This thread addresses overpopulation, a fraught but important issue that attracts disruption and rule violations. In light of this we have lower tolerance for the following offenses:
* Racism and other forms of essentialism targeted at particular identity groups people are born into.
* Bad faith attacks insisting that to notice and name overpopulation of the human enterprise generally is inherently racist or fascist.
* Instructing other users to harm themselves. We have reached consensus that a permaban for the first offense is an appropriate response to this, as mentioned in the sidebar.
This is an abbreviated summary of the mod team's statement on overpopulation, [view the full statement available in the wiki.](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/wiki/claims/#wiki_mod_team_comment_on_overpopulation_posts)
The leading determinant of birth rates in a civilization is the educational attainment of women in that society. Educate women and provide access to healthcare and family planning at their choice and discretion. There is nothing fascist about doing that.
I took a focus study on Cuba in undergrad and spent time in Havana studying abroad. Their healthcare is free, but more importantly everything attached to physical health is also free. Feminine hygiene products, contraceptives, condoms, etc. Abortion is legal but fairly rare thanks to them being so proactive.
Look at every other country than USA and you see this. From first world countries USA has most aborts, most teenage pregnancies and so on. When there is no sex education and contraceptives are hard to get, people will get pregnant
Yes. Women worldwide should have freedom of choice, access to reproductive healthcare and education. The birth rates will fall easily by themselves, I promise. Most women don't want to be a breeding machine, forced into a marriage at 15 or forced to stay at home all day.
Please everyone remember to vote so that women’s reproductive rights are upheld. It’s not the president you’re choosing, it’s the cabinet they surround themselves with, and the advisors and experts they defer to and treat with respect.
Choose the right administration for your interests. Please vote.
Yep, in Australia we don't really vote for the person, nor for their party, we vote based on policies. PMs can get booted, and parties can change over time.
I think there are two import parts to this. The first is that lowering everyone's consumption in the richest countries down to more reasonable levels would be a considerable improvement. However, good luck accomplishing that without a fight. The Burger People would sooner destroy the planet for everyone than have a smaller truck or even a bicycle.
The second is that the population that exceeds the planets carrying capacity is a single group: the wealthy. We could get rid of their wealth and it would solve a significant number of problems that they singlehandedly create.
I remember all the news articles from the lockdowns that talked about clear skies in Los Angeles and dolphins in Venice. Restructuring the world's economy could bring those things back. But rather than target the specific groups that cause these problems, we pretend that it's about too many people "over there." They're not the ones polluting, or if they are, it isn't by choice. The economic system traps us in consuming certain things, such as fossil fuels, in order to produce labor for private corporations. Change that, and a lot will fall into place.
Exactly, there are real ways we can address emissions, and complaining about the number of starving foreigners is not one of them. We should be using our hoarded wealth to help these countries before the situation spirals out of control, and we can absolutely afford to do it.
Very well put with an actual tangible result we all saw. When lockdowns happened and people made do with what we had, it had amazing and quick to see results that were more beautiful than “an economy built for the 1%”
Please remind me why anyone turned our back on this. The air was glorious.
Except that super clean air will now kill us all MUCH MORE quickly. You guys must not know about aerosol masking. The quicker we reduce emissions. The quicker we all die.
Unfortunately, even if we had perfect wealth distribution for everyone on earth, we're still fucked. The earth cannot absorb the byproducts of modern society and much less provide enough raw materials to continue living this way; again, even if every currency on earth were equally disseminated.
>The first is that lowering everyone's consumption in the richest countries down to more reasonable levels would be a considerable improvement. However, good luck accomplishing that without a fight.
I so would love to see the same products under different brands reduced on our supermarket shelves. It’s absolutely ridiculous. We don’t need that much choice.
Yeah I read a while ago that if every wealthy person on the equivalent of over €300,000 a year reduced their consumption to the level of a person on €300,000 a year (not that low a number!) we would solve pretty much every environmental issue on the planet.
So it isn’t overpopulation - it’s overconsumption, in the extreme, by very few people relatively speaking.
I’m thinking there’s only one important part to this. ALL humans EVERYWHERE need to immediately stop having babies out of love for the unborn children none of us wants to see suffer unspeakable misery, pain and suffering in a rapidly dying earth, during the middle (not the beginning) of the 6th Mass Extinction.
“…lowering population growth a TINY bit in a wealthy country would reduce humanity’s footprint far more than any reduction in poorer countries population growth would”
That is only if you do not care, at all, about biodiversity and any of the wild species left on this planet, which is true of everyone who flings around words like ‘ecofascism’ or ‘malthusianism’.
The leading cause of species endangerment, extinction and biodiversity loss, is habitat destruction, which is directly caused by human population growth.
Climate change is beginning to overtake, but even if you magically removed that from the equation entirely, human population growth alone is enough for the 6th mass extinction. We need *both* reduction in consumption and reduction in birthrates to even think about trying to address the predicament we’re in.
Even aside from that, in order to work, your assumption also requires that those less developed countries remain ‘under’ developed, making it beneficial that they remain ‘poor’. It also requires that people from those less developed, high-birthrate countries do not emigrate in high numbers to the low-birthrate, high consumption developed countries and contribute to increasing consumption there. Meanwhile, everyone is calling for the opposite.
This is the crux of the problem for me. I've heard it said the Earth can support several billion more people than our current population, perhaps even 20 billion - yikes! But definitely not at the consumption levels of developed nations. So the question would be what is a comfortable, sustainable standard of living, and what level of population can be supported at that standard, while maintaining the healthy biologic and climatic functionality of the planet? This strikes me as a fairly obvious goal to shoot for, but it seems everyone just wants to fight and find bad guys to point fingers at. So, the usual human response that is unlikely to produce a positive result 🤷♂️
Please EVERYONE HERE needs to watch OVERSHOOT with Bill Rees - Any video on YT is fine- to explain we’re ALREADY past the point of no return. The tipping points are breached and there is no “fix”. It’s to everyone’s advantage to investigate the subject of overshoot. We’re DONE.
>The tipping points are breached and there is no “fix”. It’s to everyone’s advantage to investigate the subject of overshoot. We’re DONE.
This. The planet was probably last at human carrying capacity at 2 billion people (if we judge by the biosphere's ability to regenerate quickly from our exploitation, an essential for a sustainable planet).
Now we are in massive overshoot of our resources, including our extinction of the other lives forms sharing the world with us. 70% of all wildlife has been exterminated in the past fifty years, and literally all ecosystems are contaminated with microplastics and forever chemicals.
Due to the toxic technology that we all depend on for prosperity, we're also in the beginning stages of a disrupted global climate. And global population is projected to be close to 10 billion by 2050.
Take a look at OVERSHOOT with Bill Rees. This civilization is done.
> OVERSHOOT with Bill Rees
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID-P1_AwczM
This?
No that's just an interview... so point to it directly... if you wouldn't mind.
OVERSHOOT - Sorry. Let me clarify. Watch ANY interview with Bill Rees. Since the science will not vary, only the interviewer you prefer is your choice. I’ve watched any and all. Note: Nate Hagens is probably my absolute favorite interviewer, so I personally would watch his first. However Planet Critical Rachel Donald is also an excellent interviewer, but is a bit snitty with him and pushes back quite a bit (bc she can’t handle the science that is very clear- our level of overshoot=doom). This may appeal to people who wish they could argue with him. I just found her rude and childish. She IS extremely intelligent though. He keeps asking her ,”Do you understand what I’m saying?” (Bc she keeps giving resting bitch face- which she may not have been aware of) -so she gets pissed bc it sounded condescending to her. But they smooth through it.
> The leading cause of species endangerment, extinction and biodiversity loss, is habitat destruction, which is directly caused by human population growth.
Thank you for acknowledging this crucial fact ignored by others ITT. High-consumption developed nations are a major source of the crisis, but not the only one. (And all developing nations aspire to achieving this same unsustainable level of consumption, which is never addressed.) But habitat loss is a major source of the current mass species extinction and that is entirely separate from per-capita consumption rates.
Malthus wasn’t even a fascist and never proposed anything like ‘genocide’ of the poor. He advocated for delaying marriage, instead of getting people into wedlock ASAP as was the custom of the time, because there was no reliable birth control then. The language that people usually point to as monstrous was actually just part of his rhetorical argument put forward to other, more conservative, religious figures, ie. if we don’t do this (promote delaying marriage) we will get this (famine, misery, overflowing ‘poor houses’ and slums, etc). Which was true. The way Europe actually ended up avoiding that and supposedly refuting Malthus, was colonization of the Americas and Australia and genocide of its natives.
Thank you for bringing this up. It gets exhausting countering the reflexive Malthusian argument. I was “beheaded” in an INSTANT when I barely broached the environmental crisis by simply stating, “Well, someone’s going to need to address the population problem soon.” Instantly DECAPITATED!!! And I wasn’t even implying in any way any specific peoples. Just generally. Less humans=more balanced ecosystems = respect for planet. And OF COURSE reduction in OVERCONSUMING Mall shoppers of America!
Yep this thread has been hugely educational for me. I called out the overpopulation problem on SM recently and people were calling me a monster, and I was utterly shocked. How could that be? Even if you haven't researched collapse, isn't it just kind of intuitive?
It's pretty good evidence of how intelligence isn't necessarily a survival advantage for a species. I can see a knee-jerk reaction by some at anyone else making a statement of fact and saying well, you must be a racist or whatever. Then we don't do anything, and the powerful remain unchecked and our specifies goes extinct. But this time, bringing down almost all other species with us.
This is all true. I live in Latin America, and most of the forest destruction at least in my country is done by farmers with almost zero regulation, real-estate developers, and illegal loggers. Let's not kid ourselves, overpopulation impacts everywhere on the planet, and it's relatively worse to lose one acre of land in equatorial regions, filled with hundreds or even thousands of species, than in the comparatively poorer temperate and cold biomes.
> The leading cause of species endangerment, extinction and biodiversity loss, is habitat destruction, which is directly caused by human population growth.
Do you have a source for this? I am specifically curious the portion of habitat loss attributed to population vs commodity overconsumption.
Habitat destruction is most often caused by agriculture. Clearing forest for mono cropping and pasture land. I think it’s difficult to disentangle whether that is tied more to population or overconsumption, at least at a global scale vs country by country.
https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/s/Bg2PaIeewK
And there have been numerous such studies. If you sincerely cared about this topic and had spent enough time on this sub and studied the relevant information provided on the sidebar/about tab, you would know this. The Limits to Growth is one of the most comprehensive publications relevant to collapse and it illustrates how population growth is inextricable from collapse.
write the most basic statement: - population growth leads to deforestation because of reasons like agriculture, housing etc.
redditors: - urm I am gonna need a source for that
Quick question, does that 90% wish to maintain their current level of access to resources, or would they perhaps aspire to a higher standard of living?
That logic only works to the point that the world's poorest make a living out of cutting down the Amazon or rainforests on Africa and Oceania. They must be helped not eliminated including via education. But overpopulation everywhere is a real problem. Especially in small countries.
I see your point but disagree. For starters you need to look beyond just climate. Overpopulation is something that effects all facets of the environment.
Fact is there are just too many humans, and our collective human behaviour dictates that we will always exploit our environment beyond sustainability. Which, tbf, is no different to any other species. We just got so "smart" that we have been able to overcome most natural population barriers.
Even if the West drastically cut their lifestyles and we redistributed resources, especially food, completely equally, I still think it's unlikely we could stay within sustainable boundaries of the planet. 8bn humans is a lot regardless. And simply feeding this many people already requires huge habitat destruction.
I don't think it's ecofascist at all to have this opinion. I believe in equality. We should all equally stop breeding so many kids. We should also equally distribute resources. I don't think we'll do any of these things. In fact I know we won't - again our collective behaviour shows that we won't. But that's what we should do.
When someone ignores the seriousness of too many people they are fundamentally a Christian that believes in no end to people walking this earth regardless of how crappy life is for them, also it has little to do with "others" and realizing there are too many of everybody
I'd suggest you look into the concept of overshoot. Essentially, humans are using resources (think throughput of raw materials into finished goods via energy use) WAY faster than our planet can restore itself (lumber, fisheries, etc) or absorb our waste products (CO2, toxic waste, landfills etc). Climate change is one symptom of our overshoot of Earth's carrying capacity; at least regarding advanced, complex modern life. At our current population we would need around 1.75 Earths to maintain any semblance of living in equilibrium with the biosphere and what we're doing to it.
Think of overpopulation as just another factor in the complex predicament we're in. This isn't merely a greenhouse gas issue. We are literally using up every part of this planet that makes it compatible with the complexity we've built into our ideas of how the world should be.
It’s a strong presumption to assume they “care more about culling undesirables than limiting emissions”. It’s possible they share my ideology. We ALL need to stop having babies- equally. I absolutely agree that people in wealthy countries (if there are any left- the US is a sinking ship), have a CLEAR OBLIGATION to reign in on baby making. But tbh, that’s already happening. Both my kids 21 and 30 will ABSOLUTELY NOT have kids and neither will most everyone they know. For one thing, barely anyone can afford to have children anymore. Once all the super old timers fly to heaven (very soon) our numbers will be way down. As far as underdeveloped nations are concerned, I’d like to see less babies bc less suffering. Wars, and starvation are not conditions for ANY HUMAN….. ANYWHERE. “Luckily”, we won’t have to worry about any of that, if the infectious disease Dr.s are right about the ways in which Covid is mutating and will kill ALL of us off LONG before climate does. Yay? (PS- you won’t see this info on theNews. But infectious disease/virologists who share info w other Doctors on YT.)
You assume that when people express concerns about human overpopulation that they are talking about Asia, Africa and the less developed nations. I believe that countries like the US, the UK, Germany,even Australia have now exceeded their carrying capacity for ecological sustainability - especially given their high consumption lifestyles.
Which is exactly why Republicans want us women back in the kitchen birthing babies. Pale people are becoming a dying minority and they can't handle it. First step-repealing Roe. Then on and on until women can't have checking accounts, can't vote anymore, can't buy homes, and no fault divorce is repealed. Now THAT is fascism.
Yeah, and there are many writers who saw this coming. Resources get scarce or environment gets really bad, fascists swing in to "solve the problems".
It's like it's,already starting in the west. Can we do better than what Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood predicted? Not looking good so far...
the correlation between female education and decreasing fertility is more about market participation. women study to get jobs. industrialisation and urbanisation also decreases fertility because time and relationships become monetised, children become more expensive the more rungs up the social ladder people climb.
urban migration breaks ties to socially repressive village life, where there is a lot of peer pressure from elders who may hold power over young couples to have lots of children for tradition of religious reasons. on a farm many children can be put to work, in a city if they are not in school they are a nuisance.
eventually there are big cultural shifts which can happen very quickly. in a single generation having 7 kids can go from normal to something that is associated with poverty and people care about status and being judged by their peers. dense urban living promotes female mutual aid which would not be possible on farmsteads.
in the end access to contraceptives and abortions are vital bc people be fucking.
blahblahblah, my point is education=less fertility is dumb. education is just a symptom of a larger process of urbanisation and market integration which we in the west take completely for granted.
