Sociology

"What did we do with our fossil fuel bonanza? We exploded population by revolutionizing agriculture [and health]. Now when fossil fuels inevitably (and soon?) decline, we’re left with an overhang that can no longer be supported. The resulting population decline will suddenly cast Malthus in a new light: oh what a starry-eyed soothe-sayer [sic]! When that day comes, […] realize that it’s no more tragic than the ant colony waning as it must."

"Depleting and climate-changing coal, oil, and natural gas have brought about dramatic human population growth, along with immense profits and unprecedented wealth (for the few). But all of these presumed and probably transitory benefits have been based on depleting natural resources, and on processes that are perilously changing the climate and degrading ecosystems across the planet. Every time we pick up a gasoline-powered machine we are viscerally linked to that chain of ersatz benefits and spiraling impacts."

"It is easy to get caught up in the heady whirlwinds of modernity. We have accomplished amazing feats in these past few centuries, and our extrapolative minds envision a continued acceleration. Given that our life span overlaps only a portion of the tale, it is easy to lose the context that our boom (the Industrial Revolution and what followed) is almost entirely due to fossil fuels. This energy surge in turn powered a surge in material access and economic activity (and human population) in what is perhaps fittingly described as a fireworks show."

"Increasing the standard of living of a growing population makes today’s ecological pressures look adorable."

"Human population is going up… We’re not exactly doing the planet (or ultimately ourselves) any favors presently. Will adding more humans that subscribe to our current cultural model somehow make the situation better? Will improving standards of living (thus increasing resource demand) mysteriously turn things around? It’s hard to see how—not without enacting a whole new model."

"The dream of eventually having 10 billion people living at American standards completely ignores the glaring fact that we seem to be circling the drain even at today’s impact level (i.e., overshoot). How could we possibly entertain the factor-of-five increase in resource demand that would accompany a realization of “the dream?” It seems delusional… and likely to turn into a nightmare if pursued."

"[It] is truly alarming from an ecological point of view: not only has the human population grown like gangbusters, but the level of affluence per person has soared by an even larger factor."

"A plausible scenario for ecosystem collapse... is based on the fact that we currently support 8 billion people on a fossil-intense agricultural system. We have over-leveraged that finite resource to "borrow" millions of years of eco-services (photosynthetic energy) and now host a population that probably never could have existed in ecological equilibrium. Even if fossil fuels were not going away, it seems likely we would see continued erosion of the globe's ability to support this current unsustainable mode. We have already lost about half of the wild animal life in my lifetime: is that halfway to collapse? Take away the fossil fuels, and I imagine over-hunting and rapid deforestation will take an enormous toll on ecosystem health."

"People tend to prefer the narrative that we, ourselves, are the superheroes, and that our superpowers are not from the fossil fuel suit, but are cognitive in nature. Yet we have the same neural hardware (if not slightly downsized) as our prehistoric ancestors. The main cognitive revolution happened about 70,000 years ago when humans started to believe in things that do not exist (like spirits or potential future gains) that allowed large-scale coordination and shared identity to outcompete evolution’s more biophysical tricks of sharp teeth/claws, speed, strength, camouflage, poison, or overwhelming numbers. Global spread of homo sapiens and megafauna extinctions quickly followed, and it is at this point that the human experiment began to smolder: something was off. About 10,000 years ago, agriculture started and the first visible flame ignited. About 300–400 years ago, the Enlightenment lit a fuse by developing a scientific approach to understanding the world. It was not long before the fuse found fossil fuels and we now witness the predictable explosion that ensued. The explosion is breathtakingly rapid on any meaningful timeline, only appearing in slow motion to the few generations experiencing the phenomenon and thus seeming “normal.” So we can trace some part of our current planetary dominance to human ingenuity, but perhaps the lion’s share actually is attributable to the energy bonanza—as suggested by the dramatic change in the pace of innovation before and after the fossil transition."

