Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Slower growth — and ultimately zero growth — is good for people and the planet, but not for those in power, who for millennia relied on women’s reproductive labor to produce more workers, consumers, and taxpayers. Today’s Trump-era and even progressive pronatalist policies try to reverse the trend, but there’s a reason why they won’t work.
As concern over falling birth rates spreads across the political spectrum, pronatalist ideas are finding new audiences. But protecting reproductive freedom and respecting planetary limits require rejecting the politics of population growth.
From collapsing rivers to groundwater depletion, Iran’s water crisis is often framed as a failure of governance or infrastructure. But it reflects a broader reality: water stress is emerging wherever human demand pushes beyond ecological limits.
Environmental activist and poet Esther Phillips reflects on grief and anti-natalism in this poem, which explores the choice not to have children as an act of love in an age of collapse.
As governments push costly pronatalist schemes to boost birthrates, the real solution, argues Nandita Bajaj, is to embrace declining fertility, expand women’s reproductive agency, and redesign economies for equity and ecological survival.
Nandita Bajaj, executive director of Population Balance, defies stereotypes. She chose not to have children and has dedicated her life to research and advocacy on how pronatalism, overpopulation, and human supremacy fuel social inequality and ecological overshoot, and to confronting tough questions about humanity’s outsized footprint on Earth.
Concern about a surprise acceleration in the decline of human fertility is missing the most critical factor.
What if we presented possible options for future human developments—let’s say human population as a solid example—and pretend it’s a menu from which we get to choose.
As predictions about world population decline proliferate, the causes almost never include the toxic chemicals that are dramatically undermining human fertility worldwide.
Humans could disappear from planet Earth without even a whimper, that is, the whimper of new babies as the human sperm count keeps plummeting.
A prominent paleontologist and evolutionary biologist thinks that humans are headed toward extinction soon and that nothing will stop it from happening.
When someone says that humans are on a course to extinction, it elicits a yawn from most people. Epidemiologist Shanna Swan has projected the date it will begin and can tell you exactly why
