Is Genocide Nature’s Population Regulation?

What if globally declining fertility is not merely a socioeconomic phenomenon but one of the ways by which the ecosystem responds to an overpopulated human species? And what if genocide is yet another one of those ways?

Last week I had the distinct honour of being asked to contribute my own commentary to a soon-to-be-published collection of essays by prominent authors, historians and other academics which compiles some of the latest thinking on the topic of overpopulation and overshoot, within the context of the Anthropocene. The publication will be coming out on October 6^th, and includes some big names with decades of work under their belt in this area.

I was delighted to be given access to the full manuscript, and see for myself the incredible complexity of views that the population debate still elicits, even today. And yet, across the spectrum of diverse perspectives and equally diverse focus on individual aspects of population overshoot, one idea raised by one of the writers stuck in my mind, and which highly resonates with my latest book The Biology of Collapse: the author expressed the view that perhaps the global crash in fertility rates we are witnessing is simply the ecosystem finally catching up with humans: our bodies are beginning to regulate our population levels, much like in the Density Threshold essay I recently published about how this happens among wolf populations. Humans of child-bearing age are leaving their parents’ nest progressively later in life, some unable to become fully independent and get started on a family. Many of those who do, simply can’t afford to. And of those who can, an increasingly large percentage is simply not fertile due to the whiplash of sleeplessness, stress, and forever chemicals that have been accumulating over hundreds of years of industrial civilisation and have finally caught up with us. If there is one fact that clearly tells us we are going extinct it is the sharp, accelerating slump in live sperm counts among men which is no less than catastrophic.

And while this perfect storm of infertility may seem like a mish mash of unrelated social, economic, psychological, biophysical and biological factors which seem to be working independently to bring down birth rates, they are all related. In fact, every single one of these factors has the same origin and causality, and can be traced back to a single event: population and economic overshoot i.e. The Great Depletion. The extractive capacity of our global economy in relation to the population it needs to supply is way past its peak, and this has brought about conflict and permanent price inflation on food, fuel, housing, and the exorbitant cost of having a child. Overshoot is also directly responsible for the deterioration of human quality of life resulting in poor mental health, discontent with life and aversion to raising a family, let alone bringing a child into a world that seems to be heading for collapse. Equally, this declining mental health and negative outlook is exacerbated by incredibly high rates of addiction and obesity – modern diseases that never existed in our species, but have become a normal part of every society and which are literally the result of overshoot, overconsumption, and over-availability of foods and chemicals that the human body has little natural psychological or biological defence against. People who are fat, broke, unhealthy and depressed will naturally have fewer kids, yet this is the type of human that our overshooting economy a.k.a. human animal farm produces: our necrocapitalist economic system wants us to be nothing but stressed-out, working zombies, addicted to sugar and isolated from each other by apps so that it can control us, exploit us, and monetize us until the end. Should it be any wonder then why this oppressed, and depressed species, no longer wants to, or is incapable of, undertaking one of its most basic biological functions – to procreate?

The global decline in fertility is therefore not a problem or an issue, but a message from nature: our own biology is telling us that our entire civilisation is officially a failure. We are reaching the end of the road as a species, and everything, including our bodies and the ecosystem within which they function, knows this except us: we seem to be the only ones who never got the extinction memo.

But there is yet another outcome of overshoot which leads to low fertility rates, which none of the authors in the book mentioned, or perhaps I should say, dared to mention: genocide. Because in biological terms, genocide is none other than a result of intraspecies competition and cross-cannibalisation of territory, resources and power structures that result from overshoot. Genocide is yet another outcome, and the most macabre one, of our overcrowded biology. You only have to look at species from almost every kingdom to realize this: from chimpanzees to ants, the elements of genocide were always there. But it was humans who systematized, optimized, evangelised, realised and then rationalized it.

But none of this is new to my faithful readers. I have warned plenty of times that, as resources diminish, necrocapitalism won’t die. In fact, it will become even more aggressive and dehumanizing. Having exhausted the low hanging fruit, it will start monetizing things previously unthinkable to most of us: Life. Clean water. Our most personal data, even the air we breathe.

Gaza was neither the first or last genocide, but it is the pattern of frequency of conflicts and genocides we should be paying attention to, which can increase simply as a function of increasing competition within this overcrowded petri dish. And this is neither a result of economics, politics, religion or ideology, but of something which pulls the strings of all of the above puppets: increased rivalry as a direct result of civilisational overshoot, depletion, and of course, overpopulation.

As the introduction to my book The Biology of Collapse points out, “whenever culture, politics or religion seem to make no sense, biology always will”

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