"As a jarring illustration of our tendency to value the human side over the prerequisite physical/ecological side, imagine that somehow we manage to emerge from the coming centuries having established a truly sustainable existence. All resources are renewed by nature at the rate of extraction for human needs; population is steady and at a level just tolerable to the planet in terms of indefinite support. Diverse ecosystems are left to thrive in their natural states. But imagine that we are still plagued by cancer and other maladies, so that life expectancy is, say, 90 years. Then what if a team of researchers hits on a cure for (most forms of) cancer? Hurray! At last! Unambiguously good, right? Well, not so fast. All other elements held the same, longer life spans translate to a higher population, putting additional resource burdens on the planet that it cannot handle in the long term. In order to adopt and implement the cure for cancer, we would have to either deliberately reduce population or lower the standard of living to accommodate the change. All other considerations of the complex society about economic impacts, equity of distribution, legal and political facets, or interaction with religious belief systems must take a back seat to the most fundamental and important question: is this change physically viable on this finite planet in the long term?"

"Human population will not be allowed to grow [indefinitely]. Even small growth rates will step up pressure on natural resources, and Earth can only support so much, long-term. Independent of what the “right” number is, once settled, we will not be able to dial it up without imperiling the hard-won success. Even under steady human population, any increase in resource use per person will also not be compatible. In general, growth leads to a dead end: to failure."

"We face unprecedented pressures on resources and on our environment, as human population and standard of living both surge on a finite planet. Nature will not allow this trend to continue indefinitely."

"Earth has never in its history had to contend with 8 billion fire apes, intelligent enough to have leveraged power by exploiting and burning one-time resources. We now operate outside the bounds and protections of evolution: in breach of contract, without a map to success. What could possibly convince us that this fireworks show—which has not even come close to standing the test of time—can maintain anything like its current resource impact for the long haul? Humans have demonstrated convincingly that we can live in a primitive state for hundreds of thousands of years. Our present mode is a few-century flash, supported almost entirely by inheritance-spending. Arguing that we have found a new normal is a precarious position that I would not be eager to defend. Parties end. Fireworks shows end. Why would our flash be any different? It’s not just guesswork: what other outcome could result from rapid resource exploitation on a finite planet?"

"Since growth is an absurd short-lived anomaly, what about leveling out in population, resource use per capita, and adopting a steady-state economy? The problem here is that the rate at which we are depleting one-time resources today is unsustainable. We’re simply spending our bank account without paying attention to the balance and without any source of additional income. Most clearly, forests and wild spaces are down by a factor of two in the last 60 years and will be gone within 60 years at current rates of depletion. Before even getting to steady-state conditions, inevitable near-term increases in population together with sought-after increases in standards of living around the world spell an even shorter lifetime for critical habitats. Meanwhile, fisheries are failing in domino fashion; aquifers are being depleted at rates alarmingly higher than replacement; soils are degrading and arable land is lost; fertilizer depends on a finite resource; habitat loss is resulting in species extinctions far in excess of natural rates. Even the plunder of mineral resources in the seemingly infinite crust is getting harder, only a fleeting century or so into our spree. Sustaining present levels for even a few more centuries is a dubious (i.e., unsubstantiated) proposition. It is practically absurd to imagine sustaining present practices for 10,000 years. Humans simply have not yet demonstrated an ability to maintain a technological society without utter reliance on grossly unsustainable inheritance spending."

"Even something as seemingly altruistic as health care selfishly focuses on human health, to the exclusion and often direct detriment of ecosystem health. Are we really doing ourselves favors in the long term by making the destructive human enterprise healthier, more populous, longer-living, and therefore better able to carry out its damaging activities? If this sounds abhorrently anti-human, it’s because the human enterprise is currently relentlessly anti-planet. Anything that is anti-planet will dismantle ecosystems that serve as critical life support for humans, spelling failure for the human enterprise. So it’s really the human enterprise that is anti-human by way of being anti-planet. […] The best way to assure long-term prosperity is to forge a non-human-centric partnership with nature that does not always put short-term human interests above those of non-human elements of nature. Even “good” activities like health care therefore miss the boat in terms of building a better tomorrow."

"Humans collectively must ultimately face the uncomfortable question of whether Earth’s natural systems can support 8 billion or more people at a modern standard of living. Since the resource footprint of a U.S. citizen is at least four times that of the global average, the key question is whether the planet can support an increase in material throughput four times higher than present when the strain is apparent already. As noble as it may be to wish [for] a modern living standard for an eventual ten billion or more people, it is likely that committing to such a course could result in more human suffering than would transpire under the adoption of more modest goals. The responsible path is to reduce global resource dependencies and abandon the imperative for growth starting now."

