In a recent op-ed by Michael Geruso and Dean Spears in The New York Times and picked up by The Salt Lake Tribune, “Don’t expect depopulation to solve our problems,” the authors contend that depopulation is an important issue. They note that population growth is slowing because individuals all over the world are choosing to have fewer children; however, they admit that it will be about 2080 before population “might” start to decline. They even admit that, “People cause today’s environmental problems.”
The authors argue that there have been improvements in some places in the quality of life. But the more people there are, the more difficult it is to make these improvements. They argue that “climate change requires that billions of people live differently. It does not require that billions of future people never live.” Good luck with that! Many people around the world want to live like us in the U.S., where we are about 6% of the world’s population and consume about 20% of the world’s resources, which by any measure is unsustainable.
Many researchers agree that humans are already in an “overreach” situation where we are consuming some resources faster than the Earth is producing them. Fishing is a good example. Many fisheries around the world are already beyond their sustainability levels. Also, our consumption is destroying the Earth’s ability to sustain a healthy environment. Climate change, the increasing acidity of the oceans, and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest are just some examples.
The big issue that the authors avoid is our natural environment — the animals and plants with which we share the Earth. The more people, the more of the Earth’s resources that humans consume, the less there is for the rest of the Earth’s inhabitants.
David Hart, Torrey