OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance

Humanity is pushing life to the brink. Mathematical ecologist, Corey Bradshaw, explains how our growing population and consumption are driving the depopulation and extinction of countless species while pushing Earth's ecosystems beyond their limits. We explore why overpopulation remains politically taboo, why fears of falling birth rates are misplaced given the evidence of better socioeconomic outcomes in aging societies, and why, although the future will be 'ghastly,' it's still up to us to make it 'less worse.' Highlights include:
How human activities shrink wildlife populations and genetic diversity, making species increasingly vulnerable to extinction through environmental shocks;
Why humanity is likely driving a mass extinction, even though we may never be able to fully measure its scale because most species remain undiscovered;
Why rising wealth and technological efficiencies have resulted in more ecological degradation, not less;
How the evidence is overwhelming that increased human population density is associated with greater biodiversity threats and ecological degradation - as well as declines in human health;
What slowing population growth rates in recent decades reveal about the planet's long-term sustainable human population;
Why fears of low birth rates and aging societies are driven more by economic growth imperatives than by evidence, which shows aging populations enjoy better socioeconomic and health outcomes;
Why discussion of population growth and overpopulation remains taboo across the political spectrum, and even within organizations like the UN Population Fund;
Why Corey is an 'optimistic pessimist' who believes the future will be worse on many objective measures but that it's up to us to make it both less worse and more equitable. 
See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript: 
https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/corey-bradshaw
 
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
OVERSHOOT tackles today's interlocked social and ecological crises driven by humanity's excessive population and consumption. The podcast explores needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. With expert guests from wide-ranging disciplines, we examine the forces underlying overshoot: from patriarchal pronatalism that is fueling overpopulation, to growth-biased economic systems that lead to consumerism and social injustice, to the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all beings. 
Hosted by Nandita Bajaj and Alan Ware. Brought to you by Population Balance.
Subscribe to our newsletter here: https://www.populationbalance.org/subscribe
Support our work with a one-time or monthly donation: https://www.populationbalance.org/donate
Learn more at https://www.populationbalance.org
Copyright 2016-2026 Population Balance

For millennia, animals have been treated as property or passive recipients of moral concern rather than as political beings with agency. Political philosophers Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, authors of Animals and the Right to Politics, argue that decades of research reveals that animals are members of complex political societies capable of negotiation, cooperation, and collective decision-making. We explore what it would mean to recognize animals' political rights and build a meaningful politics with animals, and why that requires transforming our laws, institutions, and everyday relationships with animals from violence and domination toward coexistence. Highlights include:
Why we need to move beyond the idea of the "minimal animal," which focuses on the animal's capacity to suffer or engage in species-specific behaviors, toward the "maximal animal" recognized as an agent with personality, culture, and political capacities;
Why we must learn to elicit and be responsive to animals' needs and wants - their political communication - and not assume that humans can represent animals' interests easily and accurately;
Why animal politics requires attending not only to animals' resistance to violence and domination but also to the many ways they express cooperation, preference, and consent;
Why the "cosmopolitan bias" in animal ethics privileges humans' global mobility over the place-based lives of both animals and indigenous and local human communities;
How meaningful coexistence and honoring animals' rights to politics differs for domesticated, liminal, and wild animals - from expanding freedom and choice, to redesigning shared living spaces, to respecting territories and habitats.
See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript: 
https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/will-kymlicka-sue-donaldson
 
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
OVERSHOOT tackles today's interlocked social and ecological crises driven by humanity's excessive population and consumption. The podcast explores needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. With expert guests from wide-ranging disciplines, we examine the forces underlying overshoot: from patriarchal pronatalism that is fueling overpopulation, to growth-biased economic systems that lead to consumerism and social injustice, to the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all beings. 
Hosted by Nandita Bajaj and Alan Ware. Brought to you by Population Balance.
Subscribe to our newsletter here: https://www.populationbalance.org/subscribe
Support our work with a one-time or monthly donation: https://www.populationbalance.org/donate
Learn more at https://www.populationbalance.org
Copyright 2016-2026 Population Balance

