Abundance Against Scarcity

Abstract

Edible ecologies stuff Ross Gay's poetic Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015). A fig tree sprawls rich in fruit over a street in Philadelphia, so abundant it almost threatens. A woman “works hard / rinsing and scrubbing / the walk / lest some poor sod / slip on the / silk of a fig / and break his hip.” Lusciousness minimizes the possible damage as the speaker imagines the sod might “reach over to gobble up / the perpetrator.” The speaker's presence serendipitously prevents this injury as the woman offers him figs and “says take / as much as / you can / help me / so I load my / pockets and mouth.” An old woman “loosed one / from a low slung / branch and its eye / wept like hers.” As the number of figs diminishes into hands and mouths, more mouths arrive, “eight or nine,” and the speaker uses his ample height and “grabbed three / or four” for a man “rubbing his stomach / I mean he was really rubbing his stomach.” The fig is a tree out of place—”everyone knows / [it] cannot grow this far north / being Mediterranean”—and yet it's there, making affinities through its fruit. In “a city like most / which has murdered its own / people,” the tree gathers people “gleeful eating out of each other's hands” (Gay 2015, 1–6).Gay's “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian” calls forth an urban ecology made of familiar things like sidewalks, backyards, animals, and plants, but mouths and bellies, touch and taste, and chance and connection also constitute this system. Such abundance exists against the odds of concrete and cold in northern U.S. cities, and it coexists with loss as those cities deal death to Black men like the poet. Catalog calls forth abundance even as it questions whose abundance counts and whose will be judged. “Spoon” remembers feeding Don Belton with sweet potato biscuits on a hungover morning: the sweet potatoes came from a colonyjust beyond my back door, smotheringwith their vines the grass and doing their partto make my yard look ragged and wildto untrained eyes, the kale and chard so rampantsome stalks unbeknownst drooped into the straw mulch . . . .this in Indiana where I am really not from, where,for years, Negroes weren't even allowed entry,and where the rest stop graffiti might confirmthe endurance of such sentiments“Such sentiments” are so enduring that the speaker expresses to Don his worry that so much barely tamed abundance might look too Black. Don reassures him, “it looks beautiful” (Gay 2015, 34–37).All this Cataloged plenty flies in the face of scarcity and stands nature alongside Blackness and urbanness rather than against them. Plenty is surprise, affinity, closeness, and “rampant” verdure, just as it is a way to account for racist and homophobic violence. It dissolves barriers to accessing abundance and, in that dissolution, shows how communities coalesce.Dissolving barriers, forming communities, and reflecting on and redressing racist violence are not always the work of ecological abundance, in poetry or outside of it. Scarcity and ecology are so often companions-in-arms, especially in an age of climate crisis and environmental degradation of all kinds. For many reasons, this must be so. A host of insecurities define existence in ecoregions across the planet: insecurities of water, food, soil, energy, and more. Consequently, loss and deficit permeate ecological thought, especially in Eurowestern environmental policy, science, and activism. Without denying ecological threats, what might arise from decoupling ecology and scarcity, or, to use the terms of this special issue, finitude? To answer this question, we need to think through the ends to which this coupling has been put. This essay studies how ecological approaches to population control appropriate scarcity to curb environmental damages but also to limit the privileges of abundance as part of sometimes-subtle and sometimes-overt racist and colonialist agendas. Admittedly, decoupling scarcity and ecology presents two big risks: (1) abandoning the realities of environmental crises, and (2) promoting growth as scarcity's antonym. Understanding the interdependence of scarcity and growth starts to cut through this knot and shows that, following David Harvey and others, scarcity is always relational. Positioning scarcity and ecology in conversations about climate crisis and reproduction, I also demonstrate how the contradictions of scarcity play out in entrepreneurial responses to climate and reproduction that do not promote the growth only of capital and property but also of the white family. Tracking the relationality of scarcity and following abundance in Indigenous and Black thought offer ways to thread together ecology, community, and affinity while resisting compulsory growth and constrained plenty in all their guises.Ideas of scarcity are thick on the ground in environmental and climate conversation, but I want to home in on population control