Environment – Fossil Fuels – Climate Science Denial – Populationism – Anti-Immigration – Far Right – Tanton Network

Jeff Sparrow in Overland rebuts a counter critique of his book ‘Crimes Against Nature’ by a faux expert Edward Smith who appears to be au faire with faux environmental and anti-immigrant arguments promoted by the US Tanton Network linked NGO Sustainable Population Australia.

One would not bother using high level analysis to rebut low level faux science nativist agitprop inspired by former ZPG Zero Population Growth types, namely deceased white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton whose colleague was Paul ‘Population Bomb’ Ehrlich, with support from the Rockefeller Bros., ‘limits to growth’ PR constructs promoted by Club of Rome and drawing on Malthus, Galton and Madison Grant.

However, it does show some of the influence that proponents aspire to, whether in media, NGOs, think tanks or politics, constantly reinforce old nativist and white Australia policy tropes masquerading as environmental science, greenwashing both fossil fuels or carbon emissions and eugenics; targets old white Australia sentiments and younger mistaking the movement and proponents as experts.

‘Climate Politics – Against Populationism

Jeff Sparrow 15 August 2022 

Edward Smith, an advocate of what he calls ‘sustainable population’, has circulated a lengthy critique of my book, Crimes Against Nature. I’m writing this response because his piece exemplifies the populationist methodology, extrapolating from an abstract ‘common sense’ in a fashion entirely impervious to historical or theoretical argument. Further, despite his repeated protestations, his article demonstrates the relationship between populationism and the far right—a relationship centred on a hostility to ordinary people.

‘Population matters,’ Smith says, ‘because the smaller the population, the lower the ecological footprint, all other things being equal. … Eating only as many fish as are spawned is going to be easier with fewer people in the first place.’ The argument appeals because of its childlike simplicity. Why, think of your own home. Does each person there eat a certain quantity of food? Yes? Well, then: if you added a billion or so new folks, where would you get all the fish? QED, natalists! Simple physics alone determines that a material world can hold only so many sweaty physically bodies.

Of course, just as we shouldn’t model economic policy on our personal budgets, we can’t—or, at least, we shouldn’t—develop political theory by scaling up individual experience. 

The world is not a household writ large and quite different laws govern the behaviour of human societies.

Unfortunately, though Smith praises my book effusively, he clearly hasn’t understood any of it. Crimes Against Nature does not argue that business exerts ‘a malign influence … on public policy’. Rather, it contends that capitalism, a distinctive and relatively new social system, fundamentally changes the human relationship with nature, commodifying our ability to labour so that our interaction with the natural world manifests as a force entirely outside our control.  

That’s the basis of the environmental crisis, a development that can only be understood historically.

Smith posits a straightforward opposition between humanity and nature, so that ‘any population growth at all means more demand for environmental destruction to feed, clothe and house extra people.’ 

His simple binary, taken from nineteenth century biology, misunderstands the relationship between people and the natural world. Humans might be distinct from nature but we’re also part of it. From the dawn of what we call ‘culture’, , we have manipulated the environment to which we belong. The name for this manipulation is labour: to survive, people must secure food, construct shelter, clothe themselves and so on.

Our labour can destroy nature but it can also sustain and foster it. Though racist Europeans once imagined the native populations of Australia and the rest of the ‘New World’ as almost part of nature, we now know that their societies fundamentally reshaped the land on which they lived for thousands of years. Without the commodification of labour power, they could deliberately and consciously alter their surrounds—and they did so, by and large, in ways that generated flourishing, diverse ecosystems.

Contrary to Smith’s schema, the presence of the Indigenous populations did not mean automatic ‘environmental destruction’. On the contrary, animals and plants flourished precisely because of human beings and their labour. We know this because the arrival of the Europeans almost everywhere brought both massive depopulation and ecological crisis.

If, as Smith contends, humans destroy nature just by existing, the huge drop in the Indigenous population after European settlement (some estimates suggest that the number of people in Australia did not reach its pre-1788 figure until the 1850s) should have been good news for the environment. But, of course, that wasn’t the case at all. On the contrary, because colonisation replaced the traditional systems of land management with the logic of capital, the Europeans spurred massive (and ongoing) environmental devastation.

What makes capitalism so uniquely destructive? It’s a system that directs labour (that is, the means by which people interact with nature) to meet the requirements of exchange rather than for immediate and concrete use. Capitalists must create commodities to sell. Competition fosters a relentless and inexorable expansion of value, only tangentially connected to human need and completely divorced from the cycles that govern natural ecosystems. Capital grows with a large population. It also grows with a small population (using techniques like planned obsolescence, conspicuous consumption etc).