For most of our history, humans lived in relatively egalitarian societies that actively prevented the accumulation of power. Author of Goliath's Curse, Luke Kemp, examines how hierarchical states, 'Goliaths', came to dominate the world. We explore why Goliaths repeatedly collapse, the likely trajectories of today's global Goliath, and what it might take to radically democratize power before history repeats itself. Highlights include:
Why Luke rejects the term 'civilization' in favor of 'Goliath' to describe the large-scale societies that have emerged over the past several thousand years and were built on dominance hierarchies such as ruler and ruled, rich and poor, man and woman, and free and slave;
How archaeological and anthropological evidence suggests that for most of human history people lived in relatively egalitarian, democratic, and cooperative societies, challenging long-standing assumptions about humanity's supposedly violent and selfish nature;
How humans historically constrained would-be tyrants through ridicule, ostracism, exile, and if necessary group execution;
How the first Goliaths emerged thousand of years after intensified agriculture, using war and violence and growing their power through the 'Goliath fuel' of 'lootable resources, monopolizable weapons, and caged land';
How 'babies, bombs, bacteria, and barbarism' enabled Goliaths to expand across the globe, conquering and absorbing non-state people into today's global Goliath;
Why the 'darker angels of our nature' - status competition, the 'dark triad' of personality traits, and the authoritarian impulse - also provide fuel to the growth and persistence of Goliaths;
Why Goliaths function as engines of inequality that become increasingly vulnerable to shocks like popular rebellion, environmental stress, disease, and how this makes societal collapse a recurring feature of large-scale societies throughout history;
Why, if we continue with business as usual, the most likely long-term fate of today's global Goliath is collapse, and why in the short term we may be heading toward a 'Silicon Goliath' of increased digital surveillance and potential for autocratic repression;
How we might 'shackle' Goliath through a process of radical democratization in 4 different forms of power - political, economic, violence, and information.
See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript: 
https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/luke-kemp
 
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
OVERSHOOT tackles today's interlocked social and ecological crises driven by humanity's excessive population and consumption. The podcast explores needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. With expert guests from wide-ranging disciplines, we examine the forces underlying overshoot: from patriarchal pronatalism that is fueling overpopulation, to growth-biased economic systems that lead to consumerism and social injustice, to the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all beings. 
Hosted by Nandita Bajaj and Alan Ware. Brought to you by Population Balance.
Subscribe to our newsletter here: https://www.populationbalance.org/subscribe
Support our work with a one-time or monthly donation: https://www.populationbalance.org/donate
Learn more at https://www.populationbalance.org
Copyright 2016-2026 Population Balance

Every age is the Stone Age. Geologist and author Marcia Bjornerud discusses how thinking like a geologist can cultivate the grounded humility of a deep time perspective. We explore Earth's turbulent history, humanity's emergence as a geologic force, and why humanity and all of life - past, present, and future - is utterly dependent on the rocky planet beneath our feet. Highlights include: 
Why geology is not just the study of rocks but the habit of seeing in four dimensions - including time;
Why rocks should be seen as 'verbs' and not just 'nouns', preserving the memory of long ago ecosystems and Earth processes that created them;
The geologic history of Earth in about 5 minutes;
Why humanity's massive impact on the planet is affecting Earth and its atmosphere faster than any known geologic force in Earth history;
Why the process of evolution is not inherently 'progressive' and how Earth's long history teaches us that change is the only constant - and that 'bad things do happen to good planets';
Why geology is in a 'golden age' of discovery and has made incredible advancement in both the understanding of Earth processes and the tools to measure and analyze those processes;
Why we're still in the 'stone age' - utterly dependent on the rocky Earth for biological life and all of the products of humanity's modern techno-industrial civilization;
How 'timefulness' - thinking like a geologist - can help us develop a deeper sense of both the past and the future, cultivating humility and countering the narcissistic focus on the perpetual 'now'.
See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript: 
https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/marcia-bjornerud
 
