In a recent post from Olivia at Empathy Conservation, she replies to a new phase on Twitter that calls discussions about human population growth “ecofascist’. Her standpoint on this is: Absurd and Harmful. I agree completely. When the trolls try to make new terms like “ecofascist” out of the most extreme polar opposite words, we are seeing the result of the collapse of human language that I discuss in my new book: Collapse 2020 Vol. 1: Fall of the First Global Civilization. A related sad commentary is how many true climate action supporters like @GeorgeMonbiot have missed the complexity of this whole issue. In a comment to her article, someone named Martin explained why.
“In fairness, I think George Monbiot was criticising Michael Moore and his emphasis on population growth rather than consumerism in the west. Realistically everything has to be in the equation to keep this planet habitable for humans”
Olivia responded really driving home the problem: “Hi Martin, I fully agree with George that Planet of the Humans has some major flaws, but “racism” isn’t one of them. The film never even mentioned developing countries – it was entirely focused on overconsumption and overpopulation in high-income countries, mostly US.”
In short, it is vitally important that well respected reporters like George Monbiot are very precise in both terminology and understanding the deep complexity of the issues and rhetoric. It is also vitally important that climate activists do the work to create detailed models of truly possible sustainable futures. These models need to show, in detail, how population would be reduced back below 2B. It will happen. Either society does it as humanely as we can, or nature – pandemics and starvation leading to war – will do it.
