By 2050, 10 to 11 billion humans will share the planet’s resources. “Is Earth overpopulated?” How many times have we heard this phrase that makes us flinch without ever finding clear answers. Is it really reasonable to want to stop making babies to save humanity? How can we fight our eco-anxiety in order to make the right decisions, those disconnected from fear and dystopian anticipation?
This was the topic of a roundtable discussion we were asked to facilitate for the b-corp certified cosmetic brand Mustela in Paris at La Maison des Parents (The Parents’ House) which welcomed 1600 participants over two weeks wanting to understand more about parenting from practical workshops such as how to deal with your baby’s sleep, to postpartum sexuality. Here is a summary of the key points which were raised by our guests, a psychotherapist, Juliette Allais and one spirituality expert, Pierre Monniz-Barreto.
The objective was to provide the tools and resources necessary to understand our desire to make children and to eventually become eco-warriors in order to help us face the uncertainties of the current transition and the eco-environmental turmoil to come. As a young mum, working in sustainability, my personal goal was to find answers to questions I raised way before falling pregnant. And this was truly helpful!
What is “eco-anxiety” and where does it come from? (from a clinical point of view)
Anxiety is described as this “feeling of an imminent, indeterminate danger accompanied by a state of unease, agitation, disarray or even annihilation”. When this feeling of worry is applied to climate change and the anticipation of a future destroyed by pollution, biodiversity loss and temperatures rising, it is called eco-anxiety. According to an IFOP survey conducted during summer 2022, 67% of French people (but this could be applied to all countries in the Northern parts of the world) say they feel fearful about the future. And, cherry on the top, women, young people and mothers are particularly prone to feeling responsible for what is happening. When I got pregnant, I was even afraid to tell my community, because of the fear of being judged for adding a negative weight on the planet.
For the psychotherapist Juliette Allais – Eco-anxiety is a term that encompasses a set of emotions, feelings, psychic states and symptoms related to a deep insecurity, more or less conscious, in front of the degradation of the earth linked to climate change and the loss of biodiversity. The manifestations vary from fear, anger, rage, to depression, and feelings of loneliness, loss of meaning, feelings of powerlessness or injustice, discouragement, despair, solastalgia (nostalgia for a lost world), and many more. These feelings express a legitimate concern: they show that we are concerned about the future of the planet and its degradation. The challenge is to contain these emotions so that they do not paralyze us or are too invasive by transforming them into something positive (useful for the planet, and therefore for us). More on that later.
The spirituality expert, Pierre Moniz-Barreto adds that actually, eco anxiety is a feeling which is totally NORMAL to experience. And he adds that it would actually be surprising not to experience it in our day and age. Like all other forms of anxiety or existential anguish, it needs to be partly integrated and partly overcome. It is in this overcoming that spirituality provides the right tool: an ability to see further than the immediate circumstances, a meta vision (beyond appearances), a freedom that overcomes the fears linked to the news. Spirituality also allows us to enter into a dimension of trust in Life (in what is deepest and most vast, with unsuspected resources), and of Faith in Life Spirituality does not eliminate the trials but it is linked to the fact that the forces of Life are stronger than the forces of death and fear.
Is Earth overpopulated?
When we interrogate our eco-anxiety and try to justify it, we often stumble upon two main causes. First, we are scared of adding a negative ecological burden on the planet. And second, we are anxious about the kind of future we will leave to our children. The first point is easily addressable and it is from a demographic point of view that we can do it, answering the question “is Earth really overpopulated?”
We went to check what demographers had to say, including Gilles Pison, demographer at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, graduate of the ENS who has been conferencing on the topic, including a podcast which has been proven to be super useful for our research. First of all, it has only been 50 years since we started to worry about population growth. And 50 years ago, the average number of children per woman was 5, today it is 2.4, with 1.6 in Europe, hardly enough to renew our generations. This number is called the fertility rate. But what’s most important, is that the population will reach a stagnation, a plateau in 2050 around 10/11 billion inhabitants (vs. approximately 8 billions today). Currently, the population continues to increase because the number of births is higher than the number of deaths BUT as the renewal fertility rate decreases, we will reach a plateau. The biggest population growth rate will come from Africa and in the Asian fringe, from India to Bangladesh.
I do not know what this information is raising for you. But for me, it actually helped to release a huge amount of guilt, as from a number point of view, we are not too many on Earth.
What about from a resource point of view?
Of course being 10 billion on Earth would require us to be smarter and more frugal (including changing our model of success etc etc etc) about how we use our resources. And it seems like we are not on the right track.
But it is always good to remind ourselves of a few high level statistics in order to be able to zoom out on the current world situation. Currently, one-third of the food produced is being wasted. And that if we were to decrease this wastage, we would not only feed the hungry people but also all the mouths to come. From an emissions point of view, we know that the richest 1% emit 70 times more CO2 than the poorest 50% and that the richest live in cities which only account for 3% of the total land surface. And also, that 100 companies are responsible for 71% of total emissions.
We could go on and on with those examples. Which would all conclude that our lifestyles, in the northern parts of the planet, and especially how we produce energy are a huge part of the problems. And that eventually, the sustainability revolution is not technical, but cultural, and spiritual.
After all, isn’t eco-anxiety just another form of anxiety?
When I first realized that eco anxious people were first and foremost anxious people, full stop, I started to really question my mental health as well. And this is when I realized that I had a lot to work on personally and that even if the future of the planet would be bright, I would still feel some anxiety about the future. Because this is what all human beings have always experienced when facing uncertainties, but for some people, the feelings are stronger.
