We're due for a pandemic flu that should wipe out 30% of the human population on the planet... I sure hope that I'm not one of those poeple, but hey knocking the population down to 4.6 Billion is a start, right?

Blaming over-population for climate change is ridiculous. It is not over-population driving climate change but rather it is rampant consumption and the global spread of late capitalism that is the problem.

It is well documented that affluent societies tend to cease having children and it these countries, not the less-affluent countries, that consume the lion's share of the earth's resources thus contributing to global environmental degredation. And as for those less affluent contries that do contribue to environmental degredation such as India, China or Russia, they do this principally because of our insatiable desire for more and cheaper consumer products.

Furthermore, the reason population control creates a visceral reaction is the sub-conscious belief that life itself should not and cannot be constrained by law.

Behind the rhetoric of population-control, however faint and hidden it may be, is the ghost of eugenics.

People love to quote Agent Smith as if the line is true. It's not. Mammals don't instinctively reach equilibrium. They eat until they starve, and when they starve, they don't breed. Most can't find elsewhere to go, so they don't get a choice. Mild starvation slows the birth rates. There's no instinct to it. The misanthropy is palpable beyond compare.

Anyway, while I do think that regulating our reproduction is a good thing, I also don't think the problem is overpopulation. Most of our problem stem from supporting current *consumption* levels using unsustainable practices. We have ample options with respect to scaling back consumption levels and switching to different practices.

Behind the rhetoric of population-control, however faint and hidden it may be, is the ghost of eugenics.

The age-old red herring takes a bow.

There is a dilemma, because reproduction is an essential human right, but at the same time we're endowed with mental faculties which allow us to forecast the future, and we can imagine an overpopulated world (or look around us in many places and SEE it.)

The best way to slow population growth is to educate girls and boys equally. That way families have fewer babies, and start later.

What disturbs me about this conversation is that we are jumping straight to enforced childbearing/sterilization. Half of all pregnancies are unplanned in the US, a supposedly civilised country. Why aren't we aggressively pursuing the low-hanging fruit and giving women real control over their bodies? We would see a significant drop in population if only we gave women the tools to avoid an unplanned pregnancy and at the same time we would immeasurably improve their life and health. Population reduction and human rights do not need to be in opposition: they are complementary.

We deserve a future where every child is planned, wanted and cared for.

I agree we need to control population, just like we need to regulate oil usage (it won't last forever). However, stating that each woman should only be allowed to have one child wouldn't sustain the population, it would make it go down pretty quickly. I believe murders and disease would outweigh births, and then there's people that choose not to have children (which seems to be on the rise), and then you have to figure that a woman has a child with a man, so that's 2 parents to one child (or 1:2), so that's halving it right there.

I would tend to agree with the author that these issues are linked, but I don't think overpopulation is the cause of global warming. Rather, it is aggravating the rate of change.

Unfortunately, I can see that the overpopulation theory will be popular with affluent nations. Firstly, they can look at their childless or one child household and say, "Well, look, I'm not part of the problem - it's those idiots down the street with six kids," while ignoring their environmental footprint.

More disturbingly, it offers denialist the chance to shift the blame _entirely_ from consumer cultures to the third world (whose birthrate far out-strips developed nations).

Those elements of global warming which are a result of coal, or slash and burn farming, or desertification may be linked to birthrate, but when 280 million people on one continent are consuming 80% of the resources, it's clearly not a linear relationship between the two phenomena.

I second Rhett's comment. One obvious expample of this for me is my butterfly garden. The Gulf Frits will over populate and eat my plants down to nothing. In turn they starve. Then the butterflies laying the eggs will lay 5 eggs where there is only 2 leaves. When they do this, every single one of their broad is destined to parish due to starvation.

It is the same with deer. If we didn't keep their populations low, disease would. They know no boundries themselves.

Hi-Tek Homeless

I'm with George Carlin

I often wonder about the whole environmentalism thing anyway.

True environmentalists should want the human race to expand and consume all fossil fuels as quickly as possible, so that massive depopulation (through war, disease, and/or starvation), clean-tech solutions, and naturalism are forced.

People who want to limit population simply so that they can maintain an overly consumptive lifestyle are not environmentalists, they are just selfish.

We are just at the beginning of the human era. Due to our technological intelligence and ability to store and transfer information, humans will be on this planet for a long, long time. Even a massive asteroid strike would be unlikely to wipe us out. Of course we will not be able to sustain our massive population. Things will settle out eventually, a population equilibrium will be established.

