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Comment by rocgf | Hacker News Reader

It is very hard to understand why your comment was downvoted this badly.

I thought everyone understands that the planet is overpopulated as it is and that bringing as many children into the world as possible is not a net positive.

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it's not overpopulated.

this is a myth that has been going on since the 1970s:

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/12/12/16766872/overpop...

700 million people in the world face food scarcity at any one time. The world is overpopulated and its resources strained by the existing 7.4 billion humans (CO2 budget, natural resources reserves, etc).

It seems like that’s artificially constrained food supply though. There’s plenty of land to grow crops on the planet. It’s not like there’s not enough seeds or dirt to grow food.

those are two unrelated ideas.

again, overpopulation is a myth. a convenient and lazy one. but still a myth.

there are too many resources on the web explaining this.

Practically speaking, we make enough food for all the humans on this planet, and we'll likely be able to until at least 10 billion people exist.

The reason that folks face food scarcity is a distribution problem, not a production problem. We don't do a good job at making sure people don't go hungry, even in the US.

https://www.nationalgeographic.org/photo/biodiv-clearcut/

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/06/phosphat...

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/sea-runni...

https://www.siwi.org/latest/the-worlds-natural-aquifers-at-r...

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/groundwat...

https://www.idtechex.com/en/research-article/the-meat-indust...

https://www.pnas.org/content/117/36/21994

More people than that are overweight. The total amount of food might be enough, but simply ill-distributed.

How many people are fat from having a calorie-rich but nutrient-poor diet?

We may produce enough calories in sugar, but stuffing the world with cheap junk food is not a solution. Total amount isn't a good metrics; total quality and availability would probably be better.

The earth is not overpopulated in the same sense that Covid is just a flu: people argue their position with anecdata instead of statistical trends.

> it's not overpopulated.

I'm sorry, but this is just a ridiculous statement to make, except maybe if our opinions on what overpopulation means are vastly different.

The author Lyman Stone writes mainly for IFS Institute for Family Studies, which is moderately to strong biased to the right according to https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/institute-for-family-studies/

He also writes for The Federalist, another biased publication: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-federalist/

If you look at the destruction of natural resources world-wide, you don't have to be an expert to see that the current resource usage is unsustainable. At the same time the rich countries are unwilling to give up their status. The trend is going in the wrong direction.

This is a super-anthropocentric perspective. If we could talk to the non-human inhabitants of the planet, they'd have much to say about the encroachment of humanity into every corner of their world and its unremittingly negative impact upon them.

My impression is that most people who talk about overpopulation are basing it on old trends before population growth rates dropped off so much.

It is a fact that we're currently using a large number of resources much faster than they replenish. That seems like a good criterion for calling the planet overpopulated.

One can of course argue that sufficient technology can curb our resource consumption without reducing the number of humans, but I find it a bit odd to use hypothetical technology deployment as an argument against the planet being beyond its sustainable carrying capacity today.

I think a lot of the disagreement in the comments here comes down to different ideas wrt the definition of overpopulation. When I talk about overpopulation, I talk about a human population that reaches the point where it's detrimental to quality of life for all beings on earth. Sure, we can sustain population growth for a long time by continuing to destroy more and more of our natural resources and wantonly disregarding the existence of all other life on this planet (and ultimately, our own), but can anyone who cares about the whole of the planet really look at that and consider it a net positive? In my mind, an anthropocentric perspective is as misguided as a purely misanthropic one, and is certainly more evidently virulent.

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