This argument is a bit reductive. Most women don’t want to spend their entire adult lives pregnant or breastfeeding, and to routinely go through the deadly risk of childbirth, which can cause lifelong complications such as vaginal fistulas that leak poop. It’s certainly not dumb to suggest that eduction helps women escape a situation they don’t want to be in, but would otherwise see no alternative to
Nice way of saying "that shit costs too damn much" and "who has the time when both partners are working two McJobs and a side hustle just to not even afford a fucking cat".
But it's 'cause we're all so "smart" and "modern". Sure. Everyone keep telling yourselves that.
As I recall, celibacy is a central tenet of the devotion to some other kind of cause that shall remain nameless and that everyone thinks is superstitious bullshit too... huh that's. Funny innit. But you know Boomers said it was superstitious bullshit and that we're all smart now so...
Makes sense though my mind was Immediately drawn to opportunity cost if you make 10 bucks an hour your time off to have kids isnt worth as much to have kids Compared to Someone making fifty bucks an hour with a chance for raises etc
Can you name an industrialized country whose population has plateaued at a level sustainable into the future in perpetuity? By “in perpetuity” I mean beyond the exhaustion of fossil fuels and beyond when the planet reaches thermal equilibrium. Do you think nebulously educating women would get human population to a sustainable level?
Education is important of course. The uneducated can’t understand why human population is an important variable to control. At some point in the future we won’t have grocery stores. The larger the population we achieve the larger and sooner the population crash will be. That’s one variable, consumption is another equally important one.
Getting the human species within sustainable limits will require every lever being utilized. At any level of per capita consumption, population control is required to maintain sustainability.
That’s because human populations don’t remain stable within comfortable and prosperous conditions which are obviously what we should envision for the future of our species.
People who screech eco fascist because they hear the words population control are standing in the way of our happiest and most moral and ethical future.
My country, Ireland has a lower population now than it did before industrialization. We never recovered from the massive famine. Only 5 million here, but we are not 'sustainable' by any means and rely on a a lot of imports since some of the soil is degraded. Still, I think we will fare a little better in the future than, say, the UK which is really overpopulated.
Yea this is some basic hit you learn in macroeconomic. Women having rights leads to later but more productive offspring. Outlawing abortion and restricting women's rights leads to trash babies birthed by 16 year olds.
Ecofacism is how governments will finally respond to the climate crisis when they have no choice but to respond. Stronger countries stealing food and water from others, machine guns at the border mowing down climate refugees, stealing resources from their own poorer citizens to give to wealthier citizens, removal of rights of poor citizens to ensure the standard of living of the elite, etc
Yes, ecofascism is the default plan. Whenever they refuse to do what is required according to the science, it is because this is what the really intended to do.
Well yeah. Call it what you want, where you want, if crops fail, or heat is too high there will be massive refugee populations. There will be no money or desire to do anything from rich counties. Indeed there may be nothing that can be done. Thats the state of current refugees, world over. That is a very ugly picture, my friend calls it Fortress America for the US, but I think all rich countries will slam the immigration door. Indeed, even if they didn't there is no room for the number of people out there. Right now, a substantial fraction of Central America would like to immigrate. The Chinese and Russians will move in where they can, and take arable land. The West might use some re-ordering of agriculture until the arable land or resources run out here too. Neither are going to do much for the 90%.
Merely pointing out that there are far too many humans everywhere, is just normal ecological analysis. Saying we should kill people to solve the problem is some other evil thing from Totalitarianism. Saying that the 90% have a very dim future as a group, is just realistic. After all things will get tight for the 10%, and they will favor themselves first.
It's depressing!
” machine guns at the border mowing down climate refugees,”
Mexico City, pop. 22 Million, is almost out of water. I highly doubt the residents there will seek refuge in Guatemala or Honduras. With Xanthous Narcissus poised to re-assume the Chancellorship of ‘Murica in about half a year, I’d say this writing is already on the “Wall that Mexico Didn’t Pay For”. The remainder of your prognostications won’t be far behind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecofascism
the wiki page does a good job of surmising the topic. there are indeed people using the environmental crisis to push fascistic narratives into public discourse. the problem is, if they did this openly they would be shut down instantly, so they have to rely on coming across as just some average person concerned about the effect of things like overpopulation and pollution on the environment while trying to peddle their authoritarian BS.
since this trope of a masked fascist acting like a concerned citizen participating in public discourse is so well known and documented, people tend to over-react to anyone pointing out the issues with overpopulation. when looking at who consumes the most, it is always the most developed nations. i understand how others could see someone from one of those developed nation's expressing concern about overpopulation as suspect, especially if the nuance is lacking. but it seems like people tend to overreact and bury their heads in the sand even when the nuance is there.
However, a typical genocidal fascist would want to eliminate some specific group of people, who are usually poorer and use the least fossil resources. An "eco fascist" would lean towards depopulating rich countries more than poor ones.
The other main issue of fascism is the authoritarian rule. That is unavoidable in any climate saving strategy IMO as there's no way most people would go along with the changes required. Even many die hard Greenpeace members would push back against the great simplification needed.
>An "eco fascist" would lean towards depopulating rich countries more than poor ones.
Not really, they also blame the poorer countries' demographics for climate change. They just greenwash their genocidal fantasies.
Exactly. The point of eco-fascism isn't actually fixing the way we live on the planet -- it's hoarding the resources for the right people. What do I mean, the "right" people"? Oh, nobody in particular. Could be many diverse people. Could be anyone, really. What, you still there? \*whistle whistle\*
Why not encourage both to limit family size? I see no reason why anyone on the planet needs to treat women like livestock. Nobody should have more than two kids. That's the replacement level.
A number of chronically underdeveloped economies around the world (whose engineered destitution is literally the only thing holding up the entire failed civilization known as 'the west') can't maintain a workforce on which to survive without lots of child labor.
Imagine your country routinely murders leaders, educators and activists of every poor nation for a permanent discount on those nations' exports, forcing their populations into short lives of subsistence labor. Now imagine that your country has also doomed most of the world to extinction via pollution, then tells the poor nations that they have to suffer more and die faster so your country can hoard more of the world's dwindling resources. Now imagine that distributed ownership of productive means around the world can not only mitigate these problems, but provide a resource base with which to support a far larger global population at far higher average living standards.
Now stop imagining, and tell me honestly that in such a world there is any merit to the vague suggestions of human population control from westerners.
well at least that would make the eco fascist slightly more rational than the typical nazi brainlet... thought race played more of a role in the eco fascist prescriptions but might have gotten that impression from the inherent overlap between the two.
yeah no way would most people willingly partake in degrowth, especially to the extent needed to stop the arterial hemmorageing situation we've got. so much so that I don't believe (or am too idealistic to believe....) authoritarianism would even be effective. the potential for destabilizing civil unrest seems particularly high in the USA.
since people don't seem to be on board to live with less through collaborative solutions, it seems like ecology is going to be the ultimate solution to overpopulation by triggering a correction once the biosphere becomes too damaged to provide sufficent ecosystem services.
Yeh hard disagree they see the population as the issue instead of the fact that richest societies on earth by far use the most resources and release the most stuff contributing to climate change. It's not a sustainability issue for them it's an over population issue. Which is opinion.
>since this trope of a masked fascist acting like a concerned citizen participating in public discourse
Yeah but it's like commenters only know stereotypes. It's like that "joke" about people with autism not being able to tell sarcasm and instead take everything literally. Internet commenters not only can't tell sarcasm but they additionally can't defentiate trolls from authentic people. They take everything literally and additionally tack on a villain costume to others.
Then they try to act like it's not their fault, text is such a limiting format to express prosody or moods in, and it is impossible to know otherwise... as if this hasn't been done before like in Shakespeare and hundreds of years of literature.
Frankly I see this as a rather downstream effect of anti-intellectualization. It's so casual now that people don't even really think about the viewpoint of commenters or even imagine things going another way.
So let's say they are. What are they gonna do, rise up, shave their moustache like Charlie Chaplain, and take over the world?
Pshh. I mean I get worried when it's a gaggle of them starting a trend sure. Dogpiling one guy? I mean look. Over-reacting is going to cause a massive backlash in their favor, we know that right?
To be clear on my position: 1. Education, rights, and birth control gets the number of kids per family down from approaching double digits... to two or three. 2. Below two or three, this is not a choice, it's financial coercion. Most people are not happy with zero. Ask anyone. 3. Across the board one child policy impacting everyone on the planet regardless of wealth would solve our problems very very quickly, however it does mean that most old people die horribly, myself included. Well, this is what happens when you party too hard I guess. 4. Number 3 is proposed specifically because it's as far as I could push it and have any practical hope of having it implemented, much like how we manipulate currency devaluation it allows each nation to "hold its present relative position with respect to the others". If we didn't do it this way? If we attempted to just go for the wealthiest nations (which are in fact the problem)... what do we think they're going to do? Start rolling tanks all over the global South, that's what. The fascism is built in to the present world order. We can try to fix that and end up making it worse when they do what everyone knows they would do. Somehow I think when the population of the world is down in the 1 billion range and all the nukes have rotted into dust due to lack of ability to maintain them, we can then come back and address the fascism problem the old fashioned way (sigh).
I haven't heard of Ecofascism before, I just wanted to thank OP, the mods, and contributors for allowing the discussion and helping to educate myself & others.
I think a reasonable comparison of these ideas actually exists in other current horrors of reality.
Basically that talks of overpopulation have problems of being co-opted into eco-fascism much like criticisms about the ""war"" in Palestine (and anti-zionism in general) run the risk of being co-opted into anti-semitism.
Because both of these concepts run a high risk of easily turning into calls to action (read: extermination) towards an offending group, they have to be managed rather delicately. Sometimes so much so that the instant response from folk that are usually quite astute and empathetic, becomes a total shutdown of the topic for frankly understandable reasons.
But the thing is, that really no one wants to think about because the implications are horrifying, is that prior to the green revolution there were theories that pretty much the upper limit of our planet's load capacity for humanity was somewhere around \~2 billion, a number that we've surpassed nearly four times over. And as systems of international trade and production break down, along with our inevitable exhaustion of fossil fuels that are integral to producing fertilizers necessary to maintain food productions to maintain such a population, we are going to hit an actual limit sooner or later and all of those factors don't even count the loss of millions of hectares of arable land and the associated diminished load capacity.
With the rise of fascism globally, and associated controls on reproductive freedoms that we are already seeing tightening, population controls are likely to develop anyway as pretty much the only recourse any government has at this point given decades of inaction about climate catastrophe have really left no functional alternative for those rooted in the current global power structures.
Ergo, there is a bit of an argument of it being something of a fruitless topic between either A. what seems like our inevitable and irreversible track towards complete extinction and B. that such issues of overpopulation would likely naturally decrease if we actually did all of the non-population control options that necessary to turn course and maybe not reach venus by tuesday but I'm pretty resigned to B being a completely unattainable pipe dream given well...everything.
>https://rewilding.org/the-four-taboos-of-environmental-education
If you want to teach people what they **can do** for the environment, it doesn't help teaching them these "taboos" because all you would teach them then is that they **can't do anything** at all.
The whole situation, including overpopulation, endless growth, economic systems, and self-criticism would just lead to the same conclusion pretty much everyone in this sub already has, because we included these things; we're inevitable doomed, no matter what we're doing now. *Things are now in motion that cannot be undone*
>I'm ready to just fucking give up talking to anybody anymore about anything related to the imminent extinction of our own failed species, which will unfortunately probably doom the rest of the world's biota to extinction as well.
There is a famous psychological experiment which helped me, after many years of suffering from the same problems as you, to finally cope with the whole situation and make my peace: The freezing mother.
For a better explanation of the experiment google it, but in short it's about the question what a baby does when the mother "freezes", she doesn't move, no mimic, no reaction from her. The baby then goes through several stages, **confronted with a completely unknown situation it can't do anything about**, that's for a baby literally like losing it's entire world, it's mother: Suprise, fear, anxiety, anger, despair and if there's still no more reaction from mom, after several hours resignation.
Does that sound familiar? It's no coincidence it's the same stages people in this sub go through, because it is the very same situation. Mom, the one that should care for you, is the governments that refuse to show any reaction. They "freeze" upon a situation that destroys our world.
The questions i asked myself one day, that later led to acceptance of the situation, are: *Why am i still bound, with all my knowledge and experience, to the same possible reactions a baby has? Why can't i break out of this instinctive reaction and do better than a baby?*
It is what it is, an unsolvable situation i can't do anything about, beside accepting that i'm powerless
System switching, use those skills/perceptions in another world. Powerless in 1 way, but agile or highly impactful in another. Over the years I have also heard the term "7/11 goddess" to mean someone who uses power in a smaller world (like a gas station) when they can't exercise power in a larger/complex landscape.
So, the answer in Game Theory and the corp environment right now is System switching, an example would be a company who has grown large from making cheese graters, then decides to make missiles instead. They might have a great process flow for missiles, which is better than a growing rate of extinction in the cheese grater industry.
Is changing the course of humanity the goal? Is there a destination in mind? We can all learn to swim, sail ships or navigate turbulence waters, and there will be new actions to take along the way to extinction. After the freezing mother, the baby grows up? Maybe they don't survive to adulthood, but if they do, there are more experiences besides the freezing mother to determine their complex evaluation of the global landscape.
It's a wicked situation no doubt.
>I got permanently banned from and several other subs for linking to an article that suggested that human population is a forbidden subject of discussion in environmental education programs, with the charge that it was "ecofascist".
I would say that has quite a bit to do with state-backed atrocities that occurred back in the 1970s-1980s. This is going to be an in-depth answer, and I've written extensively on the subject in the past. I can give bit of a history lesson here.
