The Elite’s Fixation with Low Birth Rates | Samuel Miller McDonald
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
Release Date: 07/08/2025
South Korea's No-Birth Generation | Ji-Hye Jeong
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
As South Korea’s birth rates continue to decline, reporter JiHye Jeong highlights the rising tide of young feminists who are staging a strike against patriarchy. Despite relentless cultural and political backlash, the surge in South Korea’s women’s resistance movements - from the 2015 feminist 'reboot' to 'escape the corset' and 4B - offers a radical response to the misogynistic forces that compel women into marriage and motherhood. Highlights include: How strong cultural expectations in South Korea pressure women toward marriage, motherhood, and male approval from an early age, How...
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Falling Birth Rates are Not a Crisis | Philip N. Cohen
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
Sociologist Philip N. Cohen debunks the pronatalist claims on both the right and left that falling birth rates spell disaster. Noting that pronatalism is a key feature of authoritarian states, Cohen warns that the adoption of the problematic 'fertility crisis' framing among liberals is paving the way for coercive right-wing policies, and why we must abandon this narrative. We also explore evolving definitions of family beyond the traditional model and why public-facing scholarship matters more than ever. Highlights include: Why framing low birth rates as a crisis on the political left can...
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Combatting the Extinction Crisis | Stephanie Feldstein and Tierra Curry
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
Biodiversity is collapsing under the pressures of human overpopulation, overconsumption, and animal agriculture. Tierra Curry and Stephanie Feldstein of the Center for Biological Diversity explain how science, law, and advocacy can protect wildlife and wild places. They also share strategies for combating extinction and staying motivated to act in an age of ecological crisis. Highlights include: Why human population pressure, industrial animal agriculture, and growth economies are key issues that the Center addresses, even though they are often ignored or treated as taboo by most...
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AI and the Decline of Human Agency | Jacob Ward
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
AI, under the dangerous control of tech oligarchs, is creating a world with shrinking human choice, creativity, and connection. Technology journalist Jacob Ward, author of The Loop: How Technology is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back, describes why restraint and resistance are necessary to fight back against the AI juggernaut. Highlights include: How tech journalism emphasizes novelty and business profits and amplifies tech companies' hype as journalists seek to maintain access to powerful tech leaders; How profit-driven AI exploits a human bias toward fast, easy...
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Confronting Human Exceptionalism | Christine Webb
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
The myth of human exceptionalism casts humans as separate from and superior to the rest of life. Primatologist Christine Webb, author of The Arrogant Ape, dismantles this belief, showing how science and culture sustain human exceptionalism - and why replacing it with awe and empathy for the natural world is essential to life’s future on Earth. Highlights include: How an early experience with Bear the baboon led Christine to a deep insight about nonhuman animals' complex theory of mind - the ability to know what others know; How human exceptionalism is deeply rooted in Western thought...
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The Dystopian Delusions of Tech Overlords | Adam Becker
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
Silicon Valley billionaires, such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman, promise salvation through space colonization, immortality, superintelligent AI, and endless growth. Adam Becker, astrophysicist and author of More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, debunks these profoundly immoral and biophysically impossible delusions, and explains why resisting them through collective action is essential. Highlights include: How tech billionaires confuse science fiction for reality and why their fantasies of space...
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Data Grab: The New Colonialism | Ulises Mejias
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
Data is the resource, and our lives are the territory. Ulises Mejias, co-author of Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back, reflects on data colonialism as a new social order that extends the extractive logic of historical colonialism into our everyday lives. Highlights include: How terms of digital service agreements, written in dense legalese, resemble past colonial proclamations to indigenous people intended to dispossess; How data colonialism, a system of continuous data extraction from our everyday lives, mirrors traditional colonialism in that both generate...
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Epicurean Simplicity | Stephanie Mills
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
Shaped by fears of overpopulation and ecological collapse, Stephanie Mills was launched into prominence with her 1969 college commencement vow not to have children. A long-time bioregionalist, Mills reflects on decades of questioning growth and cultivating a rooted relationship with the living world, and explains why bioregional living will become a necessity as global industrial civilization continues to unravel. She finds solace in and advocates for an Epicurean simplicity - choosing the simple pleasures of community, place, and nature. Highlights include: How the conversation around...
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The Dangers of Effective Altruism | Alice Crary
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
Effective altruism’s technocratic worldview narrows our moral imagination and helps sustain human and animal injustice. Philosopher Alice Crary argues that effective altruism (EA) and longtermism, both shaped by Silicon Valley’s techno-utopian fantasies, ignore social structures of oppression and offer either incremental welfarism or galactic transhumanism over genuine animal and human liberation. Highlights include: Why effective altruists treat concerns about personal integrity as a form of self-indulgence; How EA's welfarist approach functions as a band-aid that allows its billionaire...
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An "Abundance Agenda" for Nature | Ben Goldfarb
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
We need an “abundance agenda” for nature. Ben Goldfarb, environmental journalist and author, challenges the techno-fix growth agenda that delivers an abundance of concrete and condos and a scarcity of wildness and wildlife. He urges us to replace extinction-prevention minimalism with a bolder commitment to restoring the abundance of keystone species, thriving ecosystems, and the freedom of wildlife to roam, migrate, and flourish. Highlights include: Why the so-called "abundance agenda" and its proposed weakening of environmental laws creates an abundance of concrete and a scarcity of...
info_outlineFrom center-left Ezra Klein to right-wing Matt Walsh, the fertility panic is an elite fixation that is rooted in a human supremacist worldview and a deep fear of slowing growth. Samuel Miller McDonald, geographer and author of the book Progress: A History of Humanity's Worst Idea, exposes how our parasitic relationship with Earth lies at the core of ecological overshoot, and why resisting authoritarianism in an age of contraction means embracing a pluralistic and just degrowth vision. Highlights include:
- Why our modern relationship to Earth is fundamentally parasitic - regardless of whether societies are capitalist or socialist;
- How media commentators resist degrowth in various stages and how their rejection reveals their lack of maturity in accepting responsibility for the ecological destruction we are causing;
- Why degrowth policies and practices should emphasize pluralistic, context-specific approaches rooted in democratic participation, not top-down master plans;
- Why many degrowth proponents have been dismissive of population concerns;
- Why the political right is more poised to benefit from ongoing economic contraction and why the liberal 'abundance agenda' needs to be resisted;
- Why conviviality and class solidarity are key to a successful degrowth transition and how modern societies undermine them;
- Why core values like fairness, autonomy, and ecological integrity will be essential in resisting authoritarians' claims to power in the coming challenging decades.
See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript:
https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/samuel-miller-mcdonald
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
OVERSHOOT tackles today’s interlocked social and ecological crises driven by humanity’s excessive population and consumption. The podcast explores needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. With expert guests from wide-ranging disciplines, we examine the forces underlying overshoot: from patriarchal pronatalism that is fueling overpopulation, to growth-biased economic systems that lead to consumerism and social injustice, to the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all beings.
Hosted by Nandita Bajaj and Alan Ware. Brought to you by Population Balance.
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