Smith grasps none of this. Like most populationists, he attributes the expansion of the economy to the needs of consumers, and so assumes that, by culling the population, he can render the system sustainable. But that entirely reverses the causal sequence. The necessity of economic growth stems from the internal logic of capital, not the requirements of the populace. Quite obviously, capitalism doesn’t respond to human need—for, if it did, the starving, who desperately need sustenance, would be fed.

That’s why the populationist argument is so muddled. The environmental crisis cannot be attributed to kindly capitalists straining every nerve and sinew to keep every new baby fed and housed. On the contrary, the owners of capital ignore the urgent needs of most the world’s people, since the impoverished don’t provide a particularly attractive market.

‘Population matters,’ says Smith, ‘because the smaller the population, the lower the ecological footprint, all other things being equal.’

But, of course, all other things aren’t equal—and never will be. A theory emphasising pure numbers entirely fails to capture the reality of a social order in which Taylor Swift takes a private jet for minor errands while ninety per cent of the world’s population barely flies at all.

‘There is nothing,’ declares Smith, ‘that … anybody … could say that will change the fact that getting the number of fish caught to equal the number spawned will by physically and politically easier if there are fewer people.’ This is an overt declaration of faith, a credo impervious to an actuality in which the impoverished people of the developing world barely see any of the fish harvested by giant corporations. These corporations, in turn, expand year after year not in order to feed the world, but because the logic of competition means that if they don’t accumulate, they’ll go broke.

In Crimes Against Nature, I describe how Thomas Malthus developed populationism not to preserve the environment, but to argue against social welfare (on the basis that it would prevent the poor from starving to death). I also write about how the revival of populationism by environmentalists in the seventies) pushed activists into grotesque alliances with the far right.

Smith objects to what he calls ‘insinuations that concerns about population are a racist, eugenicist, white supremacist plot.’ He also dismisses the history of his movement on the basis that ‘the events detailed … happened before I was even born’.

This is not remotely serious.

As I argue in the book, the association between populationism and the far right is not accidental but stems from an analysis that identifies people themselves as an existential threat, leaching away at the world’s resources merely by being alive. Population theorists look at the teeming masses and say, quite literally: These people should never have been born!

It’s not difficult to grasp the horrific conclusions that might be—and repeatedly have been drawn—from such an argument. If the masses truly threaten the well-being of the planet by their existence, would, say, the emergence of a new and deadly pandemic be such a problem? The more morally squeamish of the populationist crowd might not like to follow that train of thought to its ultimate destination but plenty of others will.

Smith himself provides a good example of how identifying humanity as a curse pushes in a right-wing direction. ‘Australian’s emissions per capita are,’ he tells us, ‘about 17.1 tonnes per person whereas our main sources of migration have much lower emissions (PRC 7.4; India 1.9; UK 5.55; Philippines 1.2; Viet Nam 2.2).’

Now, per capita figures aren’t particularly useful, since they’re predicated on the assumption that emissions are a response to consumers—which simply isn’t true. But, leaving that aside, Smith and his co-thinkers could, in theory, respond to the difference between Australia and other nations by investing in a fleet of ships sufficiently large to transport them, their families and all their friends to a new low-carbon life in the Philippines.

Of course, they don’t. As always, the onus gets placed instead on the less privileged to adapt themselves to inequality.

‘[W]e need,’ Smith says, ‘people to stay in lower emitting countries not because it is fair but because the politics of a lower carbon lifestyle is hardest in high emitting countries. Fewer people with an expectation of a seventeen tonnes of carbon a year lifestyle is useful for the politics of making our planet sustainable.’

Though Smith says he doesn’t oppose refugees, he ends up with the ‘Keep Them Out’ policies familiar across the far right.

He claims to be against coercion, and yet his argument reeks of state paternalism. ‘Our migration program, and so our population policy, is,’ he explains, ‘principally about skilled migrants and New Zealanders—there is nothing wrong with them not migrating. There may even be some benefits as any unfulfilled desires they have in their countries of origin will only add useful pressure to domestic political reform.’

Think about that. If ‘we’—presumably, the Australian state—forcibly prevent migrants from travelling, their resulting unhappiness may add ‘useful pressure’ in their home country to reduce birth rates.

There’s nothing left-wing about this.

As a socialist, I’m for providing people with everything they need to control their fertility. But the key word is ‘control’: that is, the exertion of agency by ordinary women and men, rather than limitations on reproduction imposed by misanthropic ideologues.

