Too many bodies? The return and disavowal of the population question
Coole, Diana (2013) Too many bodies? The return and disavowal of the population question. Environmental Politics 22 (2), pp. 195-215. ISSN 0964-4016.
Abstract
During the 1960s and early 1970s population growth was regarded as an urgent environmental issue. Since then the topic has fallen into abeyance. Despite continuing demographic expansion and anxieties about a range of socio-ecological problems – from the stresses of high-density urban living to climate change, water, energy and food insecurity and loss of biodiversity – there is currently scant consideration of the benefits of population stabilisation or decline. Indeed, the problematisation of population numbers is widely disavowed or regarded with profound suspicion. Why have we become so reluctant to ask whether we are too many or to countenance policies that might discourage further growth? I identify five discourses – population-shaming, population-scepticism, population-declinism, population-decomposing and population-fatalism – that foreclose public debate and subject them to critical analysis. I end by eliciting signs of a hesitant revival of the population question alongside the enduring potency of silencing discourses.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | fertility, population, limits to growth, immigration, sustainability |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Birkbeck Centre for British Political Life |
| Depositing User: | Administrator |
| Date Deposited: | 06 Jun 2013 11:53 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 17:05 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/7307 |
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