Exactly this, but it's also why, whilst we should all be conscious of what we're doing to the planet, I'm not so despondent about our future and population endlessly spiraling out of control. It's been shown that once a country achieves a GDP of somewhere around $6-7k they begin to take a bigger interest in issues like climate change, more efficient energy sources and population control more seriously (China is about there now; India, Indonesia, Thailand and other large population Asian countries are getting there pretty quickly). As a planet with finite resources in terms of food and energy we can support a global population of about 10-11 billion. If it's becoming such that once societies advance to a level of development we see in places like S Korea and Japan that population begins to balance out or even slightly decrease, is that such a bad thing?