as a specific area where this appears. Philosopher Trevor Hedberg's The Environmental Impact of Overpopulation: The Ethics of Procreation (2020) demonstrates a form of thinking prevalent in conversations about population and climate crisis: citing the “raw data.”1 “When I was born, there were five billion people in the world. In the time since, we have added more than 2.5 billion people to that tally.” Hedberg then expresses shock at the ignorance, or at least silence, surrounding this issue, given how obviously out of whack the numbers are. “As a graduate student studying applied moral philosophy, I was baffled that people were not saying more about this subject and its connection to climate change, biodiversity loss, and a variety of other environmental problems we now face” (Hedberg 2020, 11, xi). What could be more obvious? Such growth—50% more people in, let's say, 30 years—is obviously unsustainable. The statistical approach to talking about population and environment is not unique to Hedberg. Adele Clarke opens Making Kin Not Population in a similar vein: “In 1900, world population is estimated to have been 1.6 billion people; today [2018] it stands at c7.6 billion and is estimated to exceed c11 billion people by 2100” (Clarke 2018, 1). Hedberg marshals statistics not only to present the issue, as Clarke does, but also to aid his appeals to common sense and rational thought. “My view follows simply from a combination of empirical observations and a few moral principles that I hold to be true,” he writes. Simply does a lot of work here: It reinforces the obviousness of his points. “The aim is to use principles that could be endorsed by any rational person engaged in serious moral reasoning” (Hedberg 2020, xii, 8, my italics).2 I admit I don't read much moral philosophy, and this might be the lingua franca of the field. Nevertheless, Hedberg's appeals to the simple, the rational, and the serious combine with the statistical thinking that launches the book to suggest objectivity and neutrality around an issue that is anything but, given the racist, colonialist, and misogynist agendas that have too often propelled population control.I'll have more to say about those agendas later in this essay, but I want to stay with Hedberg's modes of thought. Admittedly, I've set him up as a fall guy; his statistical reasoning and appeals to rationality are by no means unique to him. Despite the attack on facts in the 2010s, numbers still rule in Eurowestern policy and scientific circles. We don't want to abolish that rule entirely, but understanding the genealogies and implications of statistical thinking helps illuminate some of the troubling uses of ecology in relation to reproduction.“Native Americans make up less than / 1 percent of the population of America. / 0.8 percent of 100 percent. // O, mine efficient country. // . . . in an American room of one hundred people, / I am Native American—less than one, less than / whole—I am less than myself. Only a fraction / of a body, let's say, I am only a hand—” (Díaz 2020, 17–18). Natalie Díaz's “American Arithmetic” refuses the neutrality or the obviousness of numbers. Behind and in front of those numbers is the person, the Native American, in the room. Herself and yet one of many rendered too few in numbers by genocide and too little in political power in a white supremacist “efficient country.” The speaker is reduced to a part, split by the radical of the fraction visualized here in the line break, and is less than whole and less than the whole in this calculating country. The numbers constrain the Native American speaker to what Sylvia Wynter calls a “biocentric descriptive statement,” that is, a mode of classifying, devaluing, and dehumanizing bodies based on race, gender, and sexuality that inspires and abets colonization and enslavement. In her pathbreaking essay for The New Centennial Review, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” Wynter travels through Western history to locate when and how reason subtended this descriptive statement that created a vilified Other to the “True Christian Self.” That Self was accorded the status of “‘natural masters’” to the “‘natural slaves,’” namely, Indigenous peoples and Black Africans enslaved in the Americas and Europe (Wynter 2003, 269, 297, 265).Hedberg's appeals to statistical obviousness mask the historical violence of this dominant and dominating mode of thought in the white Eurowest. Katherine McKittrick puts an even finer point on this relation in “Mathematics Black Life,” where data like population statistics join “the list, the breathless numbers, the absolutely economic” to constitute a “mathematics of the unliving.” This mathematics enables death and dehumanization of Black and Indigenous peoples. “This is where we begin, this is where historic blackness comes from. . . . . the documents and ledgers and logs that narrate the brutalities of this history give birth to new world blackness