“Conservation biology =eugenics. Really?”

This being America in the 21st Century, there is no shortage of epically ridiculous things that people have said (or especially tweeted) and belched forth into the ether. This take - “Conservation biology was born from Eugenics” - muttered from a mouthpiece that looks like the kind of person whose style of dress would serve as an automatic red flag that rent in the neighborhood was about to go up - really tops the list of “stupid shit that I have heard this week” (nowhere close to the infamous "Taxonomy is literally the history of white people stealing things” twitter quote I came across in 2021).

This take was written in response to a paper that was published entitled “Overpopulation is a Major Cause of Biodiversity Loss and Smaller Human Populations Are Necessary to Preserve What Is Left”, the abstract of which can be viewed here : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320722001999.

And who could argue against the idea that an exponentially growing human population is a threat to the entire rest of the biosphere? It seems like such simple and easy common sense. One need not be a math wiz to see that when the population of any species on Planet Earth grows too big, it becomes a threat not only to other species in the biosphere but especially to itself - to its own health. Deer populations grow too big due to humans exterminating all the predators? The deer begin to cause the extirpation and local extinction of many of the native plant species that they must eat to survive. Eventually disease and starvation afflict the population, and the population crashes, causing unnecessary suffering on a scale that would have been impossible had a healthy population of deer been maintained. Surely one would have to be out of their right mind - or just plain ignorant on the issue - to suggest that humans can go on growing exponentially and somehow avoid damage to the rest of the biosphere as well as unnecessary suffering to themselves.

Yet this is exactly the viewpoint that I’ve unfortunately seen start to pop up on the left as of late (I would never expect the right - with their innate adherence to religious dogma, anthropocentrism and general complete ignorance of (as well as lack of respect for) science - especially natural sciences - to ever entertain the idea that too many humans could pose a threat to the rest of the biosphere, though I could indeed imagine a right-wing take on overpopulation as embodied in the lyrics to the song "Shrink” by the Dead Kennedys).

In the past few years, I have frequently shit on “woke culture”. But I have to be clear here - my use of the word “woke” is much, much different than say, a Republican senator from Missouri’s use of the word :woke”, or the way that a covertly-racist suburban father dressed in the most bland and hideous Kirkland Signature cargo shorts and polo shirt might complain about the “woke mob”. “Woke” to me doesn’t mean somebody that acknowledges racism exists, or that America has a very dark and often ingrained history of oppression/suppression/persecution of various races/ethnic groups/genders/sexual orientations. When I use the word “woke” I’m not using it do describe people who think this country needs affordable healthcare, or that industry needs to be regulated, or that gay people should have civil rights. All of that is common sense to me, and the only people who would argue against it are the kind of unenlightened, untraveled, semi-conscious halfwits who’ve never left their home town and are deftly afraid of the world as it exists beyond the 4 walls of their small-minded figurative enclave.

When I use the word “woke”, I’m instead describing a very unfortunate phenomenon that I’ve seen pop up among the left in the last fifteen years or so, a phenomenon which is a boon for the recruitment of the right-wing (one of their best recruiting tools, probably) and which only works to divide and turn people away from the core ideas of the left. It is a phenomenon that goes hand in hand with the opportunities for showboating and public performance that social media provides.

“Woke culture” to me describes a kind of short-sighted cultural phenomenon that thinks that morally lecturing and speaking down to (mostly all online rather than in person, of course) - anybody who’s not 100% in agreement with your political take - is an effective strategy for changing people’s minds and changing culture. But woke-ism has not changed the culture. Woke-ism has instead turned many people off from core leftist ideas (like affordable & universal healthcare, or funding public education, or creating opportunities for equity). All woke-ism has done is create a culture dedicated to fear and shame, where those within the ranks who might otherwise possess highly-intellectual and critical minds capable of great ideas towards the advancement of leftist ideas and towards the advancement of humanity in general are afraid to break ranks with the herd for fear of being called out on twitter as morally and ethically inferior or guilty. This kind of “online activism” likely feels good, but in the end all you’ve done is create a culture of sycophants who all parrot the same talking points out of fear of being attacked publicly online. How is THIS any different than what the right has done? Well, for one, the right doesn’t waste time constantly shitting on and attacking each other. I guess they have that going for them.

