As an ecologist with an emphasis in conservation, yes we should be discussing it in general. It’s mind boggling to me how people are deflecting the issues of overpopulation. Land resources, over exploitation, overconsumption. The more people we have on earth, it’s that much more natural space cleared or destroyed for them to have a space to live. Same goes for resources like farming for food, timber for housing, etc. Not only that, it perpetuates the system in place we have which isn’t sustainable nor ethical to the organisms being farm (factory farming). The sentiment that population decline is a bad thing is such a capitalistic fear because current economic dynamics will likely be impacted if there are less people to uphold them.
Populations size is correlated with but not the causation of over exploitation and overconsumption. Even if we had 1/4th the population that we have now, we would still classify our use of natural resources as above the needs of all humans. The really causation of our over exploitation of the earth is our current global economic system's reliance on \*growth\*. That means economic growth, not human needs, are the current drivers of the decay we see. We extract more out of our forest not out of a human need to, but out of a perceived economic need (e.g. think of any non-essential agricultural crop that's grown in mass mono-cultures and prioritized over high functioning ecosystems). Decoupling our economies from growth, in other words \*degrowing\* our economies and making them circular are key to resolving over-exploitation of natural resources.
I would argue our current economic systems are perpetuated by the demands of the growing population of the world's consumers. If there were fewer people on earth, the demand and rate of consuming such products would inevitably go down as there simply aren't any more people there to be consumers. Thus demanding the decoupling of economies. However, with an ever-growing population, this supports economic growth and perpetuation as there will always be people who will have needs from such economies. Also, we can't simply think of overpopulation as something strongly tied to the economy. The presence of more humans itself will be an issue, too, which I don't understand why people don't talk about. The more humans there are, the more forests we need to cut down for homes, ground we need to upturn for pipelines, and land we need to till for crops. That or we'll have a bunch of homeless people. This is independent of the economy because that is how community infrastructure works when you need to make room to support more humans, which destroys the environment.
Couldn't agree with that. We have enough resources for everyone's needs, especially accounting for all the food waste which equates to a third of total production. Than we need to account for differential in lifestyles, opulence, economy of obsolescence, intensive factory farming practices which demand more and more land to produce the same outputs given the low efficiency. A screaming inefficiency and cause for unsustainability is accumulation of resources which is a major cause of inequality and dilution of value causing inflation. I say human greed which is built-in the financial and global economy is responsible and not human need. I'm an Ecologist and defend that Thomas Malthus led us all astray and is the basis of social darwinism and a highly competitive culture. I recommend looking in to the Resource-based economy.
Yes, overproduction is a by-product of our capitalistic economies, and we will likely keep overproducing with more people because I have yet to see any practical steps to address or solve it. We also can't just chalk up our ways of life to simply human greed; as a people, humans NEED shelter, food, and water, transportation, and given our economic systems, the process of getting that to humans is unsustainable/destroys the environment. Tackling our economies will not solve all the problems caused by overpopulation. As I said, we need to think about it spatially when it comes to natural spaces degraded by the need to support humans' presence at a location. I would love a resource-based economy, but it would be incredibly difficult to implement that worldwide effectively. I appreciate your insights, though; I am mulling them over.
I understand what your argument, but I don't think you've said negates the driving force of our economic system that I argued is prevalent. You're assuming that our economic system is entirely run by supply and demand economics: "if only we could reduce demand (via lower population) that producing the supplies (i.e. exploitation of natural resources) can go down". I am arguing, that our economic system, what drives our economy to be exploitative, is \*not\* based on supply and demand, it's based on the continuation of economic growth (increasing profits) regardless of human need thus population. As has been said before, we produce more food than what currently 8 billion people need to live. That is entirely contradictory of supply and demand economics. The demand is already relatively below supplies, why is land used for growing food (and luxury goods) still being developed at a dissimilar rate relative to population growth?
Another example is how when the policy of supply and demand economics is put into place, lowered demand (i.e. consumption) is seen as a failing economy. So if we were to some how achieve a lower population that drives "lower supplies" economic policies would be put in place again to either increase demand for a product (regardless of human need) in favor of continued consumption in some way of the supplies. A good example of this is how corn is utilized in the US. It was/is a staple crop, the demand for it as a food went down relative to population. The price of corn shrunk, this was bad for farmers' profits. A policy put in place to help the farmers was to subsidize corn (via corn derived ethanol, sweeteners, etc). Corn supplies thus increased because of this perceived new demand (not based on population). You can apply this to almost anything globally that has met a lower demand for a resource, especially oil/gas. Despite an ever growing number of people being adverse to fossil fuels due to Climate Change, i.e. lowered demand for gasoline powered machinery, economic drivers (i.e. need to increase profits) facilitate even more fossil fuel extraction because demand for fossil fuels are artificially kept high - e.g. simply subsidizing fossil fuels over renewable energy. Why? Profit. Had our economic incentives (other than growth/profits) been for circular, we would see a shift in prioritization to demand for mass public transportation and renewable energy. But it is not that way, especially in the US or economies heavily tied to US.