As for all the critters we are extinguishing at present-- that's evolution in progress. Life goes on.

True environmentalists should want the human race to expand and consume all fossil fuels as quickly as possible, so that massive depopulation (through war, disease, and/or starvation), clean-tech solutions, and naturalism are forced.

As for all the critters we are extinguishing at present-- that's evolution in progress. Life goes on.

That is completely psychotic.

Brennan,

You forget that social unrest results from just lettin' things happen, and THAT inserts a dimension of chaos into mankind's allegedly bright future. It happened to Rome, Greece, China, it happens everywhere.

Humankind may be uniquely inventive and brilliant, but it also has a unique kind of conscience and ability to forecast, which we must listen to.

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!

Social unrest comes from overcontrolling or imposing unpopular values on populations too. Look at the Nazis and Communists in Europe, or Americans currently.

What is a bright future? The ability to drive Tesla roadsters and eat organic Big Macs in perpetuity? Why do we need better and better iPhones to define our success as a species? If we consume fossil fuels quickly and rapidly depopulate due to unpleasant consequences, mankind can still have a bright future. We will always make art and think and love.

it's like grocery shopping on a fixed budget. the first thing to get eaten are the potato chips. by the end of the month you are eating the dried beans. yeah, there's no more chips left, but you are still alive and probably better off now anyway.

has anyone seen how quickly a forest grows on an untended field? once we depopulate, the earth will very quickly return to nature. let's hurry up and get it over with. git 'er done!

Hey look, it's Paul Ehrlich, 2.0!

Seriously though-the problem of overpopulation is an environmental issue. However, it is also a very sensitive, very sketchy ethical issue. If your government isn't communist, you're hard pressed to get laws on the books about how many children you can conceive.

In some areas of the world (developing countries), having more than one child is still a viable way of life-as every child assists the family in the production of food and a livable home environment. In the developed world, many populations are either stagnant (except in the case of immigration) or declining (not enough immigration to keep up with the declining birth rate and consistent death rate).

Certainly population control is an issue, but until we can overcome the ethical implications of one's inalienable right to reproduce, any plans for implementing global birth control are useless and a waste of time.

Claire--

The tools, in the US at any rate, are out there and available. Planned Parenthood is available to any and all women over the age of 18, and women with parental consent under the age of 18. But PP can't go out and police the neighborhood, hang over the shoulders of every pregnant teen, and say "Here, take this RU 86!"

...and RU-486 is hard to get in some parts of the world (including parts of the US)

Like I said before, if you educate people, they become more affluent, and have smaller families, later, and their offspring are more likely to do the same. I don't think it's a coincedence that we have falling education standards in the US as well as falling affluence.

Allison talks about how people in some parts of the world have kids so they can have help on the farm. With education, you're not forced into that dilemma because you can use or create labor saving devices, which don't need to be fed.

Education is a truly altruistic thing. You can never charge enough so that the educator becomes rich, and if it's done right, it becomes self-sustaining. Educated people retain an interest in more learning, which they pass on to their kids.

...and no need to knock down doors to count heads, like they do in China.

Allison,

I respectively disagree. I have access to the birth control of my choice and to Planned Parenthood, and no doubt you do as well, but coverage is by no means universal in the states. Planned Parenthood itself admits it doesn't have enough sites or enough money to cover all the people who need care, particularly in rural districts. Birth control is not covered under more than half of private insurance plans, and $20-40 a month is often an unreasonable sum to those who don't have coverage.

In addition, due to the steady work of Republicans over the past ten years, accurate sexual education in schools is not guaranteed. In my state of Texas, we are mandated to use abstinence only "education," which forbids the mention of condoms or the effectiveness of the pill. In these programs, abstinence until marriage is the only means of birth control promoted. How couples are supposed to control their fertility if they do get married is an open question. Abstinence only "education" is being forced on more and more school districts despite the fact that the texts used in them have been found to have numerous outright falsehoods.

I have been an escort at Planned Parenthood for some time. Women cannot enter without having obscenities hurled at them, or at the very least, being told that they are disobeying G*d's plan. This does not encourage people to use their services.

I maintain that the most humane way to start population control is to let women control their own fertility. Only when free, socially accepted and easily accessible birth control is available to every man, woman (or girl) on Earth will we see if there is a need for government restrictions. Even if over-population was not a concern, (I completely agree that it is perhaps the most pressing environmental issue) we should be pushing for free universal birth control as a basic human rights issue.

