How do the racist and misogynist histories of population control shape current debates over climate change? How is the reproductive justice movement shifting our understandings of environmentalism and public health? How are feminist public health scholars harnessing photography, poetry, and creative writing to bring their research to diverse audiences?
In episode 83 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach interviews gender and health studies scholar Jade S. Sasser about how the long racist and sexist histories of population control shape current-day climate change debates and global health policy, how to approach scholarship from a position of social justice activism, bringing creative pursuits like photography into academic research, and why critiquing capitalist institutions instead of blaming marginalized individuals in debates over environmentalism is key to how Jade imagines otherwise.
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Guest: Jade S. Sasser
Jade S. Sasser is a scholar of gender, climate change, and women’s health. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside, where she directs the major in Sustainability Studies.
For more than a decade, her work has focused on the intersections of global environmental problems with women’s bodies and health in the context of international development.
Her first book, On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women’s Rights in the Era of Climate Change (NYU Press, 2018), explores the history and current iterations of global population advocacy at the nexus of climate change and women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights.
In addition, Jade has two new research projects. The first, which draws on fieldwork in Madagascar and Vietnam, explores the turn toward distribution of improved cookstoves in the Global South as a win-win development intervention for gender equality, public health, and environmental benefits. The second project, a partnership with the NAACP, analyzes the ways climate justice organizations in the U.S. incorporate gender justice into their work.
Jade earned a PhD in environmental science, policy, and management and an MA in cultural anthropology, both from the University of California, Berkeley. She also holds an MPH in international health from Boston University.
We chatted about
- Jade’s new book On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women’s Rights in the Era of Climate Change (02:16)
- How racist and sexist histories of population control shape public health and environmental activism (04:24)
- How the reproductive justice movement blends activism and academia (08:52)
- Approaching scholarship as creative writing (10:05)
- The intersections of fuel efficiency, women’s health, and food justice (11:41)
- Imagining otherwise (17:27)
Takeaways
Jade’s book On Infertile Ground
The book is about the history and current manifestations of population control narratives, ideas, and debate—specifically in the realm of environmentalism.
The history and present of population control
I talk about population control in the California prison system. A report that was generated discussing those issues in 2013 or 2014 documented that this still occurs today. There are still politicians as recently as 2008 who were calling for paying low-income people to become permanently sterilized in the service of not having to feed, clothe, or house people in the wake of natural disasters caused by climate change. So these population control narratives are not a thing of the past. They are very much in the present. And my students are often shocked by that.
Taking a reproductive justice approach to scholarship
Reproductive justice is an activist field. It’s been around since the mid-1990s and is led by women of color who have been resisting population control globally as well as here in the United States. When I first read about the reproductive justice movement, I said, “Okay, this is exactly what I’m talking about it. How can I weave this on-the-ground activism that these women have been doing for decades into my academic work?”
Approaching scholarship through creative writing
I think of all of this writing as a creative process. I’ve been a writer I would say my entire life. I started doing creative writing as a small child. I was writing poetry and short stories by the age of maybe seven or eight. Even though this is academic writing for me, it’s still comes from my creative place.
Fuel efficiency, women’s health, and food justice
Close to half the world’s population cooks every day at home with fuel sources that are called biomass….The way that biomass burns is it burns really inefficiently. And the smoke that’s created when you burn biomass is full of small particles called particulate matter. Particulate matter is very dangerous for human health….It’s a major source of illness and early death for women and small children around the world.
Imagining otherwise
I want a world in which we recognize that these large-scale global environmental problems like climate change are not caused by women’s decisions and actions around childbearing. I want a world in which we recognize that capitalist development, extraction, and production of resources is what’s causing these large-scale environmental problems….I really want us to think broadly in terms of scale and institutions when we identify the causes of global environmental problems and I want us to think about that scale in terms of where we assign blame and responsibility for solving those problems too.
More from Jade
- Jade’s website
- Jade’s faculty page
- Jade’s book On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women’s Rights in the Era of Climate Change
- Jade on Twitter
Projects and people discussed
- The long racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, and colonial history of forced sterilization of marginalized people in the US and its colonies
- Current abuses of sterilization
- Center for Investigative Reporting’s report on forced sterilization of women in California prisons
- Racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, and colonial history of eugenics in the US
- Reproductive justice movement
- Biomass fuel
- Extractive capitalism
- Cathy Hannabach’s interview with Macarena Gómez Barris on extractive capitalism (Imagine Otherwise ep. 75)
About Imagine Otherwise
Imagine Otherwise is a podcast about the people and projects bridging art, activism, and academia to build better worlds. Episodes offer in-depth interviews with creators who use culture for social justice, and explore the nitty-gritty work of imagining and creating more just worlds. Check out full podcast episodes and show notes at ideasonfire.net/imagine-otherwise-podcast. Imagine Otherwise is produced by Ideas on Fire, an academic editing and consulting agency helping progressive, interdisciplinary scholars write and publish awesome texts, enliven public conversations, and create more just worlds.
