THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

In an age of hypersensitivity about everything to do with race, it's quite remarkable that a campaign dedicated to stopping predominantly non-white nations from procreating to save the planet has passed without comment. But it's quite easy to see how we got here. Climate fetishists tell us we have to make sacrifices in relation to our cars, our gas, our showers or our flights abroad. It's merely the next step in the trend for curtailing your habits to suggest that some people should be encouraged to stop having kids. It's just that those people are never the town-house-dwelling protesters, and almost always poverty-stricken non-white people in countries far, far away.

This quasi-eugenicist privileging of the environment over human beings is nothing new. David Attenborough, who paraded on stage at Glastonbury last year to cheers from thousands of young progressives, is a long-time supporter of population control in its most Malthusian form. Back in 2011 in an interview with the Wellcome Trust, Attenborough declared that he "couldn't think of a single problem that wouldn't be easier to solve if there were less people". And who are these people he's talking about? They're those inhabiting "slums in South America, India, Africa" -- places that Attenborough describes as "huge areas occupied by people living, whole families, in tiny little apartments with no sanitation and no future".  Rather than arguing that those people living in poverty in parts of the developing world should be given access to the same resources that we enjoy in the West -- clean water, housing and job opportunities --Attenborough and those like him simply think there should be fewer of them.

Aside from the question of resources, population control enthusiasts are often keen to talk about women's reproductive rights. In the same interview in 2011, Attenborough said that the "only comfort" he found was in the "knowledge that wherever you empower women, wherever they have the vote, education, the free will and are in charge of their own lives and not dictated to by men, the birth rate falls -- which is a very good reason for getting rid of slums". In short, Attenborough's support for raising the level of education among women outside the Western world is dependent on the promise that they stop having children. Many of us will be familiar with the stereotype of the racist Little Englander, who bemoans the procreation of "them" -- usually Muslims or black people -- claiming that there's not enough housing or jobs or space for anyone who isn't one of "us". We condemn such views as racist, but why don't we criticise the "us and them" logic of environmentalists hellbent on bringing down population numbers in other parts of the world?

Is it a coincidence that many of the groups that support Thriving Together -- from Greenpeace to Marie Stopes International -- focus on the "marginalised communities" of developing countries, while their supporters on the front page of their website are people like Dr Jane Goodall? Of course, some of these institutions have form in the area of controversial support for population control. As Zoe Williams once pointed out in the Guardian, Marie Stopes herself was a zealous believer in sterilising the great unwashed: "Young married men of the professional classes are today often forced by conditions to remain sterile, though they passionately desire the healthy children they could have if they did not have hordes of defectives to support in one way or the other."

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