karachi

Karachi, Pakistan, pop. 25.1 million as of 2016 (Wiki, 'List of Metropolitan Areas by Population)

.

mexico city

Mexico City. As of 2014, the population of Greater Mexico City was 25.4 million (Wikipedia), but who's counting?  You're telling me this is normal?

survive and reproduce

Now there is some study claiming that the best thing people can do for the enviroment is not to have children:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children

No, it depends who the people are. The kind of people who care about the environment are precisely the people who should be reproducing-- the intelligent, educated people, rather than the religious fanatics and the welfare idiots. We are in a demographic race with those two groups, and it is a race we are losing.

authoritarianism

Given the direct connection between overpopulation and climate change (and environmental degradation in general), I'm beginning to think that some kind of authoritarian regime might be required to bring about the necessary policy changes. Certainly Trump's withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Accord indicates that a democratic system may not be up to the task-- at least not our democratic system.

telling it like it is

Finally, a world leader with some guts.

Macron says Africa’s main problem is ‘7-8 children per woman,’ social media erupts

https://www.rt.com/news/395996-macron-africa-children-main-problem/

the woodstove test

Throughout this discussion, I take it as a given that we want a world in which the standard of living is that of middle-class people in the ‘advanced’ countries. In other words, most people will be polluting a lot more than people in indigenous cultures. Therefore, we’ll need to have a lot fewer people than we have now. My guess is that this ultimate human population would be only a fraction of what it is now, maybe a quarter or a third; so we’re talking about 2-3 billion people.

It’s been estimated that for everybody on Earth to have a sustainable American-style standard of living would require the resources of four or five planet Earths (or two or three Earths for a similar European standard). [verify] Thus, if we want to extend that standard of living to all of humanity, we’ll need far fewer people on this planet than we have now.

It would be wrong to try to set a specific target like this, though. The main point is that we should have a population low enough to sustain a population that pollutes at first-world levels. We should always be seeking ways to pollute less, of course, but not by lowering our standard of living.

I have a personal rule of thumb on this: I’d like to be able to use a woodstove to heat my house. Although it should be as efficient and ‘clean’ as possible, any woodstove is going to produce more carbon emissions than heating with solar power or even natural gas. It would be nice, though, to live on a planet with a population low enough that I could use a woodstove without feeling guilty about it. (And, of course, there’s always the possibility of planting enough trees or buying carbon offsets to assuage my guilt.)

cities

Let’s face it, our cities are getting ridiculous. They’re way too expensive to live in and too hard to get around in. Places like New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong have become so expensive that middle-class people are either forced into tiny apartments or into outlying districts. Only the truly rich can afford to live well in Manhattan or central London. In the nineteenth century, a successful middle-class businessman or professional could raise a family in one of the classic, capacious three-story townhouses of that era. The few remaining domiciles of that sort, in these areas, are now exclusively the domain of the rich. We need to get back to a rational population level in which normal middle-class people can raise their families in this kind of space and amenity.

The so-called ‘megacities’ of the developing world are of course much worse. As people find it harder and harder to eke out a living in the overpopulated countrysides, they flock to these much more densely populated agglomerations of 15-20 million or more people. Life in these places is almost unimaginable to Westerners. In the first place, urban services that we take for granted—water and sewer, trash pickup, public transportation—range from the totally inadequate to the nonexistent. Places like Mexico City, Lagos, Cairo, Karachi makes Dickensian London seem like an urban paradise.

Another result of such concentrated population is a breakdown of social order. As legitimate employment is hard to find, criminal gangs multiply and prey on the general population. And yet for many people this urban life seems preferable to their former miserable, poverty-stricken lives. It’s just an indication of how unacceptable life in those overpopulated rural areas has become.

