Hello, this is Nandita Bajaj, cohost of The Overpopulation Podcast and Executive Director of Population Balance. I am excited to share that we’ve launched a second podcast, Beyond Pronatalism: Finding Fulfillment, With or Without Kids. Please subscribe and share it widely. Episodes drop every two weeks and you can find them on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Don’t miss the chance to hear stories that could very well resonate with your own experiences—or open your mind to new ways of thinking about family, community, and personal fulfillment. And, if you’d like to be on the show, check out the show notes on how you can get in touch with me.

Show Notes and Transcript

https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/beyond-pronatalism

Beyond Pronatalism | Finding fulfillment, with or without kids

To have or not have kids is one of the biggest decisions we make in our lives, and yet how many of us know that we even have a choice about how we define and create our families? Beyond Pronatalism host Nandita Bajaj interviews women and men from diverse backgrounds who are courageously and creatively navigating pronatalism - the powerful pressures to have children - whether from family, friends, or the culture at large. Through intimate conversations, they discuss how they are forging unconventional pathways to fulfillment, including redefining what family means to them - whether that means being childfree or childless, having biological children, adopting or fostering children or animals, or creating close-knit communities of friends and loved ones.

https://www.populationbalance.org/beyond-pronatalism-podcast

ABOUT US

Beyond Pronatalism is brought to you by Population Balance, the only non profit organization advancing ecological and reproductive justice by confronting pronatalism. This podcast is produced and hosted by Nandita Bajaj, with the support of the production team - Josh Wild, Elisabeth Strunk, Alan Ware and Kirsten Stade. Population Balance's mission to inspire narrative, behavioral, and system change that shrinks our human impact and elevates the rights and wellbeing of people, animals, and the planet.

Learn more here: https://www.populationbalance.org/

Copyright 2024 Population Balance

In this episode, we chat with Dr. James Hopeward, an environmental civil engineering professor at the University of South Australia. We explore the limitations of conventional economic growth models and their environmental impacts, emphasizing the need for more holistic and ecologically grounded engineering practices and cultural beliefs.

Highlights include:

• Why decoupling economic growth from energy and material use relies on temporary efficiency gains and ultimately fails in a growth-based system, rendering the concepts of absolute and relative decoupling meaningless;
• How the IPCC treats economic and population growth as exogenous to its modelling scenarios, and has therefore both overestimated fossil fuel supplies and underestimated catastrophic social and ecological outcomes resulting from overshoot;
• Why understanding exponential growth was a crucial lesson for James and is now a key part of his engineering curriculum;
• Why future infrastructure projects must prioritize climate resiliency;
• Why the significance of population issues within environmental and degrowth movements must be urgently elevated to minimize further overshoot-related harm and suffering.

See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript:

https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/james-hopeward

ABOUT US

The Overpopulation Podcast features enlightening conversations between Population Balance executive director Nandita Bajaj, researcher Alan Ware, and expert guests that draw the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, social inequalities, and ecological overshoot. Population Balance's mission to inspire narrative, behavioral, and system change that shrinks our human impact and elevates the rights and wellbeing of people, animals, and the planet.

Learn more here: https://www.populationbalance.org/

Copyright 2024 Population Balance

In this episode, we chat with Maneesha Deckha, Professor and Lansdowne Chair in Law at the University of Victoria, about her research in critical animal law. We discuss her 2021 book, Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders in which she argues for a new legal category of “beingness” for animals that transcends the inadequate legal categories of “persons” or “property.” We also dive into her 2023 article Animalization and Dehumanization Concerns: Another Psychological Barrier to Animal Law Reform, in which she highlights why a critique of human exceptionalism is essential to advancing the goals of anti-racism and decolonization.

Highlights include:

• Maneesha’s personal journey into exploring the links between animal legal studies and critical animal studies, health law, reproductive ethics, feminist analysis of law, and postcolonial and critical race theory;

• Deckha’s evaluation of the 2022 decision by the New York Court of Appeals with respect to the ongoing captivity of Happy, an elephant at the Bronx Zoo, in which she outlines why the dissociation of humans from animals is counterproductive to eliminating racism and other intra-human prejudices and inequities;

• How the legal classification of animals as “property” creates problems, such as commodification and objectification; meanwhile, using the “personhood” category for animals exacerbates the concept of human exceptionalism. Deckha argues for a new category of “beingness’ for nonhuman animals which recognizes their embodiment, relationality, and vulnerability;

• A new six-part series documentary series targeted towards secondary school students, A Deeper Kindness: Animal Law and Youth Activism, which surveys the current field of animal law and policy through the eyes of four youth active in animal advocacy.