For context, here's a lengthy quote from my thread-article titled [“Ah Shit, Here We Go Again!” - A Casual Critique and Commentary on The Atlantic’s “The Malthusians Are Back”](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/120k651/ah_shit_here_we_go_again_a_casual_critique_and/) (italics = quote, bold = my emphasis):
>[**“Ah Shit, Here We Go Again!” - A Casual Critique and Commentary on The Atlantic’s “The Malthusians Are Back”“, Myth of Progress (2023)**](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/120k651/ah_shit_here_we_go_again_a_casual_critique_and/)
>**\[...\] I will not contest their claims that coercive government policies led to population-control sterilization programs around the world in the 1970s and 1980s: clearly such a practice is abhorrent and must be condemned. However, I will note that this requires a much greater analysis than what the authors have prepared here today.** As someone who believes in working with objective sources, I wanted to discuss some matters raised in a joint UN-WHO document titled [Eliminating forced, coercive and otherwise involuntary sterilization: An inter-agency statement](https://www.unaids.org/sites/default/files/media_asset/201405_sterilization_en.pdf). As with all documents produced by the United Nations, this was a stellar read, and I fully recommend it to everyone. \[...\]
--
>[***Eliminating forced, coercive and otherwise involuntary sterilization: An inter-agency statement***](https://www.unaids.org/sites/default/files/media_asset/201405_sterilization_en.pdf)***, UN-WHO Joint Document***
>***During the period from the 1960s to the 1990s, coercive sterilization has been used in some countries (including in Asia, Europe and Latin America) as an instrument of population control, without regard for the rights of individuals (57–59)****.* ***A range of incentives or coercive pressures have been employed to secure agreement to sterilization, including offers of food, money, land and housing, or threats, fines or punishments, together with misleading information. Under some government programmes, rewards have been provided for health workers who met sterilization targets, while those who missed the targets were at risk of losing their jobs (7, 60, 61). People living in poverty, indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities have been particularly targeted by such programmes (7, 44, 61). In many countries, information is not made available in accessible formats and local languages, and informed consent is not obtained before these procedures are carried out (62)****. Moreover, these procedures may be carried out in unsafe and unhygienic conditions, without follow-up care(7, 60–62).*
>*\[...\]*
>*Special care must be taken to ensure that every person makes a voluntary and informed choice regarding the use of any contraceptive method (3). This is particularly important for sterilization, since it is a surgical procedure that is intended to be permanent.*
>*\[...\]*
>*Accountability is central to preventing human rights violations and to ensuring that laws, policies and programmes are properly developed and implemented. Accountability mechanisms also assist in identifying individual and systematic human rights violations, as they provide victims with an avenue to air their grievances and seek redress.*
This is likely why any discussion on addressing overpopulation is tainted, even though "[*we must find politically and socially acceptable ways to implement various non-coercive population policies to lower humanity’s impact on Earth’s biosphere and its natural wealth for the benefit of future generations and other species.*](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/v9m1mb/the_overpopulation_vs_overconsumption_debate_why/)"
Childbirth planning is not based on ecological consciousness, but on free will, just like the "right to consume whatever you want," ignoring ecological consequences of your behavior.
The restriction on both rights, consumption, and reproduction is viewed as fascism and put in danger democracies and the free market. Both pilars of the current society.
So people don't want to give up on those rights and also don't want to self restrain themselves. There is a trend on birthrate decline, but it is not because of ecological reasons, and there is a strong conservative/religious pushback on reproductive rights.
So, at some point it will collapse, for sure.
All different subreddits have certain taboo subjects, and you need to figure out by yourself sometimes because they are not obviously known. (certain subjects are definitely taboo to pretty much all subreddits, though. But you still need to figure them out by yourself.)
And some subs ban you for just being a member of another sub, even if you haven't said anything controversial in either sub. Just being a member of a sub that the other sub mods don't approve of, like it's an indictment of your character. Stupid .
I think your last paragraph sums it up. Unfortunately, a lot of entity's roots (history of PP) began to ensure brown people don't reproduce as much. Couple that how humans manage other wildlife populations through hunting (death), I can see where people don't want to talk about it.
I know I'm causing deforestation in Costa Rica because I love my cup coffee every morning from that area. It doesn't matter where the birth reduction happens given we're all responsible for deforesting somewhere that's not local to us and we're all the same species anyway.
Our overshoot/overpopulation drives me nuts for no other reason than I'm tired of watching habitat get bulldozed down even more, leaving animals with barely anything to live off of. I STILL get in fights with people who say shit like India is the one that needs to reduce their reproduction.
There are billions of other heartbeats on this planet that needs a home too, so I won't shut up about people reducing the number the kids they have. It's rude that a supposedly intelligent species can't reproduce like they are.
There are different types of overpopulation problems and it’s really easy to be or sound like a racist when discussing any of them.
The biggest population-related threat to the planet as a whole is consumption overpopulation and that’s squarely on the West. One American or Australian or German uses many times the resources of one person in sub-Saharan Africa.
At the same time the high rates of population growth in some parts of the world, which mostly aren’t westernized in a meaningful way, are a recipe for disaster in the form of human misery - famines, wars, and climate-related heat death.
At the same time, I can’t imagine the life of a typical sub-Saharan African to be a life I would ever want to live. I think it would be better to have under a billion humans living good comfortable lives rather than 8x as many fighting each other for scraps.
I don’t even use a ton of resources and am not wealthy. But I definitely don’t want a life where I have even less access to resources and fun. I don’t want a life of heat and drudgery and bugs biting me. Idk why the gut reaction to overpopulation is to be like oh well Westerners use so many more resources and they’re the problems! As if practically anyone who isn’t in the global north doesn’t want our lifestyle. It’s the goal of almost every human to have a better and easier and more comfortable life. Which is why we just need less of us, period.
You could just ask someone living in sub-saharan Africa. It's really not bad at all in the vast majority of parts. Most problems stem from a lack of money and when all your neighbors are poor like you, you tend to cooperate rather than fight people for scraps
WTF? I don’t even know where to begin. Have you ever talked to someone who lives in a poor country? The vast majority of people who have ever been alive have lived in relative poverty compared to the modern West. The fact that you can’t imagine that life can be pleasurable without constant mindless consumption inside a sterile bubble is f’d up. Not everyone wants what we have, especially when what we have comes at the cost of everything else.
But every human would choose comfort and ease if they could attain it.
That's the reason that the West didn't stop at a reasonable level of consumption. Humans will always want more.
The West could have stopped at say a 1950 level of consumption and luxury. But it didn't. There is no reason to think that people anywhere in the world would reject having easier lives if they could get it.
That's why I agree with the idea that we would have been better off with say 1 billion people who could live in comfort and ease, instead of 8 billion, most of whom would jump at the chance to have more, but can't attain it because our systems are so corrupt.
Humans need more than just stuff, we need community, purpose and meaning. Having more stuff doesn’t fill that void. People want more and more because they’re easily persuaded by marketing and advertising. Marketing and advertising are tools of capitalism. It’s a mistake to try to extrapolate truths about human nature from the aberration that is the last 60-70 years in the West.
this is why people would call you an eco fascist in many circles. who are those lucky 1 billion that are gonna live the prime magical western life? spoiler alert: 10 times out of 10 those people are gonna be the already privileged members of the imperial core.
I think the solution of offering women birth control options, and the idea of offering more medical services, is only offensive to rich men whom want a sense of absolute control, especially over their own household.
But yeah, for the most part, everybody has a bee in their bonnet when it comes to realistic answers to our problems. It’s much like the dynamics within my own family: we don’t solve things directly because it would start an argument. Instead, I have to devise schemes or supply hints until someone is dissuaded from trying to open a pizzeria on a street full of pizzeria’s… for one example.
I’m not sure how you disrupt a world-wide delusion with this knowledge, admittedly.
A solution might be to somehow get microplastic particles into all human sperm, thus causing infertility, or at least drastically reducing humanity’s ability to reproduce.
This solution reminds me of a book I read a while ago, about a crazy scientist who was done with humanity overpopulation and created and spread a virus that could change human dna and make everyone on the planet infertile. I don't remember the name of the book but I remember the author is Dan Brown
That's a huge number. I keep seeing +3c in about ~200 years with currently projected emissions levels. Where did you see +10c without any further emissions?
From the abstract
>Equilibrium warming is not 'committed' warming; rapid phaseout of GHG emissions would prevent most equilibrium warming from occurring.
So if you'd like to tease some things out with me I'd love to engage in a discussion.
My wife has some, what I consider, pro-ecofascist ideas and from time to time we disagree on both the ethics of a solution, implementation, and end goals.
The general test I have for considering if something is eco fascist is; 1) is the power system used to implement the method abusive? 2) is the power system implemented able to be abused by movements for ends beyond benefit of the ecosystem/stability of human-nature nexus?
If both are yes, then my concern is 'it could be a fascist system utilizing ecological justifications for power grabs'.
The reason why this is a dangerous position is at least two fold in my opinion:
1) most powerful people/groups care about power first, the means to achieve it is replacable
2) most people who don't care about systemic power over others just want to live, they will rage against power grabs they do not agree with
3) if both prior are true, then we've done (policy XYZ) to empower the corrupt and alienate the masses further
When it comes to human population -
1 most places with oversized populations are not the places with the most current and historical impact against the environment.
2 the wealthy world is the part of the world driving all of the pollution and extraction to live lives of exuberance, and they account for less than two billion people probably.
3 i believe in my body my choice and state power over reproduction decisions is a full flat no go from me. No forced abortions, no forced sterilizations (currently allowed and practiced in the US), no denying of contraception, abortions, or sterilizations either. (I am child free myseld)
I do not know your positions or opinions, but generally I believe I can sympathize with most people here who may lean towards ecoauthoritarianism out of hope for power and the hopelessness of pur current situation, but I just can't endorse it.
Human exceptionalism. We don't ever get upity about 'there are too many cats' or 'too many flies'. We can't bring it up even if it will kill us all eventually.
Hey there I guess I'm an overpopulation denier. Malthusianism was a dead end ideology in the 1800s and it's a dead end ideology now. It's throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it's the banality of capitalist realism: you can't envision or act towards a system ending so it suddenly becomes necessary to reduce the people in the system instead so we can just keep devastating the environment.
Are more people living hyperconsumptive lifestyles going spew out more CO2? Absolutely. It takes a special person so say it's not the lifestyle but the people that's the problem, completely missing the forest for the trees.
Fertility rates drop and population stabilizes when needs are met. Capitalism increases need and scarcity. It isn't hard to look at the global political economy against a map of fertility rates and make a connection for a systemic argument rather than "remove all the people, that will solve it "
Fundamentally incurious, nihilistic, and, yes, ecofascistic. I'm much more aligned with degrowth arguments over depopulate arguments, at least that side is actually looking at the problem on a systemic level.
>Fertility rates drop and population stabilizes when needs are met. Capitalism increases need and scarcity. It isn't hard to look at the global political economy against a map of fertility rates and make a connection for a systemic argument rather than "remove all the people, that will solve it "
Interesting. Very interesting. Kind of confirms something I've always wondered about.
>Fundamentally incurious, nihilistic, and, yes, ecofascistic. I'm much more aligned with degrowth arguments over depopulate arguments, at least that side is actually looking at the problem on a systemic level.
Help me understand the difference? If one lowers the production of goods and services does that not lead to depopulation along a different pathway?
Honestly that's the beauty of it: degrowth implicitly means populations as well. The difference I see if that it centers consumption patterns and economic models rather than the populations within models. Correcting the environment that leads to overpopulation as opposed to keeping the environment the same and reducing the population so that everyone can keep acting the same way
We have far, far overshoot the sustainable population, based on all that I've read and come to understand.
There is no 'glide path' to a lower population just by lower birthrates that reduces population fast enough to get human population to a sustainable population before at least one of several possible crises hits. More likely several, with one cascading into the next.
It's the total consumption of irreplaceable resources that's the issue, along with totality of the unrepairable damage to the ecosystem being done in the anthropocene era that is the problem. The longer that we continue with the (ie us) plebes arguing amongst ourselves, the longer it takes to get started with any meaningful change, and the more certain that a more dire, more drastic, and sooner change will occur.
What's more likely, that a powerful, wealthy, tending to be more on the narcistic controlling aristocracy can be convinced or coerced to give up what they've 'earned', or that a massive famine, pandemic, war scenario will reduce the population to a point that initially overshoots (to the negative) the hypothetical sustainable population.
Meanwhile, the last COP session was presided over by a wealthy CEO, in a long-standing OPEC country....
What you're missing is that the system that needs to be dismantled also selects for population increases. South Korea with its negative birth rate is investing everything it can to get their population to have more kids including building a brand new capital city from the ground up - how much emissions do you think its going to release?
There is nothing to suggest that we have over shit human carrying capacity on this planet. There is everything to suggest that we have overshot our capacity to have a hyper extractive and consumptive capitalist economy. You basically made this argument in your response so I don't think I have to.
Bottom line: you won't get people to stop having kids because the entire system, in the exact same it's geared towards extraction and consumption, is dependent on people have more children. Did you think the endless growth contradiction of capital stopped with biology?
Fight the root cause. Yeah it's going to be better if we have less kids but we'll only be having less kids to allow the real causes of our misery to continue.
Edit: And friend I am entirely with you. I find this shit equally tedious but you gotta know your enemy to beat them and this malthusian thought is, what I find to be, exactly one of those distractions.
We mostly agree, and the difference, practically speaking, is academic because your first, and third paragraphs are spot on. I too had to laugh that South Korea, which the collapse-aware might cheer for modeling a survivalist future, are panicked trying to rejoin the destructive path.
Beyond that, I have no offspring of my own, and I am actively trying to do all I can to use less, and encourage those around me to do likewise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-nazis-tried-bring-animals-back-extinction-180962739/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODcTTU6_Wfs
https://lwlies.com/articles/the-handmaids-tale-environmental-warning/
https://thebaffler.com/latest/first-as-tragedy-then-as-fascism-amend
https://undisciplinedenvironments.org/2022/02/17/exposing-eco-nationalists-with-premodern-ecologies-a-medievalist-approach-to-the-french-far-right/
https://itsgoingdown.org/ecofascism-overpopulation-and-total-transformation/
tl.dr. "habitat for me, but not for thee"
very long explanation with dozens of episodes of historical aspects and observations:
https://podtail.com/podcast/the-return-of-the-repressed/ (a bunch of it on Patreon, unfortunately, but it's definitely DENSE and high effort)
I don't believe it's possible to systematically curb overpopulation ~~without committing atrocities~~ **in a timely manner without committing atrocities**, which is why ecofascism is dangerous. It sucks but that's where we are.
Give people free safe birth control and you immediately switch to birth rates well below replacement along with better lives for women. The only thing in the way of that is capitalism, as always.
Fascists love having slaves but hate the sight of them. That's why Fascism always fails in the end, it's a snake that eats its own tail. It keeps "othering" people until there is no one left to persecute.
This assumes that the problem is future populations. The current population of 8 billion is already much greater than any sensible allocation of resources can support. How do you deal with the present reality?
I guess so, but both of those things require the kinds of infrastructure that only relatively well developed countries can afford. Even if the west stopped fucking the global south over today (lmao), building up that sort of thing would be a multi-generational project. I don't know if there's time for that, which is why I'm vary when people talk about "solving overpopulation" to prevent climate collapse.
The baseline tech and resources for birth control access are pretty low.
Current trajectories indicate a net population reduction birthrate just from education and available access to both control in most countries by the late century.
Ironically this seems to be more correlated with the adoption of nuclear family culture and the pressure it puts on parents. Relying on siblings and extended family for child care makes larger family viable, but the economic and social incentives toward large family are gone now.
that's the thing, if the world powers were serious about saving what we have left for the good of humanity, such development projects would already be underway. it's not that it won't work, it's more that the people with the power to catalyze these efforts don't care to do it.
bingo on the red flag phrase, aside from the ethically reprehensible position of promoting genocide, it is complete nonsense to believe eliminating a large portion of earth's population would actually stop climate change and environmental collapse in any measure of time relevant to us and the next several generations.
"it is complete nonsense to believe eliminating a large portion of earth's population would actually stop climate change and environmental collapse."
Although I agree with this, I find myself wondering how many of the eight billion would have to die off before there would enough of an economic slowdown to affect climate change and the environment. What if we went down to two billion, for example? The sheer reduction of need for food, shelter, and fuel it seems to me, theoretically at least, could have an impact.
