I don't see what "sustainable socialist nirvanas", whatever those are, have to do with whether the overpopulation story is factual or just an ideological subject, but I can have hopes that at some time this will add to the evidence to support an argument.Greta wrote:I cannot disagree with this more strongly. There is no evidence in all of human history that humans are capable of creating the kind of sustainable socialist nirvanas that is your idyll. We could fit all the world's humans in Texas - as long as they are corpses.
There's more people now than ever, but this alone does not suffice to raise the alarm flag of overpopulation, a term which usually implies that there are more people than there should be, given the stress that they supposedly put on natural resources. This is false, as I said to Steve3007. Now, let's get into some nuances about what can be argued. The one thing that can and must be immediately dropped is that "there's little doubt" about overpopulation. There's more than doubt, actually tons of disagreement on the issue, not from delirious skeptics, but from reasonable people and organizations, and not particularly unorthodox. That's simply because the Malthusian ideology never really settled in academic thought, I guess. But it became a very popular ideology in political circles, both in the right and left of the spectrum, since Paul Ehrlich published his book in the late 60s and appeared on the Tonight Show.Greta wrote: The planet is not just overpopulated but extremely so, and it is not racist to mention this.
The other thing to send to the myth shelve is that population is growing exponentially. Actually "...the world population growth rate has been declining since its peak in the early 1960s. Between 1950 and 2000, the world population grew at a rate of 1.76%. Between 2000 and 2050, it is expected to grow by 0.77 percent."
But more important than being racist or not, is the fact that this ideology tries to conflate the fact that humans do put stress on the environment with the fact of population growth, assuming demographics alone has a direct and equally distributed effect. But the truth is only a small percentage of the population, that living in highly developed countries, is the one causing harm. Numbers of people are not the problem, but the whole carbon footprint of the inefficient, unsustainable way of living of the few. It's not a population problem, but a profit and distribution problem of global capitalist economy. As stated in the article:
"In fact, the poorest half of the global population, some 3.5 billion people, are responsible for only around 10% of global emissions (while living overwhelmingly in the countries most vulnerable to climate change). The richest 10% of people in the world are responsible for around 50% of global emissions."
That's the illusion that has been fed to, I guess, well-intentioned Westerners. But it's a lie:Greta wrote: With cities choking with fumes, traffic gridlocked, people struggling to compete to find work or even accommodation, how much more do you think we should populate? Maybe we could live in cages like the poor in Asia? We could fit lots more people. What of other species and ecosystems? They are disappearing worldwide, not just in "greedy" wealthy nations but we don't seem to care. Breed, breed, breed. Develop, develop, develop.
Nobody is willingly returning to subsistence lifestyles so we can cram another few billion on this overpopulated planet. To what end? We have already destroyed most natural systems.
"...the Western preoccupation with the overpopulation issue isn't just silly, it's hypocritical:
In fact, rising consumption today far outstrips the rising headcount as a threat to the planet. And most of the extra consumption has been in rich countries that have long since given up adding substantial numbers to their population, while most of the remaining population growth is in countries with a very small impact on the planet. By almost any measure you choose, a small proportion of the world’s people take the majority of the world’s resources and produce the majority of its pollution.
In other words, argues Pearce, focus on the population "problem" is essentially a matter of the rich "downplay[ing] the importance of our own environmental footprint because future generations of poor people might one day have the temerity to get as rich and destructive as us."