"This moment is special because we have dramatically built up our population, technology, science, medicine, and democratic institutions as a direct result of vast amounts of surplus energy stemming from a one-time resource. The fossil fuel experience has made us dangerously confident about our cleverness and dominance over nature. What makes this century special, then, is that we will have to cope with a diminishing supply rate of the resource that has been of paramount importance to our high-tech existence."

"Baconian science is at the root of the apocalypse. We have been blessed by advances in medicine, agriculture and engineering. Science has done exactly what we asked of it and now we are set for annihilation. If European science had petered out after the discoveries of the seventeenth century, we would be less numerous and [the] Earth would not be warming."

"Human numbers are rising at roughly 1.2% a year, while numbers are rising at around 2.4% a year. By 2050 the world’s living systems will have to support about 120m tonnes of extra humans and 400m tonnes of extra farm animals."

"We’re in serious trouble. Many red lights are flashing on the dashboard. Most people are now aware that something is seriously wrong, and each has their favorite lens through which to view the problems… The common denominator to all of these problems is overshoot. Very few people are able to see through the lens of overshoot because overshoot is a very unpleasant topic with no painless solutions and no way to avoid its consequences, and because humans evolved to deny unpleasant realities like overshoot."

"Most non-domesticated life on earth is in decline and about 200 species a day are going extinct due to a wide range of environmental problems. Many humans are at risk of being harmed or killed by related problems this century. All of the many problems are caused by the same thing: humans have used non-renewable energy to explode their population from 1 billion to 7 billion in 100 years, and now consume so large a share of the earth’s resources that almost all non-domesticated species are in decline."

"… technology use harnesses far more energy and materials than we could ever manage without it, and while doing so may make our lives much easier and more comfortable, it comes at the cost of increasing ecological overshoot. As we increase overshoot, we concomitantly increase all the symptom predicaments that overshoot causes. Technology use also has another nasty side effect. It reduces and/or eliminates negative feedbacks which once kept our numbers in check. Many diseases we once suffered from like smallpox, measles, whooping cough, tetanus, etc. have been temporarily eliminated by the technological development of vaccines. Our medical industry has also wiped out many other diseases through proper sanitation, use of antiseptics, anesthetics (allowing surgeries to correct most internal ailments), antibiotics, antifungals, and antivirals to kill or prevent many diseases, and many other innovations that allow us to live better, more comfortable lives. The development of indoor plumbing, electrical systems, heating and air conditioning systems, insulation, refrigerators and freezers, and cooking devices all allow us to accomplish daily tasks either much easier or provide more comfort to us by regulating temperature and humidity levels in our living spaces. Therefore, technology use reduces or removes negative feedback thereby promoting population growth which also promotes technology growth. However, in terms of reducing overshoot (and symptom predicaments such as climate change, energy and resource decline, pollution loading, and biodiversity decline), technology use is maladaptive. This will become painfully clear as time moves forward when more or different technology does not actually solve overshoot. Population decline is what will actually work to reduce overshoot, caused by the failure of our agricultural systems, increased disease caused by antimicrobial resistance and new viruses emerging, and increased failures of infrastructural systems caused by extreme weather events. Reduced technology use will be facilitated by this mechanism, and ALL species wind up experiencing die-off whether they use technology or not."

"The Earth's population is plagued by famines, energy shortages, epidemics, environmental pollution, degeneration, terrorism, dictatorship, anarchism, slavery, excessive increase of waste materials, racial hatred, food shortages, destruction of rain forests, the "greenhouse effect", pollution of lakes, streams and oceans, hatred towards asylum-seekers; radioactive emissions, chemical pollution of water, air, plants, food, human beings and animals. Crime, murder, mass murders, manslaughter; alcoholism, hatred of strangers, oppression, hatred of one's fellowman, extremism, sectarianism, drug addiction, overpopulation, annihilation of animal species, war, violence, torture and capital punishment, general mismanagement, water contamination, eradication of plant species; hatred, vice, jealousy, lovelessness, lack of logic, false humanitarianism, lack of housing, increased traffic, destruction of arable land, unemployment, the collapse of health care, the collapse of care for the elderly, destruction of nature, the collapse of solid waste removal, and the lack of living space, among others. In spite of the many efforts, mankind's problems are not decreasing but, instead, continue to rise steadily in direct proportion to population increases."