That’s because the alternative to capitalist environmental crisis lies in socialist planning. The choice isn’t between economic growth or economic degrowth so much as between a system geared to exchange and one dominated by use. If Indigenous societies could direct their labour to improving the natural world, we can do the same, with modern science and technology guiding our interventions.

In that process, people aren’t the problem. On the contrary, they’re the basis on which a new society can be built.’

For related blogs and articles on Australian Immigration News, Demography, Economics, Environment, Immigration and Population Growth:

Immigration Restriction – Population Control – Tanton Network

Excerpts from an article by Brooke Binkowski in Unicorn Riot outlining the history of the population control movement of Tanton Network which informs migration policies in the Anglosphere and parts of Europe.

55 Tufton Street London: US Koch & Tanton Networks’ Think Tanks – Radical Right Libertarians and Nativists

Of late, UK investigative journalists especially centred round The ByLine Times and New European have discovered the ‘architecture of influence’ at 55 Tufton Street, used to keep the Conservative Party in power, and achieving Brexit. 

Australia – Indigenous Voice Referendum – Atlas – Koch Network – CIS – IPA – Murdoch

Australia has had its Brexit or Trump moment on the indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum, being usurped by a proxy election campaign, with outcomes being divided society, communities and no real solutions.

Further, the ‘architecture of influence’ and modus operandi are the same as Brexit and Trump including Koch Network think tanks at Tufton St. London and Washington, Tanton Network’s NGOs promoting former ZPG Zero Population Growth nativist tropes versus the ‘other’, whether refugee, immigrant, ethnic minority including native and population growth, with Murdoch right wing led media and related social media campaigns, targeting older voters. 

John Tanton – Australia – The Social Contract Press

John Tanton – Australia – The Social Contract Press. Many people in the Anglo world and now Europe may ask where does the current transnational white nativist or white nationalist ideology, promoting eugenics and immigration restrictions, come from?

Trump’s White House Immigration Policies and White Nationalist John Tanton

The aggressive anti-immigration sentiment and policies that are promoted by governments in the US, UK and Australia are not new and have been in the making for generations, John Tanton described as the ‘most influential unknown man in America’ appears central in modern day manifestations.

Global Warming – Climate Change – Eco-Fascism

With the science of climate change and global warming under attack as Australia experiences bushfires not seen before in scope and intensity, there are now clear links between white nationalism and niche environmentalism, or ‘eco-fascism’.  According to many this has included long term support from fossil fuels oligarchs’ foundations in promoting eugenics and anti-immigrant sentiment as an ecological solution.

Fossil Fuels and Eco-Fascism (Image copyright Pexels)

Jeff Sparrow in The Guardian Australia presents a summary of his recent book Fascists Among Us: Online Hate and the Christchurch Massacre below:

 

‘Eco-fascists and the ugly fight for ‘our way of life’ as the environment disintegrates

Genuine fascists remain on the political margins, but we can increasingly imagine the space that eco-fascism might occupy.

Earlier this year, when the fascist responsible for the El Paso massacre cited ecological degradation as part motivation for his killing spree, many considered him entirely deranged.

Eco-fascism sounds oxymoronic, a mashup of irreconcilable philosophies.

Yet, while eco-fascists violently oppose contemporary environmentalists, they often appropriate ideas from the past of the environmental movement.

In the United States, the first conservationists – men like Teddy Roosevelt – were wealthy big-game hunters trying to preserve creatures they liked to shoot.

These elite enthusiasts for “the manly sport with the rifle” blamed impoverished arrivals from eastern and central Europe for “pot hunting” – that is, for killing game for food or money rather than for fun. But they also saw immigrants as polluting America’s racial stock, making an explicit parallel between “lesser races” and the invasive species threatening native animals and plants.

On that basis, Julia Scott from the Daughters of the American Revolution could speak at the National Conservation Congress of 1910, urging attendees not only to protect flora and fauna but to conserve “the supremacy of the Caucasian race in our land”.

You can get a sense of the centrality of eugenic theory to the early movement from the career of Madison Grant, the most important environmentalist of his generation.

We can thank Grant for saving the American bison, the bald eagle, the pronghorn antelope, the Alaskan bear and the fur seal, as well as, according to his biographer, contributing to the preservation of elephants, gorillas, koalas and many other charismatic species.

But Grant also campaigned for the racist Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, and wrote the bestselling The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History, an impassioned defence of white supremacy that Hitler described as his personal “bible”.