Woke Culture has infused leftism with the kind of obnoxious, lecturing moral superiority that is an automatic turn-off to the people that need to hear it the most. It has become directly equivalent to old-school evangelical Christian proselytizing, yet nobody who participates in it would seemingly ever have the self-awareness to be able to see this or especially acknowledge it. Right-wing, left-wing, religious or not - this is what humans often seem to do when they get on their soapbox and find some kind of self-righteous moral cause to be swept away with which they let consume them. I think the Buddhists had some kind of term for this kind of thinking, though I can’t remember what it was. I’m absolutely sure that they were as fucking annoyed by it as I am, though.

Regardless, this kind of ranting and rabidly proselytizing approach that the modern left has taken up is pleasing to the ears of those in the choir that one may be preaching to, but beyond the feeling of moral self-righteous and satisfaction it grants to those parties it does little in the way of actually changing the minds of anyone who needs to hear it. It especially fails at changing culture (at least not in the way it purportedly intends to).

Part of the reason that the hippies in the 60s and early 70s were initially so successful in changing the very stiff culture and ethos left behind by the 1950s was because they made it fun. The wokies wouldn’t know the word fun if it ran up and bit them on the ass. The wokies have painted themselves as strictly anti-fun and anti-humor. They have unknowingly painted themselves into the caricature of being the FUN COP, where every single bit of cultural minutiae has to be passed through a strict filter of moral purity and the highest level of ethical superiority. They grant nobody the benefit of the doubt, know nothing of nuance or context, and view every potential post in the comments section as an opportunity to correct or re-educate someone (often by publicly shitting on them) on their ethical flaws and ingrained personality failings. In short, the wokies generally suck. It has become a cult. And it has (very unfortunately) totally tainted and infused most facets of American leftism. It has worked so well to fracture and turn people away from the left that it almost makes one wonder if it was somehow an intentional operation initiated by infiltrators on the right.

But back to the overpopulation issue. It seems like common sense that an ideal human population on Planet Earth would be one that’s a few billion in number below what we have right now. In this way, we could prevent damage to the rest of the biosphere, we could prevent species extinctions, and we could prevent all the myriad other problems, stresses and afflictions that arise - poverty, inequality, civil unrest due to food shortages and competition for resources, plagues, etc. - from any species being unequivocally abundant in number. I should add that I don’t foresee this happening any time soon, if ever, as we are still too “un-enlightened” of a species to ever figure out a way to do this, not to mention a humane and reasonable way to achieve this such as lowering birth rates via education, women’s rights, and an increased standard of living for all. While no species has ever willfully regulated its own population by controlling growth (always instead hitting a brick wall of reality and letting catastrophe do it for them), you would think that a supposedly “higher” and more self-aware species such as humans would figure out a way to make it happen so as to avoid the inevitable consequence of diminishing the quality of its own habitat. As primates, we are still too new to this “consciousness” thing and still too far below where we need to be at intellectually and empathetically, as a culture, to ever stand a chance of reaching some kind of consensus like this anytime in the next century or two (or five).

It is estimated that at a first world standard of living a sustainable human population on Earth would be around 2 billion. Beyond that, we start to take more than the resources of Earth can give and we slowly begin to diminish the global natural resource “bank account”, eventually reaching a negative balance which will only continue to grow larger as long as the population continues to, as well. If we were willing to do away with some of the unnecessary luxuries of most first world countries, we could probably double that sustainability equivalent to 4 billion. Today, world population is an estimated 8 billion. It is projected to be 10 billion by 2050, and 13 billion by 2100. With the levels of extinction and habitat loss what they are today, how can the human species possibly exist in such large numbers without causing the inevitable decline of the rest of the biosphere? The math simply doesn’t add up.

