"Earth" and Overpopulation

The Earth group mentioned that concerns about overpopulation are relatively recent and although I’m not sure that’s entirely true (thinking of Thomas Malthus), this point is still extremely relevant. Concerns about overpopulation seem to be voiced most often in the developed world where populations are stable or declining and the “let’s make them change before we change our habits here” argument seems to have at least indirect support. And I think that the fantastical solutions reflect the developed world’s half-joking way of saying that we will likely either not change our consumption habits or will do so as slowly as possible. Even though there appears to be plenty of space for everyone (I read somewhere the world population could fit within the state of Texas, with each of us give six square feet of space), the developed world appears frightened by the idea that other people will live like us, which of course immediately signals that we are in fact aware that many of our habits/lifestyles do not fit within earth’s carrying capacity.

But in regards to carrying capacity, I think the number is less important than the measurement of how we live according to our respect for the environment. Another point I find both interesting and slighting annoying is the argument about the how the developing world moves from heavy pollution into decreased pollution as development leads to better technologies and wider access to those resources. Although this might be true, I think it ignores the reality of the current U.S. situation: even though we are technologically advanced, these developments have not solved the pollution problems. Instead, technologies like filters in coal steam stacks and “safe” nuclear storage have allowed countries like the U.S. to continue to use the same resources without requiring a serious commitment to other, renewable and potentially cleaner sources.

Ecofeminism

One of the components of ecofeminism that I find both relevant and insightful is the “logic of domination” (DJ 247). When I really think about how the world is organized, these “value hierarchies” do seem to be underlying the relationships many humans have with their environments. Once again, like in social ecology, the position of this hierarchy determines how one relates to the natural world and in the ecofeminism approach the umbrella dualism might be the preference for reason over emotion. In the United States, policy decisions seem to be under the influence of this binary, as the cost benefit analysis fits perfectly under the “reason” column. Following the implications of that preference, because this trait is often associated with men, nature becomes dominated according to resource allotment. I’m not sure I follow the radical feminists argument that women have an inherent “ethics of care,” but I certainly can envision how the woman’s association with the passive and the emotional and the male with the aggressive and the reasonable dramatically shapes how we interact with the natural world.

Also, I think that these dualisms control the language we use to talk about the land, that is, the “reason” approach denotes value according to specific measures like money while the “emotional” attempts to measure something intangible and most likely subjective. Maybe the rejection of the ecofeminism approach stems from the difficulty in properly measuring that subjective or aesthetic component against human needs (of course, what is necessary for living is also debatable, which complicates even the “reason” approach). But I think that attempting to understand why humans have historically “dominated” nature is at the core of ecofeminism and perhaps, to some extent, to Timothy Treadwell’s reasons for living with the bears. Both seem focused on developing ways to escape the social dualisms that lead to the environment’s steady degradation. Both seem to step back from the social arrangement to make sense of why things happen they what that they have, which creates a foundation for injecting change into the very system. I think that these two approaches expose the human obsession with control and how this obsession cements those dualisms. With control associated with the aggressive/reasonable half of the dualism, emotion and nature are often uncontrollable, which I think makes them unsettling to the group or ideology trying to assert its superiority.