Overpopulation

At the core of most of the Earth's environmental problem is overpopulation. Without such a huge explosion in the world's population in the last 200 years, most of the thorny issues we are dealing with would have never happened--climate change, species collapse, much of our pollution, etc. Simply put, there are far too many people on the planet. Until we get population growth under control, we have little chance to battle climate change.

JMG pines that it is almost impossible to have a serious discussion of overpopulation. He also provides a series of thoughts on the issue from various writers.

China, western Europe, and Japan are on the right track toward controlling population, even if China's is compulsory and resented by large sections of the population. Soon some of these places may see negative population growth, a very good thing. But until the rest of the world gets on board, including the United States, we can do only a limited amount of solving environmental problems.

Of course, there are many factors that go into deciding whether one has children. I'm not going to make an argument here that it is immoral to have children. Not only would most of my friends denounce me, but it is too complex of a problem to make such an easy denunciation. However, I will go so far as to say that having more than 2 children is immoral. Replace your population if you want to. But adding more people to the Earth is both unnecessary and will contribute to the environmental collapse of the planet.

However, if we can reach overall world population sustainability, we have the potential to stablize the world's environments. Lots of people will bemoan population sustainability. People are already freaking out in Japan and Europe over their flat or negative growth rates--many business and government leaders cannot fathom a growing economy without a growing population. This could be a problem. I don't really know. But it is increasingly necessary to come up with a population solution, not nation by nation, but at the global level.