Page 86 - SHARP November 2021

“Ray observed something else among some of her students: an extreme, desperate panic that led them to make over-the-top, explosive statements about their fears of resource scarcity or surging populations...”
severe cases, however, climate anxiety can cause intense anger, shame, and fear. Some- times, it can bring out the worst in people.
It was around 2015 that Sarah Jaquette Ray, author of A Field Guide to Climate Anx- iety and leader of the Environmental Studies program at Humboldt State University in California, noticed a shift in her students. “The material was just so difficult for them [emotionally],” she says. “And it was really becoming intrusive into our ability to do our classes.”
Like many climate scholars, Ray orig- inally intended to help people understand and care more about climate change. But she realized something wasn’t working. Her students began expressing feelings of despair, guilt, and complicity — sometimes having existential breakdowns in class or struggling to attend at all. “We sent them over the edge to the point of apathy and nihilism,” says Ray. “And I was thinking that they were not going to be able to do stuff that the world needed them to do if they couldn’t even get to class, much less graduate.”
Yet there was more going on in her classes than just climate doomism (a hopeless mindset in which the perceived inevitabili- ty of doom justifies inaction). Ray observed something else among some of her students: an extreme, desperate panic that led them to make over-the-top, explosive statements about their fears of resource scarcity or surging populations. Someone once even admitted to liking the idea of a green dicta- torship. Some of the things they said made Ray think, “This is why Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb.”
The Population Bomb, published in 1968, is a tirade against population growth in poor countries that predicted, as Ehrlich
once said, an “utter breakdown of the capac- ity of the planet to support humanity” before the sun rose on the ’90s. The book’s tone is one of apocalyptic alarm. More alarm — and countless human rights abuses — followed its publication.
The stories we believe about climate change have real-world effects. As panic about overpopulation intersected with eu- genics movements in the mid-20th century, millions faced discriminatory, forced, and frequently unsafe sterilizations in Mexico, In- dia, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia, and Bangladesh, among other places (in Canada, Indigenous women have been forcibly sterilized as recent- ly as 2018). In countries including Pakistan and Taiwan, health workers’ salaries were at times contingent on the number of IUDs they inserted into women. These attacks on the marginalized were waged in the name of a problem that improvements in women’s rights and access to healthcare and contraception ultimately solved. Today, global birth rates are falling, and experts anticipate shrinking populaces in nearly every country by the end of the century. Even now, nations including Japan and Canada require immigration to combat the social and economic problems presented by their aging populations.
In short, The Population Bomb’s nar- rative was hysterical, racist, and wrong. The biggest threat to humanity and the envi- ronment isn’t population growth — it’s our reliance on extracting and burning fossil fuels. We now know that just 100 investors and state-owned fossil fuel companies are responsible for 70 per cent of the world’s historical greenhouse gas emissions, and that the wealthiest one per cent of the world’s pop- ulation is responsible for more than double the emissions of the poorest 50 per cent.
Yet the false belief that overpopulation is the main cause of environmental degradation (also known as Malthusianism, for the British economist Thomas Robert Malthus) persists. Depending on your perspective, it’s either ex- tremely convincing or extremely convenient to the far right, who, as climate denialism has become a harder sell, are instead nurturing the toxic seeds of eco-fascism.
So what is eco-fascism, exactly? To the white supremacist terrorists accused of, in 2019, murdering of 74 people between them in El Paso, Texas, and Christchurch, New Zealand, it was a twisted rationale. “The environment is getting worse by the year,” wrote the El Paso shooter in his manifes- to. “Most of y’all are just too stubborn to change your lifestyle. So the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources.” The Christ- church shooter identified as an eco-fascist worried about climate change, overpopula- tion, and immigration. “They are the same issue, the environment is being destroyed by overpopulation, we Europeans are one of the groups that are not overpopulating the world,” he wrote. “The invaders are the ones overpopulating the world. Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the environment.”
Eco-fascism has been called “the greening of hate” and broadly applies to the use of ecological rationales to justify the harm, subjugation, or exclusion of mi- norities. It provides a faulty veneer of logic to the idea of an ecological “purge”: a kind of “righteous” environmental genocide in which many must die in climate catastrophe for the planet to rebalance and heal (also known as “lifeboat ethics”). Fascism is an anxious ideology. It flourishes when fear and
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