And so what do the wokies have to say about this? The first step to addressing a problem is to admit that you indeed have a problem. But the wokies simply refuse to admit that there indeed might be a problem. It’s easier to scapegoat with an already obvious villain that - to be fair - does deserve it’s fair share of blame on the issue of ecological devastation : Capitalism. Oblivious to most issues regarding natural sciences and ecology as they are seemingly only educated in the field of social sciences, they have created a straw man : “Anybody who espouses the idea that human overpopulation is a threat to the rest of the biosphere is an advocate and supporter of eco-fascism.” Eco-fascism? Since when have the tenets of fascism (militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the good of the nation, and strong regimentation of society and the economy) and the study of ecological connections within a living system of thousands of interconnected organisms ever had anything to do with each other? The idea is fucking preposterous, an oxymoron of the most ridiculous kind. But it doesn’t matter - we’ll just make it up and say that it’s a thing. And what is their proof? That some shit-for-brains white nationalist shoots up a mall somewhere and mentions “declining resources for the white race” in an online manifesto? There we have it - ecofascism.

I first saw this kind of tainted thinking arise during the start of the covid pandemic before we knew the scale of and virulence of this virus. As millions of people were forced to stay inside and business everywhere came to a halt, pollution levels decreased, smoggy skies cleared up and wild animals everywhere began to re-occupy areas where they had been excluded from due to high human populations for centuries. People began to mutter the somewhat corny phrase “the Earth is healing”, added as a caption to a photo of a whale swimming through a shipping channel that was formerly clogged with container ships. It was a corny phrase, to be taken with a grain of salt for sure, but it had a point. Most anybody who’s not a moron can take a look around at what the human species is doing here on Earth and admit that it’s - at best - a complete fucking mess. At worst, it’s a direct and existential threat to the rest of life on Earth. Something needs to change to avoid catastrophe. My vote is for our current behavior and our future birth rates, rather than our immediate population numbers, though this seems unlikely. It has been shown that birth rates automatically tend to drop once standard of living, opportunities and education go up. Boom. There’s your recipe right there. Bring people up from poverty, increase access to education, and most importantly - don’t be afraid to publicly acknowledge that too large a human population means the decline in the populations and overall welfare of the rest of the species in the biosphere. This is simple math, and it doesn’t mean that humans are an inately bad species, it just means that we have to play by the same rules as every other species in Earth’s biosphere - our numbers get too large, nature knocks us back, but not before we start to knock back the populations of all the other species in our immediate ecosystem and habitat (which in this case is the entire planet, unfortunately). To me, this just seems like common sense. Nothing is inherently offensive about it. But to the wokies (and of course all the world’s major religions, as well), this is heresy.

Never missing an opportunity to culturally re-educate the masses, the wokies stepped in. Twitter accounts of the most annoying mental brand all began parroting the word “eco-fascism”. “Humans aren’t a virus, Capitalism is a virus” they said. David Attenborough was even soon attacked as being an “eco-fascist” for the insistence in some of his BBC documentaries that human civilization itself was inadvertently causing the decline of the biosphere and the 6th mass extinction on Planet Earth.

This is where the cultural re-education comes in. Was Shel Silverstein an “eco-fascist”, too, for the controversial children’s book he published called The Giving Tree? This text clearly paints humanity as a species that takes way more than it gives. This is incorrect heresy. It seems Shel Silverstein simply never “de-colonized his mind” and educated himself on “indigenous” cultures and “indigenous" land ethics. Yes, because when we need an example of an archetype sustainable operating structure for how to run a civilization of 8 billion people without running both it and the planet it occupies into the ground, what better example to use than a pre-industrial society that probably only ever reached a population level of a few million people spread out over two giant continents? For all the beauty and reverence for non-human life forms inherent in many indigenous American cultures, we need to stop with the fetishizing of an entire race of people consisting of thousands of different tribes, each with their unique and different worldviews and belief systems. It’s gross, mildly offensive, and mentally lazy. Why not instead focus on the ideas that some of these cultures and tribes espoused rather then fetishizing them all as a caricature?

While there is undoubtedly much to say about the failures of modern capitalism to protect (or even account for) the health of the biosphere, I get uncomfortable at the idea of letting people think that is just capitalism that is the problem here, rather than a cultural worldview that would probably exist (and has existed) among the human population no matter what kind of “-ism” was in place as an operating system. The problem isn’t just “capitalism”, the problem is Anthropocentrism, an unenlightened belief that we are somehow special, that we are separate and apart from the biosphere that sustains us and therefore that we shouldn’t have to play by the same rules.