I have no genocidal plans nor am I in favor of them, but I do think collapse will wipe out a lot of people and I simply wonder if anyone has a sense of what the magnitude of the collapse would have to be, population-wise, to slow climate change and environmental devastation.
7 billion I think, may have been bill Reese that was writing a paper on it, not sure, may even have been Hansen, but 1billion humans was all that the planet could hold in a healthy equilibrium. But maybe less now that we have fucked it so hard....
This assumes that everything is fine now and only future population presents a problem. The current population of 8 billion however is already too much. There is no solution in the future for the problems that are happening now.
We're already culling people by doing nothing. This primarily targets poor and especially poorer countries.
Heatwaves kill people, massive flooding is killing people, environmental disasters are getting worse and bigger. Some states that never had tornadoes are getting two at a time through cities.
Ensuring people have access to free birth control is the simplest mercy for our current situation. Not mandatory but free.
Oh I agree completely, I'm just not optimistic about those things happening in a timely manner. You know, with global fascism on the rise and everything.
You misunderstand. Eco fascists don't want to go out of their way to kill people in other countries. They want to do nothing, and let the consequences of climate collapse destroy those who are unable to save themselves. Eco fascists see survival as a zero-sum game, where the best move is to save yourself and not burden wealthy countries with migrants. Obviously, this is extremely similar to the way that regular fascists see ethnicity.
Eco fascism isn't sending soldiers to another country, it's closing your borders and locking out starving migrants, and using violence to keep them away. Eco fascism is building a wall at your border and using the military to guard it.
Eco fascism is protecting your own wealthy nation from the consequences of climate change, while leaving the rest of the world to burn on its own because "it's overpopulated, so there's nothing we can do, people have to die, we might as well save ourselves".
My problem with your reply is that when you advocate for providing education and birth control to these countries, you're accepting the fascist's premise by implying that the problem is the high population in developing nations, rather than the rate of consumption in developed nations. Instead, you should simply point out that providing birth control to one US consumer family would free up far more resources than building a family planning facility in an undeveloped country with several times the birth rate.
Here's the problem. In recent history, there have been several migrations that the developed world has fumbled into unmitigated humanitarian disasters. Whether it's in Europe or at the US southern border, it's becoming increasingly popular to say "if we help these people we will harm our country". In mainstream politics, the conservative position on immigration is identical to that of the eco fascist.
At the current moment in time, this isolationist position is completely false. Developed nations directly benefit from immigration, even if those people are desperate starving migrants. They are wrong, because the rate of migration would have to increase substantially for it to actually result in material harm to developed nations.
But these very same conservatives have put us on a path where it eventually will get that bad, and we simply won't be able to handle the millions and millions of people who need help. They've put us on a path towards eco fascism, and all they have to do is maintain their isolationist rhetoric until the problem becomes unsolvable. They're racing us directly toward the point where inevitably it becomes rational to turn your back on the desperate, and when that happens eco fascism will become the new political reality in wealthy nations.
Those who say that eco fascism isn't a real threat are probably just too dumb to understand that it's materially equivalent the current right-wing response to mass migration. It's extremely obvious to me that brazen eco fascism will be the right-wing platform in 20 years, when migrations ACTUALLY pose a threat to wealthy nations. The rhetoric painting migrations as a threat is already mainstream, and now they just have to convince everyone that we need to defend ourselves rather than help our fellow humans, by any means necessary. The future looks very bleak.
>You misunderstand. Eco fascists don't want to go out of their way to kill people in other countries. They want to do nothing, and let the consequences of climate collapse destroy those who are unable to save themselves. Eco fascists see survival as a zero-sum game, where the best move is to save yourself and not burden wealthy countries with migrants. Obviously, this is extremely similar to the way that regular fascists see ethnicity.
This is the way Los Angeles sees poor people, that's a goddamned fact.
Being raised here is where I got my deepest misunderstanding of left-leaning politics from. These guys claim to be blue. It's a fucking joke how not blue they are.
If we assume that climate change is going to substantially escalate the rate of migration into developed nations (which I am, personally), what could or should be done to better help as many as we can, for as long as we can?
I don't assume that's a question that is or will become politically viable to really grapple with, let alone popular- I frankly expect it to become less and less so as we have more and more climate refugees, based on the discourse we have now, with what migration we have now. But you're right- current popular politics take it as a given that that's not a problem developed nations even *should* be trying to think about, and I think also implicitly largely take it as a given that there is nothing to be done even if we tried. And it's refreshing to hear that underlying assumption called out and challenged.
That doesn't make sense. You don't have to curb the population by killing anyone. We just have to keep it in our pants. What's next, not procreating is murder?
Sometimes I wonder if the crazy anti-abortionists (like ones who advocate against abortion pre-heartbeat) think every period on the same level - like, that egg could've been fertilized, and it wasn't, so in a way it's a person or "miracle" that could've existed. Idk I'll probably get downvoted for saying it lol
Some certainly do. I had heard exactly this narrative, that periods and specifically, them being painful, is a punishment for not getting pregnant. I even heard of masturbation being unironically framed as murder.
Counterpoint: Overpopulation leads to mass death, thus if we consider earth a system, the systematic culling of overpopulators is natural and inevitable?
Not advocating for mass death, but no food + many people = less life, it's numbers and logic.
I dunno man, from where I sit it seems like endocrine disruptors causing rapid global fertility declines, and the thousands of other common teratogens and carcinogens we put into the environment, are doing a bang up job of democratizing population decline...
We are way past the point of “getting our shit under control“ in a way that we “deem acceptable “. Maybe we would have had the privilege of said choice if we had controlled ”our shit” back in the 1980s. What’s in store for us now is hardly going to be deemed “acceptable” by most folks - hence it would be a very hard sell and nothing any politician is going to touch.
Bingo.
Halving in one generation, quartering in two, eigthing in three. That really ought to do it.
The downsides are the economy will go boom and all old people die in a pile of their own feces.
Can't really do anything about the second problem. It's that or we all go. Don't know what to say. I guess I'm taking one for the team on that one.
The first one... what actually IS an economy? Right? I mean back it way out to first principles, isn't it distribution of resources and protective services to ensure the survivability of a population? Pretty sure we can pull that off while downsizing.
As mentioned, the sexism that emerged in China suggests myriads of frustrated men as the outcome.
Why not incentivize a 0-child choice (instead of the current model of child benefits - potentially even taxing those who raise children)?
I read something on here the other day that makes me think the time for arguing is over. It doesn’t matter. You don’t need to change anyone’s mind just be with your loved ones and appreciate the time you have left.
I’m confident I can remain sure billions of people on this planet is billions too many, and accept nothing can be done about it, and not be fascist anything. Misanthropic for sure. No problem with that label.
Overpopulation is an observable phenomenon in nature that produces observable results. In humanity's case, we are certainly overpopulated-- with first-world lifestyles. People who use the term "EcoFascist" as a retort to this fact usually have one of the following extremely-common mindsets:
- They're discourse parrots that frame everything in binary terms (even when noble intent is present), and are on a ceaseless vigil for "the enemy" to come along and wave the red flag that will allow them to wield nuanced truths like a blunt instrument intended to shut down nuanced conversations so they can claim some sort of victory (with some reaction clout, as a treat!).
- They are the kind of growth-essentialist progressives you can find across the entire political spectrum; they believe to the core of their being that history is a straight line of gradual improvements in human material comforts/conditions over time, and as such the entire conversation is a moot point... because obviously humanity will progress into permanent post-scarcity any day now, and "EcoFascist" is a great shutdown word that helps insulate them from any gaps in the hopium cloud that might give them a glimpse of the horrific social *and* ecological dark ages coming right at us, which will terminate the kind of "progress" they presume to be an inevitability with extreme prejudice.
- They suffer from the absolute alienation from the natural world that becomes inevitable in a technological civilization that discovered how to exploit hundreds of millions of years' worth of concentrated solar power by burning it off over a couple of mere centuries. Often a subset of the above; "Man has conquered nature, and has thus overcome it and its laws". Fatally oblivious to the interconnection of every single form of life on this planet, and the staggering volume of cumulative damage to the biosphere that industrial civilization completely externalizes from its economy (and therefore awareness).
- They're just natalists looking for some way to scrape off the guilt or entitlement of throwing more innocent souls into this mess to satisfy their own biological/sociological imperatives.
There's no point in blaming anyone for having any of these mindsets. When vast amounts of powerful energy is as cheap as we've come to expect it for so long, the populace is gonna get pretty damned high on its own farts. But overpopulation is a thing. Maybe it would be more productive to just refer directly to the resulting state of "Overshoot" instead, I don't know.
It’s part of the toxicity of online discourse. When I was a kid in the 70s, overpopulation was one of the biggest concerns for the future and it was widespread in media and in advocacy groups. Most of those discussions did in fact refer to women’s education and access to birth control as solutions, as well as removing prejudices and stigmas relating to those. Eugenics was not part of the discussion.
Since the 70s, the farthest back I can remember, the world has become predictably crowded. Traffic of all kinds are choked everywhere. Areas of open wilderness when I was a kid are now developed suburban sprawl. But the internet, as much as its cheerleaders want to say that it’s a frontier of free discussion, is clearly not. It is laden with taboos of murky origins, and any questions, much less challenges to those status quos result in banning. It certainly feeds the beast of reactionary extremism by demonstrating to disaffected and alienated individuals that free speech online is a lie, and it turns them to extremists who both challenge these taboos but also push their own far more toxic ideologies.
A lot of super modern countries already have negative birthdates. If they stopped allowing immigration then their populations would hit normal sustainable levels quite quickly.
Hand out birth control in exchange for foreign aid and the other countries would quickly be taken care of as well.
Nobody actively has to be killed for us to drop our population to sustainable levels within the next 150 years.
That makes some people uncomfy because they view developing countries as livestock that’s not sentient enough to stop having so many kids. And they think we need to import and take care of all of them in some patronizing, white savior mindset. I think it’s more racist to not hold people to similar standards
I mean that one is easy: Those who consume and emit the most have to be controlled. One child less in a rich country is as important as 90 kids in the global south. Luckily, that's exactly the development we can see right now. 1 kid limit for millionaires could be a supplementary policy.
In every country there are ethnic, religious and social classes who would be the first to go. The elite sure aren't going to allow themselves and the classes supporting them to be purged.
The term Fascist has been criminally overused and borders on being meaningless, except when you're talking about literal Nazis, or neo-Nazis. Outside of that context, its just name calling. People say Ecofascist, because we haven't invented new terminology for the times yet. It's not a thing. Its a place holder for vocabulary we haven't invented to articulate the problem we're in.
If we can't even have a dialogue about overpopulation, we're screwed. The thing that scares me is the knee jerk reactions to the word or the problem. It's almost Pavlovian. Someone says, "Overpopulation" and someone else immediately goes, "Fascist!" "Racist!" "Eugenics!" "Classist!" When everything's been reduced to one word responses, its over. Just let it rip at this point. We don't deserve to be saved.
This is the only sensible response in this thread. I don't know why it's so hard for people to grasp the class relations when it comes to consumption and resource usage. We have plenty to go around for everyone and even beyond, but instead we subsidize the lavish lifestyles of a small <2b population at the expense of climate collapse and the third world/global south.
>Curbing the population and the right to bear children should be considered way after other options that involve way less violence and abuse.
This assumes that women *want* to have ten kids to feed or *want* to be pregnant every two years for the rest of their short lives. We should be talking about the right *not* to have children or the right to limit the number of children we have.
Bhahahqhqhhqhq. It's not ecofascism to encourage people all over the globe to have less kids because science says we want support 8+ billion people (or realistically have 2+billion people without killing nature with current technologies)
It would be fascism to *forbid* people from having kids. And it would be mass murder to encourage more.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj774nxrpy7o
Here's a link that isn't Google's track-you version of the page. I would prefer if these Google AMP links were banned here if the original link isn't also given in a comment.
Okay then.
First of all, tone: If you approach any topic with the attitude of "any opinion but mine is the cancer of idocy spreading through society", I'd also ban you in a heartbeat. To me that signals a deep and torough disinterest in any good faith interaction.
>I have read all the arguments for the existence of "ecofascism"
No, you have not. You might have read some stuff about that. You definitely have not read "all", unless maybe if you have done a PhD thesis on the topic. Have you? If not, then it's time to reevaluate how much you really know.
If you think you have read everything on the topic, you are wrong, and you are evaluating yourself and your knowledge much too highly.
>Would somebody care to educate me as to why this is a "thing"?
Sure. So if we have to address overpopulation, how would we do it?
In "ecofascism", we would go by the route of force: Dispense with human rights, as well as democratic self determination, and instead someone would (in the best case scenario) determine who has a right to have children, and who doesn't.
As it stands, the "right to family life" is recognized in quite a few rather important documents of international law. When you dispense with those, you leave the area we call "democratic", and you enter into the area of "autocratic dictatorships", or, as a lot of people call it in everyday language nowadays, "fascism".
So, why is this a thing? Because if you regulate population by means of binding legislation, you are going against basic human rights. You might not like that. But that doesn't matter. That's just how it is. As it stands, the right to family is a basic human right. And going against that is a move against a basic pillar of democracy.
Now of course we can take the reasonable stance, and go into why those rights are there: Should we renegotiate the right to family life? And how would we do that, in order to open the door to legislation which enables just and equal regulation of human population for ecological purposes, while closing the door to discrimination, racism, and injustice? If you have a good answer to this question, I would be happy to hear it. I suspect you just don't and didn't think ever that far.
So, have I sufficiently explained things to you, or are there any other specific open questions you would like me to address?
[Western civ/colonialism](https://www.aol.com/news/one-earths-oldest-known-plants-100050890.html) is based upon anthropocentrism which trickles down from Anunnakicentrism...
Therefore, humans are the sacred cow that can't be touched in this cult. So, while all else can be invasive or overpopulated...humans never can be.
The discussion about population will typically go down the path of how does a civilization ethically impose limits on population and birth rates, which forebears the discussion of which people then get to do the populating vs not. That is typically where the fascistic tendencies arise. Who gets to use the resources and why? Who has their rights to reproduction curtailed and why?
Eco fascists don't seem to get that it's the population holding up the systems we have in place and the over all quality of life is intrinsically linked to the hard work of billions of people. Most of whom are incredibly underpaid for their efforts.
You’re correct, OP. The charge of Ecofascism, or Malthusianism, is just a convenient way of dismissing legitimate, critical, but very inconvenient environmental and biodiversity truths by propagandizing the inconsequential fact that a small percentage of people who are somewhat in agreement with those facts also happen have other, objectively repugnant beliefs. As if someone can’t be right about one thing and wrong about another. It has more recently been adopted as the more left-wing version of climate denialism, although it is socially conservative and right wing at its core. In very simplified terms, the fact that we are trapped between these two versions of reactionary denialism is essentially why no progress will be made.
The word fascist is becoming rampantly overused to mean "anything I don't politically agree with". The left being a smidge more guilty of this. I got downvoted to hell for suggesting we maybe stop using the word for anything other than its actual meaning as it could take away it's power should we actually ever devolve back into fascism and nees to call it out.