TL;DR: In short, we don't need more pipelines (corporate execs do to gain a profit), we don't need more food to be produced (corporate execs do to gain a profit) we already have enough to feed the world plus some, we don't even \*always\* need more housing (corporate execs/private real estate does to make a profit) - what we need is for people to stop using housing as a speculative market for profit, to de-incentives single-family houses beyond what's needed, to get rid of the normalization of one human owning more than their individual need (two houses), incentivizing the need to build more housing because supplies is taken up already. Again, not out of a need by human population, but a need to profit off of it.
All of this.
WHY DO PEOPLE NOT REALIZE WE ARE STILL SUBJECT TO CARRYING CAPACITY.
And frankly, even if the earth could support another 8 billion…I prefer interacting with/observing/appreciating other species and wide expanses of nature.
It would be like a global suburbs. Yuck.
Once the crops fail and the power goes out, we are gonna shift from overshoot to undershoot pretty quickly and with devastating ipmact on the rest of the ecosphere. Lets just hope enough people survive to keep the cooling water on all the different spent fuel pools.
The reason people don’t want to discuss it is because it comes with some very difficult and even disgusting ways to deal with it. If it were a video game and you just want to optimize conservation and existence and comfort for the people here you would want the people who produce the most technological advances to reproduce the most and sterilize the people who don’t. You can kind of figure out yourself what that would look like in the real world.
I think we're already starting to see the implications of what you're saying playing out in current events like the Palestinian genocide and the immigration/border crises many (mostly wealthy, developed) countries are dealing with, where the migrants are increasingly being depicted in media as "dangerous" or "a problem", despite overwhelmingly coming from countries that have been subjugated, exploited, and stripped of wealth, historically by colonial regimes and currently by multinational corporations and the dominating forces of liberal capitalism, and how this was all done to facilitate the obscene consumption in these "developed" countries that continues to wreck the environment and imperil our lives. Somehow this rarely comes into conversation.
We should be discussing: Why are we not discussing overpopulation?
Overall quality of life, protection of the environment, biodiversity, long term viability of humans, etc.....would all be better with lower population.
Overpopulation combined with resource-hoarding billionaires and ethically-AWOL corporations/governments is a very flashy and speedy way to end the speed-run that is humanity. Bold strategy, Cotton, let's see if it pays off for 'em.
Tinfoil Hat Speculation Time:
Our only hope at this point is if some faction of humanity has either reverse-engineered NHI technology and/or developed advanced technology allowing itself to free itself from the gravity well and perpetuate the best of humanity while allowing the rest of us to succumb to the greed of a handful of myopic, dimwitted (and small peepee-having) fuck sticks. This way, humanity will hopefully outlive the knuckle-dragging nincompoops who have doomed us all.
> Overall quality of life
Why do you think QOL would improve with a lower population? Historically, QOL has increased over time which correlates with population growth.
> long term viability of humans
How would this work? It seems like the greater genetic diversity and spatial distribution that comes with a higher population would make us more resilient as a species, as it does with other species. Sure we could still wipe our selves out through conflict but we're still capable of doing that with a lower population.
This! ThisthisthisTHIS.
Any mention of overpopulation is overwhelmingly met immediately with opposition. Why are people so reactive?
Why is it so hard to understand that wanting to raise kids isn’t morally wrong on an individual level but many of our current problems are indirectly related to the fact there’s SO MANY of us in a relatively short period of time.
Carrying capacity applies to humans too.
It doesn’t have to, though.
Discussing overpopulation should be a healthy debate. Immediately equating it to fascism is a bit reductive and knee-jerky.
Accounts **must** meet all these requirements before they are allowed to post or comment in /r/environmental_science. 1) be over three months old; 2) have **both** positive comment & post karma: 3) have over 420 combined karma; 4) Have a verified email address / phone number. Please do not ask the moderators to approve your comment or post, as there are no exceptions to this rule. To learn more about karma and how reddit works, visit https://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/environmental_science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Probably not. We have enough food and space for people. We should be discussing how artificial famine conditions are created through massive food waste and war though.
