Far right fascists have laid claim to the conversation of overpopulation. This was easy for them to do, considering the most famous historical promoter of this idea was a classist and racist who proposed killing the poor. Though he is wrong about population in so many ways, the basic ecological framework is real: animal populations grow to meet their food availability. The more food available, the more a population grows. The human population has increased exponentially since the “neolithic demographic transition” or in lay terms, the invention of full-time agricultural society, or, when humans began creating their food and became their own managers of the food supply. This makes population growth, and overpopulation, a central component of civilization. Understanding and speaking about overpopulation is a necessity, because it is a reality. We must wrestle this conversation away from fascists so that we can discuss it through a lens of reproductive justice as the collapse of civilization intensifies.
My guest today is Jason Godesky. Jason is an old friend and colleague of mine. We met in the early 2000’s on an internet chat board called “Ish Con” short for Ishmael Conference. It was a place to discuss the ideas presented in the books by Daniel Quinn. It was here that I gave Jason the nickname, “The Machine Gun” for his ability to remember and rapidly deploy facts, journals, studies, ethnographies, and more to back up many of the positions in what we would later call Rewilding. When ishcon closed down in 2006, I bought the domain rewild.info and invited Jason to help create a new online chat board specific to rewilding. Jason is well known for his essays on his now defunct blog, The Anthropik Network. A few years ago when Rewild Portland acquired rewild.com, I asked Jason to write the content to help people describe what rewilding means. These days his main focus is on using storytelling and gaming to promote the concepts of rewilding. Though, every once and a while he’ll post a new essay on a particular topic of interest. It’s his latest essay, entitled “Overpopulation” that we’ll be discussing here on the rewilding podcast today.
Notes:
Jason’s Projects
Mentions
- Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
- Making Kin Not Population
- Perceptions of the Environment by Tim Ingold
- Population Growth Daniel Quinn
- Lotka–Volterra equations
- Law of Limited Competition
- Europe & The People Without History by Eric Wolf
- The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter
- Against the Grain by Richard Manning
- All Things Being Equal: A Review of The Dawn of Everything
- Overshoot by William Catton
- The Neolithic refrigerator on a Friday night
- Why These Bears “Waste” Food
- Jevons Paradox: The Efficiency Dilemma
- Disinterpretation
- Degrowth