Transcript
Cathy Hannabach [00:03]: [upbeat music in background] Welcome to Imagine Otherwise, the podcast about the people and projects bridging art, activism, and academia to build better worlds. Episodes offer in-depth interviews with creators who use culture for social justice and explore the nitty-gritty work of imagining otherwise. I’m your host, Cathy Hannabach. [music fadeout]
[00:22] Jade is a scholar of gender, climate change, and women’s health. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside, where she directs the major in Sustainability Studies.
For more than a decade, her work has focused on the intersections of global environmental problems and women’s bodies and health in the context of international development.
Her first book, On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women’s Rights in the Era of Climate Change, was published in 2018 by New York University Press. The book explores the history and current iterations of global population advocacy at the nexus of climate change and women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights.
Jade is hard at work on two new projects. The first, which draws on fieldwork in Madagascar and Vietnam, explores the distribution of improved cookstoves in the Global South as a supposedly “win-win” development intervention for gender equality, public health, and environmental benefits.
[01:20] Her second project, a partnership with the NAACP, analyzes the ways climate justice organizations in the US incorporate gender justice into their work.
In our interview, Jade and I discuss how the long racist and sexist histories of population control shape current-day climate change debates and global health policy, how to approach scholarship from a position of social justice activism, bringing creative pursuits like photography into academic research, and why critiquing capitalist institutions instead of blaming marginalized individuals in debates over environmentalism is key to how Jade imagines otherwise.
[To Jade] Thanks so much for being with us today. Jay.
Jade S. Sasser: Thank you for having me.
Cathy: You’re the author of a really fantastically smart new book called On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women’s Rights in the Era of Climate Change. Can you give our listeners a little bit of sense of what that book covers and maybe what got you interested in that topic?
Jade [02:16]: Yes. So the book is about the history and current manifestations of population control narratives, ideas, and debate—specifically in the realm of environmentalism.
I got interested in that topic many years ago. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Madagascar, a health volunteer. I noticed over time through talking to friends who worked in international development that the funding and the program priorities in Madagascar, which is an environmental hotspot country, the priorities and the funding for public health, specifically reproductive health, were in areas that were environmentally important in that country. Specifically, contraceptive distribution and the provision of reproductive health services were concentrated in areas near parks, national parks, conservation areas, etc. So I started to say, “Wait a minute, it sounds like reproductive health services are motivated by this environmental impulse. Why is that the case?”
When I went back to graduate school after finishing Peace Corps several years later, I started reading books about global reproductive politics and the history of population control. I became fascinated by those subjects and did a deep dive. I noticed that almost all of them, in one way or another, touched on environmental issues, but they never fully delved into them, at least not in a long-term historical sense.
So I started to say, “Well, how has the environmental agenda actually shaped population control ideas?” I started studying that subject. It was the subject of my graduate dissertation and then eventually it became this book.
Cathy [04:17]: What are some of the most exciting or maybe surprising things that you found over the course of that long process of doing research?
Jade [04:24]: I think the most exciting thing is that there are a lot of people who are doing international work but don’t actually know the history or the source of the ideas, the narratives, and the priorities behind what they’re doing.
So for example, a key group that I study and talk about throughout this book is young people—youth activists. There are a lot of youth activists who are interested in global reproductive health and rights. They’re interested in HIV prevention. They’re interested in making sure that women have access to contraceptives and they’re also very interested in preventing, mitigating, and adapting to climate change. A lot of those young people are really raring to go. They want to get out there and do something to make a difference and they put action first and reflection later. I became really fascinated by what is motivating young people in particular to get active on population issues without having at all a sense of the history, the background, and the real problematic politics of what they’re doing.
Cathy [05:40]: Have you found that when you teach these subjects (because I know you teach a lot of courses on the same topic) you find that your students have that mind blown moment where they’re like, “Oh my god, I had no idea these things have this history?”
