Gendered Racism, Capital, Universality, and the Population Discourse

Environmental degradation and destruction is a significant problem affecting communities across the globe in the contemporary era. While the problem is evident, differing constituencies have presented a wide variety of causes and proposed solutions at the behest of specific political agendas. In their recent book One with Nineveh, Paul and Anne Ehrlich paint an alarming picture of the globe traveling down a path of destructiveness that will lead to unprecedented widespread devastation. They attribute this situation to population growth and consumption, which they argue are the two main causes of environmental destruction. In addition, they argue that a “maldistribution” of power prevents National governments from making the necessary changes to curb this path of annihilation.

From their privileged and “educated” place in the world, of which, according to the authors, “most people in the world would give anything to share,” the Ehrlich’s appear to believe that they also share an awareness of environmental problems that is additionally only evident to a social minority. They argue that “humanity” is plagued by a “social hubris”- an arrogance that prevents humanity from seeing that its own activities are carving the way to its own destruction. According to the Ehrlich’s, aside from a few enlightened scientists and political advocacy groups, themselves included, the world is generally in denial about the problems ahead and the steps that must be taken to avoid such impending crisis. They construct a world divided into enlightened long-term thinkers and unenlightened short-term thinkers. In addition, wealthy individuals, who wield power through governments, corporations, and social institutions, are invested in avoiding the problems of population growth, consumption, and ecological destruction.

The authors characterization of “humanity’s social hubris” expresses their own presuppositions rooted in western thought- the arrogance of universal or “global thinking.” Just what is meant by “humanity” is unspecified, however the authors’ inclinations towards sketching very generalized conditions without cultural or historic specificity, as well as the specific statements they make about “humanity” gives us some indication that they use the term to universalize their notion of “social hubris.” In other words, they universalize their own cultural logic as they characterize it, thus negating the “pluriverse” of different cultural cosmologies and initiatives that continue to be generated by people in their own locale all over the planet. Gustavo Esteva points to the ruse enacted by pretentious claims to “global thinking.” “Excluded, for example, from critical scrutiny is the reflection that in order for ‘global thinking’ to be feasible, we should be able to ‘think’ from within every culture on Earth and come away from this excursion single-minded- clearly a logical and practical impossibility, once it is critically de-mythologized. For it requires the supra-cultural criteria of ‘thinking’- implying the dissolution of the subject who ‘thinks.’” If the Ehrlich’s do not pretend to think from within every culture when they characterize “humanity” as suffering from “social hubris,” then they pretend to think from above every culture and outside of their own.

The status of the subject who speaks is of particular concern in this case. The Ehrlich’s claim to see the most important problems of the current era- population, consumption, and the “hubris based misuse of power” - which they claim are everyone’s most important problems, but that to their own dismay, most people don’t recognize these as their most impending problem. Although the Ehrlich’s do briefly discuss their own status, they do not critically examine the limitations such a status poses to their scientificity. “We are well housed and well clothed and have access to an incredibly rich variety of food and material things to make life comfortable and convenient, even luxurious.” In articulating what she calls a feminist standpoint, Nancy Harstock makes the offers the following useful insight about the relationship between the subject and epistemology. “(1) Material life (class position in Marxist theory) not only structures but sets limits on the understanding of social relations. (2) If material life is structure in fundamentally opposing ways for two different groups, one can expect that the vision of each will represent an inversion of the other, and in systems of domination the vision available to the rulers will be both partial and perverse.” We should ask whether the Ehrlich’s position of comfort prevents them from seeing that the “apocalypse” they paint for the future has already been imposed on the social majorities across the world over the past 500 years. Moreover, we should ask why they are inclined to make universal statements that have been so extensively critiqued by post-colonial and poststructural theory over the past two decades.

