https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9315181/

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 pr…