Kate Crowley is the Graduate Coordinator of Public Policy in the School of Government at the University of Tasmania. She has published extensively on green politics and environmental policy, and is co-editor of Australian Environmental Policy: Studies in Decline and Devolution (University of New South Wales Press) with Ken Walker. She is Deputy Chair of the Tasmanian Government's Environment Industries Council and has served on its Sustainability Committee during the State of Environment Reporting process. Dr Crowley is a keen cross country skier who has represented Australia in both racing and instructing in past years and has lived and worked in Scandanavia.

Session 7: Questions/discussion

When I was asked to give this talk, I agreed on condition that I could take a light-hearted approach to what was a very serious issue. This is because I was aware not only of the absence of material in my discipline of politics and public policy on the issue, but also of how awkward the much-maligned vision of Garrett Hardin's lifeboat ethics has become within our discipline.

Following the 'tragedy of the commons' that overpopulation and resource exploitation would inevitably cause, Hardin proposed that a Malthusian lifeboat would rescue only those that would fit in it. If everyone tried to climb aboard, of course, then all of humanity would be doomed – particularly the Third World. If they would not come to the party on population control, then they could be cut adrift.

On reflection, this is not very funny. And it's not very funny that there is a dearth of material in my discipline. But what is also not very funny is how discomforting this became for green democratic theorists. And for decades since, green democratic theorists have tried to throw off the stigma of ecological authoritarianism that followed. If we are to limit population growth, exponential economic growth, overconsumption and environmental destruction, Ophuls and others reluctantly argued, then the only way to do this is ultimately by prefacing personal freedoms with ecological objectives and thus with dismantling the liberal democratic state.

Today, green theorists will argue the reverse. (A very good book on the subject by Robyn Eckersley, called The Green State, has just come out of MIT Press.) What they argue today is that what we need is more, not less democracy to deal with these issues, and what we need to do in particular is to prise the democratic state away from liberalism where this prefaces personal freedoms with the primacy of economic objectives.

To talk about population policy, for some, is thus to revive the spectre of ecological authoritarianism. It is to shun personal freedoms, it is to threaten market interests and it is to reject the notion that economic growth will solve all our environmental problems.

I have got some quotes for reasons not to talk about population-environment. One is from Garrett Hardin:

Another one, from Ophuls:

This was regrettable and a reluctant statement from Ophuls. From Meadows et al.:

Hazel Henderson, an ecologically enlightened economist, has written:

From my point of view in my discipline, what we have here is non-coverage, to a large extent, of the issue which I will elaborate on in a minute. But I started to think maybe it would be interesting to talk about something when there was nothing to report, because what you are reporting is non-politics, and thus a non-policy and thus no decisions. It is a very difficult thing to investigate, but political scientists and policy analysts do have tools, they think, for trying to do this.

For now I will fulfil the brief of looking at the attention that the population-environment issue does not get in my discipline. But I will also look at political science, public policy and environmental policy. I would then like to turn back briefly to green political theory and discourse, and the problems of eco-authoritarianism.

If you were to ask most researchers in political science and public policy about this issue and the attention it gets, they would say it doesn't get very much attention at all. I did some analysis, not at all comprehensive, which indicates the same.

I reviewed the contents over the last three years of three journals, the Australian Journal of Political Science, the Australian Journal of Public Administration and the Australian Journal of Environmental Management, and found no coverage. The first two of those journals don't neglect environmental issues; they don't give it great coverage but they are dedicated to other things.

The Australian Journal of Political Science looks at elections, institutions, politics and political issues, and thus I suppose researchers have not seen population-environment as a political issue. And there is coverage of environmental issues.

The Australian Journal of Public Administration is a fabulous journal. It looks at public administration, public management, public policy. It is a very good journal: it looks at issues such as health, youth, women and environment, but it has no coverage of population-environment.

The Australian Journal of Environmental Management is not a policy journal, but it is a professional, multidisciplinary-based journal and it has a great range of environmental issues, but thus far not population-environment.

I then looked at textbooks in the area of political science and public policy. It was not a very comprehensive review, but everything that was in my office got pulled down onto the floor – quite a lot of books. I found that there wasn't coverage of the population-environment issue. In most of the standard texts, however, it is not unusual to find one page on immigration, say out of a 200- or 300-page book. And in one of those texts with one page on immigration, one comment by one political scientist, Nick Economou, talked about reaching the ecological limits, in the context of his discussion on immigration.

I had a look at all of the Australian environmental policy texts. There were quite a lot of them, and they tend to deal with relatively better known and actually more highly contested issues than population – things like biodiversity and natural resource management, with a lot of interest in environmental values and a lot of interest in improving policy.

The neglect of the population-environment issue in political science and public policy does seem to reflect a lack of overt politics that tends to attract the interest of the disciplines. However, it would be simplistic to say that a lack of politics suggests a lack of relevance to the typical agenda-setters – that is, conservationists, environmentalists, green politicians, political parties et cetera.

However, I had a look at the International Journal of Environmental Politics, a fabulous disciplinary journal. It is one of the best. It had no coverage over the last 10 years. So that's an international one.

In terms of green theory and political discourse, again pulling all the books off my shelves – quite a lot but not an exhaustive or systematic search – on the whole the issue is covered in most of the basic texts, very briefly and in terms of history as if it is an issue that has happened, and running to at most a couple of pages. There are a couple of exceptions and they cover the issue a little bit better. From Neil Carter's The Politics of the Environment we do learn about the history but we also learn that the politics-environment debate informs a key thread of deep ecology today, namely, that the advocacy of decreased population is suggested in order to achieve a flourishing of human and non-human species. That is very important.

Survivalism is covered in most of the textbooks. John Dryzek's book The Politics of the Earth, which is a tremendous book, talks about the discourse of survivalism, that lifeboat ethics coming under attack. This has left a lot of discomfort in contemporary terms, from leftist multiculturalists who see the term 'population' as a denial of human agency and also as a racist denial of would-be immigrants' rights, to eco-feminists, obviously, who have attacked population control as control of women by male power structures. But also, most significantly, John Dryzek talks about the population-environment debate confronting mainstream Promethean discourse – that is, discourse rooted in industrialism which applauds population policy as a pathway to economic prosperity. That is a huge issue there.

So which way forward? How can our disciplines offer a practical way forward? Green theory is the most useful for showing that attempts to curb population or to discuss it for the sake of the planet – and ultimately our own survival – raises the ire of a lot of different groups: liberal democrats, leftist multiculturalists, eco-feminists and Promethean growthists. This may explain why green and environmental groups have difficulty presenting united fronts on population, but it also shows the relative ease that business interests have in pitching a simple message for sustaining population growth.

To wrap up: green theorists provide an important clue to the non-politics of population and environment. They see survivalist discourse as anomalous and contentious within the Promethean paradigm that dominates Western liberal democracy. To have a look at paradigmatic analysis is quite a useful tool, even though it is quite a simplistic tool, but it does show that, for example, a political scientist would say that there is a mobilisation of bias towards economic interests that would explain a lack of coherent population policy.