The universalizing and totalizing logic that the authors fall prey to lead them to draw on tropes that imply an essential relationship between humans and the environment characterized by destruction. Extremely generalized statements like the following are characteristic of their discourse. “Homo sapiens has [sic] now become a truly global geological force. Among other things, it has changed the amount and patterns of light reflected back into space from Earth’s surface, altered vast biogeochemical cycles that circulate the elements upon which our lives depend,” and so on. They go onto explain that the environmental impact of humans can be determined through the equation impact (I) = population (P) multiplied by consumption or affluence (A) and the degree of destructiveness caused by the particular technologies used to provide that population with the goods they consume (T). As is true of essentializing statements about “homo sapiens” as the one referenced above, Betsy Hartman points out that “the main problem with the equation, however, is what it leaves out, namely the question of social, economic, and political power, and the systems by which current power relations are enforced.” Citing H. Patricia Hynes, Hartman goes on to make the point that “P is gender-, race-, and class-blind, all but ignoring different people’s differing impacts on the environment. Moreover, it neglects the crucial factor of human agency by viewing all humans as takers from, rather than enhancers of, the natural environment.” In addition, she reminds us that, “many cultures have long lived in harmony with their natural surroundings. The current era of widespread environmental devastation is tied primarily to a unique and hopefully transitory period of rapacious capital accumulation and commodity fetishism spreading outward from the United States, Europe, and Japan.” This subsumption of difference under the category “population,” yet another way in which the Ehrlich’s are unknowingly subjugated by what Foucault called “dominant knowledge,” leads them to overlook capitalism and focus in on the population growth of poor people of color as a significant cause of environmental destruction.

Critics would argue that the Ehrlich’s do acknowledge differences between populations in terms of consumption and population growth. However, the differences they note, even when discussed in terms of class hierarchies, are predominately divided into Industrialized, Newly-Industrialized, and Non-Industrialized countries, to which class hierarchies are also supposed to universally correspond. For example, they even go so far as to claim that “the bright lights visible from space today show not only where people are but also, and even more vividly, where the wealth is.” Of course this construction conceals what Chela Sandoval and others have called the “third world” within the first world, which ought to be strikingly visible in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina even to those who were previously unaware of such an existence. This “third world” within the United States is marked by persistent race, class, and gender hierarchies that are similar to those of the international division of labor that demarcate some populations as disposable. Furthermore, the above construction posits a false binary between urban and rural areas in terms of class and wealth. Moreover, the focus on third world population growth draws on an explicitly racist lineage of reproductive abuses in practice and discourse.

The Ehrlich’s assumption that “most people in the world would give anything to share” in the privileges and spoils they enjoy is further indicative of their ethnocentric world-view, and ultimately leads them to believe that autonomous spheres of self-activity must be managed and subverted by powerful bureaucratic agencies. Their problem is not with the organization of social relations, but that the dominant group requires new leadership that will impose solutions to the environmental crisis as they see it. This narrative stems from the colonial discourse that positions “the West” as the superior agent of progress bringing enlightened democracy to the so called culturally deficient and uneducated people of the “underdeveloped” world. It fails to account for the now globalized and heterogeneous resistance to “development” and the growing wealth of scholarship critical of the colonizing destructiveness of western cultural, political, and economic hegemony. Speaking of the umbrella of “goods” and “social services” imposed on the “social majorities” by neoliberal development schemes, Gustavo Esteva reminds us that “to enjoy the shelter offered by this umbrella, people all over the world must abandon their own culturally specific local ways of living and dying, of thinking and working, of suffering or healing, of eating and defecating in order to become a part of the global economy.”

The discursively and epistemologically colonial inclinations towards ethnocentric assumptions and universal thinking outlined above lay the groundwork for many of the arguments made throughout the Ehrlich’s book. The narrative structure and content of their argument are made possible through such epistemological maneuvers as foregoing cultural and historic specificity, and universalizing and hegemonizing their own cultural cosmology. For example, they argue, “by adopting an ecologist’s view of time and space, one can consider stretches of time hundreds of generations long and view all of Earth as a neighborhood. Doing so reveals a picture of great triumph in the rise of our species to planetary dominance- but also of the increasingly troubling side effects of that triumph.” In other words, it is through foregoing historical and politico-cultural differences that the threat “humanity” poses to the environment is revealed. Through this interpretive move, differences of power between communities based on race, class, and gender are concealed, as are the different forms of relationships that different people have with the environment. In deed, the maneuvers the Ehrlich’s make to blame third world women’s fertility for the accelerating rate of environmental destruction that has taken flight over the past 500 years via the globalization of capitalism and expansion of modern war beginning with European colonialism- not over the brief generalized fictitious account of the last 1600 years that they conjure to focus in on population- are internal to and stem from the intersections of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy.

