• 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.

  • The problem is absolutely not overpopulation.

    Population growth isn't the cause, and the motivations for saying so are often racist. But it's a symptom, and a magnifier of the side effects of the whole shitshow. Consumerism depends on population growth all the way across the board, from providing ever more consumers and workers to paying for the welfare state.

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