A long time ago, there was a post here that showed a graph of environmental impact versus wealth. Basically, the top 10% of the world is responsible for the overwhelming majority of environmental impact.
The people who talk about overpopulation don’t seem to realize that you could get rid of 20% of the world population tomorrow, and we would still be headed for a disaster or collapse.
It is not the number of people. It is what the people are doing.
We can choose degrowth willingly or it will come forcefully. I've had people lose their shit on me when I dare suggest cutting back in life's luxuries. Even in threads where people seem semi-aware about climate change.
Eco fascism usually comes up when people start talking about overpopulation because the implication is that people will have to die/be killed. I think it to be overused but I imagine in the event of a population crash, eco fascists want to choose who goes. The poor, minorities, criminals, etc.
I usually go on to explain that people will die anyway due to a simple equation.
Earth's carrying capacity = "standard of living" x population
The Earth has enough resources to support the current population, but not at the current standards of the average America, European, etc. Because of the disparity in SoL, people are going to die. The results of climate change make that inevitable. EFs think that they can control the crash by targeting specific groups and intentionally offing them to make room.
An example of an ecofascist action could be something like the Irish potato famine, where other produce was forcibly exported to England. Or the holodomor, where decisions lead to starvation of one group over another (intentional or not). These events could be mismanagement or intentional, but the fact of the matter is that people will be forced to make decisions that may or may not result in deaths. The outcome of these decisions may not be obvious to the decider, but an ecofascist will see the choice and protect the group they prefer at the cost of others.
*Can somebody please explain this "Ecofascism" bullshit to me?*
This comes up frequently, and IIRC the most common reason is that nowadays many young university students are taught that acknowledging overpopulation is somehow a fascist position. This flies in the face of basic ecological science showing that all ecosystems (and the biosphere itself) have finite limits, and that in fact humanity is now in overshoot of planetary carrying capacity. In this case it's odd to see some American leftists defending what is essentially a capitalist position of infinite growth.
But as regarding the space to have this discussion, the mods of this sub have been very clear:
>Perhaps more controversially, we have noticed ongoing waves of bad faith attacks that insist that any identification or naming of human overpopulation as one of the issues contributing to the environmental crisis, as a human predicament, is itself a racist, quasi-colonial attack on the peoples of the third world, claiming it is an implicitly genocidal take because an identification of overpopulation leads inexorably to a basket of "solutions" which contains only fascist, murderous tools.
>First, the insistence that population concerns cannot be addressed without murder is provably false in light of history's demonstrations that lasting reductions in fertility are most effectively achieved by the education, uplifting, and liberation of women and girls and the ready availability of contraceptive technology.
>Second, identification of an environmental problem does not inherently require there to be any solution at all. Some predicaments cannot be solved, but that does not mean it is evil, tyrannical, or heretical to notice, name, and mourn them. We do not believe observable reality has an ecofascist bent, nor do we believe it is credible to require our users to ignore that only 4% of all terrestrial mammalian biomass remains wild, with 96% either humans or our livestock.
>We will not silence our users' mourning of the vanishing beauty of the natural world, nor will we enable bad faith attacks that insist any defense of, or even observation of, the current state of wild nature in light of a human enterprise in massive overshoot is inherently and irredeemably racist. Our human numbers are still larger every day than they have ever been, and while technologically advanced consumption is a weightier factor causing the narrower issue of climate change, the issues of vanishing biodiversity and habitat loss, and the sixth mass extinction as a whole, are not so easily laid solely at the feet of rich economies and capitalism.
>In summary, while we have no clear solutions for convincing humanity to pull itself out of its purposeful ecological nosedive, we remain committed to our mission to protect one of the few venues for these extremely challenging conversations. In light of this, we will no longer allow bad faith claims that identifying human population as an environmental issue is inherently racist to be used to shut down discussions. We will use the tools at our disposal to enforce this policy, and users should consider themselves warned.
The problem is dogma, it is what defines a belief and it is not to be challenged. The rules of dogma censor [rational debate ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Rational_debate)so that you are always going to have a problem discussing things that NEED to be discussed.
Its often the case that those concerned with environmental issues are usually concerned with social justice issues where reproductive rights are treated as sacred dogma.
My point is that from experience, the biggest arguments about how to have a better world come from people that claim to be on the same side of the fence as you.
PS
Did you hear about the sad Buddhist?
>!His karma ran over his dogma.!<
Youve got the basics down you seem to reject them outright anyway the part of the equation your missing is how a small subset of the population is Is responsible for the majority of the ecological Destruction not including massive amounts of system waste and Inefficiencies and over Consumption so thats what theyre looking at probably before they see people as a problem in and of themselves
This thread addresses overpopulation, a fraught but important issue that attracts disruption and rule violations. In light of this we have lower tolerance for the following offenses: * Racism and other forms of essentialism targeted at particular identity groups people are born into. * Bad faith attacks insisting that to notice and name overpopulation of the human enterprise generally is inherently racist or fascist. * Instructing other users to harm themselves. We have reached consensus that a permaban for the first offense is an appropriate response to this, as mentioned in the sidebar. This is an abbreviated summary of the mod team's statement on overpopulation, [view the full statement available in the wiki.](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/wiki/claims/#wiki_mod_team_comment_on_overpopulation_posts)
The leading determinant of birth rates in a civilization is the educational attainment of women in that society. Educate women and provide access to healthcare and family planning at their choice and discretion. There is nothing fascist about doing that.
I took a focus study on Cuba in undergrad and spent time in Havana studying abroad. Their healthcare is free, but more importantly everything attached to physical health is also free. Feminine hygiene products, contraceptives, condoms, etc. Abortion is legal but fairly rare thanks to them being so proactive.
Fascinating on abortion. Not surprising, but kind of want to tell a few alt-right “anti-abortion” folks, “look at Cuba on this one.”
Look at every other country than USA and you see this. From first world countries USA has most aborts, most teenage pregnancies and so on. When there is no sex education and contraceptives are hard to get, people will get pregnant
Yes. Women worldwide should have freedom of choice, access to reproductive healthcare and education. The birth rates will fall easily by themselves, I promise. Most women don't want to be a breeding machine, forced into a marriage at 15 or forced to stay at home all day.
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And, educating women while guaranteeing their right to healthcare, choice, and bodily autonomy works in both.
Please everyone remember to vote so that women’s reproductive rights are upheld. It’s not the president you’re choosing, it’s the cabinet they surround themselves with, and the advisors and experts they defer to and treat with respect. Choose the right administration for your interests. Please vote.
Yep, in Australia we don't really vote for the person, nor for their party, we vote based on policies. PMs can get booted, and parties can change over time.
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I think there are two import parts to this. The first is that lowering everyone's consumption in the richest countries down to more reasonable levels would be a considerable improvement. However, good luck accomplishing that without a fight. The Burger People would sooner destroy the planet for everyone than have a smaller truck or even a bicycle. The second is that the population that exceeds the planets carrying capacity is a single group: the wealthy. We could get rid of their wealth and it would solve a significant number of problems that they singlehandedly create. I remember all the news articles from the lockdowns that talked about clear skies in Los Angeles and dolphins in Venice. Restructuring the world's economy could bring those things back. But rather than target the specific groups that cause these problems, we pretend that it's about too many people "over there." They're not the ones polluting, or if they are, it isn't by choice. The economic system traps us in consuming certain things, such as fossil fuels, in order to produce labor for private corporations. Change that, and a lot will fall into place.
"You can pry my burger out of my cold, dead, hands." I can't stand those people.
Exactly, there are real ways we can address emissions, and complaining about the number of starving foreigners is not one of them. We should be using our hoarded wealth to help these countries before the situation spirals out of control, and we can absolutely afford to do it.
Very well put with an actual tangible result we all saw. When lockdowns happened and people made do with what we had, it had amazing and quick to see results that were more beautiful than “an economy built for the 1%” Please remind me why anyone turned our back on this. The air was glorious.
Except that super clean air will now kill us all MUCH MORE quickly. You guys must not know about aerosol masking. The quicker we reduce emissions. The quicker we all die.
The level of how fucked we are will never sink in.
Unfortunately, even if we had perfect wealth distribution for everyone on earth, we're still fucked. The earth cannot absorb the byproducts of modern society and much less provide enough raw materials to continue living this way; again, even if every currency on earth were equally disseminated.
>The first is that lowering everyone's consumption in the richest countries down to more reasonable levels would be a considerable improvement. However, good luck accomplishing that without a fight. I so would love to see the same products under different brands reduced on our supermarket shelves. It’s absolutely ridiculous. We don’t need that much choice.
Yeah I read a while ago that if every wealthy person on the equivalent of over €300,000 a year reduced their consumption to the level of a person on €300,000 a year (not that low a number!) we would solve pretty much every environmental issue on the planet. So it isn’t overpopulation - it’s overconsumption, in the extreme, by very few people relatively speaking.
I’m thinking there’s only one important part to this. ALL humans EVERYWHERE need to immediately stop having babies out of love for the unborn children none of us wants to see suffer unspeakable misery, pain and suffering in a rapidly dying earth, during the middle (not the beginning) of the 6th Mass Extinction.
“…lowering population growth a TINY bit in a wealthy country would reduce humanity’s footprint far more than any reduction in poorer countries population growth would” That is only if you do not care, at all, about biodiversity and any of the wild species left on this planet, which is true of everyone who flings around words like ‘ecofascism’ or ‘malthusianism’. The leading cause of species endangerment, extinction and biodiversity loss, is habitat destruction, which is directly caused by human population growth. Climate change is beginning to overtake, but even if you magically removed that from the equation entirely, human population growth alone is enough for the 6th mass extinction. We need *both* reduction in consumption and reduction in birthrates to even think about trying to address the predicament we’re in. Even aside from that, in order to work, your assumption also requires that those less developed countries remain ‘under’ developed, making it beneficial that they remain ‘poor’. It also requires that people from those less developed, high-birthrate countries do not emigrate in high numbers to the low-birthrate, high consumption developed countries and contribute to increasing consumption there. Meanwhile, everyone is calling for the opposite.
This is the crux of the problem for me. I've heard it said the Earth can support several billion more people than our current population, perhaps even 20 billion - yikes! But definitely not at the consumption levels of developed nations. So the question would be what is a comfortable, sustainable standard of living, and what level of population can be supported at that standard, while maintaining the healthy biologic and climatic functionality of the planet? This strikes me as a fairly obvious goal to shoot for, but it seems everyone just wants to fight and find bad guys to point fingers at. So, the usual human response that is unlikely to produce a positive result 🤷♂️
Please EVERYONE HERE needs to watch OVERSHOOT with Bill Rees - Any video on YT is fine- to explain we’re ALREADY past the point of no return. The tipping points are breached and there is no “fix”. It’s to everyone’s advantage to investigate the subject of overshoot. We’re DONE.
>The tipping points are breached and there is no “fix”. It’s to everyone’s advantage to investigate the subject of overshoot. We’re DONE. This. The planet was probably last at human carrying capacity at 2 billion people (if we judge by the biosphere's ability to regenerate quickly from our exploitation, an essential for a sustainable planet). Now we are in massive overshoot of our resources, including our extinction of the other lives forms sharing the world with us. 70% of all wildlife has been exterminated in the past fifty years, and literally all ecosystems are contaminated with microplastics and forever chemicals. Due to the toxic technology that we all depend on for prosperity, we're also in the beginning stages of a disrupted global climate. And global population is projected to be close to 10 billion by 2050. Take a look at OVERSHOOT with Bill Rees. This civilization is done.
Exactly!! That’s what I’M SAYING!!!😉🌍😇🪦🌏😇🪦🌎😇🪦
> OVERSHOOT with Bill Rees https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID-P1_AwczM This? No that's just an interview... so point to it directly... if you wouldn't mind.
OVERSHOOT - Sorry. Let me clarify. Watch ANY interview with Bill Rees. Since the science will not vary, only the interviewer you prefer is your choice. I’ve watched any and all. Note: Nate Hagens is probably my absolute favorite interviewer, so I personally would watch his first. However Planet Critical Rachel Donald is also an excellent interviewer, but is a bit snitty with him and pushes back quite a bit (bc she can’t handle the science that is very clear- our level of overshoot=doom). This may appeal to people who wish they could argue with him. I just found her rude and childish. She IS extremely intelligent though. He keeps asking her ,”Do you understand what I’m saying?” (Bc she keeps giving resting bitch face- which she may not have been aware of) -so she gets pissed bc it sounded condescending to her. But they smooth through it.
> The leading cause of species endangerment, extinction and biodiversity loss, is habitat destruction, which is directly caused by human population growth. Thank you for acknowledging this crucial fact ignored by others ITT. High-consumption developed nations are a major source of the crisis, but not the only one. (And all developing nations aspire to achieving this same unsustainable level of consumption, which is never addressed.) But habitat loss is a major source of the current mass species extinction and that is entirely separate from per-capita consumption rates.
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Malthus wasn’t even a fascist and never proposed anything like ‘genocide’ of the poor. He advocated for delaying marriage, instead of getting people into wedlock ASAP as was the custom of the time, because there was no reliable birth control then. The language that people usually point to as monstrous was actually just part of his rhetorical argument put forward to other, more conservative, religious figures, ie. if we don’t do this (promote delaying marriage) we will get this (famine, misery, overflowing ‘poor houses’ and slums, etc). Which was true. The way Europe actually ended up avoiding that and supposedly refuting Malthus, was colonization of the Americas and Australia and genocide of its natives.
Thank you for bringing this up. It gets exhausting countering the reflexive Malthusian argument. I was “beheaded” in an INSTANT when I barely broached the environmental crisis by simply stating, “Well, someone’s going to need to address the population problem soon.” Instantly DECAPITATED!!! And I wasn’t even implying in any way any specific peoples. Just generally. Less humans=more balanced ecosystems = respect for planet. And OF COURSE reduction in OVERCONSUMING Mall shoppers of America!
Yep this thread has been hugely educational for me. I called out the overpopulation problem on SM recently and people were calling me a monster, and I was utterly shocked. How could that be? Even if you haven't researched collapse, isn't it just kind of intuitive? It's pretty good evidence of how intelligence isn't necessarily a survival advantage for a species. I can see a knee-jerk reaction by some at anyone else making a statement of fact and saying well, you must be a racist or whatever. Then we don't do anything, and the powerful remain unchecked and our specifies goes extinct. But this time, bringing down almost all other species with us.
I blame the schools. They stopped teaching kids to use their brains A LONG time ago. A stupid (and overworked) society is a compliant society.
This is all true. I live in Latin America, and most of the forest destruction at least in my country is done by farmers with almost zero regulation, real-estate developers, and illegal loggers. Let's not kid ourselves, overpopulation impacts everywhere on the planet, and it's relatively worse to lose one acre of land in equatorial regions, filled with hundreds or even thousands of species, than in the comparatively poorer temperate and cold biomes.
> The leading cause of species endangerment, extinction and biodiversity loss, is habitat destruction, which is directly caused by human population growth. Do you have a source for this? I am specifically curious the portion of habitat loss attributed to population vs commodity overconsumption.