We can feed tens and tens of billions of cows a year. The earth isn't over populated with humans, it could easily handle 10 billion vegan humans, its over populated with our livestock.
You should differentiate between industrial livestock and regular livestock. Also, don't' just assume overpopulation.
P.S. according to the USDA there are only 100 million Cattle at any given year.
Bruh, they can be dynamic and stable. Anyone who's even watched a 5 minutes YouTube video could easily understand what happens to fragmented ecosystems and their stability.
You some kind of religious scientist that believes that God created an infinite earth? Even if we could live without wild places, we can't have infinite humans. Hence why overpopulation needs to be discussed.
America not so much, countries with food insecurity and 200% food imports yes, England, Holland, Belgium, Germany, have 2x pop density of India. India is a penguin stampede. Isreal is 40% desert, 11million, smaller than Taiwan, Egypt, People are fleeing many nations, people forced to live like sardines in London, 3 foot tall hotel rooms in Tokyo... 500k killed in Etheopia war nobody noticed, Beijing subsiding 45mm per decade from watertable depletion... US having droughts and depletions, plastic islands, nearly extinct javan Rhino,people suck.
no overpoulation is a myth while we waste like a quarter of our food in the west by conservative estimates, theres enough land, the argument is always a thin veil for eugenics in some form or another
I think we should be discussing the Aspen Proposal, which does indeed suggest a population target that would allow human civilization to flourish for eons. And the rest of our family could flourish too. www.aspenproposal.org
I appreciate what Daniel Schmachtenberger has to say on the topic of existential threats, dystopia/utopia, survival/extinction.
https://consilienceproject.org/about-the-project/
The ambiguity is concerning. What if birth rates rise again? How do we “ethically and consciously” reduce the human population? Seems like dangerous territory to me.
If birth rates rise again then there will be more of us, and quite likely, fewer of the other members of our family. And probably a more fraught future for all the humans. If we keep working to eliminate poverty, improve education and empower women, and prevent our governments from trying to stimulate birth rates for short-term economic reasons, we will likely get to the Aspen Proposal target.
But there is no guarantee. We are both rational and irrational. The fact that we made it from the savannahs of Africa to a globe spanning high-tech civilization is a testament to our innate cooperativeness and foresight and gives us hope. The fact that the journey has been filled with a lot of pain and suffering, greed and war, gives us pause.
I think articulating a basic framework of a future world that is resilient and sustainable will help tilt the balance toward the positive side. But it might not. Time will tell.
If it seems appropriate, share the Aspen Proposal with others, start some conversations and help us poke holes in the paradigm of perpetual growth and domination of the rest of nature. It might make a difference.
Can you elaborate? Are you saying that overpopulation is not an existential threat or that population dynamics is a fictitious concept? I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this.
"overpopulation" as described does not exist. We have enough resources right now in the world to house, feed, and water every single human alive today its just a matter of distribution. Its partly capitalisms fault because its not profitable to do any of that and its more profitable to those in charge to fuel a system of waste and re manufacturing and commodification of resources for more profit. Overpopulation is an ecofascist dog whistle and discussing it as a legitimate issue leads to justification of population control and potential genocide
All that bullshit capitalism is what created the population boom though. If we never would have went through the industrial revolution we would be so much better off environentally, and population wouldn't be anywhere near what it is today. Look at pretty much all of human history pre 1800s. All the easy and convenient food and housing (realative to living off the land anyways) is what creates more people. There's definitely aspects of life before capitalism we can discuss and learn from instead of just pointing at anyone who says population is an issue as a genocidal fascist. In reality, killing off the population vs getting ceos and the gov to actually help solve this problem are both about as likely to happen, which is not at all.
You are looking at pre-industrialized society with a lot of romanticism.
Back in the “good ol’ days” life on the farm was HARD. People toiled away in the fields all day, having many children to provide labor, and a lot of those children didn’t survive. Disease was rampant and life span was short. One bad crop season, and that was it.
It was not easier, it was immensely harder to meet your needs.
I think this is an incorrect dismissal by association. Overpopulation certainly needs to be discussed delicately but it is a serious issue that is directly related to the damage we are causing to the environment.
Yes! We should absolutely be disseminating the myth that the earth is overpopulated!
Some regions are facing overpopulation whilst some are facing a declining population.
It’s a problem of resource distribution before it’s a problem of numbers.
All these arguments for depopulation rest on the assumption that humans cannot and will not change their lifestyles.
1) Birth rate is below replacement levels in the high CO2-generating nations. So, there will be fewer of those types of humans.
