Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive of over 1400 titles.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Human population growth is a serious biospheric problem yet is largely overlooked. Because of the neglect of demography, environmental policies — while well-intentioned – are unlikely to succeed.
This book gives a concise review of world fertility rates and population growth, and offers a valuable summary of studies of the impact of over-population on the biosphere. In addition, the book explains key demographic variables to consider when formulating law and government policy relevant to childbearing, and it summarizes findings of social science research – findings that contradict popular assumptions about the impact of government interventions addressing the frequency of childbearing and immigration.
The chapter points out that the disciplines of ecology and sociology both rely on the concept of a system and thus have a basis for collaboration even though the phenomena they study are substantively dissimilar. The character of a system is explained, and the implications of a system are discussed for human societies, for law and government, and for the consequences of government undertakings to alter the incidence of key social activities such as fertility. The chapter proposes that, because childbearing has been found to decrease as population density increases, urban planning may be able to reduce human fertility by promoting high-density housing.
The chapter returns to the absence of human-population size and growth from the paradigm that is currently dominant among environmentalists. This paradigmatic flaw is underscored by a discussion of (1) the melting of polar glaciers and (2) levels of human mortality from outbreaks of disease, both of which are affected by the size and growth of the human population. The chapter recommends that, in attempting to curb population growth, law and government policy should be used cautiously and formulated with inputs from a wide range of disciplines.
The chapter offers insights into the demography of human-population growth in the world as a whole and in nations grouped by income level. Graphs are used to examine trends since the middle of the twentieth century in age-specific fertility rates, mean age of childbearing among women, and total fertility rates. The chapter also discusses childlessness and the importance of the extent of childlessness to population growth.
The chapter discusses some methodological pitfalls in assessments of the effectiveness of law and government policy that address society-important social activities. A summary and analysis of quantitative research indicates that law and policy, including policy promoting family-planning services, have had just a limited impact on the frequency of childbearing. Research also indicates that law and policy have not had a large effect on the incidence of abortion or on the volume of immigration.
The chapter identifies primary and secondary negative environmental impacts of the numerical size and growth of the human population. Findings of scientific studies, especially findings of multivariate analyses of quantitative data, are summarized on the effects that human population size, density, and/or increase have had on the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, on human death rates generally, and on the climate of the planet. Through climate change, population size and growth have had secondary effects: Research indicates that climate change has increased wildfires, damaged agriculture, hurt economic activity, intensified hurricanes and typhoons, caused flooding and droughts, and diminished biodiversity.
The chapter points out that the current paradigm of environmentalists ignores the negative impact that human population size has on the biosphere. To counter this lack of concern with population size and growth, the chapter uses graphs to show that the ecological footprint of the global human population has appreciably expanded since the 1960s; that the numerical increase of the global population remains substantial even though the rate of population growth and the total fertility rate have fallen; and that large numbers of human beings are projected to be added each decade to the global population until at least the year 2050.
So the realism of transformation is ambitious. If hope informed by it can envisage a rapid and dramatic shift in the perception by individuals of their agency and motivations, in relation to their whole Earth-systemic context, that shift could also by extension transform the pressures shaping action by groups and collectives all the way up to the nation state and the international order. This means we are to hope for nothing less than a new kind of movement for change, establishing itself with astonishing speed through all the new forms of connectivity now available – a movement of deliberate and emphatic individual acceptance of responsibility for the wider biospheric life which is now threatened. How such a movement might be brought sufficiently swiftly into being, through what activities of consciousness-raising and mobilization coupled with the impacts of which unignorably climate-driven disasters, is an open-ended matter. So are the expressive forms which it might take, and the drastic political changes which it will demand. Empirically, none of that is remotely credible. Practically, we have no option left but to hope against hope that it could yet happen. That means believing what the previous chapters have tried to set out the warrant for believing: that the hope which we must invest counter-empirically in bringing transformation about can genuinely create the possibility of our becoming the life-responsible agents of its happening.
Counter-empirical hope, however, remains hope: desire for a valued outcome under the sign of contingency.
The account given in Chapter 5 of the underlying human condition as tragic arms us against the temptations of an irresponsible utopianism, but it also leads us towards a better grasp of the climate crisis. Certainly, if we are now urgently compelled to bring hope against hope to bear on that crisis, and such hope must be provided with a standing defence against those temptations if it is to do the proper work of hope instead of lapsing into wilful escapism, then a recognition of the tragic as central to human experience must be vital to that hope’s defeasibility. Such recognition can also, however, give us important insights into the actual structure of our climate plight, which itself exhibits the characteristic tragic feature of life-energy coming into inevitable self-conflict.
A pattern of key strengths bringing with them exposure to destructive forces, which represented our initial scoping of the tragic, is indeed readily identifiable in the aetiology of climate emergency. The secular and instrumentally rational Enlightenment spirit which has produced so much worthwhile life-improvement across the world has also generated an apparent inability to rein in the relevant activities before they do irreversible harm. Distinctive human capacities which Western civilization in particular has realized – to make rational deliberated choices, to base belief on evidence and empirical testing, to free ourselves from ignorance, superstition and dogma – have been accompanied in their development by the striving for mastery and control which has betrayed us into doing decisive eco-systemic damage.
I have been exploring a particular kind of hope, specifically called forth by our current climate and ecological plight. That hope is addressed to ways in which the life-threatening scenario now looming for humanity and the biosphere might nevertheless still be prevented from unfolding at its most drastic. In the course of the discussion so far I have characterized it in two different ways – as life-hope in the Introduction and first chapter, and as counter-empirical hope in the second. Each of these terms represents a distinct perspective on the nature of this literally vital force.
Life-hope characterizes the hope which we need from the perspective of its natural relation to the instinctual drive of life-energy in human beings. Thought of in this way, such hope is an expression of that drive as it comes to consciousness in a reflective creature endowed with language and reason and aware both of its individual future, and of its involvement in species-continuity through the lives of its descendants. It arises unprompted in the ordinarily robust, healthy individual. As such, it can manifest itself – as frequently in art – in the form simply of an eager openness to the vibrancy of ongoing life, taking no intentional object. But, as brought to bear on the actualities of our present plight, it spontaneously invests itself in the indefinite sustainability of a sufficiently flourishing human life.
When such hope is characterized as counter-empirical, however, that is to attend to it from an epistemic perspective. We thereby foreground its ultimate independence of whatever we might have learnt from experience about the scope and tenacity of the obstacles which it confronts and the possibilities of adequate action to remove or circumvent them.