"There is no way we could keep going as we have been. The increase in human population in the 1990s has exceeded the total population in 1600. The population has grown more since 1950 than it did during the previous four million years. The reasons for our recent rapid growth are pretty clear. Although the Industrial Revolution speeded historical growth rates considerably, it was really the public health revolution, and its spread to the Third World at the end of the Second World War, that set us galloping. Vaccines and antibiotics came all at once, and right behind came population. In Sri Lanka in the late 1940s life expectancy was rising at least a year every twelve months. How much difference did this make? Consider the United States: if people died throughout this century at the same rate as they did at its beginning, America's population would be 140 million, not 270 million."

"H. sapiens took around 250,000 years to reach a global population of 1 billion in 1820, and just over 200 years to go from 1 billion to 8 billion. This was largely made possible by our species’ access to cheap, easy, exosomatic energy, mainly fossil fuels. Fossil fuels enabled us to reduce negative feedback (e.g. food shortages) and thus delay and evade the consequences of surpassing natural limits. In that same 200 year period, fossil energy (FF) use increased 1300-fold, fueling a 100-fold increase in real gross world product, i.e. consumption, and the human enterprise is still expanding exponentially."

"What has caused the recent super-exponential rise in world population? Before the industrial revolution both fertility and mortality were comparatively high and irregular. The birth rate generally exceeded the death rate only slightly, and population grew exponentially, but at a very slow and uneven rate. In 1650 the average lifetime of most populations in the world was only about 30 years. Since then, [hu]mankind has developed many practices that have had profound effects on the population growth system, especially on mortality rates. With the spread of modern medicine, public health techniques, and new methods of growing and distributing foods, death rates have fallen around the world. […] On a world average the gain around the positive feedback loop (fertility) has decreased only slightly while the gain around the negative feedback loop (mortality) is decreasing. The result is an increasing dominance of the positive feedback loop and the sharp exponential rise in population […]."

"The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race."

"Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio, Subsistence, increases only in an arithmetical ratio."

"It is still the case that the worst enemies of life are, on the one hand, an excess of life (human life, in particular) and, on the other, the legislation and structure of societies based on . The sturdier a society, the more peaceful it is; the more efficient (i.e., the ransacking of natural resources), the quicker . Everything that upsets the established order of society, causing chaos and panic, gives time to nature and, ultimately, humans too."

"Our emphasis [on] science has resulted in alarming rises in world populations that demand an ever-increasing emphasis [on] science to improve their standards and maintain their vigor."

"[There's an] excessive number of humans who [want to] live a lifestyle that promotes equality, along with [others] being minimalist and/or vegan... [and] similar overpopulation by other organisms is considered a plague."

"Many people, including environmentalists, often avoid linking the multitude of environmental problems to overpopulation. Some believe that a global shift to veganism could support the current population and more. Others attribute the crisis to various factors [that] are frequently cited as primary contributors to the ongoing environmental crisis, overshadowing the impact of population growth."

"Economic and political instability will continue to increase as food and water supplies are impacted in more areas on the planet by pollution, drought, flooding, and other extreme weather events. However, while the focus is almost entirely on the supply side of the economic equation, the demand side may be the bigger issue. The planet is currently adding an additional 80 million mouths to feed each year, 4.5 times more people than the entire population of Syria. As the chasm between uncertain supplies and increasing demand widens, the social and biological implications for humanity are both unpredictable and alarming."

"Humanity has moved past the point where future generations are an issue. If there are any, they will be few in number. Ignoring the inevitable is something all species do. Humans are no different than bacteria in a Petri dish or a mountain pine beetle in a climate-stressed lodgepole pine forest. All available resources are utilized to grow and reproduce until the inevitable collapse. We’re traveling down the same path as all species that have gone through exponential increases. The only difference is Homo sapiens is doing it on a grander scale. The Herculean ability to ignore the greatest threat to our existence would be comical if not for the rapidly approaching consequential conclusion to our existence."

