It's overloaded already, but within the next 50 years we'll see another 2.5 billion added to this train we call Earth

The tremendous increase in human population has caused us to pass our carrying capacity – the number of members of a species that can survive at replacement level in an ecosystem. How can we grow beyond what the earth provides without knowing it? Simply put, we are using energy from past sunlight (in the form of fossil fuels) to grow our food. We are living on borrowed time – or to be more honest about it, stolen time.

The "green revolution" – a misnomer that hides the destructive repercussions of modern agricultural practices – allowed us to harness dead sunlight in the bodies of a past epoch. We began to grow our food with petroleum. Greasy french fries would never have spread across the globe without the oil needed to grow them in large quantities. (It takes a lot of energy to produce the nitrogen fertilizer. Where the nitrogen goes is another problem altogether.)

With the unnatural ability to turn decayed flesh into calories, we have created a new problem that is too controversial even for many environmentalists to discuss. We are in the midst of a population explosion that threatens to wipe out human civilization. Am I being melodramatic when I use these metaphors? Not really. On the scale of deep time (that looks across thousands of generations), the unprecedented rise of human numbers is a shockwave that burdens all living systems in the world.

An important thing to keep in mind is that life exists in a delicate balance of dynamic equilibrium. Life thrives in the realm of just enough – too far from the optimal and things go terribly awry. This is true for temperature, pressure, and acidity. It is also true for rates of change. If your brain grows more quickly than the skull it resides in, there will be too much pressure and blood vessels will burst. By the time damage becomes evident, things have already gone too far. The same is true for the number of members in a group that is contained by the land that sustains it.

Balance is often maintained by predation. As the deer population grows, there will be abundant food for wolves. If no such predator is able to keep them in check, they will overgraze the land and starve – a natural buffer to the problem of too many.

This is not mere speculation. A real-world "experiment" on St Matthew Island was conducted inadvertently, as described by Lester Brown:

Ecologists are intimately familiar with the overshoot-and-collapse phenomenon. One of their favorite examples began in 1944, when the Coast Guard introduced 29 reindeer on remote St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea to serve as the backup food source for the 19 men operating a station there. After World War II ended a year later, the base was closed and the men left the island. When U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist David Kline visited St. Matthew in 1957, he discovered a thriving population of 1,350 reindeer feeding on the thick mat of lichen that covered the 332-square-kilometer (128-square-mile) island. In the absence of any predators, the population was exploding. By 1963, it had reached 6,000. He returned to St. Matthew in 1966 and discovered an island strewn with reindeer skeletons and not much lichen. Only 42 of the reindeer survived: 41 females and 1 not entirely healthy male. There were no fawns. By 1980 or so, the remaining reindeer had died off. - The Nature of the New World

Humans are a different kind of animal. We have the capacity for symbolic thought. We can study the patterns of the world and plan our actions to improve our lot in life. Does this mean we will find a way to feed the 9 billion mouths predicted by 2050? Not necessarily. You see, our imagination is not what has the final say. It is the land itself, where life and death are dealt by the realities of ecosystem health.

Instead, we are called upon to put our imaginations to the test. Can we envision a different relationship with the world? One that balances what we take with what we give. Right now we are living on stolen time. Every ounce of energy from days past is depleting our soils, draining our water supplies, and creating more mouths to feed. This is a different situation from that which our ancestors experienced in the past. If they overgrazed an area, they could move on. Now that the human footprint covers the entire globe, we don't have anywhere new that we can move to.

It doesn't have to be this way. Our generation can redefine the relationship between humans and the more-than-human world.

And we had better act soon. We are already dangerously close to the overshoot point. It is possible that we have past it already. This is a critical stage where we need to transition to a sustainable population level, while decreasing our theft of resources from future generations. Not an easy task, and certainly not one we'll accomplish if we follow the industry goal of continued fossil fuel extraction and unlimited economic growth.

So what can we do about it? The intuitive notion that birth control will solve the problem is ill-founded. Just look around the world and you'll see that the biggest growth rates occur in areas where people suffer extreme poverty. Population is not a problem of fertility so much as it is about mortality. The valid concern among the world's poor is that most of their children will not live to adulthood, resulting in an incentive to have more children.

Frances Moore Lappé, Joseph Collins, Peter Rosset, and Luis Esparza express this observation in their book World Hunger: 12 Myths, with the relevant chapter available here.

Faced with scarcity, poor families needed many children to help with work on the farm, and because of high infant-mortality rates, they needed many more pregnancies and births to achieve the necessary family size. - World Hunger: 12 Myths

They go on to identify the importance of empowerment for women:

Many women have little opportunity for pursuits outside the home, because of power relations internal to the family and/or in the larger society. Continued motherhood may then become their only "choice." - World Hunger: 12 Myths

We are not merely dealing with an environmental problem. This is an issue of human suffering and social justice. Inequitable distributions of resources, in a tragic twist of irony, are driving people to have more children. Scarcity breeds excess in this bizarre calculus. As prosperity increases, so will the ability for families to choose the number of children they want. Whereas, in the dire circumstances of extreme poverty, making more babies is seen as a need.

Passing out condoms and pills won't cut it. With systemic problems like these, a narrow focus on personal responsibility isn't enough. Only by making the world more fair for everyone and recognizing that we are all in this together can we begin to turn this trend around.

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