Hello everyone:

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

Of all the strange ideas haunting this phase (and the next) of the unplanned Anthropocene experiment, the strangest may be this: There are too few of us, and declining birth rates around the developed world are a threat to the future of humanity.

This weirdness was expressed recently by Elon Musk to Fox News:

The birth rate is very low in almost every country, and unless that changes, civilization will disappear… Humanity is dying.

I scarcely know where to start in peeling back the layers of ecological ignorance, historical amnesia, human (and white) supremacy, and capitalist delusion that underlie this lie, but I’ll take a few minutes of your time in an attempt to do just that.

This matters because the unholy alliance of Christian nationalists and tech-billionaires behind the pronatalist movement here in the U.S. are now platformed prominently in the White House (and thus in the media), and they are working hard to reframe the reality of planetary crisis caused by humans into a bizarre fable of humans struggling to thrive against the overwhelming challenge of… too few babies.

This fable is at odds with every detail of reality.

Doomscrolling the Population Clock

Pronatalism is a movement intent on increasing human birth rates, despite the fact that our population is still growing at a rate of 2.4 per second, a million every five days, and about 73 million per year (more than the population of Thailand). It took all of human history to reach one billion in 1804, but since the mid-20th century, we’ve been adding a billion people every 12 to 13 years. Check out the Worldometer population clock for a real-time simulation of the still-crazy speed of growth.

I am not immune from doomscrolling the pop clock, imagining the impacts on the Earth from every split-second tick. Pronatalists, on the other hand, see doom in the prospect of slowing, then reversing, that growth.

Our population is still growing, but the rate of growth (the purple line in the graph) has dropped sharply from its peak in the mid-1960s. Here’s a confusing but vital point: The rate of growth is slightly less than half what it was then, but because there are more than twice as many of us now the total population is still growing at the same rate (~73 million per year). As growth finally slows, global population will likely peak in the next half century, and then begin to decline, as it already has in many developed nations. Spain, for example, is expected to decline from 47 million to 33 million by the end of the century. Taiwan, likewise, may drop from 24 million to 16 million. China’s population may be cut in half.

Two essential concepts here are “fertility rate,” the number of births per woman, and “replacement rate,” the 2.1 children per family it takes to keep a population stable. It’s a simplification, but above 2.1 a population grows, and below it a population shrinks. A recent UN report predicts that the global fertility rate, now 2.2, will reach 2.1 in 2050 and then fall further to 1.8 births per woman in 2100.

I’ve written about population in an essay that included this paragraph:

I should note that there is a lot of fear about population decline. Economists, nursed on the fairy tale of constant growth, are generally bewildered by it. Governments have few ideas for how to cope with it, other than to beg women to have more babies. Nationalists and racial purists see it as a direct threat to their dignity.

Pronatalists look at the declining growth rate and the subsequent reduction in population, and assume the future of humanity can only follow that decline into oblivion, as families across the globe somehow fail to have enough children to sustain our species.

This is, to put it mildly, unlikely. First, anyone claiming they know what a) the planet, b) civilization, or c) our population will look like over the next several centuries is guaranteed to be wrong. Futurism is always tenuous at best, and now the dice we’re rolling are loaded with unaddressed planetary crises and the myriad ways they’ll shape human well-being. How we’ll respond to all of it will define the Anthropocene. The future is less predictable than ever.

Second, what’s happening with population reflects a rebalancing based on human longevity and family choice rooted in more education, better healthcare, women’s freedom, and widespread technology. We live much longer lives, and those lives are less and less dependent on birthing large families to counteract the ancient scourge of child mortality. Educated, working women tend to delay motherhood. There are other factors that shape parental choices and family size - too many to discuss here - but suffice it to say that there’s no evidence beyond the initial rebalancing to prove that “humanity will disappear.”

Third, I think much of this fear of demographic “collapse” is merely a fear of losing our status quo concept of what human society looks like, as seen through the tiny, amnesiac lens of the current moment. Was there a tragic absence of humans in 1925? Two billion, the population of our great-great-grandparents just one hundred years ago, looks like an apocalypse to their 8.2 billion great-great-grandchildren.

A Smaller Civilization is a Better Civilization

It is true, however, that we are structurally unprepared for the decline that’s already happening in several nations. There are a few economists talking intelligently about two alternatives - a “steady state” economy and “degrowth” - but no modern government seems to have the foggiest idea how to run an economy with a declining population.