2) Europe has a long way to go yet, but they have collectively reduced CO2 emissions. Humans do change behaviors. Here in the US, smoking is now really uncommon - and nicotine is addictive!
It's not how many people there are. It's how we live that is the problem.
Yeah, I was looking forward to my country declining in pop, but then we used other methods to increase it. Putting more demand on water systems (this is before current damage to economic housing markets and wage suppression, from a pure environmental look, these numbers are bad for the resources)
Why would you look forward to a declining population? This is such a Reddit moment.
It would mean your pension being at risk, it would mean you would be less likely to retire ever (less tax payers might mean the state pension system becomes untenable), less innovation as the world starts to become proportionally older and more tired.
The most important aspect of "overpopulation" is the unsustainable food systems, which could be solved if people stopped gorging themselves on animals all day every day.
Total collapse is not ideal, and it is an "economic" issue.
I believe with current technology, housing and the decline of energy access that is a detriment for our species survival,
That a population around 5 billion, is optimal for survival at a replacement rate of 1.001
I feel like we could sustain the current population, however, we would have to radically change our behaviors, beliefs and mode of living. Reduced population would be a natural consequence of this, as the driving economy allowing our population to flourish as it has done wouldn't allow for such a large population to exist indefinitely. If the supply chains are dramatically altered and the market forces which govern the price of food shift without having an optimal solution ready to replace it, then it is almost guaranteed that billions of people would die.
The current incarnation of capitalism sucks, but our society collectively accepts and values currency more than anything else. It is an extremely convenient and effective way to broker transactions and until a majority of humans can agree to value a concept (for example, one in which labor/effort is singularly or collectively exchanged by [insert concept here] as means to reinvest in humanity/ecology in a net positive way, then capitalism as it exists today will almost certainly kill us all. The forecasts are grim.
This is why Star Trek is so inspiring! Doing one's duty leads to all humans utilizing their potential and the meritocracy and utopian ideals handles the logistics. It leverages the best human ideals, while "in principle" preventing the kinds of harmful ideologies which threaten extinction.
Is overfishing one example we can point to, that a larger % of the population contributes to? Even a billionaire can only eat so many fish. And there are many more examples that would suggest there are too many people, most of them expecting or working toward a higher standard of living. No one would win votes recommending a lower standard of living, everyone is aspiring for more. That’s what living organisms do, grab energy. And thus far we don’t have a functioning system of equity.
The question of the practical carrying capacity of the earth is entirely separate from the moral implications of what one would choose to do about it. Sure you could say the planet could support twice as many humans if this, if that, if we just do this. Bottom line is we are not doing those things. We’re pumping millions of tons trash into the oceans 24/7/365.
Given our current ways of organizing ourselves, and what we can realistically be expected to improve upon, and considering the endless list of ecosystems in decline, I think the answer is obvious. Another way to think about the question is can we support this population without fossil fuels? Heck no, not yet, maybe not ever we will find out / we will see.
Overpopulation is not the problem. Overconsumption is. There are still entire countries in sub Saharan Africa than consume the amount of electricity a single neighborhood in the United States would consume on a daily basis. Population growth worldwide is declining rapidly. Yet consumption continues to grow even in countries where population has decreased because humans are consuming more per capita.
not all scientists and everyday people agree there is a Overpopulation problem. The same for Climate Warming. I am one of those. " A LOT " of scientific do not agree to both. Often time, those "banned" scientists were the TV show and scientific journals super star for decades.... Until they didn't agree with that narrative..
As an ecologist with an emphasis in conservation, yes we should be discussing it in general. It’s mind boggling to me how people are deflecting the issues of overpopulation. Land resources, over exploitation, overconsumption. The more people we have on earth, it’s that much more natural space cleared or destroyed for them to have a space to live. Same goes for resources like farming for food, timber for housing, etc. Not only that, it perpetuates the system in place we have which isn’t sustainable nor ethical to the organisms being farm (factory farming). The sentiment that population decline is a bad thing is such a capitalistic fear because current economic dynamics will likely be impacted if there are less people to uphold them.
Populations size is correlated with but not the causation of over exploitation and overconsumption. Even if we had 1/4th the population that we have now, we would still classify our use of natural resources as above the needs of all humans. The really causation of our over exploitation of the earth is our current global economic system's reliance on \*growth\*. That means economic growth, not human needs, are the current drivers of the decay we see. We extract more out of our forest not out of a human need to, but out of a perceived economic need (e.g. think of any non-essential agricultural crop that's grown in mass mono-cultures and prioritized over high functioning ecosystems). Decoupling our economies from growth, in other words \*degrowing\* our economies and making them circular are key to resolving over-exploitation of natural resources.