The book’s popularity in Germany was not coincidental. Grant, like many of his colleagues, derived his environmentalism from a conservative Romanticism, the philosophical source for Nazi concepts about the importance of Lebensraum (living room) and Blut und Boden (blood and soil).

Modern eco-fascists still draw on the same Romantic contrast between the sublime hierarchies of nature and the supposedly effete degeneracy of modernity.

They also exploit the legacy of a tendency influential in environmental circles in much more recent times.

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published a book called The Population Bomb, in which he argued that ecological destruction – and, indeed, almost all social problems – could be attributed to overpopulation.

As the historian Thomas Robertson notes, few signs of a mass environmental movement existed when The Population Bomb first appeared. Yet, “by the spring of 1970, Americans could hardly pick up a magazine or a newspaper without seeing mention of ecology and the environment”. That year, the first Earth Day attracted an astonishing 20 million people to environmental teach-ins, a result attributable at least in part to Ehrlich.

Today, his influence – and that of population theory more generally – has waned considerably, not least because the rate of world population growth has slowed substantially while his predictions of ever-worsening famines in the 1970s proved spectacularly wrong.

But progressive environmentalists also recognised the succour populationism provided to the extreme right.

The attribution of ecological destruction to demographic growth obscures the social relations through which, for instance, a mere 20 fossil fuel companies can be linked to more than one-third of greenhouse gas emissions in the modern era.

Worse still, arguments that (in theory) blame all people often (in practice) target particular people: usually the poor and the oppressed.

The Population Bomb itself opened with Ehrlich describing how he’d understood the case for population control “emotionally” during a visit to Delhi where, he said, the streets “seemed alive with people” and the “dust, noise, heat and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect”. At the time, Delhi housed some 2.8 million while the population of Paris stood at about eight million – and yet it would be difficult to imagine Ehrlich reacting with equivalent disgust to crowds on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées.

Other populationists came to oppose not just fertility but also immigration, on the basis that, if the teeming masses from poor nations moved to the rich world, they’d adopt a western resource-heavy lifestyle. As a result, as academics Sebastian Normandin and Sean A Valles argue, America’s modern anti-immigrant movement “was built and led by – and in some cases is still led by – a network of conservationists and population control activists”.

The vast majority of greens now disavow the environmental populationist John Tanton, who, according to Susan A Berger, constructed many of the anti-Mexican organisations relied upon by Donald Trump as he electioneered for his border wall during the 2016 poll.

Yet the argument that ordinary people, rather than social structures, should be blamed for climate change still circulates – and invariably pushes in rightwing directions.

Think of the El Paso shooter and the document in which he justified his racial massacre.

“If we can get rid of enough people,” he wrote, “then our way of life can become more sustainable.”

The glibness with which he advocates environmental murder marks the El Paso perpetrator as distinctly fascist.

Fortunately, genuine fascists remain on the political margins in the English-speaking world. Nevertheless, we can increasingly imagine the space that eco-fascism might occupy. When asylum seekers fleeing floods and famines arrive on Australian shores in their millions, how will politicians respond?

Unless there’s a radical shift in the political culture, they will, presumably, rely upon the strategies perfected during decades of bipartisan anti-refugee campaigning, deploying the familiar arsenal of boat turnbacks, naval patrols and offshore detention, albeit on a much, much larger scale.

In other words, they’ll embrace an approach already advocated by European racist populists like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, who posits massively intensified border policing as a “realistic” response to the inevitability of the environmental disaster.

Just as the stop-the-boats campaigners of recent decades depict refugee advocates as indifferent to drownings at sea, the supporters of “green” border policing will denounce climate activists for sabotaging “practical” responses to climate change with their utopianism.

It’s not difficult to imagine “eco-authoritarianism” or what Naomi Klein calls “climate barbarism”: a politics centred on the state making “our way of life” sustainable as the environment disintegrates. Future governments committed to this project will be able to draw upon the vast array of coercive powers they’ve acquired over the past decades: draconian anti-protest laws; secret trials and imprisonment; the deployment of the army to quell civil disturbances; and so on.

Eco-fascism represents a related but distinctive tendency. It will emerge not through the state but as a political movement, with people like the El Paso perpetrator violently defending climate privilege against immigrants, environmentalists and progressives.

We’re nowhere near that point yet. But it’s a lot less unimaginable than it should be.

Jeff Sparrow’s new book, Fascists Among Us: Online Hate and the Christchurch Massacre, is out now through Scribe.’

 

For more blogs and articles about white nationalism, environment and population growth click through.