Abstract As anthropogenic climate change threatens human ex…

Abstract
As anthropogenic climate change threatens human existence on Earth, historians have begun to explore the scientific antecedents of environmental Malthusianism, the idea that human population growth is a major driver of ecosystem degradation and that environmental protection requires a reduction in human numbers. These accounts, however, neglect the antagonistic relationship between environmental Malthusianism and demography, thereby creating an illusion of scientific consensus. This article details the entwined histories of environmental Malthusianism and demography, revealing points of disagreement – initially over methods of analyzing and predicting population growth and later over the role of population growth in ecosystem degradation – and moments of strategic collaboration that benefited both groups of scientists. It contends that the image of scientific consensus in existing histories has lent support to ongoing calls for population control, detracting attention from more proximate causes of environmental devastation, such as polluting modes of production, extractive business practices and government subsidies for fossil fuel development.
Keywords: population, demography, environmentalism, Malthusianism, social science
At the beginning of the 21st century, as anthropogenic climate change threatens human existence on Earth, many people in the US – at least many of those who acknowledge the reality of the crisis – accept as common sense that population growth drives this calamity and that reducing the number of people on Earth would avert or mitigate harm (Funk et al., 2015). Some bioethicists argue that, because ‘we are threatened with more population than the planet can bear’, humans simply ‘don’t have a right to more than one biological child’ (Conly, 2016: 2). Some recommend that governments act to uphold this limit (Hickey et al., 2016). Even feminist historians and sociologists of science, including some sharp critics of the population control projects of the late 20th century, now call for measures to reduce childbearing as a means of combatting climate change (Clarke and Haraway, 2018). Environmental Malthusianism, the idea that human population growth is the primary driver of environmental harms and population control a prerequisite to environmental protection, is experiencing a resurgence (Dean, 2015; Gleditsch, 2021; Kallis, 2019; Robertson, 2012).
Over the past 20 years, historians have uncovered the intellectual, social and political roots of environmental Malthusianism, tracing it to the first decades of the 20th century (Bashford, 2014; Desrochers and Hoffbauer, 2009; Robertson, 2012; Ross, 1998). While these accounts document the relationship between environmental Malthusianism and the broader 20th-century population movement, they generally overlook the tensions between environmental Malthusianism, promulgated primarily by natural scientists, and demography, the quantitative social science of human population dynamics. By including only the very few demographers who aligned themselves with environmental Malthusianism (most prominently Kingsley Davis), these histories create the false impression of scientific consensus regarding the relationship between human population and the natural environment. Historical critiques of population control further promote this illusion by conflating environmental Malthusianism and demography into an undifferentiated population science (Connelly, 2008; Hartmann, 1995).
Histories of demography, for the most part, largely ignore the natural environment and environmental Malthusianism (Greenhalgh, 1996; McCann, 2017; Merchant, 2017; Murphy, 2017). This omission makes sense, as demographers – social scientists who worked in and/or received their graduate training in university-based population research centres – had little to say about the natural environment before the mid-1990s (Pebley, 1998). Even as late as 2018, Amy Tsui, the outgoing president of the Population Association of America (PAA, demography’s primary professional organization), acknowledged that ‘the one area we [PAA] somehow never captured, and maybe we need a celebrity for this, so to speak, an advocate, is environment’ (Weeks et al., 2018: 11). Despite demographers’ overwhelming silence about the natural environment, however, environmental Malthusianism was integral to the history of their field. Environmental Malthusianism generated public concern about overpopulation, which translated into massive funding for research and training in demography after World War II. It is likely because environmental Malthusianism was such a boon to demography that demographers largely kept their scientific critique of environmental Malthusianism to themselves.
This article traces the relationship between environmental Malthusianism and demography from the interwar period to the early 21st century, drawing on the archives of environmental Malthusians, demographers, their employers and their funde…