I have been thinking about the population of the planet, and I have a question that I am not sure we are allowed to ask: What if one of the most important numbers we repeat is one we have never really examined?
The official estimate is somewhere around 8.2 billion people. We repeat this number as though someone counted us, as though there were a giant clipboard somewhere and every human being had checked a box confirming his or her existence. But that is not actually what happened. The population of the planet is an estimate, built from national censuses of wildly varying quality and age, incomplete birth and death records, surveys, migration estimates, and mathematical models.
I started thinking about this because I tried something very simple. I began looking at the populations of the largest cities in the world. If there are more than eight billion people on Earth, where, physically, are all of these people? Adding together hundreds of the world’s largest cities accounts for only a fraction of the supposed population. Of course, billions could live in smaller cities, towns, and villages, so this calculation proves nothing by itself. But it made me curious: How much of the world’s population has actually been counted, and how much has been calculated?
India is estimated to have more than 1.4 billion people, yet its last completed national census was in 2011, when approximately 1.21 billion people were counted. Today’s figure is a projection, not a recent head count. India has roughly 735 million acres of land, so if the estimate is accurate, that works out to nearly two people for every acre across the entire country, including farmland, forests, mountains, roads, and cities. That’s roughly equivalent to moving the entire population of the United States into Texas.
Then there is China. For decades, the government enforced its one-child policy while simultaneously reporting enormous population growth. Demographers have offered explanations for how both can be true, and I understand those explanations. Still, it has always struck me as something worth examining rather than simply accepting without question.
The United Nations and the U.S. Census Bureau have at times differed by tens of millions of people, and some researchers argue China’s population has been substantially overstated. Whether those researchers are right or wrong, the disagreement itself reminds us that these figures are estimates, not an exact head count of humanity.
My husband grew up in a small village in Oaxaca, Mexico. During the devastating 2017 earthquake, his grandmother was among those who died. The official death toll was reported at fewer than a hundred people, yet my husband personally knew around 10 people from his own village who lost their lives. That left me wondering how one small village, nowhere near the size of a city, could account for such a large share of the reported deaths. I am not claiming the official figures were wrong. I simply remember thinking they did not seem to match the reality his family described. His grandmother was buried by her family with little visible government involvement, and it reminded me that these enormous statistics are assembled from thousands of local records, estimates, and reporting systems.
Governments are not the only institutions with incentives attached to population. International organizations, nonprofits, and NGOs compete for funding, influence, and relevance. Population projections affect government spending, international aid, political representation, and countless programs. None of this proves that anyone invented billions of people, but whenever enormous amounts of money and political power are attached to statistics, I think we retain the right to question how those statistics are produced.
Maybe there really are 8.2 billion people. I don’t know. But the population number is only one piece of something much larger that interests me.
For most of my life, the environmental movement has carried an underlying message that there are simply too many of us. Too many people consuming, driving, eating, and having children. Too many houses. Too many cows. Too much carbon. Too many human beings taking up space.
I have come to believe this is part of a much larger psychological operation convincing human beings that we do not belong here.
I use the words “psychological operation” intentionally. I am not suggesting there is necessarily one room somewhere where a handful of people designed the entire thing. Ideas can become embedded in institutions, education, media, and culture until we all begin repeating their assumptions without remembering where they came from.
Look at the message we have absorbed. Your existence has a carbon footprint. Your children increase it. Your food damages the planet. Your car damages the planet. The animals you raise damage the planet. Eventually, the conclusion becomes difficult to avoid: You are the problem.
We have taught human beings to fear one of the fundamental building blocks of life: carbon. Carbon is in our bodies, our food, our soil, and every living thing around us. We consume it. We exhale it. Plants take in carbon dioxide and transform it through photosynthesis into the building blocks of life. Carbon moves continuously between the atmosphere, plants, animals, oceans, and soil in a cycle that makes life possible.
Instead of teaching ourselves that we are participants in this cycle, we have made carbon itself frightening. We talk about our “carbon footprint” as though our very presence leaves a stain upon the Earth. I am a regenerative farmer. I spend my life trying to put carbon into soil, where it builds fertility, holds water, and supports life. I do not want to fear carbon. I want to participate intelligently in its cycle.
I spent much of my life inside the environmental movement, and I still believe we have a profound responsibility to care for the Earth. Soil matters. Water matters. Animals matter. Ecosystems matter. But somewhere along the way, caring for the planet became intertwined with believing that human beings themselves were a burden upon it.
We are now raising a generation of young people who experience genuine anxiety about their own existence on this planet. Young people are increasingly questioning whether they should have children because they have absorbed the idea that another human life is a burden to the Earth.
I am a farmer. I raise mammals. And I sometimes find myself asking a very basic question: How much do you have to abuse a mammal before it no longer wants to reproduce? Because that is not a normal condition. It is a biological signal that something is deeply wrong.
This is why the population question interests me. Not because I can prove there are secretly 4- or 5- or 6 billion people on Earth. I cannot. The population estimate may prove remarkably accurate. But the number has become part of a much larger story about our place in the world.
We are told the universe is unimaginably enormous and we are an insignificant speck within it. We are told the planet is overcrowded, our existence consumes finite resources and our everyday lives contribute to a planetary emergency. Over and over, the message is the same: You are small. You are insignificant. There are too many of you. Your existence is dangerous.
What if that is the psychological operation?
What if the most important question is not whether there are exactly 8.2 billion people on Earth? What if the more important question is why we have become so willing to believe that, however many of us there are, there are too many?
I believe we are God’s children, and I believe we belong here. That does not give us permission to abuse the world around us. Quite the opposite. If I belong to this place, I have a responsibility to care for it. There is an enormous philosophical difference between stewardship and population control. A steward asks how we can live here well. A manager of populations asks how many of us should be allowed to be here.
I have watched degraded land come back to life under the guidance of human beings who decided to care for it. I have watched water return to landscapes, soil deepen, and ecosystems become more abundant because people were present and participating, not because they disappeared.
The question I care about is deeper.
Who convinced us we do not belong here?
We are not carbon units or a problem waiting for a government, NGO, or international organization to solve. We are God’s children. We belong here. The greatest lie of our age may not be a number on a population chart. It may be the belief that humanity itself is a mistake.
