Eco-socialism will be anti-eugenic or it will be nothing: Towards equal exchange and the end of population
| Published date | 01 May 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02633957221075323 |
| Author | Lisa Tilley,Max Ajl |
| Date | 01 May 2023 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957221075323
Politics
2023, Vol. 43(2) 201 –218
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/02633957221075323
journals.sagepub.com/home/pol
Eco-socialism will be
anti-eugenic or it will be
nothing: Towards equal
exchange and the end of
population
Lisa Tilley
SOAS University of London, UK
Max Ajl
Wageningen University, The Netherlands
Abstract
In this article, we draw attention to similarities and synergies between eco-fascist and liberal
forms of populationism which encourage reproductive injustices against Indigenous women and
women of colour globally, increasingly in the name of climate change mitigation. Calls to intervene
in the bodily and social autonomy of racialised women, at best, distract from ecological crisis
and, at worst, encourage violent forms of reproductive injustice. We urge instead for an honest
reckoning with the root problem of ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) as the system of global
extraction, which enacts environmental harm and reproductive injustice. Finally, we call for an
anti-imperialist eco-socialist move towards equal exchange on a world scale to end the flow of
undervalued resources from the South and to limit the contaminating activities these enable.
We also stress that an anti-imperialist eco-socialism needs to be attuned to the teachings of
reproductive justice movements and resistant to creeping liberal eugenicism, as much as to the
overt eco-fascism which has proved so deadly in recent years.
Keywords
climate change, ecofascism, eco-socialism, populationism, race
Received: 12th August 2021; Revised version received: 25th November 2021; Accepted: 6th December 2021
As Bikrum Gill (2021: 1, this volume) argues, ‘race underwrites the distinctively exhaus-
tive society/nature relation fuelling . . . the productive excess and ecological exhaustion
of the capitalist world-system’. To accept and extend Gill’s claim, we argue that race
Corresponding author:
Lisa Tilley, Development Studies, SOAS University of London, London WC1H 0XG, UK.
Email: LT28@soas.ac.uk
1075323POL0010.1177/02633957221075323PoliticsTilley and Ajl
research-article2022
Special Issue: Race & Climate Change
202 Politics 43(2)
underwrites many of the dominant solutions and novel innovations of governance devel-
oped within the frame of environmentalism and in response to the urgency of climate
change, particularly in relation to the enduring construction of ‘overpopulation’ as an
environmental problem. To substantiate this, we revisit how ‘population’ – already a term
for racialised groups developed through colonial management – became re-articulated
with ‘environment’ in key formative publications in environmental studies due to the
efforts of white nationalists in the mid- to late-20th century. Absent any serious reckoning
with this lineage, liberal environmentalism continues to launder effectively white nation-
alist priorities into their policy-oriented analyses. Here we trace this relationship from the
white nationalist populationism of Garrett Hardin through to the liberal environmentalist
populationism of Partha Dasgupta.
We situate this population fix as the necessary ideological thimblerig that justifies a
capitalist world-system structured to extract value and resources from peoples of colour
in the periphery – extraction which super-exploits and degrades peripheral labour, social
orders, and ecologies, and drives migration to the core.1 Such flows are then remoulded
and represented as natural facts and threatening forces to northern audiences through
populationist discourses to justify border violence and political exclusion (see Turner and
Bailey, 2021).
The first section of this article revisits ‘population’ as a racialised ‘managerial noun’
(Murphy, 2017: 135), which prepares the ground for coercive reproductive interventions
in the name of ecology. Here we consider the synergy and reciprocity which connect
ecofascism with liberalism through the foundational white nationalist populationism of
figures like Garrett Hardin. The second section uses the lens of ecologically unequal
exchange (EUE) to bring into focus the system of extraction and exploitation, which con-
nects environmental harm and reproductive injustice. The third focusses on some ele-
ments of an anti-eugenic and anti-imperialist eco-socialism, using historical Third World
documents that raised and dismissed the population-development nexus, and contempo-
rary struggles which are the mooring for a committed programme towards global devel-
opmental convergence. We conclude by reasserting that an anti-imperialist eco-socialism
needs to be attuned to the teachings of reproductive justice movements and resistant to
creeping liberal eugenicism as much as to the overt eco-fascism which has proved so
deadly in recent years.
From replacement narratives to reproductive interventions
On 15 March 2019, a self-described ‘Ethno-nationalist Ecofascist’ murdered 51 Muslim
worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand (Forchtener, 2019). The white
Australian killer distributed a ‘manifesto’ titled The Great Replacement wherein he
lamented the destruction of the environment due to ‘overpopulation’. Although he spe-
cifically targeted Muslims in an atrocity rightly identified as Islamophobic, the killer’s
manifesto made a broader and all-too-familiar separation between whites and people of
colour in his understanding of population. Referring to ‘Western’ and ‘white’ nations he
bemoaned dwindling white fertility rates in opposition to non-white ‘races’ with ‘higher
fertility rates’ who seek to ‘ethnically replace my own people’. In the killer’s own words:
the environment is being destroyed by over population, [sic] we Europeans are one of the groups
that are not over populating the world. The invaders are the ones over populating the world. Kill
the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the environment.2
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