Daniel Lee Carrigan, founder of the GAIA Earth-Balance Foundation, died on 4 March 2024 after a long struggle with heart disease. We gratefully commemorate his contribution to population and sustainability efforts.

by Jane O’Sullivan

Like a shooting star, Dan Carrigan’s dynamic energy lit up the population-sustainability world for a brief few years. In its wake, it left some significant change for the better: seeds sewn in grassroots projects, networks strengthened and people energised with a sense of community and a renewed commitment to reach for the possible.

Dan Carrigan first contacted me in May 2020, in response to a blog I had written. He was seeking advice on how best to direct his life-legacy toward creating a more sustainable world. His was not a vast fortune, but a few million dollars he thought better spent “finding a legacy that reflects my values” than left as inheritance. However, it was clear he was not merely looking for a worthy recipient for a bequest: Dan would play a significant role in designing any project he supported.

Our correspondence soon moved his thinking from the prospect of a pilot project paying women in high-fertility countries a small incentive to adopt long-acting contraception, to seeking to influence policy discourse around population and development. This included rekindling political will for family planning programs and addressing the developed world’s anxiety about population ageing and decline.

This led to a dialogue with Robin Maynard of Population Matters (PM) in the UK about the potential to form an “Ecological-Development Economics Institute”. Dan offered funds for a researcher to do a feasibility study. PM recruited the brilliant Monica Scigliano to do this groundwork. However, with hold-ups due to the pandemic and other issues on PM’s plate, and Dan’s deteriorating health heightening his impatience, his plans moved on. The exercise was not wasted, as it strengthened networks and lead to PM’s 2022 conference ‘Boom or Bust: Economy, Wellbeing and Population’. Monica continued with PM to research and write an important report on the recent rise in coercive pronatalism, ‘Welcome to Gilead: how population fears drive women’s rights abuses’.

After successful heart surgery in 2021, Dan had new energy for exploring his options. He set up the Gaia Initiative for Earth-Human Balance as a charitable foundation, ready to distribute funds. He also met a new life partner, Zee Berl, who became an invaluable collaborator in his new endeavours.

Dan’s new idea was to offer a number of small grants of $10,000 for organisations to undertake projects relating to reducing population growth in high-fertility countries, or dispelling the population taboo in media and political discourse. Over the course of two years, thirteen organisations benefited, including The Overpopulation Project. Dan’s donations enabled us to extend the part-time appointment of our multi-talented assistant, Pernilla Hansson, without whom we would be much less productive.

Other beneficiaries elevating population discourse included Population Balance, the Population Institute and Center for Biological Diversity in the US, and Population Matters in the UK. Direct help for family planning and women’s health and education activities was provided to Kilimanjaro Clinical Research Institute (Tanzania), Regenerate Africa (Uganda), Family Medical Point Abaita (Uganda), Rwanda Association of Midwives, CHASE Africa and Margaret Pyke Trust (UK-based charities working largely in eastern and southern Africa), OASIS (US-based charity working mainly in west Africa) and Population Media Center (US-based, working in many countries).

In Dan’s own words, these mini-grant projects included:

• a wide variety of population-focused on-the-ground projects in Global South high-growth nations – including family planning education, media for teens/young adults on FP, study of cultural/religious factors influencing FP adoption, girls/women’s autonomy including such things as broad-based community/village education on family planning, on female genital mutilation, and on the impact of available low cost “cup-menstrual management.”
• projects in Global North dealing with birth-choice influencers – forms of cultural pronatalism and decision-assist resources for young adults regarding alternate choices – from temporary birth control to permanent childfree for life.

Dan very much enjoyed his relationships with these organisations and was grateful for the learning he gained. However, the more Dan engaged with the population issue, the more frustrated he became with its avoidance and misrepresentation in mainstream media. In his words,

“We all wish for a better world – with less oppressive poverty and better balance between humans and the planetary environment.

“Population-reduction advocates all know that voluntary family planning programs have the highest efficacy and are most cost-beneficial as poverty prevention measures in poor developing countries with sky-high fertility rates.

“And yet – the superstition and anti-science and hyperbolic apoplectic reactivity to past history indirectly fosters more poverty, more suffering, more generations of dire poverty – ironically among those who these advocates wish to help.”

He became increasingly focused on shifting the culture in the developed world, both on “extreme consumerism” and the negative attitudes toward the prospect of population decline. In response, the late 2022 grant round would focus on the public policy challenges of depopulation in the United States.

In 2023 he decided to discontinue the small grants in favour of fewer large, multi-year projects “to constructively encourage a change in our societal thinking about the impacts of population.” However, it proved difficult to find applicants matching his vision of ventures capable of shifting the discourse. A couple of projects were supported but not of the scale he hoped.

By late 2023, Dan’s health was deteriorating and he scaled back activities of the foundation. His last project was to support a competition for high-school students, hoping to engage them deeply in sustainability issues.

Dan lived longer than he had anticipated when he embarked on the Gaia Earth-Balance Foundation. His death nevertheless came as a shock, so soon after animated emails pursuing his latest project. I will miss the random emails sharing articles he had come across and seeking a sounding board for his ideas. Population and family planning activists will miss the stimulus he provided for our work. The Overpopulation Project, in particular, is grateful for his support.

NOTE: with the passing away of our two main financial supporters (Laszlo Szombatfalvy and Dan Carrigan) of TOP since 2018, we welcome new donations for our work. In particular, we wish to support, by salary, young students that are interested in working with us on research and outreach. In addition, we are working on an international film project on the history of family planning, and the solutions to overpopulation.