We are fortunate, Allison, to take access to birth control for granted. It is by no means a priviledge the majority of the world, or of the US currently enjoy.

Agent Smith was the villain. Neo ignored him.

is overpopulation an environmental issue? It is easily the #1 issue to the stability of our planet. Overconsumption is an issue and so is lack of education and access to birth control. But guess what? Those problems get multiplied by the population.

Just imagine if you could that the population of america was 100 million instead of 300 million, would there have been as many extinctions? Would there still be Vegas Valley Leopard frogs in nevada? would there still be massive flocks of passenger pigeons darkening the skies? Would there be a global warming problem as bad as it is today? Imagine if humans never populated Madagascar or new Zealand, would there still be elephant birds or giant moa today? They only went extinct some 500 years ago from over hunting.

For some reason very few of you people seem to have commented on what it means for species to go extinct. Something that takes millions of years to form and develop and evolve, something that can never come back once they are gone, the finality of it is sickening.

We have webbed our way across this earth separating habitats, closing corridors, and recklessly killing. There is no reason our species should cover the entire world in a web of roads, farms, and towns. This has nothing to do with evolution or survival of the fittest, some reports say 50% of the earths known animals could be extinct by 2050 and we are just about entirely to blame. This is in OUR control.

There is no way there can be any denial that the world would not be for the better to have a lot less of us.

The world has been experiencing a population explosion of not only people, but farm animals too. The combined weight of the world's 15 billion farm animals surpasses the weight of the human population by over one and a half times!

This raises the effective non-wild population of Earth from 6.5 billion to 17 billion beings of human-weight equivalent.

Overpopulation puts pressure on the earth's resources. Each person has needs for food, water, shelter, heating/cooling and transportation. To a large extent domesticated animals have the same needs.

By eating less meat, less animals will be bred, and the population can come down quickly. More vegetarians would be great, but it would be more effective to end agricultural subsidizes. Cheap corn and soy distorts the true cost of food. Most of it is used to fatten animals. The US subsidized agriculture to the tune of $21 billion in 2005. See www.ewg.org. Vegetarian food choices would be much more appealing if meat was ten times more expensive.

For more info see: http://veg.ca/environment

Vegetarian food choices would be much more appealing if meat was ten times more expensive.

That's just what we need - everyone buying guns to go shoot dinner since beef is taxed to death. Great idea there.

Does anyone know of a discussion group or good sites about overpopulation? I get way to excited about this stuff and need a place to vent.

Thanks!
Claire

I hear you Claire, these kinds of posts seem to pop up about once a week and its such a good topic.

When there is overpopulation it causes disease, starvation, war and authoritarianism. There must be an authoritarian system to eliminate the surplus population. I was concerned as to why there had never been any real peoples democracy. When I read Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb it dawned on me that overpopulation was the cause of authoritarianism and that we would never have any real peoples democracy until we properly regulate the world's population with birth control. However all organizations, including Socialist, Humanist, Communist, Democrats, and etc., don't want real peoples democracy. They want money and power. We don't have democracy, we have a moneyocracy. However they have not been able to eliminate birth control and all industrial countries have effective birth control and in time the whole world will have effective birth control if global warming doesn't change events.

Daniel Boisseau

As others noted, the problem of overpopulation is tightly connected to people's consumption rates. The world cannot bear 12 times current impact - according to Jared Diamond, the factor which would result from all Third World inhabitants adopting First World lifestyle.

The real problem of overpopulation lies in the final dawning on all those people in the Third World that current First World living standard is unreachable for them, while at the same time the First World is reluctant to lower it. Never forget that those poor people have nuclear bombs.

Reproduction rights do not include treading on other people's rights.

Population control is not about forcing reproductive laws on people. It is educating people to act responsibly. If we cannot teach the value of regulating our growth, then no one will try. I do not want to see anyone's choices restricted. I want to see people make smart, healthy, responible choices. If we (as a world) do not understand the consequences of our choices - good and bad - we will inevitable make some "bad" ones. And repeating the same old mistakes is not growth, nor evolution.

Of course nature will correct our population if it exceeds a sustainable limit, regardless of whether that limit is here now or centuries from now. Personally, suffering that fate, and/or watching my child suffer that fate, is not my first choice. I would rather prevent it than battle it.

I can't thnk of one single reason to increase our population. Nor have I read a decent arguement in favor of increasing population.