The One Where I Talk To Nandita Bajaj & Kirsten Stade of Population Balance

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In this week's episode, I talk to Executive Director and Communications Manager at Population Balance, Nandita Bajaj and Kirsten Stade. 

The organisation’s mission is to offer education and solutions to address the impacts of human overpopulation and overconsumption on the planet, people, and animals. It is the first and only organisation globally that draws the connections between pronatalism, anthropocentrism, and overpopulation, and their combined devastating impacts on social, reproductive, ecological, and intergenerational justice. 

In this episode, we talk about how the planet is in ‘ecological overshoot’; the many manifestations of the climate and biodiversity crises; and how our growing population is essentially crowding out all of the other species on the planet.

We also talk about pronatalism as the driver of overpopulation, and why it is having such a huge and devastating impact; how Nandita herself did not think she had a choice to not have children because of her upbringing in India; and coercive pronatalism - the default pressure that is placed on women to have children.

We discuss how Kirsten never felt pressure from her family to have children, but how she noticed the pressure surrounding her; how getting pregnant isn’t always a positive development in a woman’s life; how the media has depicted families with children as somehow more ‘whole’ or ‘complete’, and how this makes it hard for people to know what they truly want; and how peeling away the layers of pronatalism is essential to afford women the clarity to choose whether or not they truly want children, and / or a potentially smaller family.     

The conversation also covers how pronatalism undermines reproductive responsibility; overpopulation denialism in academic circles due to sensitivity surrounding population control; how women in certain are still regarded as reproductive vessels who have absolutely no reproductive autonomy; and how the desire for procreation is not universal but rather falls on a spectrum.


Finally, we talk about awareness and how to translate that into action; and pushing the boundaries on what the term ‘family’ means.  

Follow Population Balance on Instagram: @populationbalance

On Twitter: @populationbalance

Find out more at the website:

https://www.populationbalance.org/ 

Listen to the podcast, The Overpopulation Podcast, on Spotify:

https://open.spotify.co

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