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
OVERSHOOT tackles today's interlocked social and ecological crises driven by humanity's excessive population and consumption. The podcast explores needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. With expert guests from wide-ranging disciplines, we examine the forces underlying overshoot: from patriarchal pronatalism that is fueling overpopulation, to growth-biased economic systems that lead to consumerism and social injustice, to the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all beings. 
Hosted by Nandita Bajaj and Alan Ware. Brought to you by Population Balance.
Subscribe to our newsletter here: https://www.populationbalance.org/subscribe
Support our work with a one-time or monthly donation: https://www.populationbalance.org/donate
Learn more at https://www.populationbalance.org
Copyright 2016-2026 Population Balance

The uncritical adoption of 'humane', 'cage-free', 'free-range', and lab-grown meat by animal advocates, funded by effective altruism philanthropy and the animal agriculture industry, not only reproduces the myth that meat is normal, natural, and necessary, it represents an ultimate defeat for animals. Vasile Stănescu, animal liberation scholar exposes the 'humane' hoax and explains why the failure of many animal advocates to frame veganism as a social justice movement in solidarity with other social justice movements is sustaining and reproducing systems of oppression and exploitation of humans, animals, and nature. Highlights include:
How parents and society teach us to repress the childhood trauma that's triggered when we learn about the animal suffering and death from eating animal products;
Why the so-called 'humane', 'cage free', and 'free range' agriculture practices are a hoax funded by the animal agriculture industry that are even more harmful for the animals — both wild and domesticated — and the planet than the conventional factory farming systems they claim to replace;
Moral philosopher Peter Singer's complicity in perpetuating these 'humane' myths, and the growing shift from liberation to welfarism within the animal advocacy movement through Singer-supported effective altruism philanthropy;
The relevance of Jevon's paradox to animal advocacy and how new categories such as 'cage-free' or 'free-range' do not replace the old system, but rather expand it, and why animal advocates must reject market-based or technology-based 'solutions' as they sustain and reproduce the current system of speciesism, exploitation, and growthism;
How the slaughterhouse and its dis-assembly line of animals' bodies became the template for the manufacturing assembly line of modern capitalism;
How western governments historically promoted 'cheap meat' to keep the laboring classes content with their low wages and help them continue feeling superior to the 'effeminate' and 'weak' rice and corn eaters of colonized Asia and South America;
How vegetarian and vegan eating are pathologized in a way that diets with animal products are not — even though large consumption of animal products is in no way 'natural' in much of the world or through the majority of human history;
Why lab-grown meat — still in its experimental phase — is not vegan, as its growth medium relies on the blood of unborn cows, not environmentally beneficial, as it requires huge amounts of energy, and is exorbitantly expensive; meanwhile, in collaborating with the animal agriculture industry for its creation, proponents of lab-grown meat are throwing animals — and animal advocacy — under the bus;
Why some animal rights activists turn to effective altruists and the money they offer to placate their despair and see short-term 'faux wins' - while not appreciating that successful social justice movements have always taken time and persistence;
Why veganism should be framed not as a consumerist diet lifestyle option but as a social justice movement in solidarity with other social justice movements.
See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript: 
https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/vasile-stanescu
 
OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance
OVERSHOOT tackles today's interlocked social and ecological crises driven by humanity's excessive population and consumption. The podcast explores needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. With expert guests from wide-ranging disciplines, we examine the forces underlying overshoot: from patriarchal pronatalism that is fueling overpopulation, to growth-biased economic systems that lead to consumerism and social injustice, to the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all beings. 
Hosted by Nandita Bajaj and Alan Ware. Brought to you by Population Balance.
Subscribe to our newsletter here: https://www.populationbalance.org/subscribe
Support our work with a one-time or monthly donation: https://www.populationbalance.org/donate
Learn more at https://www.populationbalance.org
Copyright 2016-2026 Population Balance