Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [62]
There’s a third way to look at population, which is, I think, as useless and harmful as the others. Even when people do accept the existence of carrying capacity and aren’t trying to use their talk of overshoot to maintain the rich’s current stranglehold over the lives of the poor—and to extend this stranglehold into the most intimate aspects and decisions (sexuality and childrearing) of their lives—they more often than not talk of population in terms of mathematics, in terms of exponential increase, in terms of some “natural rate of population growth.” It’s very simple: turn on your computer, plug the appropriate numbers into your handy-dandy formula—X number of people on Y amount of land containing Z amount of resources, where W represents the industrial educational level of women—and watch the little black and brown dots representing people fill your screen. But this formulation carries with it many dangerous premises, including the essential premise of mathematics itself: those to be studied and described are not individuals who make choices, but instead are objects who—or rather which—act with no great measure of volition. It presumes people do not make rational short-, mid-, and long-term family-planning decisions based on their circumstances, experiences, and the social values into which they’ve been acculturated. Nor do they give any thought to the personal, social, or environmental consequences of their decisions. Heck, it presumes people—especially poor, brown, uneducated people—breed with no thought whatsoever: where does thought, or choice, fit into these or any equations? It presumes they breed like rabbits. But that’s nonsense. I’m not even sure rabbits breed like rabbits.
Sure, we can make probabilistic predictions of what certain percentages of people (or rabbits) will do under certain social and ecological conditions, but to talk of any “natural rate of population growth” without talking about the culture that causes—acculturates, inculcates, coerces, rewards—people to not only ignore environmental limits but to perceive, accurately, that their larger social fabric would collapse without incessant growth is to naturalize—make normal, make invisible, make seem as inevitable as gravity—something that is not natural but cultural.
Non-linear—cyclical—cultures, those not predicated on growth but on dynamic equilibrium, maintain stable populations. Having reached the limits of what their landbase willingly supports, indeed—and this is well-nigh inconceivable to those of us raised in a culture where we are taught to perceive all life as horrific competition and humans as the bloody victors—having reached a population level that best serves the needs not only of their human community but of their nonhuman neighbors, they, believe it or not, reduce the number of children. They do this by breastfeeding their existing children for many years, by abstinence, by taboos, by the use of herbal contraceptives and abortions. Prior to conquest, American Indian women, for example, used more than two hundred plants, roots, and other medicines as means of birth control, making the decisions themselves as to whether to use them.138 When all else fails, some cultures, and I’m not promoting this, practice infanticide. This infanticide is often not gender-based.
Beneath these techniques is the real point, which is an intimate and mutually beneficial relationship with their landbase.
“What nonsense!” I can hear you say, “Humans exploit their surroundings! Human needs are in opposition