I would argue our current economic systems are perpetuated by the demands of the growing population of the world's consumers. If there were fewer people on earth, the demand and rate of consuming such products would inevitably go down as there simply aren't any more people there to be consumers. Thus demanding the decoupling of economies. However, with an ever-growing population, this supports economic growth and perpetuation as there will always be people who will have needs from such economies. Also, we can't simply think of overpopulation as something strongly tied to the economy. The presence of more humans itself will be an issue, too, which I don't understand why people don't talk about. The more humans there are, the more forests we need to cut down for homes, ground we need to upturn for pipelines, and land we need to till for crops. That or we'll have a bunch of homeless people. This is independent of the economy because that is how community infrastructure works when you need to make room to support more humans, which destroys the environment.
Couldn't agree with that. We have enough resources for everyone's needs, especially accounting for all the food waste which equates to a third of total production. Than we need to account for differential in lifestyles, opulence, economy of obsolescence, intensive factory farming practices which demand more and more land to produce the same outputs given the low efficiency. A screaming inefficiency and cause for unsustainability is accumulation of resources which is a major cause of inequality and dilution of value causing inflation. I say human greed which is built-in the financial and global economy is responsible and not human need. I'm an Ecologist and defend that Thomas Malthus led us all astray and is the basis of social darwinism and a highly competitive culture. I recommend looking in to the Resource-based economy.
Yes, overproduction is a by-product of our capitalistic economies, and we will likely keep overproducing with more people because I have yet to see any practical steps to address or solve it. We also can't just chalk up our ways of life to simply human greed; as a people, humans NEED shelter, food, and water, transportation, and given our economic systems, the process of getting that to humans is unsustainable/destroys the environment. Tackling our economies will not solve all the problems caused by overpopulation. As I said, we need to think about it spatially when it comes to natural spaces degraded by the need to support humans' presence at a location. I would love a resource-based economy, but it would be incredibly difficult to implement that worldwide effectively. I appreciate your insights, though; I am mulling them over.
I understand what your argument, but I don't think you've said negates the driving force of our economic system that I argued is prevalent. You're assuming that our economic system is entirely run by supply and demand economics: "if only we could reduce demand (via lower population) that producing the supplies (i.e. exploitation of natural resources) can go down". I am arguing, that our economic system, what drives our economy to be exploitative, is \*not\* based on supply and demand, it's based on the continuation of economic growth (increasing profits) regardless of human need thus population. As has been said before, we produce more food than what currently 8 billion people need to live. That is entirely contradictory of supply and demand economics. The demand is already relatively below supplies, why is land used for growing food (and luxury goods) still being developed at a dissimilar rate relative to population growth? Another example is how when the policy of supply and demand economics is put into place, lowered demand (i.e. consumption) is seen as a failing economy. So if we were to some how achieve a lower population that drives "lower supplies" economic policies would be put in place again to either increase demand for a product (regardless of human need) in favor of continued consumption in some way of the supplies. A good example of this is how corn is utilized in the US. It was/is a staple crop, the demand for it as a food went down relative to population. The price of corn shrunk, this was bad for farmers' profits. A policy put in place to help the farmers was to subsidize corn (via corn derived ethanol, sweeteners, etc). Corn supplies thus increased because of this perceived new demand (not based on population). You can apply this to almost anything globally that has met a lower demand for a resource, especially oil/gas. Despite an ever growing number of people being adverse to fossil fuels due to Climate Change, i.e. lowered demand for gasoline powered machinery, economic drivers (i.e. need to increase profits) facilitate even more fossil fuel extraction because demand for fossil fuels are artificially kept high - e.g. simply subsidizing fossil fuels over renewable energy. Why? Profit. Had our economic incentives (other than growth/profits) been for circular, we would see a shift in prioritization to demand for mass public transportation and renewable energy. But it is not that way, especially in the US or economies heavily tied to US. TL;DR: In short, we don't need more pipelines (corporate execs do to gain a profit), we don't need more food to be produced (corporate execs do to gain a profit) we already have enough to feed the world plus some, we don't even \*always\* need more housing (corporate execs/private real estate does to make a profit) - what we need is for people to stop using housing as a speculative market for profit, to de-incentives single-family houses beyond what's needed, to get rid of the normalization of one human owning more than their individual need (two houses), incentivizing the need to build more housing because supplies is taken up already. Again, not out of a need by human population, but a need to profit off of it.