as they evacuate life from blackness.” McKittrick writes against this construction of Black nonlife in the historical documents that commodify and render it lifeless, as well as in “black scholarly thought” that ends up “repeating anti-black violences” (McKittrick 2014, 17, 16, 20).McKittrick's brilliant “stories”3 of science and racial violence vividly assert that numbers are not neutral, and nor are acts of marshaling them as rational evidence. Numbers discipline by “reify[ing] biocentric and colonial categories,” and “discipline is empire” (McKittrick 2021, 44, 39). The simple, the rational, the serious, and the obvious statistic all speak as discipline and seek to discipline. Discipline and rationality uphold each other in creating categories of human and not-human that justify the enslavement of peoples, the expropriation of lands and waters, and violence against the human and other-than-human (Wynter 2003, 296). In my book Infowhelm, I study the positivist traditions of knowledge production that “have helped instrumentalize and dominate nature and have suppressed and supplanted bodies of knowledge cultivated by storytellers, women, indigenous peoples, and long-term inhabitants of places” (Houser 2020a, 6). Assertions of simple, rational, obvious, and serious knowledge also suppress, deny, and supplant knowledge. As Wynter, McKittrick, and their fellow travelers show, denying knowledge is tantamount to denying humanity and setting off on a course leading to “all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth [sic] resources” (Wynter 2003, 260).Numbers are not neutral, but they are persistent and perhaps no more so than when population is at issue. Wynter appeals to statistics in “Unsettling Coloniality” at the very moment she addresses reproduction and population. Dwelling with her essay demonstrates how readily the discipline, sensu McKittrick, of population gets bundled up with statistics as well as imagery of fearful abundance. Wynter's remarks on population have not gone as academically viral as the wider point of her essay, which is to historicize the creation of modern “Man” against his “Human Others” under the sign of coloniality. Yet it is notable that those remarks enter just as statistics do: early in the first pages of the essay, in a long parenthetical aside that continues the quotation cited earlier: the sharply unequal distribution of the earth [sic] resources (20 percent of the world's peoples own 80 percent of its resources, consume two-thirds of its food, and are responsible for 75 percent of its ongoing pollution, with this leading to two billion of earth's peoples living relatively affluent lives while four billion still live on the edge of hunger and immiseration, to the dynamic of overconsumption on the part of the rich techno-industrial North paralleled by that of overpopulation on the part of the dispossessed poor, still partly agrarian worlds of the South). (Wynter 2003, 260–61).The hunger and immiseration of 4 billion people become a problem of overpopulation. Wynter here speaks in a voice familiar from the canon of population control discourse. What's curious here is that that discourse typically represents “the dispossessed poor” in descriptive statements that reinforce colonial and white power over Black and Brown “Others.”Take, for example, Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb: Population Control or Race to Oblivion? (1968), the brightest of the flashpoints in the modern history of population control. Ehrlich popularized anxiety about the ecological unsustainability of rising population numbers in the 20th century. The Population Bomb rests on statistical modeling of food and resource availability, but, as Ursula Heise has argued, it also mobilizes images of the teeming poor in the Global South to incite fears of rising numbers of humans. Heise quotes the book's opening anecdote about the Ehrlich family's visit to Delhi and Calcutta, India, in the 1960s. The “overprivileged tourists” find themselves in “a crowded slum area. . . . . The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. . . . . People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. . . . . People, people, people, people. As we moved slowly through the mob, hand horn squawking, the dust, noise, heat, and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect” (Ehrlich, quoted in Heise 2003, 76). Abundance is hellish, fearful.Wynter brings her genealogy of Man into the present precisely through reproduction, population, and consumption. “These behaviors [that are instituting our contemporary world], whether oriented by the residual metaphysics of fertility/reproduction of the agrarian age in the poorer parts of the world, or by the metaphysics of productivity and profitability of our techno-industrial one in the rich enclaves—with the one impelling the dynamics of overpopulation, and the other that of overconsumption—now collectively threaten the planetary