We’re addicted to the impossible-but-normalized delusion of constant economic growth, and this addiction underlies the popular billionaire obsession with turning humans into a “multiplanetary species,” as Alexander Zaitchik noted in a 2020 New Republic article:

Even just one more century of growth – which so far has shown no sign of taking a less destructive form – will require multiple earths. This is the neatest explanation for why Eric Schmidt, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos have invested in interplanetary colonization and asteroid mining. They know we can obey laws of the universe or the laws of growth, but not both.

Musk in particular seems to have assumed that because of our species’ irrational and harmful behaviors - of which he is a deeply disturbing example - the Earth is toast, and so cares little about life here as he plans for moving a few of us to Mars.

Like so much about his public persona, Musk’s soundbite for Fox News - “civilization will disappear… Humanity is dying” - is false and problematic, in part because it conflates civilization with humanity. “Civilization” is a blip in the long run of human history, and wouldn’t be measurable in Earth history if not for its likely changes to the fossil record. Humanity, on the other hand, is simply who we are and what we do within the community of life. Small villages marked by campfire smoke are as much a sign of humanity as Delhi cloaked in smog.

If, in a millennium, our population is reduced to half a billion well-fed, AI-infused primates living in techno-bubbles amid a healthier, greener Earth, then at least our numbers will have gone in the right direction.

For now, though, we are transgressing planetary boundaries on all fronts, whether atmospheric, oceanic, or terrestrial. We and our livestock outweigh all of the planet’s vertebrates, other than fish. We’re playing with the existential thermostat, driving thousands of species toward extinction, and erasing millions of years of evolution from the Earth’s innumerable communities of life.

Just to cite a recent example, an important new study by 200 scientists of thousands of plant communities around the globe noted an extraordinary absence of species that should be present, even in areas with less obvious human interference. This is yet another measure of the hidden impact of human activity on the biodiversity present before our population surged.

For ecological reasons alone, then, a smaller civilization is a better civilization. A sensitive, ecologically-aware, low-impact, even apologetic population of 8.2 (or 9 or 10) billion people cannot make enough room for all the life that filled the Earth even as recently as fifty years ago. Less, as they say, is more.

Thus, I’m not really inclined to worry about a below-replacement-rate fertility rate for 10 billion people. In fact, I wish I was going to be around to see our population return to our numbers at the dawn of the Anthropocene, before our mad bacterial growth of the past three hundred years.

To “Save Humanity,” We Must First Become a One-Planet Species

A recent Axios article about Elon Musk’s obsession with pronatalist policies explained that “his business empire, political influence and private life are aligned around a singular mission: saving humanity and becoming a multi-planetary species.” In Musk’s weird but powerful fantasy, income from Tesla and his other companies fuels SpaceX, which in concert with his AI company will forge our path to the stars.

Leaving aside that living on Mars is a ridiculous delusion, the idea of humans as a multiplanetary species is, so far, part of the reason we no longer qualify even as a one-planet species. Those we allow to design society have forgotten what it means to be human in the community of life, and they don’t know what home means. They’ve forgotten how to live here, but they think we’re ready to live elsewhere? The Mars-and-beyond fantasy is too often an adolescent formulation, in which the Earth serves merely as a (scorched) launch pad for our dreams. The only rational element of the fantasy is that it places us on planets and moons as barren as Musk’s industrial imagination.

My rule, in keeping with the adolescent theme, would be this: No one goes anywhere until we clean up our mess. The civilizational forces at work here must demonstrate, as so many of us do in our ordinary lives, responsibility for the powers we possess, stewardship over all we impact, and love for the lives with whom we share this planet. If we want to keep sending probes and telescopes into the blackness of space, I’m all for it. That’s a curiosity and expense I’m willing to support. But we stay here until we earn the privilege of a second planet.

We have far too much work to do here, turning our energies toward repairing the ecologies we’ve shattered, rewilding wherever we can, and reminding the next (smaller) generations that the living Earth is more astonishing than anything we’ll find beyond our thin atmosphere.

We do not need a trillion people to explore and occupy the solar system, as Jeff Bezos has said in a truly half-witted interview. That’s a hundred times the predicted peak of our Earth population later this century, and there will not be room for a tenth of them in even the most outlandish sci-fi delusions of settlements spread across planets, moons, and space stations designed, we imagine, by quantum AIs who probably won’t need more than a handful of us to oil the machines. Even if in a century or three we’ve reduced our numbers to a billion or two, we’ll still have enough people to loan a few to bases on the Moon, or to join with smarter machines in forays around the solar system.