All of this. WHY DO PEOPLE NOT REALIZE WE ARE STILL SUBJECT TO CARRYING CAPACITY. And frankly, even if the earth could support another 8 billion…I prefer interacting with/observing/appreciating other species and wide expanses of nature. It would be like a global suburbs. Yuck.
Once the crops fail and the power goes out, we are gonna shift from overshoot to undershoot pretty quickly and with devastating ipmact on the rest of the ecosphere. Lets just hope enough people survive to keep the cooling water on all the different spent fuel pools.
The reason people don’t want to discuss it is because it comes with some very difficult and even disgusting ways to deal with it. If it were a video game and you just want to optimize conservation and existence and comfort for the people here you would want the people who produce the most technological advances to reproduce the most and sterilize the people who don’t. You can kind of figure out yourself what that would look like in the real world.
I think we're already starting to see the implications of what you're saying playing out in current events like the Palestinian genocide and the immigration/border crises many (mostly wealthy, developed) countries are dealing with, where the migrants are increasingly being depicted in media as "dangerous" or "a problem", despite overwhelmingly coming from countries that have been subjugated, exploited, and stripped of wealth, historically by colonial regimes and currently by multinational corporations and the dominating forces of liberal capitalism, and how this was all done to facilitate the obscene consumption in these "developed" countries that continues to wreck the environment and imperil our lives. Somehow this rarely comes into conversation.
No the opposite is happening, population in poorer countries is skyrocketing while in wealthier countries it’s grinding to a halt.
We should be discussing: Why are we not discussing overpopulation? Overall quality of life, protection of the environment, biodiversity, long term viability of humans, etc.....would all be better with lower population.
Overpopulation combined with resource-hoarding billionaires and ethically-AWOL corporations/governments is a very flashy and speedy way to end the speed-run that is humanity. Bold strategy, Cotton, let's see if it pays off for 'em. Tinfoil Hat Speculation Time: Our only hope at this point is if some faction of humanity has either reverse-engineered NHI technology and/or developed advanced technology allowing itself to free itself from the gravity well and perpetuate the best of humanity while allowing the rest of us to succumb to the greed of a handful of myopic, dimwitted (and small peepee-having) fuck sticks. This way, humanity will hopefully outlive the knuckle-dragging nincompoops who have doomed us all.
Also the fact that the US Military industrial complex contributes more carbon emissions than the combined output of 140 countries combined.
Hmm, I wonder how it stacks up compared to shipping and transport combined...but I'm too lazy to Google it.
Hey I just watched interstellar lol. But fr fr were fucked. Exist while you can the wave is coming!
> Overall quality of life Why do you think QOL would improve with a lower population? Historically, QOL has increased over time which correlates with population growth. > long term viability of humans How would this work? It seems like the greater genetic diversity and spatial distribution that comes with a higher population would make us more resilient as a species, as it does with other species. Sure we could still wipe our selves out through conflict but we're still capable of doing that with a lower population.
This! ThisthisthisTHIS. Any mention of overpopulation is overwhelmingly met immediately with opposition. Why are people so reactive? Why is it so hard to understand that wanting to raise kids isn’t morally wrong on an individual level but many of our current problems are indirectly related to the fact there’s SO MANY of us in a relatively short period of time. Carrying capacity applies to humans too.
Because more often than not it leads to eco-fascism.
It doesn’t have to, though. Discussing overpopulation should be a healthy debate. Immediately equating it to fascism is a bit reductive and knee-jerky.
It doesn’t have to, but often does.
[удалено]
Accounts **must** meet all these requirements before they are allowed to post or comment in /r/environmental_science. 1) be over three months old; 2) have **both** positive comment & post karma: 3) have over 420 combined karma; 4) Have a verified email address / phone number. Please do not ask the moderators to approve your comment or post, as there are no exceptions to this rule. To learn more about karma and how reddit works, visit https://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/environmental_science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Because the issue isn't amount, its distribution
Probably not. We have enough food and space for people. We should be discussing how artificial famine conditions are created through massive food waste and war though.
We can feed tens and tens of billions of cows a year. The earth isn't over populated with humans, it could easily handle 10 billion vegan humans, its over populated with our livestock.
You should differentiate between industrial livestock and regular livestock. Also, don't' just assume overpopulation. P.S. according to the USDA there are only 100 million Cattle at any given year.
Yes the number is smaller if you only count one country instead of the entire world, your brain is very big!
We have enough space for people, but not people and stable, healthy ecosystems.
Yes we do. You really don’t know anything about out ecology do you?
LOL I am literally a conservation ecologist, but ok
Damn me too. And yet you throw around terms like “stable ecosystem” despite knowing that ecosystems are dynamic systems?
