Problem Child? What are you AT?

Whose children are the problem? Population, wealth and the ecology of inequality

Willy De Backer

Retired journalist exploring interconnected crises reshaping our world. Digging into social-ecological security, planetary health, & justice within the web of life.

December 12, 2025

 

"If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

With these words, Ebenezer Scrooge became literature's most famous villain. The Ghost of Christmas Present later throws them back at him: "Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die?"

Nearly two centuries later, climate science demands we revisit Dickens’ most renowned anti-hero. The wealthiest 10 per cent of the global population are responsible for roughly half of all greenhouse gas emissions. The carbon footprint of the 1 per cent is approximately 175 times greater than that of the poorest 10 per cent. The ecological footprint of an American child is more than 160 times greater than that of a child born in Bangladesh.

It turns out there is a surplus driving planetary breakdown. But it is not the "surplus population" of the poor. It is the surplus consumption of the rich.

 

The last taboo

Population remains the topic that nobody in the eco-emancipatory movement wants to touch. Since the Enlightenment, the emancipatory tradition has progressively expanded rights and freedoms. Women's liberation included reproductive autonomy. Decolonisation meant rejecting Western control over non-Western bodies. The right to have children became understood as a private choice, for feminists, specifically the woman's choice.

Any suggestion of limits, therefore, triggers deep alarm. It sounds like patriarchy returning through the back door, or colonial population control programmes revisited. And yet: we now face a situation where exercising reproductive freedom - particularly in wealthy countries - directly contributes to a future where billions will face climate catastrophe. The excessive liberty of some undermines the survival of others. Here, modernity’s emancipation dialectic appears in its sharpest form.

 

Breaking the Silence

Environmental ethics professor Michel Bourban recently published what might be the most courageous chapter in recent academic literature on this topic. His argument: the IPAT equation tells us environmental impact equals Population times Affluence times Technology.

Climate ethicists have spent decades emphasising A and T while quietly ignoring P. Bourban calls this intellectually dishonest. He proposes working within liberal values - tax incentives for smaller families, a one-child norm for developed countries - and connects this to Ingrid Robeyns' limitarianism: if we can justify upper limits on wealth, why not upper limits on reproduction?

Ecological economist William Rees goes further. For Rees, the problem is not designing better incentive structures. Modern techno-industrial society is in dangerous ecological overshoot - humanity's demand on the ecosphere is at least 73 per cent larger than available biocapacity, and overshoot is ultimately a terminal condition.

Between 1961 and 2016, population growth accounted for approximately 80 per cent of the increase in humanity's total ecological footprint. But Rees notes the inequality dimension: adding one citizen to a high-income country imposes the same ecological load as adding six people to a low-income country.

What would sustainability require? If we redistributed global biocapacity equally, each person would be entitled to 1.5 global hectares. High-income consumers currently demand about 6 hectares per capita, meaning the wealthy would need to reduce their ecological footprint by 75 per cent. Some studies suggest a sustainable global population of one to two billion. The choice Rees presents is binary: planned contraction or chaotic collapse. There is no third option.

 

Whose children?

Here we must return to Scrooge - and to the Ghost's question. Before we can discuss population limits, we must discover "what the surplus is, and where it is."

High-income consumers, representing 15 per cent of the global population, claim 57 per cent of global biocapacity. When a child is born in a wealthy country, that child will consume resources extracted from ecosystems worldwide.

The question is whose consumption patterns created ecological overshoot, and whose children will bear its consequences. Indigenous communities might reasonably ask: why should populations that lived sustainably for millennia accept fertility limits defined by the civilisation that broke the planet?

 

The Impossible questions

We are left with questions that have no easy answers.

Does the state decide who gets children, as in China's coercive one-child policy? Do we rely on fiscal nudges, treating the existential question of new life as a matter for financial engineering? Do we let "nature" decide through the collapse Rees warns is coming - an abdication whose costs fall on those least responsible?

Or is there another path? What if we understood fertility not as private choice but as a commons to be governed through democratic deliberation? What if we took seriously the indigenous insight that children belong not to individual parents but to communities and land - that "a child does not grow up only in a single home"?

But there is a problem. The indigenous model works because the community that raises the child depends on the same land and resources. If we have too many children, we all experience the consequences together. In globalised modernity, this feedback loop breaks completely. A child born in Brussels consumes resources from the Congo, emits carbon that contributes to floods in Bangladesh, and eats food grown in Brazil. The community bearing ecological consequences is disconnected from any decision-making about fertility.

We do not yet have political forms adequate to this challenge - a way of making collective decisions that is neither coercive state control nor atomised individual choice, and that includes voices of those bearing consequences across space and time, including the yet unborn.

 

Freedom Reimagined

The deeper challenge is not designing better policies. It is transforming our understanding of freedom: from liberation as individual autonomy to liberation as collective capacity to flourish within constraints.

Ivan Illich wrote that "honesty requires that we each recognise the need to limit procreation, consumption, and waste" - but understood this within "conviviality": freedom realised in interdependence rather than isolation. Vanessa Andreotti calls for a shift from "a culture of entitlements to one of intergenerational responsibilities centred in our entanglement with a living Earth."

The hardest step is recognising that we, those whose lifestyles generate emissions 175 times greater than the world's poorest, do not get to set the terms of this conversation alone.

Population sufficiency, like wealth sufficiency, is never innocent. It is always a political choice about flourishing within limits. The question is whether we can make that choice together, with honesty about who bears the costs, who makes the rules, and whose consumption patterns created the crisis.

Scrooge asked the wrong question about the wrong surplus. We must not repeat his mistake.

 

Michel Bourban Ingrid Robeyns 🟥 William Rees Barbara Williams