Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

We can dance around it all we want, but we will always arrive at human overpopulation contributing to all our environmental problems. We can fool ourselves that lowering birth rates mean lowering population. We can fool ourselves that stabilizing the population hides that we are using more than the Earth can sustain, which will lead to population collapse. We can fool ourselves that human nature requires growth yet many civilizations have stabilized populations for centuries and nations like Thailand went from 7 children per couple to under 2 in a few years purely voluntary (think the opposite of the One Child Policy, no forced abortions or sterilizations). We can fool oursleves that efficiency will lower our waste to sustainable levels.

We can fool ourselves that rich nations won't feel it as much, but it will hit us just as much eventually.

This community is so quick to split atoms, fuse atoms, and rocket to Mars. If we can do those things, we can globally provide the contraception and education that leads to 1.5 children per couple for a few generations, which will bring our population to sustainable.

Current predictions have population peaking at 10-11 billion humans worldwide. That's a level of population we could sustain with our current technology. Most "first world" nations have a birthrate under the replacement rate, with population numbers only being held up by immigration.

The problem is that we want more than we can have, and we fail to establish clear incentives to limit ourselves. We aren't overfishing the oceans because we have to have that much fish to survive, we overfish the oceans because people love to eat fish.

Interestingly, 30 year old predictions put that number at ~9 billion.

> We can fool ourselves that lowering birth rates mean lowering population.

Could you explain why this is not the case?

In less developed societies, most people end up dying before adulthood. As modernization reaches these places, more of their children survive.

If each woman previously had five children, but only one survived, you're going to have less overall population than if she had two children, and they both survive.

Imagine if the human population halved over night. Would trawlers suddenly stop? Would the price at fish markets be so low that boats would stop going to sea? I doubt it somehow. The meat would still be sufficiently cheap and/or desirable.

Marine mammals die due to an inability and unwillingness to regulate fishing.

Over-population is one big elephant in the room. The other one is disproportionate and ridiculously unbalanced consumption and wealth distribution. You can never succeed in getting very poor people to care about their numbers or about the Earth.

Sorry, but we're talking about whales and dolphins here.

Poor people don't meaningfully contribute to the ritual overfishing of the oceans. They don't cause massive oil spills. The poor don't tend to operate the kinds of active sonar that confuses cetacean navigation. Those are decisions made by people with capital.

I'm replying to the parent just above my comment who said overpopulation is the primary threat.

In this case it was a engineers team that just did not cared to include a safe corridor for big fauna.

It is easy to try to blame a problem caused by people consuming on the people that own the means of harvesting. The demand for harvesting animals from the commons (i.e. seas) or mining oil exists regardless of who owns it. Someone else will step in to provide the food and the energy. The problem remains demand, and regardless of economic status, people contribute to that. The whale in the room isn't the whale. It's the low cost of harvesting fish, or pumping oil compared to the alternatives.

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