Jade [05:52]: Yes, that happens all the time. Every time we cover population issues, students are really taken aback because I go through specific examples of coercive human rights abuses that have been facilitated by a population control agenda. And I don’t just talk about history in a distant was. I bring it up to the present. I talk about recent things that have happened. I talk about population control in the California prison system. A report that was generated discussing those issues in 2013 or 2014 documented that this still occurs today. There are still politicians as recently as 2008 who were calling for paying low-income people to become permanently sterilized in the service of not having to feed, clothe, or house people in the wake of natural disasters caused by climate change.
[07:00] So these population control narratives are not a thing of the past. They are very much in the present. And my students are often shocked by that.
But with that said, what also happens every quarter in the classroom that is intensely frustrating to me because I don’t know what to do about it, is that students will hear me spend an entire hour and a half or even several weeks offering a very critical, very nuanced, very challenging perspective on population control. Then after all that, they’ll still go back to, “Well, but we need to slow or control or end population growth because of climate change. Population is still something that we need to really tackle because of climate change.” And I’m like, “Have you not listened to everything I just said?”
What I’m doing in my work is I’m really trying to disrupt and dislodge paradigms, knowledge paradigms, and it’s hard for young people to let those paradigms go because they’ve been raised with them. But I continue to persevere. I won’t give up. I will continue to challenge my students’ thinking and really try to disrupt and dislodge the idea that population control is a natural and necessary component for environmental conservation.
Cathy [08:23]: It sounds like a lot of the work you do both in the classroom and in your scholarship and in your other projects weaves together your interest in academic research or scholarship with a commitment to social justice activism or social change and thinking creatively about approaches to these. I’d love to shift a little to talk about that nexus, that braid, of activism, academia, and art. What draws you to that kind of combination?
Jade [08:52]: I think I’ve always thought about women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights through an activist lens. It was the activist lens that drew me to the academic research.
Reproductive justice is an activist field. It’s been around since the mid-1990s and is led by women of color who have been resisting population control globally as well as here in the United States. When I first read about the reproductive justice movement, I said, “Okay, this is exactly what I’m talking about it. How can I weave this on-the-ground activism that these women have been doing for decades into my academic work?”
So I started going to reproductive justice conferences, workshops, and advocacy trainings. I started doing lobbying on Capitol Hill. I started getting to know the people in the reproductive justice movement, really understanding the narratives and frameworks that they’re developing, and positioning myself as a reproductive justice activist through scholarship.
[10:05] In terms of art, it’s a bit interesting. You know, I think of all of this writing as a creative process. I’ve been a writer I would say my entire life. I started doing creative writing as a small child. I was writing poetry and short stories by the age of maybe seven or eight.
Even though this is academic writing for me, it’s still comes from my creative place. I still do creative writing even as I do academic writing too. So, for example, when I sit down to write anything academic, I have to start off writing something creative first. I have what’s called a brain dump file where I just get all of my ideas out. Whatever’s in my head that might be blocking me creatively, I just get it out. That’s not creative in terms of being fiction, but I think I get my ideas out there in an artful way in that brain dump every day.
I also connect what I’m thinking and writing with music. I always have music playing in the background, everything from funk, R&B, classic rock, neo-soul, Afrobeat, Malagasy music [from Madagascar], you name it, but there always has to be music infusing my writing.
More recently, I’ve gotten back into writing poetry and have picked up the camera again, which I had put down for a long time, particularly with my next research project, which focuses on cook stoves, fuels and energy. I’m incorporating a lot of photography into that project, so I’m very excited about that.
Cathy [11:41]: Oh, that sounds really cool. What’s the new project about?
Jade: The tentative title is Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen: Stoves, Fuels, and Women’s Agency in the Global South. In that text, I’m exploring the ways that women make decisions and engage in everyday actions around cooking, fuel use, and stove use in a few countries in the Global South. That research began in 2013 when I took a trip to Ethiopia to try to understand what was going on there around the development and distribution of improved fuel-efficient cookstoves. Ethiopia takes a very proactive stance [on this]. They have a national distribution program, they have a national program to train women in how to build stoves, how to market stoves, and how to sell stoves to other women. I also started doing further research in Vietnam and Madagascar on the same subject.
[13:00] To back up for just a moment, close to half the world’s population cooks every day at home with fuel sources that are called biomass. So we’re talking about firewood, we’re talking about charcoal, we’re talking about animal dung in the form of cow patties, we’re talking about vegetable residue, like the shells or holes or husks of coconut.
The way that biomass burns is it burns really inefficiently. And the smoke that’s created when you burn biomass is full of small particles called particulate matter. Particulate matter is very dangerous for human health because it lodges into your airway and it causes all kinds of respiratory problems like asthma, bronchitis, COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease]. It causes cardiovascular problems as well, like stroke and heart disease.