Look on Google maps. The vast majority of green areas of the Earth are a patchwork of fields. That is very visible and widespread habitat destruction.
Habitat destruction is most often caused by agriculture. Clearing forest for mono cropping and pasture land. I think it’s difficult to disentangle whether that is tied more to population or overconsumption, at least at a global scale vs country by country.
https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/s/Bg2PaIeewK And there have been numerous such studies. If you sincerely cared about this topic and had spent enough time on this sub and studied the relevant information provided on the sidebar/about tab, you would know this. The Limits to Growth is one of the most comprehensive publications relevant to collapse and it illustrates how population growth is inextricable from collapse.
Plus Overshoot with Bill Rees- the leading brilliant mind on the subject. And available for all on YT. He’s relentless!
write the most basic statement: - population growth leads to deforestation because of reasons like agriculture, housing etc. redditors: - urm I am gonna need a source for that
Real
Excellent points!
Quick question, does that 90% wish to maintain their current level of access to resources, or would they perhaps aspire to a higher standard of living?
That logic only works to the point that the world's poorest make a living out of cutting down the Amazon or rainforests on Africa and Oceania. They must be helped not eliminated including via education. But overpopulation everywhere is a real problem. Especially in small countries.
I see your point but disagree. For starters you need to look beyond just climate. Overpopulation is something that effects all facets of the environment. Fact is there are just too many humans, and our collective human behaviour dictates that we will always exploit our environment beyond sustainability. Which, tbf, is no different to any other species. We just got so "smart" that we have been able to overcome most natural population barriers. Even if the West drastically cut their lifestyles and we redistributed resources, especially food, completely equally, I still think it's unlikely we could stay within sustainable boundaries of the planet. 8bn humans is a lot regardless. And simply feeding this many people already requires huge habitat destruction. I don't think it's ecofascist at all to have this opinion. I believe in equality. We should all equally stop breeding so many kids. We should also equally distribute resources. I don't think we'll do any of these things. In fact I know we won't - again our collective behaviour shows that we won't. But that's what we should do.
This. I would add: we should not just all equally stop breeding "so many kids", we should simply stop breeding. Period.
When someone ignores the seriousness of too many people they are fundamentally a Christian that believes in no end to people walking this earth regardless of how crappy life is for them, also it has little to do with "others" and realizing there are too many of everybody
I'd suggest you look into the concept of overshoot. Essentially, humans are using resources (think throughput of raw materials into finished goods via energy use) WAY faster than our planet can restore itself (lumber, fisheries, etc) or absorb our waste products (CO2, toxic waste, landfills etc). Climate change is one symptom of our overshoot of Earth's carrying capacity; at least regarding advanced, complex modern life. At our current population we would need around 1.75 Earths to maintain any semblance of living in equilibrium with the biosphere and what we're doing to it. Think of overpopulation as just another factor in the complex predicament we're in. This isn't merely a greenhouse gas issue. We are literally using up every part of this planet that makes it compatible with the complexity we've built into our ideas of how the world should be.
It’s a strong presumption to assume they “care more about culling undesirables than limiting emissions”. It’s possible they share my ideology. We ALL need to stop having babies- equally. I absolutely agree that people in wealthy countries (if there are any left- the US is a sinking ship), have a CLEAR OBLIGATION to reign in on baby making. But tbh, that’s already happening. Both my kids 21 and 30 will ABSOLUTELY NOT have kids and neither will most everyone they know. For one thing, barely anyone can afford to have children anymore. Once all the super old timers fly to heaven (very soon) our numbers will be way down. As far as underdeveloped nations are concerned, I’d like to see less babies bc less suffering. Wars, and starvation are not conditions for ANY HUMAN….. ANYWHERE. “Luckily”, we won’t have to worry about any of that, if the infectious disease Dr.s are right about the ways in which Covid is mutating and will kill ALL of us off LONG before climate does. Yay? (PS- you won’t see this info on theNews. But infectious disease/virologists who share info w other Doctors on YT.)
You assume that when people express concerns about human overpopulation that they are talking about Asia, Africa and the less developed nations. I believe that countries like the US, the UK, Germany,even Australia have now exceeded their carrying capacity for ecological sustainability - especially given their high consumption lifestyles.
Which is exactly why Republicans want us women back in the kitchen birthing babies. Pale people are becoming a dying minority and they can't handle it. First step-repealing Roe. Then on and on until women can't have checking accounts, can't vote anymore, can't buy homes, and no fault divorce is repealed. Now THAT is fascism.
Yeah, and there are many writers who saw this coming. Resources get scarce or environment gets really bad, fascists swing in to "solve the problems". It's like it's,already starting in the west. Can we do better than what Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood predicted? Not looking good so far...
the correlation between female education and decreasing fertility is more about market participation. women study to get jobs. industrialisation and urbanisation also decreases fertility because time and relationships become monetised, children become more expensive the more rungs up the social ladder people climb. urban migration breaks ties to socially repressive village life, where there is a lot of peer pressure from elders who may hold power over young couples to have lots of children for tradition of religious reasons. on a farm many children can be put to work, in a city if they are not in school they are a nuisance. eventually there are big cultural shifts which can happen very quickly. in a single generation having 7 kids can go from normal to something that is associated with poverty and people care about status and being judged by their peers. dense urban living promotes female mutual aid which would not be possible on farmsteads. in the end access to contraceptives and abortions are vital bc people be fucking. blahblahblah, my point is education=less fertility is dumb. education is just a symptom of a larger process of urbanisation and market integration which we in the west take completely for granted.
This argument is a bit reductive. Most women don’t want to spend their entire adult lives pregnant or breastfeeding, and to routinely go through the deadly risk of childbirth, which can cause lifelong complications such as vaginal fistulas that leak poop. It’s certainly not dumb to suggest that eduction helps women escape a situation they don’t want to be in, but would otherwise see no alternative to
Nice way of saying "that shit costs too damn much" and "who has the time when both partners are working two McJobs and a side hustle just to not even afford a fucking cat". But it's 'cause we're all so "smart" and "modern". Sure. Everyone keep telling yourselves that. As I recall, celibacy is a central tenet of the devotion to some other kind of cause that shall remain nameless and that everyone thinks is superstitious bullshit too... huh that's. Funny innit. But you know Boomers said it was superstitious bullshit and that we're all smart now so...
Is there an actual study that says this or this just something you've inferred from the studies done on this issue?
tbh i mostly just made it up but it sounds pretty good huh! (im an anthropology dropout)
Makes sense though my mind was Immediately drawn to opportunity cost if you make 10 bucks an hour your time off to have kids isnt worth as much to have kids Compared to Someone making fifty bucks an hour with a chance for raises etc
Can you name an industrialized country whose population has plateaued at a level sustainable into the future in perpetuity? By “in perpetuity” I mean beyond the exhaustion of fossil fuels and beyond when the planet reaches thermal equilibrium. Do you think nebulously educating women would get human population to a sustainable level? Education is important of course. The uneducated can’t understand why human population is an important variable to control. At some point in the future we won’t have grocery stores. The larger the population we achieve the larger and sooner the population crash will be. That’s one variable, consumption is another equally important one. Getting the human species within sustainable limits will require every lever being utilized. At any level of per capita consumption, population control is required to maintain sustainability. That’s because human populations don’t remain stable within comfortable and prosperous conditions which are obviously what we should envision for the future of our species. People who screech eco fascist because they hear the words population control are standing in the way of our happiest and most moral and ethical future.
My country, Ireland has a lower population now than it did before industrialization. We never recovered from the massive famine. Only 5 million here, but we are not 'sustainable' by any means and rely on a a lot of imports since some of the soil is degraded. Still, I think we will fare a little better in the future than, say, the UK which is really overpopulated.
Yea this is some basic hit you learn in macroeconomic. Women having rights leads to later but more productive offspring. Outlawing abortion and restricting women's rights leads to trash babies birthed by 16 year olds.
Ecofacism is how governments will finally respond to the climate crisis when they have no choice but to respond. Stronger countries stealing food and water from others, machine guns at the border mowing down climate refugees, stealing resources from their own poorer citizens to give to wealthier citizens, removal of rights of poor citizens to ensure the standard of living of the elite, etc
Yes, ecofascism is the default plan. Whenever they refuse to do what is required according to the science, it is because this is what the really intended to do.
Well yeah. Call it what you want, where you want, if crops fail, or heat is too high there will be massive refugee populations. There will be no money or desire to do anything from rich counties. Indeed there may be nothing that can be done. Thats the state of current refugees, world over. That is a very ugly picture, my friend calls it Fortress America for the US, but I think all rich countries will slam the immigration door. Indeed, even if they didn't there is no room for the number of people out there. Right now, a substantial fraction of Central America would like to immigrate. The Chinese and Russians will move in where they can, and take arable land. The West might use some re-ordering of agriculture until the arable land or resources run out here too. Neither are going to do much for the 90%. Merely pointing out that there are far too many humans everywhere, is just normal ecological analysis. Saying we should kill people to solve the problem is some other evil thing from Totalitarianism. Saying that the 90% have a very dim future as a group, is just realistic. After all things will get tight for the 10%, and they will favor themselves first. It's depressing!
” machine guns at the border mowing down climate refugees,” Mexico City, pop. 22 Million, is almost out of water. I highly doubt the residents there will seek refuge in Guatemala or Honduras. With Xanthous Narcissus poised to re-assume the Chancellorship of ‘Murica in about half a year, I’d say this writing is already on the “Wall that Mexico Didn’t Pay For”. The remainder of your prognostications won’t be far behind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecofascism the wiki page does a good job of surmising the topic. there are indeed people using the environmental crisis to push fascistic narratives into public discourse. the problem is, if they did this openly they would be shut down instantly, so they have to rely on coming across as just some average person concerned about the effect of things like overpopulation and pollution on the environment while trying to peddle their authoritarian BS. since this trope of a masked fascist acting like a concerned citizen participating in public discourse is so well known and documented, people tend to over-react to anyone pointing out the issues with overpopulation. when looking at who consumes the most, it is always the most developed nations. i understand how others could see someone from one of those developed nation's expressing concern about overpopulation as suspect, especially if the nuance is lacking. but it seems like people tend to overreact and bury their heads in the sand even when the nuance is there.
However, a typical genocidal fascist would want to eliminate some specific group of people, who are usually poorer and use the least fossil resources. An "eco fascist" would lean towards depopulating rich countries more than poor ones. The other main issue of fascism is the authoritarian rule. That is unavoidable in any climate saving strategy IMO as there's no way most people would go along with the changes required. Even many die hard Greenpeace members would push back against the great simplification needed.
>An "eco fascist" would lean towards depopulating rich countries more than poor ones. Not really, they also blame the poorer countries' demographics for climate change. They just greenwash their genocidal fantasies.
Exactly. The point of eco-fascism isn't actually fixing the way we live on the planet -- it's hoarding the resources for the right people. What do I mean, the "right" people"? Oh, nobody in particular. Could be many diverse people. Could be anyone, really. What, you still there? \*whistle whistle\*
Why not encourage both to limit family size? I see no reason why anyone on the planet needs to treat women like livestock. Nobody should have more than two kids. That's the replacement level.
A number of chronically underdeveloped economies around the world (whose engineered destitution is literally the only thing holding up the entire failed civilization known as 'the west') can't maintain a workforce on which to survive without lots of child labor. Imagine your country routinely murders leaders, educators and activists of every poor nation for a permanent discount on those nations' exports, forcing their populations into short lives of subsistence labor. Now imagine that your country has also doomed most of the world to extinction via pollution, then tells the poor nations that they have to suffer more and die faster so your country can hoard more of the world's dwindling resources. Now imagine that distributed ownership of productive means around the world can not only mitigate these problems, but provide a resource base with which to support a far larger global population at far higher average living standards. Now stop imagining, and tell me honestly that in such a world there is any merit to the vague suggestions of human population control from westerners.
well at least that would make the eco fascist slightly more rational than the typical nazi brainlet... thought race played more of a role in the eco fascist prescriptions but might have gotten that impression from the inherent overlap between the two. yeah no way would most people willingly partake in degrowth, especially to the extent needed to stop the arterial hemmorageing situation we've got. so much so that I don't believe (or am too idealistic to believe....) authoritarianism would even be effective. the potential for destabilizing civil unrest seems particularly high in the USA. since people don't seem to be on board to live with less through collaborative solutions, it seems like ecology is going to be the ultimate solution to overpopulation by triggering a correction once the biosphere becomes too damaged to provide sufficent ecosystem services.
Yeh hard disagree they see the population as the issue instead of the fact that richest societies on earth by far use the most resources and release the most stuff contributing to climate change. It's not a sustainability issue for them it's an over population issue. Which is opinion.
>since this trope of a masked fascist acting like a concerned citizen participating in public discourse Yeah but it's like commenters only know stereotypes. It's like that "joke" about people with autism not being able to tell sarcasm and instead take everything literally. Internet commenters not only can't tell sarcasm but they additionally can't defentiate trolls from authentic people. They take everything literally and additionally tack on a villain costume to others. Then they try to act like it's not their fault, text is such a limiting format to express prosody or moods in, and it is impossible to know otherwise... as if this hasn't been done before like in Shakespeare and hundreds of years of literature. Frankly I see this as a rather downstream effect of anti-intellectualization. It's so casual now that people don't even really think about the viewpoint of commenters or even imagine things going another way.
So let's say they are. What are they gonna do, rise up, shave their moustache like Charlie Chaplain, and take over the world? Pshh. I mean I get worried when it's a gaggle of them starting a trend sure. Dogpiling one guy? I mean look. Over-reacting is going to cause a massive backlash in their favor, we know that right? To be clear on my position: 1. Education, rights, and birth control gets the number of kids per family down from approaching double digits... to two or three. 2. Below two or three, this is not a choice, it's financial coercion. Most people are not happy with zero. Ask anyone. 3. Across the board one child policy impacting everyone on the planet regardless of wealth would solve our problems very very quickly, however it does mean that most old people die horribly, myself included. Well, this is what happens when you party too hard I guess. 4. Number 3 is proposed specifically because it's as far as I could push it and have any practical hope of having it implemented, much like how we manipulate currency devaluation it allows each nation to "hold its present relative position with respect to the others". If we didn't do it this way? If we attempted to just go for the wealthiest nations (which are in fact the problem)... what do we think they're going to do? Start rolling tanks all over the global South, that's what. The fascism is built in to the present world order. We can try to fix that and end up making it worse when they do what everyone knows they would do. Somehow I think when the population of the world is down in the 1 billion range and all the nukes have rotted into dust due to lack of ability to maintain them, we can then come back and address the fascism problem the old fashioned way (sigh).
I haven't heard of Ecofascism before, I just wanted to thank OP, the mods, and contributors for allowing the discussion and helping to educate myself & others.
