This week Nandita Bajaj, the Executive Director of Population Balance, spoke with Dr. Brian Henning, founder and Director of the Gonzaga Institute for Climate, Water, and the Environment, at the Gongaza University in Washington.

This online event, titled Confronting population denial amid unraveling global crises, addressed the issue of how, despite leading scientific authorities warning that overpopulation and rampant overconsumption are driving climate change, resource scarcity, and biodiversity collapse, there is still widespread dismissal of the consequences of overpopulation among journalists, academics, environmental organisations, and policymakers.

Nandita Bajaj discussed the factors behind the silencing of this discourse, namely growth-biased socio-economic systems, past population policies, pronatalism, and human exceptionalism.

She explained the harmful implications of overpopulation denial on the most vulnerable people and ecosystems, how the powerful institutions of the state, the church, the military, and the economy perpetuate and benefit from this denial, and why we must urgently move past it.

She also offered strategies on how to hold power accountable, while embracing population and economic de-growth as a means to advance social, reproductive, and ecological justice.

Click the video below to watch the replay.

Nandita Bajaj is the Executive Director of Population Balance, a US nonprofit that works to inspire narrative, behavioral, and system change that shrinks our human impact and elevates the rights and wellbeing of people, animals, and the planet. She also co-hosts The Overpopulation Podcast, a popular series that delves into the nuances of the drivers and impacts of human expansionism with expert guests.

Bajaj is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Humane Education at Antioch University, where she teaches about the combined impacts of pronatalism and human expansionism on reproductive, ecological, and intergenerational justice.

In addition to a number of peer-reviewed papers and forthcoming book chapters, her work has appeared in major news outlets including Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, The Guardian, Newsweek, Ms. Magazine, The Globe and Mail, The Washington Post, and National Post.

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