If I could snap my fingers and have people wake up from the capitalist propaganda they’ve been force-fed their whole lives, I would. Population is not the issue, it’s a deflection.
If your only problem is that you want more resources available for yourself, I can see how you’d come to that conclusion, but you’re wrong. It wouldn’t solve the underlying problems, and in fact it would create a whole set of new ones. Modern civilization depends heavily on economies of scale, and your magic finger snap does nothing to change how resources are produced, distributed, or consumed.
You’re also assuming that every human consumes resources at roughly the same rate. They don’t. Not even close. A tiny fraction of humanity consumes vastly more resources than billions of other people. Your finger snap doesn’t address that inequality at all. The same people and systems that concentrate resources now would simply have an even larger pool of resources to hoover up afterward. Then what? Snap your fingers again?
And follow the logic to its conclusion. If reducing humanity to 100 million “solves” problems because fewer people are consuming resources and competing for them, then 1 million should be even better. Five thousand better still. Ultimately, zero humans means zero poverty, zero war, zero homelessness, zero human carbon emissions, and zero human suffering. Problem solved!
Except obviously it isn’t, because eliminating the people who experience a problem is not the same thing as solving the problem for those people.
We don’t have billions of people living in poverty because there simply isn’t enough stuff on Earth to go around. We have enormous disparities in who controls resources and who gets to consume them. Fantasizing about eliminating most of humanity while leaving that system completely intact makes you a stooge for the oligarchs.
But even with these slower rates of growth, our population is already far above the sustainable carrying capacity given by Bradshaw and team’s models.
The gap between their optimum number of 2.5 billion and our current population size of 8.3 billion may help explain the problems with overconsumption our species currently faces.
Did you actually read what you provided? It’s really not the defense of your point that you are making it out to be. Lead author, Corey Bradshaw (Who also co-authored Human Population Reduction is Not a Quick Fix for Environmental Problems), argues that our current consumption system is unsustainable. I couldn’t agree more!
The 2.5 billion figure cited within is not some immutable physical limit on the number of human bodies Earth can contain. The authors explicitly acknowledge that a “sustainable” population depends on things like standard of living, economics, social conditions, and resource consumption. Their ecological-footprint estimate of 2.35 billion specifically assumes today’s average material standard of living and current consumption distribution, including the enormous consumption of the wealthiest people.
You’re taking a model of how many people our planet can sustainably support under particular socioeconomic and consumption conditions and treating it as evidence that the people themselves are the fundamental problem. That’s not what the evidence shows, though. Not even the evidence you yourself brought to the table, sorry!
Reality is malleable. Sure, the current circumstances of how resources are divided and used is reality. The current population is reality. We are both discussing ways in which our reality can be transformed to the benefit of all. Your suggested path involves the death of billions of people, while my suggested path involves some people having slightly less exorbitant lifestyles. Your suggested path is not only extreme, but it wouldn’t even work according to the very scholars you are citing. THAT is reality.
If I could snap my fingers and have people wake up from the capitalist propaganda they’ve been force-fed their whole lives, I would. Population is not the issue, it’s a deflection.
Population is definitely an issue there’s no many problem that wouldn’t be instantly solved by going down to a hundred million people.
If your only problem is that you want more resources available for yourself, I can see how you’d come to that conclusion, but you’re wrong. It wouldn’t solve the underlying problems, and in fact it would create a whole set of new ones. Modern civilization depends heavily on economies of scale, and your magic finger snap does nothing to change how resources are produced, distributed, or consumed.
You’re also assuming that every human consumes resources at roughly the same rate. They don’t. Not even close. A tiny fraction of humanity consumes vastly more resources than billions of other people. Your finger snap doesn’t address that inequality at all. The same people and systems that concentrate resources now would simply have an even larger pool of resources to hoover up afterward. Then what? Snap your fingers again?
And follow the logic to its conclusion. If reducing humanity to 100 million “solves” problems because fewer people are consuming resources and competing for them, then 1 million should be even better. Five thousand better still. Ultimately, zero humans means zero poverty, zero war, zero homelessness, zero human carbon emissions, and zero human suffering. Problem solved!
Except obviously it isn’t, because eliminating the people who experience a problem is not the same thing as solving the problem for those people.
We don’t have billions of people living in poverty because there simply isn’t enough stuff on Earth to go around. We have enormous disparities in who controls resources and who gets to consume them. Fantasizing about eliminating most of humanity while leaving that system completely intact makes you a stooge for the oligarchs.
Earth’s Population Has Surpassed The Planet’s Capacity, Study Suggests
Did you actually read what you provided? It’s really not the defense of your point that you are making it out to be. Lead author, Corey Bradshaw (Who also co-authored Human Population Reduction is Not a Quick Fix for Environmental Problems), argues that our current consumption system is unsustainable. I couldn’t agree more!
The 2.5 billion figure cited within is not some immutable physical limit on the number of human bodies Earth can contain. The authors explicitly acknowledge that a “sustainable” population depends on things like standard of living, economics, social conditions, and resource consumption. Their ecological-footprint estimate of 2.35 billion specifically assumes today’s average material standard of living and current consumption distribution, including the enormous consumption of the wealthiest people.
You’re taking a model of how many people our planet can sustainably support under particular socioeconomic and consumption conditions and treating it as evidence that the people themselves are the fundamental problem. That’s not what the evidence shows, though. Not even the evidence you yourself brought to the table, sorry!
It’s a number of people that the planet can carry based on reality.
Reality is malleable. Sure, the current circumstances of how resources are divided and used is reality. The current population is reality. We are both discussing ways in which our reality can be transformed to the benefit of all. Your suggested path involves the death of billions of people, while my suggested path involves some people having slightly less exorbitant lifestyles. Your suggested path is not only extreme, but it wouldn’t even work according to the very scholars you are citing. THAT is reality.
Sounds good enjoy your fairy tale take on the world I’ll stick with the reality we’re living in.
The reality of ignoring all evidence to validate wishing you could kill most people for no reason? And I’m the one living in a fairy tale? Okay.