Confronting population denial amid unraveling global crises

About This Event

Human population has doubled from 4 billion in 1970 to 8 billion currently, and is expected to grow by another 2.5 billion this century. While leading scientific authorities warn that overpopulation and rampant overconsumption are driving climate change, resource scarcity, and biodiversity collapse, there is widespread dismissal of the role of population in these crises among journalists, academics, environmental organizations, and policymakers. In this talk, Nandita will discuss the factors behind the silencing of this discourse, namely the growth-biased socio-economic systems, past population policies, pronatalism, and human exceptionalism. She will explain the harmful implications of population denial on the most vulnerable people and ecosystems, how the powerful institutions of the state, the church, the military, and the economy perpetuate and benefit from this denial, and why we must urgently move past it. Strategies on how to hold power accountable, while embracing population and economic degrowth as a means to advance social, reproductive, and ecological justice, will be discussed.

About the speaker: Nandita Bajaj is the Executive Director of Population Balance, a US nonprofit that works to inspire narrative, behavioral, and system change that shrinks our human impact and elevates the rights and wellbeing of people, animals, and the planet. She also co-hosts The Overpopulation Podcast, a popular series that delves into the nuances of the drivers and impacts of human expansionism with expert guests. She is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Humane Education at Antioch University, where she teaches about the combined impacts of pronatalism and human expansionism on reproductive, ecological, and intergenerational justice. In addition to a number of peer-reviewed papers and forthcoming book chapters, her work has appeared in major news outlets including Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, The Guardian, Newsweek, Ms. Magazine, The Globe and Mail, The Washington Post, and National Post.