The targets of overpopulation rhetoric are people from “developing nations,” where, due to government and corporate corruption, and the lingering effects of colonialism, many suffer from abject poverty. Overpopulation discourse rarely centers Western (US, Canada, Israel, Australia and Europe) and Westernized (like Japan and South Korea) nations as being part of the problem, instead it zeroes in on how birth rates in Asian and African countries are leading mankind down a road of imminent disaster. For many Westerners, a poor family of nine in Niger will contribute to the demise of the Earth more than ONE American, whose energy consumption on average is equivalent to the consumption of over hundreds of people in some countries. Yet, today 1% of the world’s population controls over half of the world’s wealth; the next 9% occupy 40% of the world’s wealth. This top 10% of the world, who are overwhelmingly based in Western and Westernized nations, make up 90% of the global economy. Such monopolization of wealth, by proxy, yields the monopolization of access, distribution, and hoarding of the world’s resources.

It is irrational that the blame for why some are forced to eat food made from literal garbage is attributed to their having big families and not to today’s historically unprecedented wealth and resource inequality. When Americans waste over 50% of food produce, it’s hard to believe that immense poverty in low-income countries is a result of overpopulation and not due to Western over-consumption and resource hoarding. Instead of accepting responsibility for the wastefulness that modernist hedonism produces and for the maintenance of transnational corporatism as the primary economic system by which the global economy operates, culpability is shifted to the ones who suffer the most because of our indiscretions.

Overpopulation rhetoric makes those who have had the least impact on the deteriorating condition of the Earth most culpable. In the quest to preserve the excessive consumerism of the West (as justified by the modernist notion of “seeking pleasure so long as it harms no one”), we are actively putting the world at risk and absolving ourselves of any responsibility. Such is the primordial state of the “modern” human. World leaders waste billions on paintings, military expansionism, and taller skyscrapers, while children in Haiti eat mud cakes as a delicacy. It is nonsensical to presume that having fewer children is the solution to abject poverty. Our self-indulgence has a price, and that price will be paid when God asks us about what we did with the comfort and wealth He blessed us with. We won’t be able to escape responsibility then.