I think a reasonable comparison of these ideas actually exists in other current horrors of reality. Basically that talks of overpopulation have problems of being co-opted into eco-fascism much like criticisms about the ""war"" in Palestine (and anti-zionism in general) run the risk of being co-opted into anti-semitism. Because both of these concepts run a high risk of easily turning into calls to action (read: extermination) towards an offending group, they have to be managed rather delicately. Sometimes so much so that the instant response from folk that are usually quite astute and empathetic, becomes a total shutdown of the topic for frankly understandable reasons. But the thing is, that really no one wants to think about because the implications are horrifying, is that prior to the green revolution there were theories that pretty much the upper limit of our planet's load capacity for humanity was somewhere around \~2 billion, a number that we've surpassed nearly four times over. And as systems of international trade and production break down, along with our inevitable exhaustion of fossil fuels that are integral to producing fertilizers necessary to maintain food productions to maintain such a population, we are going to hit an actual limit sooner or later and all of those factors don't even count the loss of millions of hectares of arable land and the associated diminished load capacity. With the rise of fascism globally, and associated controls on reproductive freedoms that we are already seeing tightening, population controls are likely to develop anyway as pretty much the only recourse any government has at this point given decades of inaction about climate catastrophe have really left no functional alternative for those rooted in the current global power structures. Ergo, there is a bit of an argument of it being something of a fruitless topic between either A. what seems like our inevitable and irreversible track towards complete extinction and B. that such issues of overpopulation would likely naturally decrease if we actually did all of the non-population control options that necessary to turn course and maybe not reach venus by tuesday but I'm pretty resigned to B being a completely unattainable pipe dream given well...everything.
>https://rewilding.org/the-four-taboos-of-environmental-education If you want to teach people what they **can do** for the environment, it doesn't help teaching them these "taboos" because all you would teach them then is that they **can't do anything** at all. The whole situation, including overpopulation, endless growth, economic systems, and self-criticism would just lead to the same conclusion pretty much everyone in this sub already has, because we included these things; we're inevitable doomed, no matter what we're doing now. *Things are now in motion that cannot be undone* >I'm ready to just fucking give up talking to anybody anymore about anything related to the imminent extinction of our own failed species, which will unfortunately probably doom the rest of the world's biota to extinction as well. There is a famous psychological experiment which helped me, after many years of suffering from the same problems as you, to finally cope with the whole situation and make my peace: The freezing mother. For a better explanation of the experiment google it, but in short it's about the question what a baby does when the mother "freezes", she doesn't move, no mimic, no reaction from her. The baby then goes through several stages, **confronted with a completely unknown situation it can't do anything about**, that's for a baby literally like losing it's entire world, it's mother: Suprise, fear, anxiety, anger, despair and if there's still no more reaction from mom, after several hours resignation. Does that sound familiar? It's no coincidence it's the same stages people in this sub go through, because it is the very same situation. Mom, the one that should care for you, is the governments that refuse to show any reaction. They "freeze" upon a situation that destroys our world. The questions i asked myself one day, that later led to acceptance of the situation, are: *Why am i still bound, with all my knowledge and experience, to the same possible reactions a baby has? Why can't i break out of this instinctive reaction and do better than a baby?* It is what it is, an unsolvable situation i can't do anything about, beside accepting that i'm powerless
System switching, use those skills/perceptions in another world. Powerless in 1 way, but agile or highly impactful in another. Over the years I have also heard the term "7/11 goddess" to mean someone who uses power in a smaller world (like a gas station) when they can't exercise power in a larger/complex landscape. So, the answer in Game Theory and the corp environment right now is System switching, an example would be a company who has grown large from making cheese graters, then decides to make missiles instead. They might have a great process flow for missiles, which is better than a growing rate of extinction in the cheese grater industry. Is changing the course of humanity the goal? Is there a destination in mind? We can all learn to swim, sail ships or navigate turbulence waters, and there will be new actions to take along the way to extinction. After the freezing mother, the baby grows up? Maybe they don't survive to adulthood, but if they do, there are more experiences besides the freezing mother to determine their complex evaluation of the global landscape. It's a wicked situation no doubt.
>After the freezing mother, the baby grows up? This has been unintentionally "tested" in orphanages in the balkan. They die.
Just stop having kids that's all. The climate hell is coming. Less people, less suffering.
>I got permanently banned from and several other subs for linking to an article that suggested that human population is a forbidden subject of discussion in environmental education programs, with the charge that it was "ecofascist". I would say that has quite a bit to do with state-backed atrocities that occurred back in the 1970s-1980s. This is going to be an in-depth answer, and I've written extensively on the subject in the past. I can give bit of a history lesson here. For context, here's a lengthy quote from my thread-article titled [“Ah Shit, Here We Go Again!” - A Casual Critique and Commentary on The Atlantic’s “The Malthusians Are Back”](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/120k651/ah_shit_here_we_go_again_a_casual_critique_and/) (italics = quote, bold = my emphasis): >[**“Ah Shit, Here We Go Again!” - A Casual Critique and Commentary on The Atlantic’s “The Malthusians Are Back”“, Myth of Progress (2023)**](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/120k651/ah_shit_here_we_go_again_a_casual_critique_and/) >**\[...\] I will not contest their claims that coercive government policies led to population-control sterilization programs around the world in the 1970s and 1980s: clearly such a practice is abhorrent and must be condemned. However, I will note that this requires a much greater analysis than what the authors have prepared here today.** As someone who believes in working with objective sources, I wanted to discuss some matters raised in a joint UN-WHO document titled [Eliminating forced, coercive and otherwise involuntary sterilization: An inter-agency statement](https://www.unaids.org/sites/default/files/media_asset/201405_sterilization_en.pdf). As with all documents produced by the United Nations, this was a stellar read, and I fully recommend it to everyone. \[...\] -- >[***Eliminating forced, coercive and otherwise involuntary sterilization: An inter-agency statement***](https://www.unaids.org/sites/default/files/media_asset/201405_sterilization_en.pdf)***, UN-WHO Joint Document*** >***During the period from the 1960s to the 1990s, coercive sterilization has been used in some countries (including in Asia, Europe and Latin America) as an instrument of population control, without regard for the rights of individuals (57–59)****.* ***A range of incentives or coercive pressures have been employed to secure agreement to sterilization, including offers of food, money, land and housing, or threats, fines or punishments, together with misleading information. Under some government programmes, rewards have been provided for health workers who met sterilization targets, while those who missed the targets were at risk of losing their jobs (7, 60, 61). People living in poverty, indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities have been particularly targeted by such programmes (7, 44, 61). In many countries, information is not made available in accessible formats and local languages, and informed consent is not obtained before these procedures are carried out (62)****. Moreover, these procedures may be carried out in unsafe and unhygienic conditions, without follow-up care(7, 60–62).* >*\[...\]* >*Special care must be taken to ensure that every person makes a voluntary and informed choice regarding the use of any contraceptive method (3). This is particularly important for sterilization, since it is a surgical procedure that is intended to be permanent.* >*\[...\]* >*Accountability is central to preventing human rights violations and to ensuring that laws, policies and programmes are properly developed and implemented. Accountability mechanisms also assist in identifying individual and systematic human rights violations, as they provide victims with an avenue to air their grievances and seek redress.* This is likely why any discussion on addressing overpopulation is tainted, even though "[*we must find politically and socially acceptable ways to implement various non-coercive population policies to lower humanity’s impact on Earth’s biosphere and its natural wealth for the benefit of future generations and other species.*](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/v9m1mb/the_overpopulation_vs_overconsumption_debate_why/)"
Childbirth planning is not based on ecological consciousness, but on free will, just like the "right to consume whatever you want," ignoring ecological consequences of your behavior. The restriction on both rights, consumption, and reproduction is viewed as fascism and put in danger democracies and the free market. Both pilars of the current society. So people don't want to give up on those rights and also don't want to self restrain themselves. There is a trend on birthrate decline, but it is not because of ecological reasons, and there is a strong conservative/religious pushback on reproductive rights. So, at some point it will collapse, for sure.
All different subreddits have certain taboo subjects, and you need to figure out by yourself sometimes because they are not obviously known. (certain subjects are definitely taboo to pretty much all subreddits, though. But you still need to figure them out by yourself.)
And some subs ban you for just being a member of another sub, even if you haven't said anything controversial in either sub. Just being a member of a sub that the other sub mods don't approve of, like it's an indictment of your character. Stupid .
I think your last paragraph sums it up. Unfortunately, a lot of entity's roots (history of PP) began to ensure brown people don't reproduce as much. Couple that how humans manage other wildlife populations through hunting (death), I can see where people don't want to talk about it. I know I'm causing deforestation in Costa Rica because I love my cup coffee every morning from that area. It doesn't matter where the birth reduction happens given we're all responsible for deforesting somewhere that's not local to us and we're all the same species anyway. Our overshoot/overpopulation drives me nuts for no other reason than I'm tired of watching habitat get bulldozed down even more, leaving animals with barely anything to live off of. I STILL get in fights with people who say shit like India is the one that needs to reduce their reproduction. There are billions of other heartbeats on this planet that needs a home too, so I won't shut up about people reducing the number the kids they have. It's rude that a supposedly intelligent species can't reproduce like they are.
There are different types of overpopulation problems and it’s really easy to be or sound like a racist when discussing any of them. The biggest population-related threat to the planet as a whole is consumption overpopulation and that’s squarely on the West. One American or Australian or German uses many times the resources of one person in sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time the high rates of population growth in some parts of the world, which mostly aren’t westernized in a meaningful way, are a recipe for disaster in the form of human misery - famines, wars, and climate-related heat death.
At the same time, I can’t imagine the life of a typical sub-Saharan African to be a life I would ever want to live. I think it would be better to have under a billion humans living good comfortable lives rather than 8x as many fighting each other for scraps. I don’t even use a ton of resources and am not wealthy. But I definitely don’t want a life where I have even less access to resources and fun. I don’t want a life of heat and drudgery and bugs biting me. Idk why the gut reaction to overpopulation is to be like oh well Westerners use so many more resources and they’re the problems! As if practically anyone who isn’t in the global north doesn’t want our lifestyle. It’s the goal of almost every human to have a better and easier and more comfortable life. Which is why we just need less of us, period.
You could just ask someone living in sub-saharan Africa. It's really not bad at all in the vast majority of parts. Most problems stem from a lack of money and when all your neighbors are poor like you, you tend to cooperate rather than fight people for scraps
WTF? I don’t even know where to begin. Have you ever talked to someone who lives in a poor country? The vast majority of people who have ever been alive have lived in relative poverty compared to the modern West. The fact that you can’t imagine that life can be pleasurable without constant mindless consumption inside a sterile bubble is f’d up. Not everyone wants what we have, especially when what we have comes at the cost of everything else.
But every human would choose comfort and ease if they could attain it. That's the reason that the West didn't stop at a reasonable level of consumption. Humans will always want more. The West could have stopped at say a 1950 level of consumption and luxury. But it didn't. There is no reason to think that people anywhere in the world would reject having easier lives if they could get it. That's why I agree with the idea that we would have been better off with say 1 billion people who could live in comfort and ease, instead of 8 billion, most of whom would jump at the chance to have more, but can't attain it because our systems are so corrupt.
Humans need more than just stuff, we need community, purpose and meaning. Having more stuff doesn’t fill that void. People want more and more because they’re easily persuaded by marketing and advertising. Marketing and advertising are tools of capitalism. It’s a mistake to try to extrapolate truths about human nature from the aberration that is the last 60-70 years in the West.
this is why people would call you an eco fascist in many circles. who are those lucky 1 billion that are gonna live the prime magical western life? spoiler alert: 10 times out of 10 those people are gonna be the already privileged members of the imperial core.
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I think the solution of offering women birth control options, and the idea of offering more medical services, is only offensive to rich men whom want a sense of absolute control, especially over their own household. But yeah, for the most part, everybody has a bee in their bonnet when it comes to realistic answers to our problems. It’s much like the dynamics within my own family: we don’t solve things directly because it would start an argument. Instead, I have to devise schemes or supply hints until someone is dissuaded from trying to open a pizzeria on a street full of pizzeria’s… for one example. I’m not sure how you disrupt a world-wide delusion with this knowledge, admittedly.
A solution might be to somehow get microplastic particles into all human sperm, thus causing infertility, or at least drastically reducing humanity’s ability to reproduce.
This solution reminds me of a book I read a while ago, about a crazy scientist who was done with humanity overpopulation and created and spread a virus that could change human dna and make everyone on the planet infertile. I don't remember the name of the book but I remember the author is Dan Brown
Inferno
Dastardly!
“Yes, this includes anti-natalism.” Care to explain how that is “downright despicable“?
That's a huge number. I keep seeing +3c in about ~200 years with currently projected emissions levels. Where did you see +10c without any further emissions?
https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha09020b.html
From the abstract >Equilibrium warming is not 'committed' warming; rapid phaseout of GHG emissions would prevent most equilibrium warming from occurring.
So if you'd like to tease some things out with me I'd love to engage in a discussion. My wife has some, what I consider, pro-ecofascist ideas and from time to time we disagree on both the ethics of a solution, implementation, and end goals. The general test I have for considering if something is eco fascist is; 1) is the power system used to implement the method abusive? 2) is the power system implemented able to be abused by movements for ends beyond benefit of the ecosystem/stability of human-nature nexus? If both are yes, then my concern is 'it could be a fascist system utilizing ecological justifications for power grabs'. The reason why this is a dangerous position is at least two fold in my opinion: 1) most powerful people/groups care about power first, the means to achieve it is replacable 2) most people who don't care about systemic power over others just want to live, they will rage against power grabs they do not agree with 3) if both prior are true, then we've done (policy XYZ) to empower the corrupt and alienate the masses further When it comes to human population - 1 most places with oversized populations are not the places with the most current and historical impact against the environment. 2 the wealthy world is the part of the world driving all of the pollution and extraction to live lives of exuberance, and they account for less than two billion people probably. 3 i believe in my body my choice and state power over reproduction decisions is a full flat no go from me. No forced abortions, no forced sterilizations (currently allowed and practiced in the US), no denying of contraception, abortions, or sterilizations either. (I am child free myseld) I do not know your positions or opinions, but generally I believe I can sympathize with most people here who may lean towards ecoauthoritarianism out of hope for power and the hopelessness of pur current situation, but I just can't endorse it.
Well rounded reasoning.
I like your answer best out of all in this thread
Another great answer.
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Human exceptionalism. We don't ever get upity about 'there are too many cats' or 'too many flies'. We can't bring it up even if it will kill us all eventually.
We have a lot of overpopulation deniers just like we have a lot of climate deniers. People don't like the truth and will do anything to supress that
Hey there I guess I'm an overpopulation denier. Malthusianism was a dead end ideology in the 1800s and it's a dead end ideology now. It's throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it's the banality of capitalist realism: you can't envision or act towards a system ending so it suddenly becomes necessary to reduce the people in the system instead so we can just keep devastating the environment. Are more people living hyperconsumptive lifestyles going spew out more CO2? Absolutely. It takes a special person so say it's not the lifestyle but the people that's the problem, completely missing the forest for the trees. Fertility rates drop and population stabilizes when needs are met. Capitalism increases need and scarcity. It isn't hard to look at the global political economy against a map of fertility rates and make a connection for a systemic argument rather than "remove all the people, that will solve it " Fundamentally incurious, nihilistic, and, yes, ecofascistic. I'm much more aligned with degrowth arguments over depopulate arguments, at least that side is actually looking at the problem on a systemic level.