Elon Musk, in particular, is a problem disguised as a solution, as his recent adventure in buying, weakening, and impoverishing the U.S. government has made clear. If he and his fellow irrational tech-bro pronatalists put their trillions into conservation, universal education, global family planning, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, and other measures known to improve the health of human and more-than-human communities, the Earth would become a place for rockets to return to, rather than one they had to leave.

Nurture All We Have and All We Are

The great paleontologist, evolutionary thinker, and writer Stephen Jay Gould once wrote this about our obsession with Albert Einstein’s intelligence:

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Jeff Bezos, who doesn’t seem to be able to distinguish numerical growth from empathy, said in his interview,

If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins… Our solar system would be full of life and intelligence and energy.

Those two sentences deserve their own essay, but for now it’s enough to say that Bezos seems better suited to destroying the Earth through efficient shopping and hoarding private wealth than saving humanity through social engineering. His dream of a crowded, networked solar system is more colonial than personal, more industrial than enlightened, and more urbane than humane. Just as “Christian” pronatalists have little use for the teachings of Jesus or the environmental wisdom of Pope Francis, the tech-bro pronatalists like Bezos and Musk et al would rather nurture intelligence than people. They’re ideologues, not idealists.

Citing Gould, climate and water scientist Peter Gleick posted this on Mastodon:

Bezos and Musk have it deeply wrong. The problem isn't that we need a trillion people to have more Einsteins or Mozarts… The problem is we don't nurture and protect the ones we have.

And that’s it in a nutshell. Here’s a proposal: Let’s first create economies that provide a decent standard of living, complete with good food, education, income, housing, healthcare, and ecological stability to every child and their family, everywhere. After that, let’s see whether civilization is still somehow desperately short of Einsteins and Mozarts. Let’s nurture all we have and all we are before fantasizing about somehow thriving by multiplying and leaving an exhausted Earth to die in the lifeless void.

The Sociopathy of Pronatalism

Pronatalists, despite the title, do not demonstrate a broad interest in babies, children, and families. They seem instead focused on the births and birthrates of white, educated, ideally wealthy, Europeans and North Americans (excluding Mexico). The Wall Street Journal, in a recent article on how Elon Musk manages his “legion” of babies and their NDA-restricted mothers, notes that Musk “is concerned about what he called Third World countries having higher birthrates than the U.S. and Europe,” and that “educated people [need] to have more children.” Call me conspiratorial, but it sounds to me like a white, uber-wealthy South African has ideas that sound a bit similar to the replacement-theory fear that underpins white supremacy.

(I should note that I’m referring here to the pronatalists most prominently in the news. There may be some humble, liberal, nondenominational or atheist, non-white, race-blind, and/or working class pronatalists who espouse the same fears of demographic collapse but with less elitism and media savvy. My apologies to them.)

“The focus is on middle class and above, native-born, Christian, white women,” Elizabeth Ananat, an economist at Barnard, told Axios: “It's like a fantasy of a 1950s TV show.” The same article notes that Vice President J.D. Vance, five years ago, said this about childless adults:

I worry that it makes people more sociopathic and ultimately our whole country a little bit less, less mentally stable.

In case you’re wondering whether Vance is merely wrong or wildly ridiculous, the Mayo Clinic offers a typical definition of sociopathy (a.k.a. antisocial personality disorder):

a mental health condition in which a person consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others. People with antisocial personality disorder tend to purposely make others angry or upset and manipulate or treat others harshly or with cruel indifference. They lack remorse or do not regret their behavior. People with antisocial personality disorder often violate the law…

It’s always a little too easy to find tech entrepreneurs and politicians who are poster children for this definition, but we live in a moment in which a mob of sociopathic children are running the American show. They visibly thrive on a) showing no regard for norms of right and wrong, b) ignoring the rights and feelings of others, c) purposely angering much of the electorate, d) treating people harshly and with cruel indifference, e) lacking remorse and regret, and f) flagrantly violating the law.

Vance gleefully oversees a wholesale assault on the rights and dignity of immigrants, a hollowing-out of due process and the rule of law, a diminishment of free speech and academic freedom, an attack on independent science, and a growing threat to the voting rights of U.S. citizens. The elimination of funding of USAID projects for medical, family-planning, and environmental projects is heartless, and the kidnapping and extradition of innocent migrants to a brutal foreign prison is an intentionally cruel scare tactic aimed at immigrant communities across the U.S..

