This is an abridged version of my discussion with Alison Bashford.

You can listen to an extended version on the LRB website.

Just follow the link in the description.

You're listening to the LRB podcast. I'm me and Christ, and welcome to the third episode in a special four-part series exploring the intersection of climate chaos and reproductive justice.

In our last episode, I spoke with evolutionary biologist and feminist scholar Banu Subramanium about the intersections of science, culture, and feminist

thought, as well as the dangers of biological determinism.

Today I am joined by writer and historian Alison Bashford, laureate professor of history

at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.

She is director of the Laureate Center for History and Population, as well as founding

co-director of the New Earth History's Research Program. Throughout her career, most notably in her book,

Global Population, History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth, she has traced the ways thinking about

population has transformed from the 18th to the 20th centuries.

Most relevant to today's conversation, she has written about the rise of international efforts

to control global population, from the work of 18th century political economist Thomas Malthus,

who argued that the relationship between food production and population makes poverty inevitable,

through the panic associated with the

best-selling 1968 book, The Population Bomb, written by Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich and his

uncredited wife, Anne, which predicted mass famines in the 1970s because of overpopulation.

She is currently interested in the question, how do we think about population in the Anthropocene?

For some, this is not a question we should be asking at all, and is one that is loaded with historical trauma.

For others, questions about population are still relevant and bear rigorous investigation.

Allison has been awarded the Royal Society of New South Wales History and Philosophy of Science Medal

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