Panic Over 7 Billion: Letting The 1% Off The Hook

Ian Angus & Simon Butler
Series Number: 
73
Fall
2011

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In October 2011, the UN Population Fund decided to pinpoint the birth of the world’s seven billionth living person as Halloween — a choice clearly meant to encourage conversations about how terrifying the number should be. In this issue of DifferenTakes, authors Ian Angus and Simon Butler explain that the wave of populationist fearmongering that followed was based on misleading statistics, and dangerously ignores the real perpetrators of environmental destruction.

Panic Over 7 Billion: Letting The 1% Off The Hook

Ian Angus and Simon Butler are the co-authors of Too Many People: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis, published in October 2011 by Haymarket Books. Ian edits the online journal Climate And Capitalism, and Simon is co-editor of the Australian newspaper Green Left Weekly.