The New Malthusians

Professor Frank Furedi writes in Spiked Online about the rise of the neo-Malthusians. Concerned by CO2 emissions, pollution, and terrorism, there are growing calls for ‘population control’ in the Third World (and, by implication, the Muslim world).

He writes:

For contemporary Malthusians, every new child is another pollutant: she may just be a baby now, but by the time she is 80 she will be responsible for the emission of 9.3 tonnes of CO2! So why worry about how much pollution your car causes? Apparently you should be far more concerned with limiting the size of the population. ‘Population limitation should…be seen as the most cost-effective carbon offsetting strategy available to individuals and nations’, argues the dreary British-based population-control outfit, the Optimum Population Trust (OPT) (2). Once the emission of greenhouse gases is taken to be the defining feature of human activity, then it follows that controlling fertility is the ideal ‘carbon offsetting strategy’. ‘If we had half as many people, we wouldn’t have much of a climatic warming problem’, says Ric Oberlink of the US-based group Californians for Population Stabilization (3). And no doubt if the human species disappeared off the face of the Earth altogether, then the crisis of global warming would resolve itself and the planet would be very happy.

The old Malthusian idea of a “ticking population bomb” is even being linked to the emergence of terrorism.

The Malthusian fantasy about a ‘ticking population bomb’ has been recycled in a new form – now rising population is said to give rise to real bombs in the form of Islamist terrorism. Apparently overpopulation creates a lot of poor, unemployed, discontented men; and many of them turn into troublemakers, which means that they can become canon fodder for terrorist networks; thus they end up on the wrong side of the ‘war on terror’. In the Seventies Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, argued that population growth in the South inexorably led to the triumph of communism. Today he has recycled this simplistic diagnosis to argue that population growth has led to the rise of international terrorism. Demographic factors are ‘likely contributors’ to terrorism, he claims. Why? Because the ‘vast majority of terrorists are young males’ and there are ‘huge numbers of boys under 15’ in Muslim nations.

This idea that large numbers of young males equals a potential terrorist threat is systematically promoted by the supporters of population control. ‘It is impossible to ignore the link between rapid population growth and terrorism’, says the director of the Population Coalition, a collection of population-control groups. In truth, it is the logic of the simpleton that sees a link between large numbers of young men and terrorism: population-control activists believe that because population is growing at the same time that new forms of terrorism are emerging, then they must be linked! If we took this view to its logical conclusion, then anything that coincides with current demographic patterns – whether it’s Hurricane Katrina, the boom in property prices in London or the popularity of iPods – could be linked to population growth.