As Betsy Hartman points out, “even though the Ehrlich's recognize the environmental destruction caused by affluence and technology, they inevitably return to population as the main factor.” By attributing population growth, specifically in the third world, as a main factor contributing to environmental destruction, the Ehrlich’s conceal the degree of responsibility owed for such destruction to capital’s continued state of primitive accumulation and the bourgeois benefactors who wield systemic power under capitalism. The disparities between the world’s social minorities and social majorities in resource use, pollution, and so on are striking.

Currently, the industrialized nations, with 22 percent of the world’s population, consume 70 percent of the world’s energy, 75 percent of its metals, 85 percent of its wood, and 60 percent of its food. The much smaller populations of Northern industrialized nations generate almost three quarters of all carbon dioxide omissions, which in turn comprise nearly half of the “manmade” greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. They are also responsible for most of the ozone depletion.
By coming back to population as a significant contributor to economic degradation, the Ehrlich’s end up downplaying the degree of environmental destruction attributable to capitalist modes of production and conceal the place of consumption and regression as internal to capitalism, not mal directed aberrations from it. Moreover, the Ehrlich’s end up blaming environmental degradation on the very people who suffer the most under capitalism and have the least capacity to contribute to environmental destruction.

The politics and discourse advocated by the Ehrlich’s draws on what Judith Butler calls “schematic racism” in order to convince the public that third world women’s fertility poses a threat to “humanity.” In this discourse, “humanity” operates as a floating signifier, at times slipping into the tropological status of signifying elite, white populations that do not currently suffer the crisis of exploitation, militarism, and environmental racism and actually stand to lose a privileged life style. On the opposite end of “humanity” is the constructed image of people of color that emerges out of what Andrea Smith describes as the “continuing legacy of sexual violence against Native peoples and peoples of color that has rendered them inherently impure and dirty in the U.S. psyche.” Smith goes onto cite Ehrlich’s own description of his conversion to population politics. “I have understood the population explosion intellectually for a long time. I came to understand it emotionally one striking night in Delhi a few years ago.” The notion of “schematic racism,” which Judith Butler argues “pervades white perception, structuring what can and cannot appear within the horizon of white perception.” She goes on to pose the question, “to what extent does [schematic racism] interpret in advance ‘visual evidence’?” Noting that racism is not only ideological, and in this case, schematic, but also an embodied set of practices that are habitual and structured into feelings, we might ask to what extent Ehrlich’s own schematic racism led him to experience “the population explosion” emotionally only once he was in Delhi late in his life, and to what extent did schematic racism structure the conclusions he drew from these feelings? To address these questions, we might look at his own political affiliations.

To return to the question of the subject authoring the text, as several essays addressing the racism prevalent in population politics point out, Paul Ehrlich supports groups with strong ties to racist groups and politics. Andrea Smith notes, “Popular population alarmist/environmentalist Paul Ehrlich of CCN also sits on the executive board of FAIR.” In defense of its anti-immigrant politics, the Carrying Capacity Network (CCN) has argued that “the Anglo-Saxon civil culture of the nation must continue to reign supreme in the interest of stability and prosperity for everyone.” Moreover, Smith notes that the Pioneer Fund, who “has supported Nazi eugenicist work and eugenicist research in the U.S., including Charles Murray’s ‘bell curve’ studies,” also “funds FAIR, the anti-immigration organization, which was very active in organizing around the anti-immigration ballot in the Sierra Club in 1997-1998.” The Sierra Club blamed immigrants, as opposed to industry or policies such as NAFTA, for environmental destruction along the border. Thus, although it helps us to explain how racism operates within population discourses, we are not burdened with proving that Paul Ehrlich is racist because his avowed political agendas advocate racist and capitalist politics.

