Evo said:
You don't seem to understand the problem of overpopulation. You seem to think it's a problem of people getting along with each other, that's not it at all. It's the destruction of the planet's ecosystems, it's polluted water, destruction of forests and wetlands, destruction of the ocean. It's about making the planet uninhabitable for most of it's creatures, including humans.
And you don't seem to be able to apply the distributive function of global human culture to local resource consumption and utilization.
When ecosystems become polluted and their resources farmed out of balance, when deforestation occurs, wetlands altered by water-flow pattern alterations, ocean pollution and overharvesting occurs, etc. it is due to human cultural activities at the local level.
I proceed from the assumption that it is possible for humans to engage in cultural practices that are sustainable. The issue is figuring out what sustainable cultural practices would be and how to organize human life in a way that results in the minimum amount of harm and damage while maximizing human happiness, which includes maximizing reproductive freedom.
Reproductive control and the Mathusian pessimism that drives it are, imo, a by-product of cultural mismanagement at the local, i.e. individual, level. I also believe that such pessimism develops as a result of tangible cultural experiences by individuals at the local level. If you lived on a land parcel, or in a community, which was sustainable in terms of its cultural activities and resource-usage, why wouldn't you exhibit a more positive vision of how to achieve sustainability?
If you were witness to an urban architecture that allows people to work and enjoy leisure without imported goods/resources, including fuel, why wouldn't you promote this culture as a means for others to live sustainably and self-govern their reproductive choices to fit within their economic lifestyle?
You seem to proceed from the assumption that there is no alternative except for a global high-consumerism middle-class to continue to grow and therefore the only means to limit ecosystem and resource pillaging is to limit the number of humans, period.
I, on the other hand, believe that consumerism can evolve to greater levels of resource-conservation through more sustainable forms of consumption and transportation. I believe that when people are locally responsible for their own agriculture and other resource-utilization, they are able to gage for themselves how many children they can economically sustain.
When people are self-sufficient at the local level, there is no reason for them not to spread their culture through migration and cultural exchange. Ultimately, the only thing that can be done for the people already living is to convert their culture into the most sustainable forms possible. Once that is achieved, resource pillaging will have reached a minimum.
Once resource conservation is maximized, it may still be the case that it will be possible to estimate limits of sustainable population growth. When local self-sufficiency is the economic means of resource-utilization, however, people will be able to see for themselves when their resources are in danger of unsustainability.
The problem with that is that as long as territorialism/regionalism promotes bordering of people and culture, those who develop the most sustainable cultures will be the ones who are able to reproduce the most and who suffer population problems. Meanwhile, those who waste resources because their regional territories are more vast will face less pressure to curb population, even while their inefficient resource-utilization practices reduce the overall availability of resources for the planetary population.
This is why it makes sense to focus on cultural reforms while allowing those who reform successfully to expand and migrate. Remember that culture does not just expand through having and socializing children. It also occurs through cultural exchanges among individuals as they come in contact with each other, either locally or through media.
While population growth may eventually be a determinant factor in resource and ecosystem depletion, at present culture is more the culprit, I believe. Look at it this way: rewind a few years to the expansion of the automotive, fuel, and road industries. Population was less and less dense, which allowed and maybe even encouraged the growth of sprawl culture. As a result, population growth was economically stimulated in that the means of consumption, jobs, etc. grew with the technology/culture.
Now it's easy to take this technology/culture for granted and blame population quantity for the problems, but in fact it was the same technological/cultural developments that promoted population growth that also increased resource and ecological depletion.
As technology/culture continues to evolve into more resource-efficient forms, both conservation will grow as well as the prospect of expanding population shrinking insofar as division of labor and industrial intensiveness will decrease.
Now, it may be the case that human labor will become a substitute for much labor that is currently mechanized. That is logical if resource-conservation is a goal, since it makes more sense to replace a tractor with 10-20 people than it does to curtail the human rights of those 10-20 people in order to divert resources to run a tractor for other people.
So while human population is increasing, machine population may decrease to make its resources available for human life. This does not mean that technological progress is fading away or reversing. It just means that technology is becoming smaller and more efficient. Information technology replaces atoms with bits, in the words of Nicolas Negropante, which can be translated as information technology distributing techniques and other informational means of efficiency that reduce the ratio of resource-use to marginal-utility.
Culture actually evolves in the direction of the being able to sustain more people with the same amount or less resources, but for that to occur people have to be open to transforming their lifestyles to fully utilize newer and/or more efficient technologies. As long as they resist, you end up with culture wars of who has the right/freedom to maintain less resource-efficient culture at whose expense.