"Those who defend the belief that overpopulation isn’t at the core of every environmental problem are not unique. Every myth presents itself as an authoritative, factual account, no matter how much the topic varies from natural law or ordinary experience. There is a long, bloody history of Homo sapiens defending myths against those who might either question their veracity or have a competing myth. It has resulted in the deaths of millions of people [and other animals] since the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution. As a result of ignoring the obvious reality, newborns are effectively positioned as moneymaking machines. The former prime minister of Japan suggested that women who bore no children should be barred from receiving pensions. In most countries, those who choose not to have children are required to pay for those who do through taxes. In this campaign for more babies, childbearing is reduced to a means for economic growth. Even though overpopulation, natural resource extraction, and environmental degradation are clearly linked, the needs of the economic market trump the needs of the planet. Children are nothing more than moneymakers in the eyes of politicians, forever blind to the moral, environmental, or humanitarian consequences of their policies. Market thinking has obliterated moral thinking on a grand scale. After all, if the West doesn’t produce more children, it can’t produce the wealth needed to look after parents when they retire. No social animal is ever guided by the interests of the entire species to which it belongs. No pika cares about the interests of the pika species; no northern spotted owl will lift a feather for the global northern spotted owl community; no wolf alpha male makes a bid for becoming the king of all wolves. Likewise, few humans care about the interests of Homo sapiens. People only care about themselves and those who directly affect their lives."

"Population growth vanished from the agendas of mainstream environmental organizations that previously regarded escalating numbers as a major environmental threat. These groups were primarily shackled by their fear of alienating donors, ultimately selling their purpose and integrity for money. Criticism from progressive and conservative interests claiming that overpopulation is a myth further incentivized these groups to pretend the rising global population wasn’t a factor in planetary degradation."

"In 1968, with the release of their book The Population Bomb, Paul and Anne Ehrlich were among the first to identify the most significant factor that will precipitate the collapse of humanity. Their book inspired an environmentalist fad in the 1970s. The premise for the book was gradually rationalized away by most as the work of lunatics. It was listed by the Intercollegiate Review as one of the 50 worst books of the 20th century. In the Human Events list of the “Ten Most Harmful Books of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” it garnered an 11th-place honorable mention. Since that time, the global population has more than doubled. During those five decades, humanity has identified six types of quarks, developed the modern internet, eradicated smallpox, decoded the human genome, and developed vaccines for Ebola and COVID-19. Despite all our new technologies and discoveries, the most basic concept of rapid human growth inside a finite system—our planet—leading to collapse is a concept too difficult for our greatest minds to reconcile. Humanity’s carefully calibrated psychological filters go into overdrive to prevent this simple mathematical postulate from entering our psyche. As seemingly prescient as the Ehrlichs were, our collision course with extinction was preordained long before their book was published in 1968."

"… as our population has grown, humans have been liquidating the planet’s natural resources for thousands of years. The effects of our current population on forests, grasslands, biodiversity, clean air, and water are catastrophic. Zero population growth means the planet would still be trying to support the current population, over 8 billion people. Humanity can no longer pay even the interest. We’ve already spent much of the planet’s clean air, water, and biodiversity with no mechanism for repayment. Zero population growth isn’t going to happen. We can’t curb our evolutionarily programmed need to grow and reproduce any more than we can stop the sun from rising. Like all populations of organisms on the planet, the number of humans will continue to increase until it’s no longer possible. When that day happens, Earth will be a truly inhospitable place."