Environmental destruction and environmental racism being a serious problem, people do, however, have a responsibility to take action. This is not to say that any particular problem is the critical problem facing everyone, or that everyone shares the same responsibility, but rather that those who impose suffering on others must change their ways. Furthermore, attention to issues of environmental justice must not abandon (nor co-opt) social justice issues. We must seek environmental justice, for example, without compromising women of color’s reproductive autonomy, as population control advocates do. We also, must attempt to transform current social relations through seeking alternatives to capital and state extension into autonomous spheres of life, such as the colonization of indigenous communities through Universal Human Rights.
Bill Devall puts forth a set of proposals that draw on literature advocating “strategies to reduce consumption and waste in households,” but goes further to “encourage that changes in behavior toward the house (which is shorthand for any dwelling unit) can be part of our deepening understanding of our lace in nature.” In other words, Devall outlines a vision of changing western relationships with the environment through changing western cultural practices and ways of conceiving of home. He proposes that people downscale, grow food in their gardens and lawns, reduce energy use, detoxifying our households, and developing ecoteams- “small groups of people working with each other, and supporting each other to make changes in their own household or among several households.” Devall goes on to outline his utopic vision of “ecocities,” offering Arcata as an example. The general guidelines he offers for developing ecocities includes minimizing the alteration of natural bodies of water, use solar technology when possible, redesign transportation systems, cluster dwelling units, reduce the area necessary to travel, and encourage other modes of transportation.

While Devall’s advocacy of a cultural shift towards the three R’s sounds romantic (as does his portrayal of homelessness, which ought to give us caution), he returns ultimately to the same kind of population control discourse advocated by the Ehrlich’s. In particular, he resorts to the classic narrative of the West liberating the singularly oppressed third world women from the throes of patriarchy that emerged out of colonial discourse. Of course, what such a narrative conceals is that not only would the liberator of third world women in this case be Western patriarchy, but much of the oppression- gender, race, and class- that third world women face results from the policies and practices of the West emerging out of the very institutions that would offer “voluntary population controls.”

The oxymoronic term “voluntary population control” has been used to describe programs that carried out the worst abuses of women’s reproductive autonomy both in the United States and elsewhere. Recently, this term has been applied to programs that limit contraceptive options to those that are more invasive of women’s bodies, proven to cause more severe side-effects, maintain control in the doctor’s hands, and are generally more susceptible to sterilization abuses. For example, Norplant has become a leading option amongst family planning programs in poor communities of color in the United States and population control programs targeting women of color in the third world. Norplant arrived in the wake of the decade of the 1970’s during which 500,000 women, mostly of color, and mostly without consent, were sterilized- a period out of which the term “Mississippi appendectomies” arose. One popular ideological justification for the distribution of Norplant in the third world as opposed to the birth control pill and other contraceptives that place more control of women’s bodies into their own hands, is that third world women do not have the regiment or daily routine to be responsible for taking a pill once a day. This is a particularly racist ideology that draws on a racialized homogenous construction of “the 3rd world woman” as singular and deficient. It is surprising that such a notion would pass as truth considering that third world women tend to perform the majority of work in the world.

What today often passes as “voluntary” is not significantly different from the coercive situation in the 70’s. As Dorothy Roberts points out, “these programs use contraception as a means of social control over individual misbehavior rather than as a means of women’s control over their own reproduction. Norplant may be an infallible way of preventing pregnancy, but it is a miserable means of promoting reproductive autonomy.” Moreover, she adds, “a women’s freedom to choose among reproductive options does not mean she has reproductive freedom. We should also be concerned about the quality of options available to her. It is possible that all of the alternatives decrease her control over her reproductive health… It makes a mockery of the concept of reproductive liberty to say that telling young Black women to pick between Depo-Provera and Norplant, for example, increases their ‘choice.’” Population control, so called voluntary or not, is a means to social control, not to reproductive autonomy.

