And while we are all being progressive and fighting for people’s rights, does anyone other than me find it disturbing to casually compare Paul Ehrlich to a KKK member using carefully trimmed out-of-context comments?

Come on people.

We’ve already exceeded global carrying capacity. We are now in “overshoot”. (Visualize a car sailing smoothly, but quite temporarily, through the air after having been driven off of a cliff.)

Global population is nearing 7 billion. Different theorists using different methods seem to end up agreeing that global carrying capacity is probably about roughly 2 billion. (This assumes some level of social justice and a moderate, low by US standards, standard of living. More is possible if you accept a cattle car / Matrix-esque “life”.)

In any case, we will get to that much-lower-than-7-billion number the hard way (wars, famine, disease, and their accompanying losses of environmental quality, freedom, and social justice) OR the less hard way (immediately and drastically reducing our population voluntarily). Yes, all of us, yes, everywhere. There is no scenario anywhere in which population growth is a “good thing” long term.

Yes a drop in population would cause problems, but none of those problems are as big as the problems, suffering, and environmental collapse that is certain to occur if we don’t.

I disagree with any argument that there is some “right to reproduce”. If there is any “right to reproduce” it’s in the concept that one has the freedom to nurture a child or children and form some sort of family. Biological reproduction is not necessary to do that and there are many in need of this sort of nurturing. Just as my right to swing my fist stops at your nose, there is also no right to reproduce if (as is true now for all of us everywhere) doing so assures greater suffering for more people now and into the future.

This is a global issue with local and nation-state consequences. For example, immigration is a consequence of overpopulation, not a cause of it. Likewise, global climate change and the collapse of ocean fisheries are not impressed by national boundaries.

No technological / “alternative energy” options have the capacity or can be ramped up fast enough to avoid major global calamity. That isn’t to say we shouldn’t do them. Aggressively shifting to alternative energy is necessary, just not sufficient. That is also true of education and female empowerment.

For more comprehensive analysis of all this I suggest

Bandura etc.
http://growthmadness.org/2008/02/18/impeding-ecological-sustainability-through-selective-moral-disengagement/

Albert Bartlett on the exponential function as it relates to population and oil:
http://c-realm.blogspot.com/2008/12/kmo-interview-with-albert-bartlett.html

Approaching the Limits essays http://www.paulchefurka.ca

Bruce Sundquist on environmental impact of overpopulation http://home.alltel.net/bsundquist1/

How Many People Should The Earth Support? http://www.ecofuture.org/pop/rpts/mccluney_maxpop.html

More On Carrying Capacity
http://iere.org/ILEA/leaf/richard2002.html

Thanks for stopping by! I agree that catastrophic global failure is bad for women and other living things, and that’s exactly why it’s important to not taint the message with poorly handled race and coercion issues. Effective outreach on family planning means that people can’t think that you’re secretly plotting their deportation or elimination. (Don’t have time to find a specific example now, but this conversation in the feminist community has frequently gone horribly wrong.)

Also, my previous post on the GPSO notes that some of their sources are anti-immigrant groups listed on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s site. Maybe this is too close of a focus on a very big issue, but how can the environmental message reach diverse communities with giant stumbling blocks like this in the way?

Just for the record, I would remind all readers that the GPSO website, which started this thread, does NOT show images of crowds in Delhi or anywhere else, and DOES recommend empowerment of women (and others) as a key recommendation for constructive solution of this problem. I encourage everyone to visit the GPSO site and use whatever materials you find useful there in getting the broad issue of overpopulation onto the table and into the discussion.

I think it’s worth stepping back a bit to get some perspective: allowing a collapse of the global life support system, which is not at all out of the question in the next century or so, would be far and away the most catastrophic human rights violation in history, and would make all the other things we’re talking about here moot.

i think the bad examples of human population planning in part explains the reticence in talking about overpopulation in the scientific community… i think it’s also the memories of galton, lysenko, and bad 50′s representations of “mad scientists bent on purifying the human race” that in part informs the “hands-off” approach to population discussions…

but in many, many discussions now with scientific colleagues over the years about this issue, there’s also some deep belief systems that science should in fact not have anything to say about reproductive behavior… i’ve had heated arguments with fellow scientists (men and women) that proscriptive recommendations of that nature should be left to religious authorities and philosophers… why is science so eager to shed it’s (what i consider) responsibility to issues that impact the sustainability of the biosphere?

reproductive issues and recommendations should be left to religious authority?!

to quote rabbi hillel: oy vey!

anna – I’m dubious about the cancer links, but the osteoporosis thing is very real and very nasty. My doctor strongly warned against it for that reason (which makes forcing it on poor women extra bad). But I wouldn’t worry now – just get your calcium and I bet you’ll be fine.

DN – ARRRRR! *ahem* Yes, exactly! And in the US, lowering barriers to obtaining birth control is pretty important, too.