Environmental issues these days seem to be framed mostly in relation to climate change or the extinction of this or that cute "boutique species." Occasionally a more sophisticated environmentalist will try to steer the latter into an understanding of the need for biodiversity.
All well and good, but it seems there is not much talk these days about the 10-billion-pound elephant in the room: overpopulation.
Sure, global population is supposed to peak at about 10 billion by 2100 and then "level off" or decline, but getting to 10 billion may cause irreparable damage to the biosphere, even if there is a decline later.
We can pack in 20 billion if we all want to live like factory-farmed chickens, but the true long-term carrying capacity of the globe is probably closer to 2-4 billion. Which means we have already overshot by almost double.
Capitalists want larger populations so they can drive down labor costs, push up GDP, and exploit labor more easily, while theoretically making more money from a larger (if more impoverished) pool of consumers. Meanwhile, on the "postmodern left," people are squeamish about the issue because it carries the whiff of colonialism and/or racism ("too many brown people…"). But it doesn't have to: it can be argued that developed nations need to reduce population as much or even more than impoverished countries, because the consumption per capita is so much higher in the first world.
In the old days, lower population was always seen as a desirable goal by Marxists and socialists, whether it be China's one-child policy or Soviet efforts at birth control and female education/labor. They understood the importance of "quality over quantity" and were more attentive to the grim potentials of resource shortages, with massive famines and industrial output struggle in living memory.
Well, Zig Forums, why aren't you pushing this issue harder?
Focusing on 'overpopulation' deflects attention away from actually addressing the source of environmental problems, which is an economic system which requires perpetual growth and consumption in order to function. Resource depletion and pollution can only be addressed by abandoning more superfluous, energy-intensive economic activities (i.e. bitcoin, global shipping of plastic crap, etc.) and adopting a no-growth or low-growth economic system. A combination of low- and high-tech strategies can then be used to lower CO2 levels and clean up pollution, while efficiency gains from advancing technology are converted into leisure time for workers, rather than being reinvested into the system to consume and pollute more.
That being said, the gradual reduction of humans towards a stable, sustainable population should be a parallel component to such an economic transition. I would like to believe that it could be done entirely non-coercively, via incentives for adoption and childlessness, birth control, female education, etc.
Aaron Torres
This.
Nathan Fisher
This. Any person's needs could be met with vastly fewer resources if we stopped using a consumption-based system like capitalism. Capitalism requires us to keep buying/selling the stuff we use so businesses can have perpetual growth. A production-for-use system (socialism) means that everything is built to last a lifetime or several and once it's made you just have to maintain it. Nothing about several billion people explicitly requires that all of our stuff be disposable.
Going by all evidence population tends to shrink when standard of living rises. The population boom we're seeing right now is a temporary effect of rising standards of living and social customs re: family lagging by a generation or more.
Ryan Price
But what happens to all the people who work on the automobile industry and related chains when nobody is buying cars anymore? do they all just go unemployed?
But what happens when nobody is consuming anything else new anymore because they already have the thing and the thing lasts forever?
That's just too utopic and will never fly with humans. Everybody knows that you need to work in order to be worth the bread you eat.
Christian Allen
No, the value of the cars goes up because they'll last longer (assuming there even are cars in socialism lel). That's a bourgeois response. The whole point of reducing labor time is so people can do whatever they want with the time they no longer have to work to make society function. That's only a problem in a consumption based economy. The whole point is to not be that any more. People already don't need to work anywhere near how much we do now in order for our society to function. We have to create bullshit jobs in order to pay people money to buy things in order to be able to sell enough things. That's just baseless assertions.
John Bennett
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Benjamin Reyes
Pragmatic solutions to contextual problems are not the same thing as universal human truths.
Grayson Butler
All right them, so there's no jobs in socialism/communism and that won't be a problem. Yeah, I can totally see society working like that.
Asher Nelson
That's not what anybody was arguing. "We don't need to consume as many resources as we do" isn't the same as "no work has to be done at all."
