Een land zonder mensen? De demografische verbeelding van de ecologie

The link between planetary boundaries and demography, mentioned in many works of fiction, has haunted modern ecological thought since its origins. If environmentalism has freed itself from its Malthusian heritage to focus instead on our ways of inhabiting the world, it has done so by relegating reproduction to the private sphere, treating it as a political taboo. Between these two extremes lies a conceptual void that remains to be explored.

“When I tried to classify your species, I realized that you are not actually mammals. All mammals on this planet instinctively develop a natural balance with their environment, but not you, humans. You settle in a region, then you multiply endlessly until you exhaust all natural resources, and the only way for you to survive is to move to another region. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? Viruses. Human beings are a disease, a cancer on this planet. You are the plague, and we are the cure.”

This disparaging observation addressed by Agent Smith to his prisoner Morpheus in the first volume of the Matrix trilogy serves as a justification for the technical rationality of the machine civilization to legitimize its empire over humanity, reduced to the condition of an energy slave. It has, a priori, nothing to do with one of these many radical ecological critiques of human demographic pressure on planetary resources. Yet, it is a constant among grievances voiced by other fictional characters.

Among the enemies of humanity, the most powerful would be Thanos, the mythic supervillain of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Traumatized by the collapse of the ecosystem of his native planet under demographic pressure, the Titan sets out in search of the “Infinity Stones” whose collection will allow him to save the universe from human proliferation, by blindly erasing, with a literal snap of his fingers, exactly half of the living population – to preserve threatened natural balances.

To save the planet, should we rid it of its most burdensome host? Clearly, some misanthropic ecological currents and figures do not hesitate to take this step. But since no one claims to sacrifice themselves to make room, it is always others who are considered excessive – especially the poorest. A minor but eloquent literary illustration, Jean-Christophe Rufin’s novel The Perfume of Adam (2007) imagines a radical ecologist organization planning bioterrorist projects (notably via a cholera strain) to reduce the global overpopulation threat – starting with regions like the favelas of Brazil. True disciples of the good pastor Thomas Malthus, who in his time did not hesitate to “encourage the return of the plague” to help with the natural regulation of the poorest populations.1

The Children of Malthus

Ironically, it seems that progress and technological developments have begun to respond to the morbid wishes of Malthusian minds – but in a more indiscriminate way than they probably would have wished. Beyond the 4 million deaths caused each year by air pollution worldwide, including about 180,000 across the EU, we are collectively subjected to a “universal poisoning” that inexorably reduces our chances of reproduction. Ubiquitous throughout the planetary ecosystem, chemical pollutants directly attack our reproductive systems. Phthalates, bisphenols, pesticides of all kinds, endocrine disruptors alter the hormones of insects destined for destruction – and spread far beyond. In humans, they reduce sperm quality, cause early infertility and genital malformations in newborns. Heavy metals like lead or mercury accumulate in tissues, disrupt ovulation and spermatogenesis. Microplastics, ingested via water and food, infiltrate ovaries and testes, while PFAS, or “forever pollutants,” decrease ovarian reserve and increase miscarriages. To this apocalyptic list are added dioxins, PCBs, and other flame retardants whose toxic cocktail lowers overall fertility, jeopardizes pregnancies, and weakens future generations.

These concrete impacts on our lives and natural faculties reveal an ecology of the body itself, where the ecological crisis becomes a reproductive crisis, closely linking demography and environmental health. Beyond the dynamics of the Christian fundamentalist movement seizing power, it is at this nexus between environmental crisis and its demographic consequences that Margaret Atwood places the catalyst for the advent of the patriarchal and totalitarian regime of Gilead: pollution, toxic waste, and the sharp decline in fertility foster the overthrow of democracy and the implementation of total population control, especially over women’s bodies, which are literally nationalized in the name of societal perpetuation – and the biblical injunction to grow and multiply. The bestselling dystopian book and series, The Handmaid’s Tale, tragically illustrates the political link between environment and demography.

This is a question that haunts ecology from its very origins, not only as a matter of figures but as the intimate knot between our bodies and the world. Born in the 1970s during a double awareness of the limits and contradictions inherent in the development model of industrial society, the first ecological movements were imbued with this tension between resources and populations.

Moreover, with the first Meadows report from the Club of Rome (1972), the scientific demonstration of the inevitability of these consequences in terms of pollution and resource depletion highlights the fragility of Earth’s balances. As the veil of thermodynamic illusion is torn away, the industrial promise of universal abundance becomes a threat. Material growth is all the less infinite as we must consider sharing it more and more.

It is within this double crisis of finiteness that the first modern ecological imagination crystallizes. René Dumont’s presidential campaign in France in 1974, the first ecologist to take a political step to sound the alarm and introduce ecological awareness into the public space, also denounces both waste linked to consumerism and demographic pressure: “It would be possible […] to authorize only a birth rate that exactly compensates for mortality, thus quickly reaching zero growth, if one employed authoritarian methods – which the global danger would justify.”