[14:09] The thing is it’s a major source of illness and early death for women and small children around the world because women primarily do most of the cooking. Especially in the Global South countries where people are using biomass, they’re exposed to the smoke all the time. Their children are exposed to this smoke with them. They’re often cooking in places where there’s not proper ventilation and more often than not they’re cooking over these traditional stoves that expose them to massive volumes of smoke. So it’s a perfect storm in terms of public health exposure.
There’s also an environmental component too, because when that fuel doesn’t burn efficiently, you have to use a lot of it to keep a fire going and to cook various dishes for the household.
I became really fascinated by this topic a long time ago. Again, it starts with Peace Corps. My host mother during Peace Corps cooked over an open fire everyday. She would go out and collect massive bundles of firewood, carry them for miles on her head to get them back home, and then would use them every morning to start the cooking fire. I noticed every morning as I would climb the stairs to the kitchen that the higher I got on the stairwell, the blacker the stairwell became because of that thick smoke.
[15:17] And the coughing, the respiratory problems. Everyone in the family had chronic respiratory issues. I developed chronic respiratory issues while I was living with them. So when I was finishing up my first project [On Infertile Ground] and looking around for another project to do, I said, “I really want to go back to that issue.” It was ubiquitous in Madagascar and I noticed when I started traveling to other countries that it was ubiquitous in those countries too. I said, “I just really need to explore this further because this is fascinating and why is this still such a challenge when so many people in the world are already not cooking this way?”
Cathy [15:51]: How does the photography element come in? Are you taking photos of people cooking or the vessels that they’re using?
Jade [15:59]: I’m taking photos of people cooking, of what they’re cooking was (so a lot of photos of stoves). I’m taking a lot of pictures also of the fuel sources, so I have lots of photos of bundles of firewood and piles of charcoal. I went to one factory and unexpectedly got some really good photos of large piles of raw coal sitting around. I didn’t realize that a component of a stove that I was looking at was made with raw coal.
I also take photos of smoke because smoke is the key actor, the key player, in this project because it’s smoke that goes from the biomass to the body. It transforms from solid biomass into a semisolid gas state and then it enters the human body and wreaks havoc in that state. So the smoke itself is actually important—both the smoke you can see and the smoke that you can’t see.
Cathy [17:04]: This sounds fascinating! I’m so excited to read this!
Jade [17:10]: I have to say I love this project and I love that I’m getting back into photography through it. I think that the visual narrative is equally as important as the other narrative and I really want to find a central way to put that out there.
Cathy [17:27]: So this brings me to my last and my absolute favorite question that I get to talk to folks about and that gets at the heart of that big why behind all of these projects. That’s that world that you’re working towards, that world that you’re imagining that you’re helping create, that you produce in collaboration with others. So I’ll ask what is a giant question, sometimes a scary question, but I think an important one. What kind of world do you want?
Jade [17:50]: Wow.
Cathy: I know it’s giant.
Jade: It is giant but honestly that’s what drives everything that I do. So I’m always thinking about it, but I’m not sure that I’ve ever fully answered it for myself.
I want a world in which we recognize that these large-scale global environmental problems like climate change are not caused by women’s decisions and actions around childbearing. I want a world in which we recognize that capitalist development, extraction, and production of resources is what’s causing these large-scale environmental problems. I want a world in which we recognize that the militaristic pollution of land and the atmosphere is what’s causing these problems. I want us to recognize that oil production, extraction, and burning is what’s causing these problems.
I really want us to think broadly in terms of scale and institutions when we identify the causes of global environmental problems and I want us to think about that scale in terms of where we assign blame and responsibility for solving those problems too.
[19:03] I want a world in which poor women, poor women of color in the US and the Global South, are not blamed for environmental problems and are in fact in a position to really thrive and not just survive.
Yeah, I think actually I’ll just leave it at that. I want a world where marginalized communities don’t just survive. I want us to thrive and I want my work to be a part of that.
Cathy: Well, thank you so much for being with us today and sharing all the ways that you imagine and create otherwise.
Jade: Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.
Cathy [19:39]: [upbeat music in background] Thanks for listening to another episode of Imagine Otherwise. Imagine Otherwise is produced by Ideas on Fire and this episode was created by Christopher Persaud, Rebecca Reynolds, Michelle Velasquez-Potts, and myself, Cathy Hannabach.
You can check out the show notes for this episode on our website at ideasonfire.net where you can also read about our fabulous guest as well as find links to the people and projects we discuss on the show. [music fadeout]
