-
The problem is absolutely not overpopulation. It's excessive and constant use of machines--transportation machines, computers (wrongly considered to be a universal tool), industrial agriculture, and depleting the natural world through destructive practices like monocultures and deep-sea trawling. It's been shown that a lot of the damage caused by aviation, for instance, is caused by relatively few frequent fliers, etc. The lifestyles of the vast majority of the population—people who live in warm areas, who still share more things communally, are (materially) relatively poor, don't travel much, etc.—are not a problem. All this is of course undermined by all the seductive nonsense about modernism, as it has been for the past 200 years, by hyper-individualism, 'bucket list' desperation, bad and unjust government, wars and violent repression (with the exception of the World Wars, I don't think anything much has changed there compared to past times, though), and so on. But yeah, let's distract from the real problem and claim that it's poor(er) people who cause it, it might just get us off the hook.
You are reading a single comment by @DoubtfulAce and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
Oliver Schick
@DoubtfulAce
Just found this on the Wiki Overpopulation page.
"Concerns about population size or density have a long history: Tertullian, a resident of the city of Carthage in the second century CE, criticized population at the time: "Our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly support us... In very deed, pestilence, and famine, and wars, and earthquakes have to be regarded as a remedy for nations, as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race."[98] Despite those concerns, scholars have not found historic societies that have collapsed because of overpopulation or overconsumption.[99]"