We're Now an 8 Billion Person World

Can our planet handle it? Can we?

Photo by Joseph Chan on Unsplash

According to the United Nations, the world’s population has now hit 8 billion. In just 12 years, we added 1 billion people to the globe. In 1927, when some of our grandparents were alive, there were just 2 billion people in the world.

Much of this growth is the result of progress. People the world over live longer. Far fewer are living in poverty. Fewer babies die in their earliest years; fewer women die giving birth. More preventable diseases are prevented; more treatable diseases are treated. Really basic things like cleaner water, toilets, and hand-washing have prevented millions upon millions of deaths, and allowed millions and millions more people to exist.

But we’ve also radically over-consumed and stressed our planet — and that’s particularly true for those of us in the wealthy and developed world. The price, though, is being paid largely by those with far fewer resources.

Writing about population is tricky, because “population control” has such an ugly history. Over and over again, overpopulation has been used as a pretext for abuses, mostly against poor women, and mostly against the global majority of non-white women. Some of this has come in the form of explicit state policy, of leaders stripping basic rights to bodily autonomy away from their people — China’s one-child policy, for example. And some of this has come from the abhorrent actions of outsiders, often those from wealthier nations intruding on the rights of more vulnerable people for what they saw as the greater good — forced and coerced sterilization campaigns, for example.

All over the world, women’s reproductive choices are politicized and manipulated. In the US, where I live, that comes in the form of outlawing abortion, making contraception harder to get, and fear-mongering about the “great replacement” and declining birthrates. This strategy — constraining women’s abilities to prevent or end pregnancies, and in effect forcing women and girls to reproduce against our will — is more common than legally (or extralegally) forcing us into having abortions or using contraception. But the latter happens, too, and it’s all a profound violation, and all a piece of the same misogynist ideology.

Talking about the troubling outcomes of unsustainable population growth, then, poses serious risks: Lots of folks hear the facts and conclude, well, we’ve gotta get women to have fewer babies in high-fertility countries. But there is another way.