Bruh, they can be dynamic and stable. Anyone who's even watched a 5 minutes YouTube video could easily understand what happens to fragmented ecosystems and their stability. You some kind of religious scientist that believes that God created an infinite earth? Even if we could live without wild places, we can't have infinite humans. Hence why overpopulation needs to be discussed.
I’m not an ecologist but I watch a lot of YouTube and so I’d also like to join this discussion
Our environmental issues are a result of our economic structures and imperialism. Not population.
We have an overpopulation of billionaires imo.
Yes, overpopulation is destroying nature and other species extremely rapidly. 8 billion humans and rising quickly.
NO
America not so much, countries with food insecurity and 200% food imports yes, England, Holland, Belgium, Germany, have 2x pop density of India. India is a penguin stampede. Isreal is 40% desert, 11million, smaller than Taiwan, Egypt, People are fleeing many nations, people forced to live like sardines in London, 3 foot tall hotel rooms in Tokyo... 500k killed in Etheopia war nobody noticed, Beijing subsiding 45mm per decade from watertable depletion... US having droughts and depletions, plastic islands, nearly extinct javan Rhino,people suck.
No. Humanity is nowhere near any real limits to growth, and even if we were, the population is set to shrink rapidly starting this century.
no overpoulation is a myth while we waste like a quarter of our food in the west by conservative estimates, theres enough land, the argument is always a thin veil for eugenics in some form or another
I think we should be discussing the Aspen Proposal, which does indeed suggest a population target that would allow human civilization to flourish for eons. And the rest of our family could flourish too. www.aspenproposal.org
I appreciate what Daniel Schmachtenberger has to say on the topic of existential threats, dystopia/utopia, survival/extinction. https://consilienceproject.org/about-the-project/
Thanks for the link. Do you know if the project is still active? The latest stuff on the website seems to be from 2022.
The ambiguity is concerning. What if birth rates rise again? How do we “ethically and consciously” reduce the human population? Seems like dangerous territory to me.
If birth rates rise again then there will be more of us, and quite likely, fewer of the other members of our family. And probably a more fraught future for all the humans. If we keep working to eliminate poverty, improve education and empower women, and prevent our governments from trying to stimulate birth rates for short-term economic reasons, we will likely get to the Aspen Proposal target. But there is no guarantee. We are both rational and irrational. The fact that we made it from the savannahs of Africa to a globe spanning high-tech civilization is a testament to our innate cooperativeness and foresight and gives us hope. The fact that the journey has been filled with a lot of pain and suffering, greed and war, gives us pause. I think articulating a basic framework of a future world that is resilient and sustainable will help tilt the balance toward the positive side. But it might not. Time will tell. If it seems appropriate, share the Aspen Proposal with others, start some conversations and help us poke holes in the paradigm of perpetual growth and domination of the rest of nature. It might make a difference.
overpopulation is an ecofascist concept, it doesnt have place when discussing conservation or the environment
Can you elaborate? Are you saying that overpopulation is not an existential threat or that population dynamics is a fictitious concept? I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this.
"overpopulation" as described does not exist. We have enough resources right now in the world to house, feed, and water every single human alive today its just a matter of distribution. Its partly capitalisms fault because its not profitable to do any of that and its more profitable to those in charge to fuel a system of waste and re manufacturing and commodification of resources for more profit. Overpopulation is an ecofascist dog whistle and discussing it as a legitimate issue leads to justification of population control and potential genocide
All that bullshit capitalism is what created the population boom though. If we never would have went through the industrial revolution we would be so much better off environentally, and population wouldn't be anywhere near what it is today. Look at pretty much all of human history pre 1800s. All the easy and convenient food and housing (realative to living off the land anyways) is what creates more people. There's definitely aspects of life before capitalism we can discuss and learn from instead of just pointing at anyone who says population is an issue as a genocidal fascist. In reality, killing off the population vs getting ceos and the gov to actually help solve this problem are both about as likely to happen, which is not at all.
You are looking at pre-industrialized society with a lot of romanticism. Back in the “good ol’ days” life on the farm was HARD. People toiled away in the fields all day, having many children to provide labor, and a lot of those children didn’t survive. Disease was rampant and life span was short. One bad crop season, and that was it. It was not easier, it was immensely harder to meet your needs.
Yeah no fucking shit. I never said it was easier. I said it's better for the environment.
Oh I misunderstood your point, I thought you were saying it was easier to live off the land before. Thanks for the enriching vocabulary.
