Overpopulation Is Not the Problem

I think they're looking over the social aspect of this. Areas with highest birthrates tend to be the most uneducated ones, and thus you will have a greater amount of people who will more likely make irresponsible decisions for the planet's sustainability. Look at how many people still don't believe in global warming, and how fiercely they're opposed to the government taking initiatives to solve these problems. Look at a list of countries by population growth rate, and look at a list of countries by how much they recycle -- you'll see a compelling correlation.

This is the most purblind, misguided editorial opinion I have read in weeks. It repeats an old saw often repeated by people who don't understand the Logistic function and its role is describing biological systems:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function

The Logistic function concisely describes the behavior of biological systems that don't have any control over their numbers, as humans most certainly do not.

At the left, the function's curve is nearly flat because there aren't enough living organisms to support a higher birth rate.

At the right, the functions's curve is nearly flat because mass starvation and death prevents a higher birth rate.

The Logistic function models a growing biological colony in a finite world, and it applies to any biological colony. For such a biological colony, eventually mass birth is balanced by mass death.

Does this model have any bearing on the human biological colony? Let me answer by saying as time passes, more and more accounts of mass death are met by less and less surprise or alarm among the world's population.

At Sandy Hook, a boy has a fight with his mother, so -- being a healthy young boy, possessed of normal instincts -- he kills her, then goes to a local school and kills as many people as he can possibly manage. The story makes national headlines for a few days, all those innocent children systematically killed by an amateur, acting on a whim. But that story evaporates, pushed out the public's consciousness by another story of mass death, and another.

By contrast, when the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped in March 1932, it made national headlines for years -- years -- until the perpetrator was apprehended, tried, and executed in 1936. It's the story of one family, one child, one murder. Today that story wouldn't be able to compete with the latest mass murder account. "Oh, Bashar Assad has killed 1,500 people in a nerve gas attack. Oh, well, they're not anyone I know personally. What else is in the news?"

The author of the linked editorial concludes his article by saying, "The only limits to creating a planet that future generations will be proud of are our imaginations and our social systems. In moving toward a better Anthropocene, the environment will be what we make it."

Both claims are likely, but with one important difference -- future populations will wonder what we were thinking, as we struggled to avoid considering the consequences of our own actions. As to "the environment will be what we make it", that is certainly true -- we will gradually tolerate more and more mass death, a process that has already begun.

At the next Sandy Hook mass killing, people will say, "Hey, what can you do? Boys will be boys. But this can't be allowed to stand in the way of progress."

This strikes me as a rare case in which the article itself contains (the academic equivalent of) middlebrow dismissal.

> While I'm all for keeping resource-consumption in check and keeping sustainability in mind, I don't like what people say about overpopulatiion.

That's your argument? That you don'e like it? I don't like it either, but mass death is how nature deals with species who exceed the carrying capacity of their environments.

> Sometimes I would hear people hoping that population numbers would decrease by natural catastrophies or diseases.

People don't hope for that, but they expect it as a natural consequence of biological growth. And they're right. The evidence is clear -- eventually mass birth is balanced by mass death. We're already seeing the first stages.

> Good to hear that I'm not the only one with this opinion.

Oh, you aren't the only one, not by any means. Most people think there's no reason to think about this. Natural selection efficiently chooses those who don't believe it's worth thinking about, and over time they become the entire surviving population -- people who accept mass death as a practical regulatory mechanism.

More here: http://arachnoid.com/evolution

Pretty sure if the baby of a famous couple was kidnapped today, it would make headlines, and if there were ongoing elements it would be a recurring story for years. And random violent acts do often lead to reform. At the same time, evidence shows better status and education yields fewer births. You take your gloomy point too far.