Musk, meanwhile, talks about “saving humanity” while gutting the U.S. government’s capacity to care for its people and lands. And he advocates for educated people to have more children while supporting the Trump administration’s effort to impoverish public schools, defund school lunch programs, and generally make it harder for working families to raise kids comfortably.

And abroad, of course, in those less-wealthy and less-worthy nations, the Trump administration has slashed USAID funding for organization whose missions are known to strengthen and enrich families: reproductive health, girls’ education, and women’s rights and opportunities.

Moreover, many public pronatalists seem allied to (if not advocating for) the fossil fuel industry plan to end government regulation, scientific study, and public discussion of the climate and biodiversity crises, despite the existential threat they pose to the well-being of all humans.

I could go on. As could you.

There’s a lot I haven’t touched on here, but I’ll summarize by saying that pronatalism as it’s commonly articulated seems 1) as ethically challenged as the “pro-life” movement that disregards the rest of life on Earth, 2) as weird as businessmen thinking their success in making money qualifies them for making social policy, and 3) as irrational as a society that exalts billionaires rather than condemning them as a cascade failure of policy, regulation, and economic morality.

Perhaps the most important point I’ve made here is that many of us have no idea what a future with a declining population looks like, in part because of the ongoing failure of leadership across the globe to accept what’s coming and make long-term plans to adapt. It seems clear, though, that the folks pushing the pronatalist narrative are not those we want making our decisions.

If that doesn’t seem clear enough, keep an eye on the White House for upcoming announcements of strategies to boost the size of American families, even as some families are torn apart or hurt by other policies. Recent reporting suggests that a motherhood medal - for women who have several children - is one option, despite its history as an incentive for the Nazis, Stalin, and other more recent authoritarian regimes.

You can learn more about the contemporary pronatalist movement in an excellent Mother Jones article, in which the reporter journeys into a fascinating, depressing, and bizarre conference in Texas. And a really great Times op-ed a few days ago provides an excellent counterpoint to the idea that federal pronatalist policy will make any difference at all in the U.S. birthrate. Here are a few great quotes that should motivate you to read it:

In a better world than ours, our demographic troubles could easily be solved by immigration.

There’s a common factor in countries where birthrates are cratering: They are almost always places that are both modern and highly patriarchal.

But if Trump really wanted to arrest the decline in America’s fertility rate — which reached a historic low of 1.62 births per woman in 2023 — the best thing he could do is resign in concert with his entire administration. The crude chauvinism his presidency represents is a major impediment to the creation of healthy families.

Thanks for sticking with me.

In other Anthropocene news:

Hundreds of millions of birds are flying overhead tonight here in North America. See the visualized migration forecast for each night in your region and state at BirdCast. It’s an astonishing thing to see. Go outside and look up at the sky, knowing now that it is wildly and widely inhabited.

From

From Mother Jones, the fate of hellbender salamanders in a post-Hurricane-Helene and post Trump-2.0 world looks even dimmer. Hellbenders (also cheerfully known as snot otters) are large, slimy, essential, and endangered. This MJ story is thoughtful and heartbreaking, but beautifully told.

From the Guardian, an update on the massive wildlife crossing bridge over the 101 in Los Angeles. The structure is up, and now being covered with 6,000 cubic yards of soil. In May, they’ll begin planting thousands of native plants.

From

From Undark, “The Dangerous Illusion of Climate Resilience,” a reality-check on the lazy, “pragmatic” idea of adapting to a hotter, more turbulent world rather than doing all we can to prevent it from happening.

Also from Undark, a detailed examination of the Trump administration’s proposed change to endangered species protection by eliminating habitat from the definition of “harm.” This is a cruel effort to undermine protections overall, allowing destruction of habitat without guardrails established in the Endangered Species Act.

From Vox, an overview of the burgeoning success of “the holy grail of clean energy,” grid-scale battery storage, which allows us to store solar and wind energy and disperse it as needed, and which is already changing the energy landscape.

From Mongabay, a survey of the Gulf of Mexico’s recovery fifteen years after the massive BP oil spill.

From Nautilus, a scientist’s perspective on all that is lost as a result of funding cuts to Arctic and Antarctic science:

Across dinner tables, disciplines, and research sites, stories converged on a clear and sobering reality: Antarctica’s ice knows no politics, yet it faithfully records the consequences of our choices. From the origin of the universe to the future of our planet, polar science holds a chronicle of our ever-changing world.

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