In addition to Devall’s advocacy of population control programs and general ignorance towards the conditions of injustice that social majorities face, his consumer politics are still stuck within a capitalist social relation. His activism reproduces individualism characteristic of capitalism and fails to take seriously the degree of collective activity that has come before him and must continue to be waged in order to create social change. Through his consumer politics, our agency and creativity are significantly limited to consumer life-style choices (e.g. reduce, reuse, recycle), following the logic of the free market, thus reducing the subjects of his activism to nothing more than products of capitalism. Not only our politics, but also our very subjectivities become comodified through his politics.

If we are to address the variety of issues facing various communities in the world today, we ought to take head from the people who’ve come before us and seek ways to engage in strategic and collective actions that create change on the systemic level. In the realm of reproductive justice and autonomy, movements led by women of color have insisted that reproductive justice is not merely a matter of “rights” or choice- whether to have an abortion or not- but of the ability to have and support a child as well. When the issue is looked at in this way, we are forced also to look at class hierarchies and state racism as barriers to women’s reproductive autonomy. It is this lineage of critical and collective praxis to which this paper intends to belong and to which I aspire to participate in through my activism.


1 Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash, Grassroots Postmodernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures (New York: Zed Books, 1998) pp. 23. I was introduced to the terms “social majorities” and “social minorities” through this book. They explain, “‘Social majorities’ and ‘social minorities’ are two ‘ideal’ types of groups of people- parts of the analytical devices we are employing to present our insights. In using these categories, we are not succumbing to the modern statistical reduction of people, qualifying or disqualifying them only by their numbers. At the same time, however, we are differentiating between groups of people by the ‘quality’ of their living conditions, which usually determine their mode of thinking and their behavior.” (pp. 16)
2 Paul R. Ehrlich and Ann H. Ehrlich, One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future (Washington: Island Press, 2004) pp. 12
3 Ibid. pp. 17
4 Nancy Harstock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism” in Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires, ed., Feminisms (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 153.
5 “Almost one-third of the people in the South still live below the income poverty line of $1 per day. Over half lack access to sanitation, nearly a third to safe water, and almost one-third of children under age five are underweight.” Betsy Hartman, “The Changing Face of Population Control,” in Anannya Bhattacharjee and Jael Silliman, eds., Policing the National Body: Race, Gender, and Criminalization (Cambridge: South End Press, 2003) pp. 263.
6 See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994) and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
7 Ehrlich and Ehrlich, pp. 21
8 Betsy Hartman, “The Malthusian Orthodoxy,” from Reproductive Rights and Wrongs pp. 23-24.
9 Ibid. pp. 24
10 Ibid. pp. 22
11 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980).
12 Ehrlich and Ehrlich, pp. 12. “Hubris-based misuse of power, in our view, is a major reason why increasing overpopulation and runaway consumption- driving forces in environmental deterioration- are not being adequately assessed or addressed.”
13 Esteva & Prakash, pp. 10
14 Ehrlich and Ehrlich, pp. 17
15 See, for example, David Harvey A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and Wolfgang Sachs, ed., The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (New York: Zed Books, 2005)
16 Andrea Smith Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge: South End Press, 2005) pp. 77.
17 Ibid. pp 77.
18 Judith Butler, “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” in Robert Gooding-Williams, ed., Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising (New York: Routledge, 1993) pp. 16.
19 Ibid. pp. 16.
20 Andrea Smith, pp 76.
21 Carrying Capacity Network, Carrying Capacity Network Focus 2, no. 3 (1992), cited in Andrea Smith (2005).
22 Andrea Smith (2005) pp. 76
23 Bill Devall, “Making a Home” pp. 141
24 Ibid. pp. 149
25 Bill Devall, “Ecocities?” pp. 196-197
26 See Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)
27 Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage Books, 1997) pp. 90.
28 The Professor argued this point in class.
29 Ibid, pp. 136-137
30 Ibid, pp. 136
31 See, for example, Mimi Abramovitz, Under Attack, Fighting Back: Women and Welfare in the United States (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000)