For our psychotherapist, Juliette, our eco-anxiety echoes with a place in us where we felt vulnerable or powerless in the face of change or a threat to life, during our childhood. It therefore reactivates older wounds (whatever their origins are) and the emotions linked to them. We can differentiate between them if we are aware of them, and if we know that part of our symptoms are related to something that has already happened.
Isn’t it mind blowing to understand that how we feel on the inside affects our capacity to perceive the world on the outside? And hence, our capacity to act and impact the world, our communities, and ourselves for the best?
Where does the desire to have children come from? Does “maternal instinct” exist?
This is another fundamental question we raised.
For our psychotherapist, Juliette, NO – the maternal instinct does not exist. It is a construction of the patriarchal society to maintain women in roles that keep the system together. The desire for a child is constructed from our place as a child, from what we have recorded of our parents’ relationship, from our whole family history, and from our own “personal signature”. It is at the same time conscious and unconscious and feeds on a thousand things transmitted on motherhood, parenthood, our own lacks, our parents’ expectations… It is singular for each of us, and at the same time very encouraged by a society for which the family is an essential pillar.
For Pierre, our spirituality expert, the desire for children is first and foremost a desire for Life. Regardless of eco-anxiety, it is good to ask oneself why one (really) wants to have children? There can be many reasons, and many bad ones: selfishness, fear of loneliness, fear of being neglected at an old age, obsession to be like everyone else, family pressure, etc. And there may be a link with eco-anxiety because our relationship to the desire for children is symptomatic of our relationship to the world: our inner ecology is reflected on our outer ecology. It is good to want to add life to Life, but bad reasons can add imbalance to the ecosystem, to the evolution of humanity, to a certain universal harmony. And introducing/adding disharmony necessarily produces deleterious effects (more or less long term, directly or indirectly).
Any concrete tips to understand where our anxiety truly comes from? And if there is eco-anxiety, how can we fight it?
It becomes clearer that it is less necessary to question our desire to make children from a sustainability point of view, than from a mental health point of view. Once we do some work on ourselves, on our shadows, family wounds etc. the decision becomes wiser and feels lighter.
For Juliette, a psychotherapist – it is all about containing our ecological anxiety by first, welcoming it, without letting it settle in. Welcoming the sensation is always the first step in the transformation. Then, there are many ways to engage from there, to make it less of a “threat”. Connecting with others to share our emotions makes them less heavy to bear. Taking action by getting involved in causes which empower us. The idea is to put ourselves back in touch with the “living” parts of the world and of ourselves, both inside and outside of us, and to be able to transmit this to our children. The same approach with beauty: what makes us feel good and increases our feeling of inner security helps us to face the unknown and the threat of annihilation. But also to revisit our relationship to finitude, and to the deep meaning of this crisis in order to connect us also “elsewhere”, “differently” and to give us enough faith in Life to have confidence. It is a real initiatory process to which all this invites us, to go beyond ourselves as human beings to build a new relationship with the 6th life where it is “sacred”. This forces us to a complete mutation of our values, as an essentially materialistic society cut off from a relationship to the symbolic.
Finally, for Pierre, spirituality invites us to enter into a dimension of trust and faith in life. In particular, reframing the word “death” which seems to be opposed to the word “birth” in our societies but actually, the story continues, here below (the evolution of Life on Earth) and beyond (Life in the spiritual world). Human existence includes finitude, Life on Earth includes Death and trials: the indigenous wisdoms had well integrated this notion/dimension, with harmony: we have removed and relegated to corner everything that makes us think of illness, suffering, death, but this is a mistake: the faith in Life in the spirituality sense of the term (river of eternity, below birth and beyond death), and the perspective of the evolutionary reincarnation (our beings reincarnate to evolve towards an always better version of themselves), allow us to enter in a calmed vision of our paths, and to welcome the Meaning of Life where we did not see it (the deep Meaning escapes us at first instance, but it is revealed little by little, especially if we give it the possibility).
Overall, our crisis invites us to leave our comfort zones, and to develop a great capacity to adapt, and children amplify this invitation considerably. I believe that we must respond with faith (deep trust), flexibility (adaptability) and responsibility (in consciousness – interconnected – but without being crushed by the weight of abstractions: theoretical proofs, planetary dimension of the crisis, etc.). The key is to give birth, collectively to a population of eco warriors, capable of changing the course of history. He adds that history has proven that small groups of individuals were capable of that!
I truly hope this article will help you to find ways to feel relaxed and empowered, while remaining aware of the sustainability crises we are facing.
Participants’ bios
Juliette Allais is an author and psychotherapist in Paris. She is a regular speaker at various training sessions and in the media. She is a lecturer in France and abroad. Trained in transgenerational psychoanalysis, Jungian psychoanalysis, Gestalt PGRO, affective neuroscience, couple therapy and clinical sociology. She practices a multidisciplinary approach, aiming at reconciling each person with his or her genealogical place and the effects of his or her unconscious heritage. She thus accompanies men and women in search of meaning and fulfillment towards more just places and more luminous trajectories that respect the living.
Pierre Moniz-Barreto is an entrepreneur, trainer, editor, author and speaker. He has been exploring the spiritualities of the world for more than 25 years and is an expert in questions of spirituality and temporality. He is a graduate in business studies (ISG), philosophy and applied theology (Jesuit Faculties of Paris and Brussels). He directs L’Académie des Intelligences Humaines, which he co-founded in 2019, where he deploys an expertise in Spiritual Intelligence unique in France (pioneering training and publications).
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