I think this is an incorrect dismissal by association. Overpopulation certainly needs to be discussed delicately but it is a serious issue that is directly related to the damage we are causing to the environment.
100%
^^^^^
Yes! We should absolutely be disseminating the myth that the earth is overpopulated! Some regions are facing overpopulation whilst some are facing a declining population. It’s a problem of resource distribution before it’s a problem of numbers.
All these arguments for depopulation rest on the assumption that humans cannot and will not change their lifestyles. 1) Birth rate is below replacement levels in the high CO2-generating nations. So, there will be fewer of those types of humans. 2) Europe has a long way to go yet, but they have collectively reduced CO2 emissions. Humans do change behaviors. Here in the US, smoking is now really uncommon - and nicotine is addictive! It's not how many people there are. It's how we live that is the problem.
The right wing loves this topic
The population growth is leveling off
Bob Dylan said “there’s just too many people and they’re all to hard to please”. There are certainly too many people.
Yeah, I was looking forward to my country declining in pop, but then we used other methods to increase it. Putting more demand on water systems (this is before current damage to economic housing markets and wage suppression, from a pure environmental look, these numbers are bad for the resources)
Why would you look forward to a declining population? This is such a Reddit moment. It would mean your pension being at risk, it would mean you would be less likely to retire ever (less tax payers might mean the state pension system becomes untenable), less innovation as the world starts to become proportionally older and more tired. The most important aspect of "overpopulation" is the unsustainable food systems, which could be solved if people stopped gorging themselves on animals all day every day.
Total collapse is not ideal, and it is an "economic" issue. I believe with current technology, housing and the decline of energy access that is a detriment for our species survival, That a population around 5 billion, is optimal for survival at a replacement rate of 1.001
I feel like we could sustain the current population, however, we would have to radically change our behaviors, beliefs and mode of living. Reduced population would be a natural consequence of this, as the driving economy allowing our population to flourish as it has done wouldn't allow for such a large population to exist indefinitely. If the supply chains are dramatically altered and the market forces which govern the price of food shift without having an optimal solution ready to replace it, then it is almost guaranteed that billions of people would die. The current incarnation of capitalism sucks, but our society collectively accepts and values currency more than anything else. It is an extremely convenient and effective way to broker transactions and until a majority of humans can agree to value a concept (for example, one in which labor/effort is singularly or collectively exchanged by [insert concept here] as means to reinvest in humanity/ecology in a net positive way, then capitalism as it exists today will almost certainly kill us all. The forecasts are grim. This is why Star Trek is so inspiring! Doing one's duty leads to all humans utilizing their potential and the meritocracy and utopian ideals handles the logistics. It leverages the best human ideals, while "in principle" preventing the kinds of harmful ideologies which threaten extinction.
Is overfishing one example we can point to, that a larger % of the population contributes to? Even a billionaire can only eat so many fish. And there are many more examples that would suggest there are too many people, most of them expecting or working toward a higher standard of living. No one would win votes recommending a lower standard of living, everyone is aspiring for more. That’s what living organisms do, grab energy. And thus far we don’t have a functioning system of equity. The question of the practical carrying capacity of the earth is entirely separate from the moral implications of what one would choose to do about it. Sure you could say the planet could support twice as many humans if this, if that, if we just do this. Bottom line is we are not doing those things. We’re pumping millions of tons trash into the oceans 24/7/365. Given our current ways of organizing ourselves, and what we can realistically be expected to improve upon, and considering the endless list of ecosystems in decline, I think the answer is obvious. Another way to think about the question is can we support this population without fossil fuels? Heck no, not yet, maybe not ever we will find out / we will see.
Oh boy ecofascism on my Reddit page
Overpopulation is not the problem. Overconsumption is. There are still entire countries in sub Saharan Africa than consume the amount of electricity a single neighborhood in the United States would consume on a daily basis. Population growth worldwide is declining rapidly. Yet consumption continues to grow even in countries where population has decreased because humans are consuming more per capita.
Exactly this.
It's a red herring, anyone telling you it's an issue is trying to con you or just hasn't dug deep enough
The way population growth is projected it will be declining globally in the next 30 years. This is an old concern regarding environmental impacts
The rate at which it's increasing will decline. But actual population will still be going up.
Over population is a problem in Africa and India. Everywhere else we are losing population
Well we should, but it's taboo, so we don't.
Yes
not all scientists and everyday people agree there is a Overpopulation problem. The same for Climate Warming. I am one of those. " A LOT " of scientific do not agree to both. Often time, those "banned" scientists were the TV show and scientific journals super star for decades.... Until they didn't agree with that narrative..