This advent of modern ecology, based on the statistical recognition of the dead ends of the abundance society and the demographic danger, thus produced a very powerful imaginary. Demography becomes the revealing symbol of a metaphysical threat. The number of humans on Earth then condenses the anxieties of the time: hunger, exhaustion, pollution, urban congestion, wild urbanization, disappearance of landscapes, the end of Promethean certainties, and resource wars. Aware of its mortality since the terrifying discovery of nuclear fire after Hiroshima, humanity now feels threatened by its own vitality: after A-bombs and H-bombs, the “P-Bomb” suddenly joins the list.2 A warning issued by neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich, biologist at Stanford University, co-founder of Zero Population Growth, closely linked to the early days of the ecological movement and organizations like Friends of the Earth.

This anguished obsession with overpopulation profoundly marks the early ecological movements while fueling a prolific literary and cinematic catastrophe genre. Very “Club of Rome,” the novel Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, published in 1972, depicts a world saturated with toxins, waste, systemic violence, where collapse is no longer an accident but an atmosphere. The population is not only too numerous; it is caught in a hostile and poisoned environment, as if the species were imprisoned within its own externality. More subtly, Ursula K. Le Guin, with The Dispossessed in 1974, offers a confrontation between material abundance rooted in property and an anarchist, frugal, egalitarian, and solidaristic society, to answer this question at the heart of ecology: how to organize to live in a world of finite resources.

The Feeling of Scarcity

Very quickly, the apocalyptic imaginary of ecological prophecy encounters its demand for an ethical and political overhaul of economic development. Ecologists observe that the economic system they confront does not collapse under “the weight of its internal contradictions,” but reinvents itself by exploiting scarcity itself – a logic that Brunner’s work clearly anticipates by showing a society trapped in a self-sustaining scarcity loop, where finiteness does not stop accumulation but transforms it into more voracious and dystopian forms. Essentially, behind the statistical aggregates, the problem is first a matter of individual behavior – thus of worldview, of humanity’s place in the universe.

Reading the small essay Limits (2019) by Greek economist Giorgios Kallis, a theorist of degrowth, reveals that contrary to what his heirs have understood, Malthus was not really hostile to population growth. He even saw it, like Adam Smith or classical liberals, as the true wealth of nations. But, being contemporary with certain material supply difficulties, he was primarily driven by this irresistible anxiety: while our appetites (sexual and food-related) are unlimited, material resources are limited. The answer to this contradiction therefore lies in growth. Malthus is not at all an advocate of degrowth, as some ecologists and all natalist racists obsessed with the “great replacement” might imagine, but one of the founding fathers of the growthist church.

The feeling of scarcity is the cornerstone of this church. It is within this scarcity that the dynamics of economic growth are rooted. Paradoxically, however, this feeling is only a projection, a prejudice about the world – and, as Kallis emphasizes, a performative vision. In other words, by articulating from the outset the justification for economic growth based on the anticipation of an impending scarcity, real or not, we have organized our economic system around managing scarcity. What is rare is expensive. Organizing scarcity pays off. All that remains is to generate desires that sustain the feeling of lack, which can be satisfied by our products… and the loop is closed. The economy of unlimited desire has found its formula.

Ecotopias

However, awareness of limits is at the heart of ecological thought. And if one of the first limits it imposes is that of material desires, central in the thinking of André Gorz, it also concerns our immaterial desires. Published in 1975, the classic of utopian ecological fiction, Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach, offers a peaceful counterpoint to all totalitarian or catastrophic interpretations of the “P-Bomb.” The republic of Ecotopia presents a society that has stabilized its population, controlled its fertility, and organized a form of demographic sobriety compatible with its ecological balance, without infringing on individual freedoms. Far from the puritanism of the United States from which they seceded, the Ecotopians also avoided the pitfalls of a superficial sexual liberation, which would only perpetuate relations of sexual domination – an ambivalence between liberation and liberalization of sexuality, central to the work of Michel Houellebecq.3

In fact, in Ecotopia, when the narrator and central character of the book finally moves west, choosing his new ecological homeland, he does so out of love: it is neither the formidable agroecological sustainability nor the circular economy or the end of advertising, nor even the beauty of preserved natural landscapes that win him over – but the richness and depth of human relationships, especially romantic bonds.

The distinction between love, sexuality, and reproduction is one of the anthropological keys to the stability of societies based on ecological sobriety. But this is not always straightforward, as it touches on one of the most intimate subjects of the human condition. A recent example, provided by Camille Leboulanger in her novel Eutopia, explores the political repressions of this dimension of family and human reproduction. Devoid of the artifices of narration built around the conflict that haunts the genre of “disclosed utopias,” the novel describes a world that, in many respects, corresponds to the ideal forms of human relationships and production relations dreamed of by most degrowth thinkers.