"The human population will continue to increase until it can’t. When it can no longer increase, it will crash. Our extreme efforts to focus our minds elsewhere are symptoms of a desperate attempt to find solid footing, to believe in a future that will not vanish. Mankind has had a storied existence on Earth. Our thirst for knowledge and innovation has provided comfort and security. However, it is becoming increasingly evident that our remarkable progress has become our worst enemy. We know our planet is finite. Images of Earth from space make it plain for all to see. However, people routinely ignore this verifiable certainty in all aspects of their lives, treating the world as [if it were] infinite. Modern-day human activities are not only wiping out ecosystems and biodiversity but [also] plundering the clean air, water, and topsoil that helped bring about our tenure on the planet. Entire ecosystems have vanished, including the tallgrass prairie in North America, Madagascar’s rainforests, and the Aral Sea in Asia. We use Earth’s natural resources like a bunch of drunks on the greatest bender of all time. Human consumption is negatively modifying the planet and permanently damaging the biological systems upon which our continued existence depends. The deterioration of our ecosphere has been exponentially accelerating for at least 100,000 years. As technological advances improve our lives, humanity becomes increasingly detached from its environment and the natural resources allowing us to persist. People now have a much closer affinity with iPhones, Amazon, online shopping, restaurants and bars, Netflix, beauty salons, and sporting events than forests, grasslands, marshes, and oceans. Few now understand our existence on Earth is entirely dependent upon photosynthesis. Instead, they believe their survival is contingent on parents, doctors, farmers, governments, bankers, police, and other players in society. It’s not that those institutions, people, and specialties aren’t important, but they represent the retailers. Photosynthesis is the wholesaler. There is a supply chain disruption occurring on a massive scale in our relationship with the planet. The ancient forests and grasslands that provided the planet with free oxygen in the air and sequestered carbon dioxide, making it habitable for humans and other complex life, are nearly gone. For most people, the natural resources that support their existence and lifestyle might as well be from a distant galaxy. This extreme disconnect has resulted in people losing their capacity to understand the dire circumstances facing complex organisms on Earth, including themselves. The deafening alarm bells portending our extinction are routinely misunderstood or ignored. For those who perceive our state of crisis, there is a great deal of angst. Much of the frustration, anger, and sadness results from having unrealistic expectations of human beings. Despite our advanced technologies, the basic tenets of human behavior haven’t changed for centuries or millennia. Letting go of the false expectations that Homo sapiens can or will modify our behavior can bring us an element of peace. Expectations are incredibly powerful in structuring our moods and emotions. Identifying unrealistic expectations can reduce our chances of being disappointed and can increase happiness. A better understanding of our behavioral history can provide valuable insights into recognizing human capabilities and limitations."

"On a global level, there is no threat to human survival greater than that posed by world overpopulation—paradoxical though that may seem—and it is abundantly clear that consensus decision making is ineffective for dealing with that. Some kind of “solution” is nonetheless unavoidable, and is certain to be ugly. To say that there is no visible world leadership on that transcendental question is to understate the case. Optimists on the population problem don’t measure progress in terms of a decrease in population, or even a decrease in the rate of increase, but in terms of a decrease in the rate of increase of the rate of increase."

"In the 20th century we decisively broke our dependence on energy systems that were fed by the wind and sun and which we supplemented with human and animal muscle power. That leap was made possible by innovations that allowed us to extract, pump, use, and transform raw materials, particularly to unlock energy stored in coal and oil to make chemicals and plastics. That in turn allowed a massive expansion in population, lifespans, and economic growth. The rise of industrial capitalism from 1851 to 1971 went hand in hand with a surge in population, mainly in cities, provided with better food and public health."

"Driven by the Anthropocene engine, human population has grown exponentially, and individual societies have approached collapse multiple times over the past 8,000 years. The disappearance of the Easter Island civilization and the collapse of the Mayan empire, for example, have been linked to the depletion of environmental resources as populations rose. The dramatic decline of the European population during the Black Death in the 1300s was a direct consequence of crowded and unsanitary living conditions that facilitated the spread of Yersenia pestis, or plague."

"Fossil fuels’ biggest impact on the agricultural sector stems from the use of natural gas in industrial fertilizer production. Industrial fertilizer was first mass-produced in 1914 using what came to be known as the . This invention enabled the , a boom in agricultural production that took place in the latter half of the 20th century, starting in Mexico and India. From 1961 to 2010, cereal yields per acre increased by 217 percent in Mexico and 183 percent in India. It is no coincidence that the human population has more than quadrupled since 1920. We often attribute the Green Revolution to the spread of high-yielding crop varieties. Yet these varieties typically require industrial fertilizer application. The Haber-Bosch method, combined with mechanization and pesticides derived from fossil fuels, [has] represented a massive and unsustainable injection of fossil fuels into our food system. Today, the production of one food calorie in the United States requires 2.7 fossil fuel calories."