So in the wokie ethos regarding overpopulation - it isn’t real, and it doesn’t exist. It just a bunch of Malthusian “eco-fascist” nonsense meant to drum up support for a conspiratorial “eugenics program” that will one day be used to suppress populations of the poor and communities of color. While that last bit certainly seems like an agenda on the minds of more than a few on the right, the idea that there is a conspiracy among ecologists and naturalists to use overpopulation as an excuse to advance the agenda of white nationalists is a deranged and absurd strawman that simply doesn’t make any logical sense (most ecologists I know are devout progressives that hold inherently anti-racist beliefs, or believe themselves to and aspire to, at least) or pan out with reality. So overpopulation? Best not to talk about it. It isn’t real. Sweep it under the rug and ignore it. Complete fucking madness.

So what are their talking points? Well, the most common talking point here is kind of an obfuscation, as it’s a rebuttal to an argument that nobody is really making. They correctly point out that first world countries (and a handful of select corporations, specifically) are responsible for the bulkload of carbon dioxide emissions. But wait - carbon dioxide emissions? I thought we were talking about exponentially-growing human populations, in which case the most direct threat to the biosphere would be habitat loss : forests being burned to set up pasture land for cattle and farmland to grow crops? Aquifers being drained. Rivers being diverted for agriculture and hydro-electric. Rivers being filled with garbage and pollution. Roads being built into formerly unreachable wilderness areas, which automatically bring an infusion of human development and a destruction of habitat.

Nobody here was ever incorrectly arguing that carbon dioxide emissions were mostly the fault of poor countries, or that poor countries need to be singled out as opposed to their often much more ecologically devastating rich counterparts. Further, as the obvious negative ecological effects of poverty are undeniable, it would seem important for anybody that wants to minimize human impact on the biosphere to want to advocate on the behalf of the poor so as to bring them out of the kind of desperate situations that cause one to do things like inadvertently destroy one’s surrounding ecosytem for the sake of survival. So why are we talking about the carbon dioxide emissions of first world countries when habitat loss is the most direct and conspicuous threat to the biosphere caused by uncontrolled human population growth? Nonsense.

Another common talking point begins with an introduction of how “indigenous communities” and “indigenous stewardship” need to be given the steering wheel when it comes to the future of human civilization. This I actually agree with in principle, however it’s far too simple of a talking point, and I’ve grown somewhat nauseous at the seemingly unthinking fetishization of “indigenous” culture that seems so prevalent in the modern American leftist ethos. I believe it’s born out of an inherently good-intention, but as so many phenomena with social media it has become an annoying talking point that means next to nothing anymore. It seems that many people parroting this talking point could not adequately describe in detail the belief systems and ideologies possessed by some “indigenous” cultures that make them notable. Rather than saying that I think it much better to say that the land ethics and values systems espoused by some indigenous cultures the world over we would be very wise to try to adopt in to our current civilization.

And that’s exactly my point - lets’ focus on the ideas and ethics we admire in some indigenous, pre-industrial civilizations rather than fixating on some absurd and creepy idolizing of the civilizations themselves. At the same time, we must remain aware that this kind of stewardship and relationship to the land existed in a time very much removed and almost incomparably different from our own, with a population that was barely a fraction in number compared to what exists today, and to adopt these ethics and belief systems into our civilization - were it even possible - we would need to add a few updates and fundamentally think this through a bit more rather than just tweeting 280 characters as a rebuttal to a fact that makes us uncomfortable.

The land ethics of many indigenous American cultures espoused an innate reverence and respect for other organisms that humans shared the land with, regardless of the species in question having any direct use or purpose important to human beings. This is a belief that is an indicator of an enlightened outlook, and we would do well to adopt this in into our modern culture. It is a fundamentally flawed, short-sighted and inherently unintelligent belief that the only organisms worthy of “keeping around” are those that directly benefit our species in some way.

Today we face many threats to our own survival, all of them directly caused by ourselves. We would do well to avoid at all costs obfuscating the issue by doing things like misplacing blame solely on a single economic system (though it certainly bares an inordinately large share of blame for the current ecological wreckage) or especially, to avoid sweeping issues like overpopulation under the rug and refusing to talk about them - and demonizing anyone who does.