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Few people realize that Project 2025, the comprehensive blueprint for President Donald Trump’s second administration, is historically rooted in deeply-held conservative values about finite resources in the United States and who deserves and who does not deserve the right to enjoy them. Whether gaining access to the natural environment or lawful entry to the United States, the Trump Administration has taken a page out of the playbook of influential eco-fascist ideologues of the twentieth century, namely Garrett Hardin. A professor of ecology turned popular science writer and lifelong student of Reverend Thomas R. Malthus’s 1798 theory on the limits of population, Hardin spent a lifetime arguing for the need to restrict national as well as global populations lest we have famine, war, and chaos descend upon our shores. This talk explores those themes as well as Hardin's concerns with the quality, not just the quantity, of populations, arguing particularly that the disabled, immigrants, and people of color from the Global South, including African Americans, Mexicans, and Indians, threatened the American way of life.
Miroslava Chávez-García is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and holds affiliations in the Departments of Chicana/o Studies and Feminist Studies as well as Iberian and Latin American Studies. She holds a 2025-26 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, where she is a fellow for the year.
Sponsored by the Aoki Center. Lunch provided.