"Peak human population will surely lag … peak oil and peak mineral resources until these conditions express themselves as food shortages. This means that the human population will continue to rise for a while, even as we begin to encounter these … strict resource limits. It’s not possible to estimate how much the population will increase because the relationship between energy and mineral resources and food production is a very fragile equation, subject to any number of discontinuities. To these, add the complications of weather disasters arising from climate change, including drought, the spread of plant diseases, and so forth. This lagging further rise in [the] human population will only make the inevitable contraction more acute once food shortages begin. [Overpopulation] amounts to a human population overshoot … to the planet Earth’s ecology. We're putting a strain on everything the earth has to offer us. While the combination of peak stuff and [too many] billion humans is forcing the issue, ...the truth is that circumstances will now determine what happens, not policies or personalities. … Population overshoot is therefore unlikely to yield to management. Rather, the usual suspects will enter the scene and do their thing: starvation, disease, … violence … [and] death."

"Cheap oil had allowed populations to explode in precisely those parts of the world that had had, for millennia, a high infant mortality rate and modest life expectancy. Cheap oil was behind the "green revolution" that increased the food supply in the nonindustrial world. Oil was also behind many of the medicines and preventives that had neutralized… diseases. Now, suddenly, most of those children… survived, grew up, and produced more children who survived and grew up, and over… the twentieth century, the global populations hurtled into extreme numerical overshoot. Populations were, in effect, eating oil, notably in [the form of] food exports from the United States, where agribusiness had completely taken over from agriculture. Local farmers in Africa, Asia, or South America couldn’t compete with corporate Archer Daniels Midland’s oil-and-gas-based grain crops and U.S. government subsidies."

"Malthus was certainly correct [that demand will outstrip supply], but... [hydrocarbons] ...skewed the [supply-demand] equation over the past [two] hundred years while the human race has enjoyed an unprecedented orgy of [a fraction of] nonrenewable condensed solar energy accumulated over eons of prehistory. The “green revolution” in boosting crop yields was minimally about scientific innovation in crop genetics and mostly about dumping massive amounts of fertilizers and pesticides made... of ...[petroleum] onto crops, as well as employing irrigation at a fantastic scale made possible by abundant oil and gas. The cheap oil age created an artificial bubble of plen[t]itude for a period not much longer than a human lifetime, a hundred years. Within that comfortable bubble, the idea took hold that only grouches, spoilsports, and godless maniacs considered population hypergrowth a problem [with a direct solution], and that to even raise the issue was indecent. ...As oil ceases to be cheap and the world reserves arc toward depletion, we will indeed suddenly be left with an enormous surplus population... that the ecology of the earth will not support. No political program of birth control will avail. The people are already here. The journey back to non-oil population homeostasis will not be pretty. We will discover the hard way that population hypergrowth was simply a side effect of the oil age. It was [more of] a condition [without a remedy], not a problem with a [direct] solution. That is what happened, and we are stuck with it."

"It has been estimated that the world human population stood at about one billion around the early 1800s, which was roughly about when the industrial adventure began to gain traction. It has been inferred from this that a billion people is about the limit that the planet Earth can support when it is run on a nonindustrial basis. World population is now past six and a half billion, having more than doubled since my childhood in the 1950s. The mid-twentieth century was a time of rising anxiety over the “population explosion.” The marvelous technological victory over food shortages, including the “green revolution” in crop yields, accelerated that already robust leap in world population that had begun with modernity. Dramatic improvements in sanitation and medicine extended lives. Industry sopped up expanding populations and reassigned them from rural lands to work in the burgeoning cities. The perceived ability of the world to accommodate these newcomers and latecomers in a wholly new disposition of social and economic arrangements seemed [to] be the final nail in the coffin of Thomas Robert Malthus…"

"All we can say now is, that, even now, 600 persons could easily live on a square mile; and that … 1,000 human beings—not idlers—living on 1,000 acres could easily, without … overwork, obtain … a luxurious vegetable and animal food, as well as the flax, wool, silk and hides necessary for their clothing. As to what may be obtained under still more perfect methods—also known but not yet tested on a large scale—is better to abstain from any forecast: so unexpected are the recent achievements of intensive culture. We thus see that the over-population fallacy does not stand the very first attempt at submitting it to a closer examination."

"We have learned a lot in the 50 years since "" was published. We should not shy away from discussing what actions are ethically permissible to facilitate a stable level of population growth, nor should we leave this discussion in the hands of the affluent. The conversation about ethics, population, and reproduction needs to shift from the perspective of white donor countries to the places and people most affected by poverty, climate change and environmental degradation."

"Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess. What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and education of the billions who are its victims."