environment of our human-species habitat” (Wynter 2003, 270). Both the affluent, high-consuming North and the poor, high-reproducing South pose an ecological threat. Wynter's imagery differs significantly from Ehrlich's. For example, the poor she describes are dispossessed, rather than a burden to rich tourists. But the “over-” of overpopulation in Wynter's and Ehrlich's respective stories of environmental strain chimes in their valence of an excess that threatens ecologies.What at first seems contradictory to Wynter's purposes of combatting the methods, concepts, and violations of coloniality fits into the pattern of “Unsettling Coloniality” when she takes on Thomas Malthus's population arguments. In An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), the late-18th-century “clergyman-economist” appeals to an unerring law of the autonomous increase of human life (Wynter 2003, 320). His overarching argument is that rising population numbers lead to increased poverty because agricultural outputs cannot keep up to feed all those hungry mouths. Only curbs to population growth can ensure that a society does not overreach the carrying capacity of a designated region. Malthus's premise arises from spotty reasoning. He determines to “take as our rule . . . . that population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every twenty-five years or increases in a geometrical ratio” (Malthus 1798, 24). By contrast, food production increases arithmetically and cannot match the number of human bellies in Malthus's equation. The poor, more tied to their own embodied labor for sustenance and less constrained by the proprieties and inheritances that come with class status, will multiply and create these conditions for immiseration unless the state intervenes. Which it should not, he argues, so that food scarcity can manage numbers in support of the priorities of capitalist growth.Wynter reads Malthus's analysis as creating a kind of permanent enslavement for the poor. “Enslavement here is no longer to Original Sin, or to one's irrational nature,” she explains. “Rather, enslavement is now to the threat of Malthusian overpopulation, to its concomitant ‘ill’ of Natural Scarcity whose imperative ‘plan of salvation’ would now be postulated in economic terms as that of keeping this [i.e., Scarcity] at bay.” Society stratifies into those subject to scarcity and those master of it. The masters are the “middle class Breadwinner and/or successful Entrepreneur/Investor” (Wynter 2003, 320, 324). Wynter calls attention to a point sometimes overlooked in environmentalist appeals to Malthusian thinking: that he had no interest in ecological preservation or social justice. His essay instead disempowers the poor and renders their plight the result of immutable laws that find expression in mathematical equations. We have here another example of the biocentric mathematics of life, now tied to the limits of the earth and marshaled for ecological arguments. McKittrick's refrain in Dear Science that “description is not liberation” finds an exemplary case in the influential clergyman-economist (McKittrick 2021, 128).Wynter's analysis of Malthus shows the problems with the “obvious” statistical thinking we identified in Hedberg and that Wynter rehearsed to arrive at her critique of Malthusianism. The obvious is so often about sustaining inequities and naturalizing them. I propose that ecological scarcity, frequently dressed up in data and models, does similar work, especially when it appears in arguments for population control for “Others” and entrepreneurial reproduction for “Breadwinners.”Abundance among the wrong people and in the wrong forms poses a threat to those on whom its privileges are typically conferred. This management of abundance emerges starkly in the environmental discourse of population control. Recall, for example, the anecdote of fearful abundance that opens Ehrlich's The Population Bomb and the conservation strategies that provided the impetus behind his book. As Ian Angus and Simon Butler note, two years before the book made its splash, Sierra Club director David Brower declared, “We feel you cannot have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy” (Angus and Butler 2011, 9). These policies are interdependent because conservation is premised on scarcity—on diminishing land, water, and food—that arises from misuse by abundant human populations. Four years after the publication of The Population Bomb, The Limits to Growth reasserted the causality between population growth and ecological scarcity and damage (Meadows et al. 1972). Along with pollution, industrialization, agriculture, and resource extraction, world population is a crucial parameter in the models that provide the basis for the book's arguments. Leaping ahead 20 years to another flashpoint in modern environmentalism, the UN Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro underscored “this assumed causal connection between the