Alison Bashford - History

Exploding population myths: learning from history

The world population is 6.6 billion, far exceeding early 20th-century predictions that it would reach 3.9 billion by 2009. Yet overpopulation barely registers as a public issue, not even as part of discussions about planetary sustainability.

Professor Bashford is seeking to remedy this. One stream of her research on the history of science and the environment explores traditional attitudes towards population growth.

For much of the 20th century experts characterised overpopulation primarily as an economic danger, affecting resources and international security.

In 1911 the Australian statistician Sir GeorgeKnibbs warned that: “The limits of human expansion are much nearer than popular opinion imagines. The exhaustion of sources of energy is perilously near.” Population growth was cast as ‘the world’s greatest crisis’. For thinkers like Knibbs, population was a security issue: solving disparities in densities across the globe would secure lasting peace.

Knibbs may have been a eugenicist but he was an early environmentalist, supporting fairer global distribution of food and resources. Other early scientists also grasped the concept that reproduction and energy consumption are two sides of the same coin.

Modern lessons can be learned from this. The real population question emerges as an issue of health and reproductive politics, as well as one of density, territory, migration and ‘empty land’. It is a spatial issue as much as a sexual one, problematising the fertility of soil as much as the fertility of women.

When attention is shifted from the issues of sex to the issues of space, a chronology and geography of world population and health emerges, at once more complicated and more accurate.

This allows a clearer picture of the multiple connections between biopolitics and geopolitics over the 20th century.