The almost insolvable problem we have is everyone 60 or younger grew up with throwaway consumerism as "normal". My parents generation didn't. They had a fraction of my generation's environmental impact without any efforts to environmentalism. Simply they expected to buy something once then repair it if need be and replace when broken beyond repair. Not when something a little better gets released.

For all the huge increase in general awareness of the environment, when in the 80s the environment was something of the fringe, we're destroying it at an ever increasing rate. I'm not optimistic.

[0] https://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/horseshoe-crabs-went-fertil...

When I read other comments about birds obscuring the sky, fishes you could caught by hand, etc. It seemed unreal, almost magical. A fairy tale on some Westeros-like world.

If we can use this narrative to astonish people, and make them get perspective on what should be, it can be a powerful message.

"Eat less meat", "recycle", "use less the car/plane" are not really sexy. They are constraints.

"Look how amazing things used to be before we did this", however, is much more inspirational.

I think it needs a multi-pronged approach. Inspiration is a great start, but it's fairly weak against a marketing machine spending billions inventing more nonexistent problems and needs.

We need to rediscover collective action, activism of the get off facebook and into the street to make someone's life difficult variety, regulation as a good thing (food safety laws, clean air acts, child labour laws etc), and stop pretending the market has the solution to everything.

That's a slightly challenging wishlist especially if we don't want to give up all the lifestyle in the process. :)

Where most people live, virtually everything is covered with concrete and whatever is left green is routinely sprayed with lots of chemicals.

It just happens we don't share it and we waste it.

I think energy, peace and hygiene are a better factor in baby booming. They contribute to a better food distribution as well.

But even then, people don't need that much food to be healthy. A regular human being can live happy with one meal a day. We are just used to more.

The population was also much lower in the past.

The problem is more about:

- war

- people not helping each others

- a small group of people keeping a lot of it for themself (royalty, rich cast, etc)

And of course now we face a novel problem: the fact our population is getting huge and want to eat meat 2 times a day.

Also, I feel that these appeals often suggest that we should be OK with letting some unspecified Other die for the cause of environmentalism when we would clearly not accept this for ourselves.

Who said anything about wealth? That sounds like a red herring to me. In any ecosystem, with any living organism, a population will increase until it reaches the limit of its food supply.

>Also, I feel that these appeals often suggest that we should be OK with letting some unspecified Other die for the cause of environmentalism when we would clearly not accept this for ourselves.

And I feel like your appeals are more interested in virtue signaling than actually having a meaningful discussion.

Say you have an island that has enough resources to feed 100 people. 30 settlers move there. In a few years, the population grows to 105. There isn't enough food. People die off and the population is down to 95. There's enough food to go around, so the next generation the population grows to 105 again. This process fluctuates indefinitely.

Then someone takes a boat out and discovers a nearby island. This has enough resources to feed another 100 people. There's enough food to go around, until the population reaches 205 people. Now there's not enough food again and people are starving. Repeat indefinitely until we run out of islands.

There is no solution to "solving hunger" that doesn't involve controlling birth rates. Anything else is just pushing the problem back. Nobody has to die. Simply making contraceptives as ubiquitous in third world countries as they are in developed countries would probably solve most of the problem.

You can see his very well made conference on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&feature=list_oth...

It's one of the reasons I'm very excited about vasalgel:

https://www.parsemus.org/projects/vasalgel/

This procedure has been tested for 10 years in India under the name of RISUG and has been quite successful up to now.

I really hope we can demonstrate it's efficient and safe in the US, as:

- the procedure it incredibly simple: a simple injection

- it's semi-permanent: up to 10 years with one injection

- it's supposedly reversible : back to fertility in 3 month after an injection of another product

- it's not hormone based. In fact it does not appear to affect the body outside of the injection area.

- it's on the male size. Now given than less males want children than females and that there are still many males having children despite not wanting them, I'm curious on the effect perfect male control can have. Not only on the population growth, but also on the quality of fatherhood. I just hope it won't make STD more common because people will avoid condoms.

Reversibility has been an issue to prove on rabbits for now. So the suspense is killing me :)

As for the food supply stuff: animal populations can be constrained by factors other than food supply, particular when we're talking about a population which is capable of reason. You yourself seem to acknowledge this when you propose offering condoms, which would be a nonsensical suggestion if you truly believed that the only thing affecting population size was food supply. Therefore, I do not believe it is necessary for the sake of the planet to deliberately allow people to die of starvation.

Empricially incorrect with humans, largely because human reproductive behavior isn't purely instinct driven and involves conscious choice based on lifestyle concerns, which is why natural population growth consistently declines with I creasing strength of social support systems. The distributional failures which are the only reason for world hunger despite far more than sufficient production to neat global needs also contributes to population growth by making children and family the social support structure in much of the world.

Solving world hunger means solving the distribution problems which allow hunger to exist, which means improving social safety nets around the world; stronger social safety nets are consistently associated with lower rates of natural population growth, so, no, solving world hunger doesn't mean causing a population boom, it means reducing global population growth.

It does mean a smaller share of the people who are born will live in misery and die young, but it also means fewer people will be born in the first place.

Debatable. In The Netherlands, except for professional cyclers people who drive bicycles generally don't wear helmets. If they'd do, they'd look like profs and then cars keep less distance, which is an increased danger. A cap and glasses works fine for me with regards to sun and getting things in my eyes (sand is still annoying at times), just don't drive with your mouth open.