Environment & Energy

Even the centrist NewsWeek published this:
https://www.newsweek.com/worrying-population-declines-are-actually-hopeful-sign-opinion-1911426

I agree with that author. The comments section of that article is largely the usual nonsense (a little over half anyway), but the article is decent.

No one is talking about coercive policies like the ones in China. But there is a difference between calling out the veiled racism or classism of some attacks on arguments for smaller population sizes. And denying the issue altogether.

It is a heavily loaded debate but only honesty can fix that. In an economy where a black single parent of two is made to feel bad for getting some govt assistance while the Duggars and their 19 kids are considered valuable contributing members of society, these debates become absurd if care is not taken to be blunt about the realities of overpopulation without those becoming a rationale for more cruel austerity policies.

But certainly I wish a global campaign like the one against tobacco existed letting people make the connection between mass extinctions and ecological degradation and over-large human populations.

Definitely here in the global south I see the effects of overpopulation every day. It is really absurd to deny it. More people does not equal more happiness or a democratic dividend or any of the bs a type of media bullish on this model of crass growth favours. It means more breaking infrastructure…

While the specific model of resource depletion that is Malthusian didn’t come to pass. That doesn’t mean that many of the stresses of modern life are not due to population pressure. It is callow nonsense imo - that libertarian stuff about excess humans meaning excess creativity.

The truth is that our resources are strained and it takes a lot of input to make a fully aware citizen of our complex global world. And we are not there..every war, every crisis we have would be less scary with smaller populations. Fewer angry, bored, misinformed people fighting over the same narrow pool of resources..we are mass producing people and cheap phones etc and cannot really mass produce true experts (which is what is needed for all our varied crises).