See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript:

https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/maneesha-deckha

ABOUT US

The Overpopulation Podcast features enlightening conversations between Population Balance executive director Nandita Bajaj, researcher Alan Ware, and expert guests that draw the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, social inequalities, and ecological overshoot. Population Balance's mission to inspire narrative, behavioral, and system change that shrinks our human impact and elevates the rights and wellbeing of people, animals, and the planet.

Learn more here: https://www.populationbalance.org/

Copyright 2024 Population Balance

In this episode, we chat with Zoe Weil, co-founder and president of the Institute for Humane Education, about her pioneering work in the area of comprehensive humane education, an approach to teaching that draws the intimate links between human rights, animal protection, and environmental sustainability. We take a dive into Zoe's latest book The Solutionary Way, which explores how to use a solutionary lens to bridge divides and address the seemingly intractable challenges we face.

Highlights include:

• Zoe’s personal journey of co-founding the Institute for Humane Education in 1996, and the many programs and resources offered through the Institute;
• The description of a “solutionary” as someone who transforms unjust, unsustainable, and inhumane systems for the most good and least harm, and how one can cultivate a solutionary mindset;
• How to use a humane education lens to understand the connections between overpopulation, lack of reproductive autonomy, animal exploitation, and ecological degradation;
• Zoe’s reflections on societal double standards around reproductive choices - how not having children is stigmatized while having children is the unquestioned default;
• The purpose and joy of living in alignment with our values while simultaneously working in community towards system change.

See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript:

https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/zoe-weil

ABOUT US

The Overpopulation Podcast features enlightening conversations between Population Balance executive director Nandita Bajaj, researcher Alan Ware, and expert guests. We cover a broad variety of topics that explore the impacts of our expanding human footprint on human rights, animal protection, and environmental restoration, as well as individual and collective solutions. Learn more here: https://www.populationbalance.org/

Copyright 2024 Population Balance

In this episode, we explore with environmentalist and author Ashish Kothari how entrenched “development” ideologies have led to an immense loss of traditional knowledge and cultural systems and caused immeasurable ecological destruction in India and globally. Ashish highlights radical alternatives being led by communities in India and around the world who are resisting the dominant capitalist, statist, and patriarchal model of “development” and offering transformative solutions from the ground up that are based in social justice and ecological wisdom. Highlights include:

• How the Western model of development in India, combined with colonialism and globalization, led to incalculable social injustice and ecological destruction;

• How the elite class within countries reinforces neoliberal and neo-colonial models, exacerbating existing inequalities such as gender and caste;

• The concept of radical ecological democracy, as expressed through the Flower of Transformation, the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, Vikalp Sangam (Alternatives Confluence), all of which highlight and connect local community-led radical alternatives of social transformation, ecological restoration, and revival and sustenance of multiple knowledge and cultural systems;

• Pathways to authentically engage in the practice of decolonizing knowledge systems and cultural practices to allow for the emergence of social and ecological diversity.

See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript:

https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/ashish-kothari

ABOUT US

The Overpopulation Podcast features enlightening conversations between Population Balance executive director Nandita Bajaj, researcher Alan Ware, and expert guests. We cover a broad variety of topics that explore the impacts of our expanding human footprint on human rights, animal protection, and environmental restoration, as well as individual and collective solutions. Learn more here: https://www.populationbalance.org/

Copyright 2024 Population Balance

In this episode we speak with Dr. Clive Spash, an ecological economist who is fundamentally challenging conventional economic paradigms through his development of social ecological economics. His work addresses the intersections of human behavior, environmental values, and economic systems - advocating for a radical transformation towards a more socially and ecologically just world. Highlights include:

• A critique of mainstream economics for failing to consider not only ecological and biophysical realities, but also pro-social human behavior and relationships, as well as power hierarchies;

• How economists who have completed multiple degrees in economics are found to be particularly closed-minded and resistant to alternative perspectives;

• How major environmental NGOs, including The Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, and World Wildlife Fund, have been taken over by corporate and neoliberal ideologies;

• How prominent advocates of degrowth and alternative economic models, such as Jason Hickel, Tim Jackson, Kate Raworth, and Timothée Parrique, are unwittingly supporting the many growth agendas of mainstream economics while also peddling population denialism and human supremacy;

• Why Social Ecological Economics provides a scientific and ethical basis for degrowth economics that considers the rights of nature and of people.