True, urban life has appeals of its own—the prospect of education for children, the hope for more lucrative employments, etc. The reality, however, is often far worse—and yet they keep coming.

at the national level

At the national level, governments can be harder and more draconian than they could be at either the local or planetary level. That’s because they’re dealing with ‘their’ people, but more at arm’s length than the local level. They can afford to be a little harsher with them—for the good of the nation, of course. Thus, while local governments may set the number of children people may have, the national government would determine what penalties citizens would incur for violating these norms. And while such penalties would probably not be criminal in nature, there could be substantial civil penalties in the nature of fines, time spent in community service, prohibition from serving in elective office, etc. The children themselves might be removed to foster care.

It is also at the national level that government has a perfect right to prevent the influx of foreign migrants into the home country. Border checks, visas, even the construction of physical barriers: All these are legitimate methods for controlling immigration—which is to say, controlling population. They are also, conversely, ways of preventing other countries from trying to irresponsibly export their surplus population. Thus they also serve to encourage other countries to control their own populations.

way too many people

Isn’t it obvious? Look around you. Isn’t it obvious there are way too many people in your neighborhood, your town, your region, your country, and on your planet?

Or perhaps you just need a little more convincing. If you live in a large city, have you noticed that, at certain times of day, the auto traffic becomes simply intolerable—and there really is no way to fix it? You can’t add enough new lanes or divert enough traffic to public transportation, or anything, really. There are simply too many people moving around in too small a space.

Or perhaps you’re a farmer in a developing country. Have you noticed that if you divide the family plot among the children, none of them will have enough land to feed themselves? So perhaps some of them move to cities where there is not enough work but too much overcrowding, filth, and crime. People’s lives become ever more desperate.

Some of these desperate people move on even farther, to other countries, where they may be met with chilly reactions, to say the least. These countries may try to prevent the intrusion of economic migrants through various means, including physical barriers and even walls. The people of these host countries may feel they already have enough people and in any case don’t want to let in people who are so different in appearance, custom, religion, and mental outlook. And why should they? These economic migrants are merely trying to transfer the problem of overpopulation from their home countries to their new host countries. This movement of economic migrants from more overpopulated areas to less overpopulated areas is like a cancer metastasizing. The problem is not going away, it’s simply spreading.

In addition, there’s the problem of a population expanding outward to take up more adjoining land. This is the phenomenon of suburbanization in the United States. When this happens, the new form of the land use—human habitation—takes over from the old form. In the U.S., that may mean gobbling up valuable farmland. In a place like Africa, it can mean encroaching on the habitat of some of that continent’s most iconic wildlife. Thus, it’s estimated that giraffes may go extinct because so much of their habitat is being used for human habitation and other activities. For the same reasons, elephants increasingly come into contact with human beings and are seen as nuisances and predators. In previous times they could go about their business unimpeded, avoiding human contact altogether. This is no longer possible.

One other thing you may have noticed is a general decline in civility. Rudeness is becoming almost the standard way of dealing with other people, and the use of profanity has become much more prevalent in daily discourse. Why is this?

I think at least some of this is caused by the subconscious realization that, as a result of overpopulation, we’re fighting over ever scarcer resources. We seem to be moving into an ‘every-man-for-himself’ situation. I’ve even heard it suggested that such a horrendous event as the Rwanda genocide may have had its genesis in overpopulation. Rwanda is one of the most densely populated countries on this planet. In a country whose economy is based on subsistence agriculture, you can plot on a graph how many people it can support per hectare. If the population gets above that number—and in Rwanda it undoubtedly was—something’s got to give. This is the point at which simmering ethnic tensions can boil over into war and genocide.

Then there’s the question of scarcity. It should bother people, for instance, that we are so obsessed with providing oil for our teeming billions that we’re drilling for it in some of the most inhospitable places on earth—above the Arctic Circle and thousands of feet beneath the sea.

Food is another example. Even now this planet is not providing enough food to provide an adequate diet for all seven billion of us. As arable land gets gobbled up by residential development, the situation only gets worse. At the same time, various fisheries are being exploited almost to the point of extinction. Minerals needed for our high tech society—iron, copper, rare earth minerals for our smartphones—become ever scarcer and more expensive. The list goes on.