American Scientist

To the Editors:

I found Samantha Jo Fried’s article on climate science interesting (“How Climate Science Could Lead to Action,” January–February), but I did not see any mention of overpopulation as a cause of climate change. Does she think that overpopulation is a cause of climate change? If so, why was it not mentioned in the article?

John Alcock
Tempe, AZ

Dr. Fried responds:

Like Dr. Alcock, I believe that the Earth can’t support an infinitely growing population of people, particularly with the toll our species takes on the environment. And I trust the experts who confirm that there is correlation, if not direct causation, here.

But because I argue that more data and information do not lead directly to action—and population data are not an exception to this belief—I must provide a mental model that might help us build local, national, and even international coalitions around environmental preservation.

This responsibility leads me to the question: How would we work on the problem of population growth together? We could tell folks to remain chaste forever, which I don’t think would win hearts and minds. We can suggest that not everyone should have families, and we can champion birth control. However, we risk alienating people who have strong cultural or religious reasons for opposing birth control, or who believe that families are sacred.

Not to mention, plenty of rhetoric around population control already exists, and has existed for quite some time: It entered popular discourse in the mid-1940s, after World War II. This rhetoric is older than environmental rhetoric. For this reason, I would conclude (as I have with the data-to-action paradigm) that it’s actually keeping us from building coalitions toward our goal of protecting the environment.

When it comes to discourse about population growth and the environment, we should also be wary of what we’re saying about women’s bodies and control thereof. Poor women, women of color, and women from the global south especially suffer at the hands of population control rhetorics. Such discourse can also negatively affect people with physical or mental illnesses. To me, at least, our urge to secure the environment derives from an urge to protect one another. If we’re not doing that, what are we fighting for?

This question about population control is meaningful to me, and it helped me come to this conclusion: Because we are fighting for and with one another, environmental coalition-building is rooted in the question of what we owe to one another, and to the place that gives us the opportunity to owe things to one another in the first place.

I worry that pointing out folks’ irrationality about climate—that is, clarifying the difference between climate and weather, or explaining collective carbon footprints—will backfire as a strategy. As you suggest, the information is out there, but some people are actively choosing not to invest in that knowledge. If we really believe that a path to change involves more widespread investment in scientific ways of knowing, then it’s our duty to listen to people who don’t trust climate science. It’s our responsibility to figure out what life experiences they’ve had, why alternative information is more appealing to them, and what we can do to gain their trust.

It’s also a reality that we can’t win over everyone, and that we need to cast a wider net in our rhetoric about climate change, one that goes beyond trying to sway the most stubborn. An even more winning strategy, then, involves having conversations with people who are ambivalent, or who understand the existential threat but don’t yet know what to do about it (and most of us fall into this category). If we really believe that a path to change involves more widespread investment in acting on these scientific ways of knowing, then it’s our duty to have conversations about conservation as a social movement, and not just to offer information that someone can either believe in or reject.