See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript:

https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/clive-spash

ABOUT US

The Overpopulation Podcast features enlightening conversations between Population Balance executive director Nandita Bajaj, researcher Alan Ware, and expert guests that draw the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, social inequalities, and ecological overshoot. Population Balance's mission is to inspire narrative, behavioral, and system change that shrinks our human impact and elevates the rights and wellbeing of people, animals, and the planet.

Learn more here: https://www.populationbalance.org/

Subscribe to our newsletter here: https://www.populationbalance.org/subscribe

Copyright 2024 Population Balance

In this episode we speak with Riane Eisler, a social systems scientist, futurist, cultural historian, attorney, consultant, speaker, and author of many books, including The Chalice and the Blade and The Real Wealth of Nations, about how to construct a more equitable, sustainable and less violent world based on partnership rather than domination. Highlights include:

• Riane’s childhood experiences of being a Holocaust survivor and living as a refugee in Cuba, which informed her study of contrasting societal models of dominator versus partnership;

• How domination systems enforce violence through rigid rankings, while partnership systems reduce abuse through democratic structures;

• How gender inequality, pronatalism, and population growth are integral to domination systems, and why engaging in population denial perpetuates hierarchies of domination within the family and within politics;

• How partnership model values, such as caregiving and non-violence, were prevalent in pre-historic times and are more conducive to individual human happiness and flourishing;

• Why examining past societies' egalitarian models can help us redefine power structures and gender in order to reconstruct models that are relevant in today’s societies.

See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript:

https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/riane-eisler

ABOUT US

The Overpopulation Podcast features enlightening conversations between Population Balance executive director Nandita Bajaj, researcher Alan Ware, and expert guests that draw the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, social inequalities, and ecological overshoot. Population Balance's mission is to inspire narrative, behavioral, and system change that shrinks our human impact and elevates the rights and wellbeing of people, animals, and the planet.

Learn more here: https://www.populationbalance.org/

Subscribe to our newsletter here: https://www.populationbalance.org/subscribe

Copyright 2024 Population Balance

In this episode we speak with Jo-Anne McArthur, acclaimed animal photojournalist and founder and president of We Animals Media, an organization whose photographers document the lives of unseen and ignored animals caught within human systems of exploitation and oppression. HIghlights of this episode include:

• How, motivated by the power of photography to catalyze social change and to raise awareness about animal exploitation, Jo-Anne created a new genre of photojournalism, namely Animal Photo Journalism (APJ);

• APJ’s mission to capture, memorialize, and expose the experiences of animals who are caught within the complex human-dominated systems and whom we fail to see - animals within the industrial food systems, animals used for entertainment, such as in circuses, zoos, aquaria, theme parks, and rodeos, and animals used in research;

• Jo-Anne’s travels to over 60 countries that catalogue our complex relationship with animals, captured in her three books, We Animals, Captive, and Hidden: Animals in the Anthropocene, and her feature role in the acclaimed Canadian documentary, The Ghosts in Our Machines;

• inspiring stories of animal advocacy and highlights of the work of women on the front lines, captured in the Unbound project by We Animals Media;

• how Jo-Anne manages the emotional impact of documenting animal suffering while staying committed to animal liberation;

• and finally, on behalf of our planet which is groaning under the pressure of human dominion, Jo-Anne’s reflection on her personal journey of choosing not to have children, emphasizing the importance of considering alternative and richer ways to express love and fulfillment.

See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript:

https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/joanne-mcarthur

ABOUT US

The Overpopulation Podcast features enlightening conversations between Population Balance executive director Nandita Bajaj, researcher Alan Ware, and expert guests. We cover a broad variety of topics that explore the impacts of our expanding human footprint on human rights, animal protection, and environmental restoration, as well as individual and collective solutions. Learn more here: https://www.populationbalance.org/

Copyright 2024 Population Balance