Certainly, Eutopia (the “good place,” rather than the “non-place,” as the author explains) is primarily a fictional speculation on the forms a society completely liberated from the commodification of labor might take, organized by the “lifetime salary” of Bernard Friot and fundamentally egalitarian. Yet some characters in Eutopia’s society feel haunted by an existential question. In the figure of Gob, “eternally maladapted” as the author calls him, an illustration that “it is possible to be unhappy in a utopia,” this anxiety revolves around family ties and attachment to lineages in descendants – opening the potential challenge to one of the pillars of this degrowth society, which aims to reduce its “human impact indicator” by limiting births to “half a child” per individual.

The point is never Malthusian, and the demographic question is not even central to the book’s thesis. But this utopian society, which has implemented degrowth and freed itself from productivity injunctions, faces within the privacy of the individual a form of anxiety that exceeds the material condition of the species, while inscribing it within its own limits: time.

Reproduction as an Unthought

Demography is an inscription in time. It is precisely here that the source of moral panics that ignite the Western public sphere and feed both reactionary dynamics and martial metaphors lies.4 Fear of civilizational erasure, territorial abandonment, retreat of the footprint left behind: demographic anxiety questions our relationship to time as much as to space. Like ecology.

However, today’s ecologists are no longer Malthusians. There are three main reasons for this. The first is their definitive entry into the political arena. Once ecology ceases to be a mere critical imaginary and becomes a force of governance, it can no longer reasonably advocate policies of birth limitation without facing a fundamental objection: the bodies of individuals, especially women’s, family life, and the choices to have or not have children are matters of fundamental freedoms. The second reason is even deeper. As ecology has become more precise, it has shifted the focus from the number of inhabitants to how they inhabit the world. The pressure on resources does not come mechanically from simply being numerous; it mainly depends on how societies produce, consume, transport, heat, build, eat, and throw away. A child born in a frugal country does not have the same footprint as a citizen of a hyper-consumerist society. Social inequalities are also ecological inequalities. Very quickly, it became more relevant to think about reducing material flows, transforming infrastructures, and practicing system sobriety than to target demography as such. The third reason is the political and moral corollary of the previous ones. The discourse on birthrate is a minefield. It can very quickly revive racist, colonial, anti-South tropes, where criticizing the fertility of poor countries serves to avoid confronting the overwhelming responsibility of rich countries.

This is why contemporary ecological discourse emphasizes transforming the societal model. It talks about production, consumption, energy, mobility, social justice, agriculture, and bifurcation. It talks less about reproduction. As if social life were thought in its visible cycles – extract, produce, distribute, consume – but not in how it is humanly renewed. Reproduction has become an unthought, or rather a non-object, relegated to the private sphere, the intimate, and political taboo. This is perhaps one of the paradoxes of contemporary ecology: rethinking the relationship with the world, but leaving out the question of its biological and generational transmission.

A Future Without Children?

Perhaps this is where part of the current problem lies. Because if demography has left the center of ecological concern, it has not left reality. With few exceptions, all societies worldwide are aging, fertility rates are falling, desires for children clash with material constraints, and futures are shrinking. Moreover, the effects of eco-anxiety, especially among younger generations, turn the future itself into an emotionally burdensome load. For some of the youth, refusing to have children becomes even an intimate protest against the very idea of reproduction in a world in crisis.

This “child strike” is neither planned nor truly widespread. But in some ecological circles, especially Anglo-Saxon ones, it is no longer just about denouncing overpopulation or advocating for demographic sobriety, but about refusing to have children oneself in a world deemed too degraded, too uncertain, too unjust to bring a new generation. This political, minority, and militant act has its legitimate motives, moral foundations, and protest power. But it also has its limits, as it shifts the responsibility of collective transformation onto individual choices, which have little impact on the structural causes of the crisis, caught in a difficult tension between critique and withdrawal from the world. In this way, it says much about the era: no longer the fear of being too many, but the anxiety of having children in a future that already seems compromised.

Ecology has managed to think about resource limits, but has less successfully considered the consequences of its calls for human withdrawal. Between the fear of being too many and the fear of being too few, between the anxiety of overloading the planet and that of giving birth to children doomed to uncertainty, there is almost a conceptual void. This void, ecologists have not yet truly inhabited. They have thought about emissions, flows, infrastructures, systems; they have less thought about what the environmental crisis does to desires of kinship, life choices, and the very possibility of projecting oneself into a generational continuity.

Perhaps it will be necessary to revisit this. Not to rehabilitate regressive Malthusianism, but to think a comprehensive ecology capable of articulating the conditions of social reproduction, those of human reproduction, and the affects that traverse them. An ecology that does not merely transform the world but also questions how this world is transmitted, populated, renewed, and narrated to itself. Because ultimately, the link between demography and ecology is primarily a thought of the future: who will come after us, in what kind of world, and with what possibilities to inhabit it? A society whose children are absent is a society that struggles to project itself into the future and to define a project beyond itself. With a weakened vital charge, it risks falling into entropy or losing itself in an eternal, meaningless present.

This is the whole meaning of the human adventure that is posed through this question – very anthropocentric. Like the sound of a fallen tree in an uninhabited forest, what would be the meaning of terrestrial life without human consciousness to account for it?