rising numbers of people and the destruction of the earth's ecological foundations” (Mies and Shiva 2014, 277).Even basic definitions of ecology link scarcity effects to human presence and numbers. For example, historian Alison Bashford recounts that when the ecological sciences were institutionalizing in the early 20th century, ecology referred to “the life and death of populations of interdependent organisms in environmental spaces, in limited universes of various scales” (Bashford 2014, 158). This definition paratactically connects death to limits. Ecology measured the fluctuations of abundance and scarcity of organic and inorganic components of an ecosystem and explained the processes determining those fluctuations and their impacts. Proponents of population control relied on ecological ideas about how many organisms a given ecosystem—whether it be a forest, national park, ecoregion, nation, or entire planet—can sustain when they argued that rising numbers of humans are tipping ecosystems out of balance and stretching their carrying capacity.To this day, appeals to ecological scarcity are integral to securing abundance for the privileged and demonizing the abundance of others. The fate of population control efforts within the Sierra Club in the early 2000s provides a glaring instance of how ecological scarcity functions in a white supremacist agenda. As I have written elsewhere, the schism within the Club is part of U.S. environmentalist lore (Houser 2020b). Led by white nationalist John Tanton, a group of Sierra Club members tried to take over the board and push through a racist platform targeting immigrants from Mexico and Latin America. The argument went that so many additional (Brown) bodies would further degrade American water- and landscapes. Those advocating for immigration restrictions qua population control cited recreation and nature appreciation, rather than subsistence or traditional spiritual relationships to land and water, demonstrating that wealthy, often white, individuals deserve the pleasures and privileges of a “balanced” ecology.4 It was “a classic case of ‘greenwashing’—a cynical effort by nativist activists to seduce environmentalists to join their cause for purely strategic reasons” and a template for current efforts to curb immigration under the veil of eco-care (Southern Poverty Law Center, Beirich, and Potok 2010, 4). Ecological principles of scarcity and overreach fuel these racist, nativist fires.Population control advocates at times acknowledge wealth disparities and account for them in their measures toward achieving environmental sustainability. Yet, even so, scarcity often rears its head and reveals inequalities. The Population Bomb speaks directly to affluence as a contributor to ecological loss, and Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren codified and quantified the role of wealth and consumption in environmental damage through the influential IPAT equation: Impact = Population × Affluence × Technology. There's a lot wrong with this equation as a tool for calculating environmental impact—for example, technology is not monolithic and differentially alters the magnitude of the other parts of the equation—but there is also a lot wrong with it as a quantitative instrument that “evacuate[s] life” (McKittrick 2014, 16). Donella Meadows, lead author of the original Limits to Growth, puts it this way when she recounts her awakening to inequities built into the equation 23 years after helping propagate it: “IPAT is a bloodless, misleading, cop-out explanation for the world's ills . . . . It points the finger of blame at all the wrong places. . . . . It counts what is countable. It makes rational sense. But it ignores the manipulation, the oppression, the profits. It ignores a factor that scientists have a hard time quantifying and therefore don't like to talk about: economic and political POWER” (Meadows, quoted in Angus and Butler 2011, 214). As McKittrick and Wynter would chime in, that POWER almost always finds expression in colonialism, racism, and patriarchy.If injustice and violence too often get erased in equations accounting for ecological scarcity, they are just as often inscribed in the measures to address it. The examples of this are numerous: When land availability and food security become interrelated global concerns, governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) sterilize poor Black and Brown women in the United States and the Global South (Hartmann 1995; Ross and Solinger 2017). When so-called wilderness diminishes, the state dispossesses Indigenous tribes to preserve it (Cronon 1995; Treuer 2021). When bird habitat faces contamination and destruction and species die off, militarized borders and harsh immigration policies keep Mexican and Latin American immigrants out (Kulish and McIntire 2019). These policies often fly under the banner of environmentalist care and the need to protect finite ecosystems.Scarcity is not