Soumaya Majdoub - Consumeren als Konijnen (ASP, 2021) **

Soumaya Majdoub is a PhD researcher at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and a demographer. She holds degrees in political sciences and journalism. This relatively short book (88 pages) is part of a series of essays on our climate. Majdoub's thesis is that demographic growth and over-population are not the cause of our current climate issues, even if the topic is wrongly used by environmental activists. 

Her text is more a pamphlet than a scientific text. Majdoub has a cause to defend, called "ecofeminism", a concept that she jumps on the reader in the last pages of the book, without any prior discussion or introduction, as if it was the solution to all the wrong thinking of neomalthusianists, neoliberals, environmentalists ... Many of her comments and attacks are directed to older thinkers such as Malthus 
himself, with little attention to current facts or trends. Her major influence is Eric Ross, whose "The Malthus Factor Population, Poverty and Politics in Capitalist Development" (1998) offers the foundation of Majdoub's thesis. In order to be fully convincing, I - as the possibly naive reader - would have liked more data (see for instance Rosling's 'Factfulness' on demographics) on the real global challenges and trends. 

There is no doubt that our current way of life will lead to extinction of life on our planet, possibly sooner than later. It is also evident that we need to change our consumption of resources, both fossil and non-fossil. That women may play a crucial role in all this, could be a change compared to how things were organised in the past, and thus be welcomed. The major downside of Majdoub's thesis however, is that there is no obvious nor substantiated link between the identified problem and the possible solution. Her thesis is too much a personal crusade than a scientifically clear way forward.