Jean Degottex（French, 1918-1988）

Horsphere Arrache IV, 1967

Overpopulationists were seen to blame nonwhite, non-Western people for the so-called population bomb. As Woodhouse writes, the racism of the overpopulation debate sometimes stemmed from what he calls “holism,” or the idea that all of humanity, not certain subsets of it, was equally to blame for planetary degradation. Holism obscured the fact the people’s habits of consumption and resource use mattered more when it came to environmental destruction than sheer numbers — and on that count, the racial capitalism of the West had caused far more damage than any numeric population growth of the Global South. Yet sometimes the racism of overpopulation was much more direct, as when Ehrlich opened The Population Bomb with a racist caricature of an overcrowded Indian city street. The overpopulation debate also coincided with the rise of the Black Panthers and the implementation of community survival programs, which exposed the racial politics of whose families had historically been allowed to grow, and whose populations had been suppressed by centuries of violence and terror — or grown by the same means.

Lynne Feeley, Earth First? On “The Ecocentrists” and Pregnancy in the Anthropocene

The Observers Book of Cacti & other Succulents, 1970s.