neutral. It also figures in the contradictions of capitalism. Capitalism engineers scarcity and abundance according to its own ends. It offers abundance in the form of commodities for consumption on the false promise that land, water, and what lies in and under them are infinite resources. Yet at the same time it insists on and produces scarcity to create markets for goods and extraction. These paradoxically entangled polarities of abundance and scarcity are manufactured. “Paradoxically this time of crisis [i.e., the global recession of 2007–2009], in which so many have already suffered immiseration, is in fact a time of abundance,” explains David Lloyd. “Hunger and homelessness, driven by foreclosure and widespread unemployment, thrive in the midst of plenty, signaling that what we face is an artificial and systemically produced scarcity in and even through abundance” (Lloyd 2016, 208). The paradox of abundance and scarcity surfaces in austerity responses to financial crises, when “necessary” contraction of social supports ensures that those engineering crises get their payouts. It surfaces in meaty contracts for profiteers in education and policing following disasters, even as the poor go without or wait and wait for federal relief funds (Klein 2007). Scarcity, real and manufactured, authorizes and abets “exploitation, labor discipline, subjugation” (Lloyd 2016, 209).The inequities of scarcity within population discourse are not unrelated to these capitalist contradictions of abundance. The mind torques with the tensions and contradictions inherent in populationist agendas built on scarcity without a strong attack on capitalism and inequality. To put it reductively, fewer people means more resources available to feed into a capitalist agenda of growth. As David Harvey instructs, scarcity is relational; “the history of capitalism” proves as much: “To say that scarcity resides in nature and that natural limits exist is to ignore how scarcity is socially produced and how ‘limits’ are a social relation within nature (including human society) rather than some externally imposed necessity.” For this reason, it is one thing to say that capitalism in a given state is encountering a condition of ecoscarcity and overpopulation of its own distinctive making. Indeed, it can be argued . . . . pace Marx, that capitalism as a mode of production necessarily must always do that, so that to translate this particular circumstance into a set of universal limitations is to completely elide the political-ecological point. (Harvey 1996, 147)Reading Harvey in our context, we can say that population control has lost the plot by sidestepping the capitalist manufacture of scarcity and abundance. The growth imperative demonstrates the relationality of scarcity Harvey highlights. As Lloyd notes, growth fits hand-in-glove with scarcity, despite the seeming antagonism between them. The centuries-long process of capitalist modernization flies in the face of definitions of ecology like Bashford's in which humans are part of an ecology with limits and therefore must think of their numbers and behaviors in relation to those limits.Indeed, resistance to limits is inscribed in the very words from Pico della Mirandola that inaugurate Eurowestern rational humanism, which paves the way to capitalist modernity. Wynter samples Pico to launch “Unsettling Coloniality” because his Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486/1496) is an ur-text that redescribes the human as “the Rational Self of Man as political subject of the state” (Wynter 2003, 277). Pico ventriloquizes God and reassures his white learned, landed male readers that limits do not apply to them. His statement amounts to a secularized version of the dominion of nature decree in the Judeo-Christian Bible. “A limited nature in other creatures is confined within the laws written down by Us. In conformity with thy free judgment, in whose hands I have placed thee, thou art confined by no bounds; and thou wilt fix limits of nature for thyself” (quoted in Wynter 2003, 260). Capitalism speaks in this voice of limitless nature out of one side of its mouth. As the eco-Marxists explain, it is “an enormous engine for the ceaseless accumulation of capital, propelled by the competitive drive of individuals and groups seeking their own self-interest in the form of private gain. Such a system recognizes no absolute limits to its own advance. The race to accumulate, the real meaning of economic growth, is endless“ (Foster, Clark, and York 2010, 28, my italics). Yet out of the other side of its mouth, capitalism speaks of scarcity to its expansive advantage. Scarcity confers value. The environmental upshot of this is that “the growth of natural scarcity [from pollution, deforestation, water use, climate crisis, etc.] is seen as a golden opportunity in which to further privatize the world's commons. This tragedy of the privatization of the commons only accelerates the destruc