater and greater rates because there are more and more people and more and more people in the middle class. And there are these very, uh, driven arguments about what will happen that I think, like you say, they're not necessarily based in statistics. Uh,
Speaker 2 00:42:42 Well, in fact, they are right, because if you, if you talk about China, China's emissions in a aggregate they're greater than the United States. If you talk about them per capita, they're much, much less because China is what three or four times as populous as the United States. And, um, so that's a way of, of, um, you know, dealing with the statistics right. In a different way, it's, it's an aggregation as opposed to the sort of individualization of, of consumption.
Speaker 3 00:43:13 Right. That's a good point. Yeah. And it's about, you know, I think it's, it's just very interesting for me to observe the way that it's, it's somehow easier to make this sort of fear driven leap to, even if it's lower per capita right now, it's, it's going to grow so significantly, um, that it will become, you know, par with our consumption. There's I think there's a fear on Americans part or a reluctance to, to question our own consumption levels. Right. And, and the, the other statistic, which is that the vast majority of us are in the very tiny fraction of, of major consumers and emitters. Right. And that, that, that has really shaped the global climate change landscape. Uh,
Speaker 2 00:44:05 Yeah. Be, I mean, beginning, beginning, back in the, in the 1980s, um, when, uh, when, when the climate, you know, concerns about climate started to emerge on a, on a much broader scale, Caroline, what sorts of work are you planning to do? Are you gonna do anything around this issue in your, you know, in your career, in the near term?
Speaker 3 00:44:28 Yeah, I guess it's, it's hard, hard to, to avoid it because I do think that both, um, you know, the question of abortion rights is, is very present right now this year of course, and climate change is a bitingly important as well. Um, so yes, I guess is the short answer right now working as a climate justice reporter.
Speaker 2 00:44:50 Oh yeah. Tell us about that.
Speaker 3 00:44:52 Yeah. I, I think, uh, both these questions are, are, are very much on my mind. Um, I've been here I'm, I'm here in Southern Arizona. So I've been doing some interviews with, uh, women in Mexico who are parts of networks of abortion providers there, um, in states, both where the laws have been liberalized and where they haven't mm-hmm <affirmative>, um, and trying to figure out how, how the cross border relationship is gonna change as, uh, as the laws are changing here, because as maybe, you know, Arizona has had a challenging time putting its abortion ban into effect because it had two on the books. Um <laugh> and, um, and then in terms of climate justice reporting, I feel like that's, in some ways, uh, working against the Neoma neoism and, and demonstrating that in fact, uh, the, there are, it's not a generalized phenomenon that everyone is feeling the effects of equally because we're all sort of, uh, too big of a population, but rather that, um, climate change affects different people differently.
Speaker 3 00:46:03 So I'm just wrapping up a story. Um, that'll come out, uh, in a couple months about, um, how manufactured homes, uh, are particularly vulnerable to excessive heat. And they're really disproportionate statistics about heat related deaths in Arizona. They, they really they're. I think the statistic is that they're eight more, if you live in a manufactured home, you're eight times more likely to die in an excessive heat event. So, um, yeah, that, those are the types of stories that climate justice entails sort of looking at the variations in the effects of climate change rather than the overall kind of statistical effect.
Speaker 2 00:46:42 I'm just, I'm just curious, is that because the inhabitants of mobile homes are more likely to be poor and less likely to have air conditioning, is that the, the, the connection
Speaker 3 00:46:53 That is part of it, there it's, again, one of these things where there are a number of factors to untangle, one of the issues is that the construction of the homes themselves is not particularly weatherized especially older homes. Right? Sure. So homes from before, before 19 90, 19 76 is really the worst, but even before 1990, they're very thin walls and not sufficient weatherization, but then also, yeah, the, um, residents of manufactured homes are on average, uh, lower income than either owners or renters of, of site built housing. And, and then there's another wrinkle, which is a particularly, um, substantive one that, uh, some researchers at Arizona state university, uh, sort of uncovered, um, by doing comparative mapping, which is that, that residents of trailer parks don't have access to a lot of utility assistance programs because those parks are sub metered. Um, so the only the park is the direct, uh, consumer of the UT direct customer of the utility. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it, even people who could, uh, could qualify for utility assistance often cannot get it. And that's a big issue here in Arizona
Speaker 2 00:48:08 That that's, that's because there's one master meter for the whole park, right. For electricity and, and gas. And then the, the owner of the park sells, I guess, resells the, the electricity and, and gas to the, to the residents.
Speaker 3 00:48:23 Yeah. They're um, they're, they're essentially, yeah. Subcontracted and, and there that required by law to sell it, sell the electricity at the same price. They can't go, oh,
Speaker 2 00:48:32 Oh,
Speaker 3 00:48:32 They can't, you know, gouge the residents, Uhhuh <affirmative>. But, uh, it does, it does make it complicated if not impossible for residents to get utility assistance.
Speaker 2 00:48:42 Yeah. Well, I wanna thank you for being my guest on sustainability now.
Speaker 3 00:48:49 Thank you so much for having me. It was a real pleasure.
Speaker 2 00:48:51 Yeah. It was a, it was a great conversation. Um, you can read more of Carolyn Tracy's writing by following the hyperlinks on the blurb for this broadcast on the case squid website, or of course you can always Google Caroline E Tracy. And, uh, she will turn up. She has her own website and, um, appears in, in many other places. So once again, Caroline, thank you.
Speaker 3 00:49:15 Thank you.
Speaker 2 00:49:16 So thanks for listening and thanks to all the staff and volunteers to make case good, your community radio station and keep it going. And so until next every other Sunday, sustainability now
Speaker 1 00:49:45 Population is growing exponentially. Food production only grows. Linearally when they cross, we've got myself a crisis. Hello, nice to meet you. My name is Thomas Malus. I'm an English old demographer. My sad predictions make me quite unpopular. Don't you know, our planet will be doomed at this current rate that the population zoo only three things can be done to slow it down. Wall disease in the plants turn in brown. I'm here to tell you there's too many babies, but all your English folks look at me like I'm crazy. All of us will return to pharmacist consistently. If the babies keep getting born consistently, while I'm sitting in preaching. Let me tell you more, all the problems fall squarely on the poor. So if, if you want avoid a catastrophe of the world about to hit its carry capacity, hopefully you're on the right side of the J curve. If not food will be pretty tough to serve. Population is growing exponentially. Food production only grows linearly when they cross, we got ourselves a crisis. Goodbye. Y'all I'm Thomas.