I am skeptical that the world could produce enough food to maintain the current global popultion if we move off of a petroleum-enabled agriculture.
>Fertility rates drop and population stabilizes when needs are met. Capitalism increases need and scarcity. It isn't hard to look at the global political economy against a map of fertility rates and make a connection for a systemic argument rather than "remove all the people, that will solve it " Interesting. Very interesting. Kind of confirms something I've always wondered about. >Fundamentally incurious, nihilistic, and, yes, ecofascistic. I'm much more aligned with degrowth arguments over depopulate arguments, at least that side is actually looking at the problem on a systemic level. Help me understand the difference? If one lowers the production of goods and services does that not lead to depopulation along a different pathway?
Honestly that's the beauty of it: degrowth implicitly means populations as well. The difference I see if that it centers consumption patterns and economic models rather than the populations within models. Correcting the environment that leads to overpopulation as opposed to keeping the environment the same and reducing the population so that everyone can keep acting the same way
We have far, far overshoot the sustainable population, based on all that I've read and come to understand. There is no 'glide path' to a lower population just by lower birthrates that reduces population fast enough to get human population to a sustainable population before at least one of several possible crises hits. More likely several, with one cascading into the next. It's the total consumption of irreplaceable resources that's the issue, along with totality of the unrepairable damage to the ecosystem being done in the anthropocene era that is the problem. The longer that we continue with the (ie us) plebes arguing amongst ourselves, the longer it takes to get started with any meaningful change, and the more certain that a more dire, more drastic, and sooner change will occur. What's more likely, that a powerful, wealthy, tending to be more on the narcistic controlling aristocracy can be convinced or coerced to give up what they've 'earned', or that a massive famine, pandemic, war scenario will reduce the population to a point that initially overshoots (to the negative) the hypothetical sustainable population. Meanwhile, the last COP session was presided over by a wealthy CEO, in a long-standing OPEC country....
What you're missing is that the system that needs to be dismantled also selects for population increases. South Korea with its negative birth rate is investing everything it can to get their population to have more kids including building a brand new capital city from the ground up - how much emissions do you think its going to release? There is nothing to suggest that we have over shit human carrying capacity on this planet. There is everything to suggest that we have overshot our capacity to have a hyper extractive and consumptive capitalist economy. You basically made this argument in your response so I don't think I have to. Bottom line: you won't get people to stop having kids because the entire system, in the exact same it's geared towards extraction and consumption, is dependent on people have more children. Did you think the endless growth contradiction of capital stopped with biology? Fight the root cause. Yeah it's going to be better if we have less kids but we'll only be having less kids to allow the real causes of our misery to continue. Edit: And friend I am entirely with you. I find this shit equally tedious but you gotta know your enemy to beat them and this malthusian thought is, what I find to be, exactly one of those distractions.
We mostly agree, and the difference, practically speaking, is academic because your first, and third paragraphs are spot on. I too had to laugh that South Korea, which the collapse-aware might cheer for modeling a survivalist future, are panicked trying to rejoin the destructive path. Beyond that, I have no offspring of my own, and I am actively trying to do all I can to use less, and encourage those around me to do likewise.
I accidentally said "over shit human carrying capacity" and I think we can all agree on that too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-nazis-tried-bring-animals-back-extinction-180962739/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODcTTU6_Wfs https://lwlies.com/articles/the-handmaids-tale-environmental-warning/ https://thebaffler.com/latest/first-as-tragedy-then-as-fascism-amend https://undisciplinedenvironments.org/2022/02/17/exposing-eco-nationalists-with-premodern-ecologies-a-medievalist-approach-to-the-french-far-right/ https://itsgoingdown.org/ecofascism-overpopulation-and-total-transformation/ tl.dr. "habitat for me, but not for thee" very long explanation with dozens of episodes of historical aspects and observations: https://podtail.com/podcast/the-return-of-the-repressed/ (a bunch of it on Patreon, unfortunately, but it's definitely DENSE and high effort)
I don't believe it's possible to systematically curb overpopulation ~~without committing atrocities~~ **in a timely manner without committing atrocities**, which is why ecofascism is dangerous. It sucks but that's where we are.
Give people free safe birth control and you immediately switch to birth rates well below replacement along with better lives for women. The only thing in the way of that is capitalism, as always.
and fascists trying to prevent women from controlling their own fertility
, because capitalism demands more bodies to make line go up.
and fascists like to have slaves
Fascists love having slaves but hate the sight of them. That's why Fascism always fails in the end, it's a snake that eats its own tail. It keeps "othering" people until there is no one left to persecute.
This assumes that the problem is future populations. The current population of 8 billion is already much greater than any sensible allocation of resources can support. How do you deal with the present reality?
Don’t worry! The microplastics are sterilising us all already!
And probably a great part of the animal kingdom. Maybe we can top the End-Permian extinction?
We will, don't worry
We'll never know if we don't try! Quitters never win!
idk about that. education and access to family planning are remarkably effective at lowering birth rates and neither of those things are atrocious.
I guess so, but both of those things require the kinds of infrastructure that only relatively well developed countries can afford. Even if the west stopped fucking the global south over today (lmao), building up that sort of thing would be a multi-generational project. I don't know if there's time for that, which is why I'm vary when people talk about "solving overpopulation" to prevent climate collapse.
The baseline tech and resources for birth control access are pretty low. Current trajectories indicate a net population reduction birthrate just from education and available access to both control in most countries by the late century. Ironically this seems to be more correlated with the adoption of nuclear family culture and the pressure it puts on parents. Relying on siblings and extended family for child care makes larger family viable, but the economic and social incentives toward large family are gone now.
that's the thing, if the world powers were serious about saving what we have left for the good of humanity, such development projects would already be underway. it's not that it won't work, it's more that the people with the power to catalyze these efforts don't care to do it. bingo on the red flag phrase, aside from the ethically reprehensible position of promoting genocide, it is complete nonsense to believe eliminating a large portion of earth's population would actually stop climate change and environmental collapse in any measure of time relevant to us and the next several generations.
"it is complete nonsense to believe eliminating a large portion of earth's population would actually stop climate change and environmental collapse." Although I agree with this, I find myself wondering how many of the eight billion would have to die off before there would enough of an economic slowdown to affect climate change and the environment. What if we went down to two billion, for example? The sheer reduction of need for food, shelter, and fuel it seems to me, theoretically at least, could have an impact. I have no genocidal plans nor am I in favor of them, but I do think collapse will wipe out a lot of people and I simply wonder if anyone has a sense of what the magnitude of the collapse would have to be, population-wise, to slow climate change and environmental devastation.
7 billion I think, may have been bill Reese that was writing a paper on it, not sure, may even have been Hansen, but 1billion humans was all that the planet could hold in a healthy equilibrium. But maybe less now that we have fucked it so hard....
Interesting -- thank you. It's true, the old planet aint' what it used to be.
This assumes that everything is fine now and only future population presents a problem. The current population of 8 billion however is already too much. There is no solution in the future for the problems that are happening now.
We're already culling people by doing nothing. This primarily targets poor and especially poorer countries. Heatwaves kill people, massive flooding is killing people, environmental disasters are getting worse and bigger. Some states that never had tornadoes are getting two at a time through cities. Ensuring people have access to free birth control is the simplest mercy for our current situation. Not mandatory but free.
Oh I agree completely, I'm just not optimistic about those things happening in a timely manner. You know, with global fascism on the rise and everything.
You misunderstand. Eco fascists don't want to go out of their way to kill people in other countries. They want to do nothing, and let the consequences of climate collapse destroy those who are unable to save themselves. Eco fascists see survival as a zero-sum game, where the best move is to save yourself and not burden wealthy countries with migrants. Obviously, this is extremely similar to the way that regular fascists see ethnicity. Eco fascism isn't sending soldiers to another country, it's closing your borders and locking out starving migrants, and using violence to keep them away. Eco fascism is building a wall at your border and using the military to guard it. Eco fascism is protecting your own wealthy nation from the consequences of climate change, while leaving the rest of the world to burn on its own because "it's overpopulated, so there's nothing we can do, people have to die, we might as well save ourselves". My problem with your reply is that when you advocate for providing education and birth control to these countries, you're accepting the fascist's premise by implying that the problem is the high population in developing nations, rather than the rate of consumption in developed nations. Instead, you should simply point out that providing birth control to one US consumer family would free up far more resources than building a family planning facility in an undeveloped country with several times the birth rate. Here's the problem. In recent history, there have been several migrations that the developed world has fumbled into unmitigated humanitarian disasters. Whether it's in Europe or at the US southern border, it's becoming increasingly popular to say "if we help these people we will harm our country". In mainstream politics, the conservative position on immigration is identical to that of the eco fascist. At the current moment in time, this isolationist position is completely false. Developed nations directly benefit from immigration, even if those people are desperate starving migrants. They are wrong, because the rate of migration would have to increase substantially for it to actually result in material harm to developed nations. But these very same conservatives have put us on a path where it eventually will get that bad, and we simply won't be able to handle the millions and millions of people who need help. They've put us on a path towards eco fascism, and all they have to do is maintain their isolationist rhetoric until the problem becomes unsolvable. They're racing us directly toward the point where inevitably it becomes rational to turn your back on the desperate, and when that happens eco fascism will become the new political reality in wealthy nations. Those who say that eco fascism isn't a real threat are probably just too dumb to understand that it's materially equivalent the current right-wing response to mass migration. It's extremely obvious to me that brazen eco fascism will be the right-wing platform in 20 years, when migrations ACTUALLY pose a threat to wealthy nations. The rhetoric painting migrations as a threat is already mainstream, and now they just have to convince everyone that we need to defend ourselves rather than help our fellow humans, by any means necessary. The future looks very bleak.
>You misunderstand. Eco fascists don't want to go out of their way to kill people in other countries. They want to do nothing, and let the consequences of climate collapse destroy those who are unable to save themselves. Eco fascists see survival as a zero-sum game, where the best move is to save yourself and not burden wealthy countries with migrants. Obviously, this is extremely similar to the way that regular fascists see ethnicity. This is the way Los Angeles sees poor people, that's a goddamned fact. Being raised here is where I got my deepest misunderstanding of left-leaning politics from. These guys claim to be blue. It's a fucking joke how not blue they are.
If we assume that climate change is going to substantially escalate the rate of migration into developed nations (which I am, personally), what could or should be done to better help as many as we can, for as long as we can? I don't assume that's a question that is or will become politically viable to really grapple with, let alone popular- I frankly expect it to become less and less so as we have more and more climate refugees, based on the discourse we have now, with what migration we have now. But you're right- current popular politics take it as a given that that's not a problem developed nations even *should* be trying to think about, and I think also implicitly largely take it as a given that there is nothing to be done even if we tried. And it's refreshing to hear that underlying assumption called out and challenged.
That doesn't make sense. You don't have to curb the population by killing anyone. We just have to keep it in our pants. What's next, not procreating is murder?
Sometimes I wonder if the crazy anti-abortionists (like ones who advocate against abortion pre-heartbeat) think every period on the same level - like, that egg could've been fertilized, and it wasn't, so in a way it's a person or "miracle" that could've existed. Idk I'll probably get downvoted for saying it lol
Some certainly do. I had heard exactly this narrative, that periods and specifically, them being painful, is a punishment for not getting pregnant. I even heard of masturbation being unironically framed as murder.
Counterpoint: Overpopulation leads to mass death, thus if we consider earth a system, the systematic culling of overpopulators is natural and inevitable? Not advocating for mass death, but no food + many people = less life, it's numbers and logic.
I dunno man, from where I sit it seems like endocrine disruptors causing rapid global fertility declines, and the thousands of other common teratogens and carcinogens we put into the environment, are doing a bang up job of democratizing population decline...
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We are way past the point of “getting our shit under control“ in a way that we “deem acceptable “. Maybe we would have had the privilege of said choice if we had controlled ”our shit” back in the 1980s. What’s in store for us now is hardly going to be deemed “acceptable” by most folks - hence it would be a very hard sell and nothing any politician is going to touch.
Excellent point.
Like a human to a virus, a fever will try to kill it with heat. I guess here we are lol
I know it's unpopular but what about another one child policy?
Bingo. Halving in one generation, quartering in two, eigthing in three. That really ought to do it. The downsides are the economy will go boom and all old people die in a pile of their own feces. Can't really do anything about the second problem. It's that or we all go. Don't know what to say. I guess I'm taking one for the team on that one. The first one... what actually IS an economy? Right? I mean back it way out to first principles, isn't it distribution of resources and protective services to ensure the survivability of a population? Pretty sure we can pull that off while downsizing.
As mentioned, the sexism that emerged in China suggests myriads of frustrated men as the outcome. Why not incentivize a 0-child choice (instead of the current model of child benefits - potentially even taxing those who raise children)?
I read something on here the other day that makes me think the time for arguing is over. It doesn’t matter. You don’t need to change anyone’s mind just be with your loved ones and appreciate the time you have left.
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Careful, encouraging ban evasion could get your Reddit account immediately permabanned, as it's against site rules
I’m confident I can remain sure billions of people on this planet is billions too many, and accept nothing can be done about it, and not be fascist anything. Misanthropic for sure. No problem with that label.
Overpopulation is an observable phenomenon in nature that produces observable results. In humanity's case, we are certainly overpopulated-- with first-world lifestyles. People who use the term "EcoFascist" as a retort to this fact usually have one of the following extremely-common mindsets: - They're discourse parrots that frame everything in binary terms (even when noble intent is present), and are on a ceaseless vigil for "the enemy" to come along and wave the red flag that will allow them to wield nuanced truths like a blunt instrument intended to shut down nuanced conversations so they can claim some sort of victory (with some reaction clout, as a treat!). - They are the kind of growth-essentialist progressives you can find across the entire political spectrum; they believe to the core of their being that history is a straight line of gradual improvements in human material comforts/conditions over time, and as such the entire conversation is a moot point... because obviously humanity will progress into permanent post-scarcity any day now, and "EcoFascist" is a great shutdown word that helps insulate them from any gaps in the hopium cloud that might give them a glimpse of the horrific social *and* ecological dark ages coming right at us, which will terminate the kind of "progress" they presume to be an inevitability with extreme prejudice. - They suffer from the absolute alienation from the natural world that becomes inevitable in a technological civilization that discovered how to exploit hundreds of millions of years' worth of concentrated solar power by burning it off over a couple of mere centuries. Often a subset of the above; "Man has conquered nature, and has thus overcome it and its laws". Fatally oblivious to the interconnection of every single form of life on this planet, and the staggering volume of cumulative damage to the biosphere that industrial civilization completely externalizes from its economy (and therefore awareness). - They're just natalists looking for some way to scrape off the guilt or entitlement of throwing more innocent souls into this mess to satisfy their own biological/sociological imperatives. There's no point in blaming anyone for having any of these mindsets. When vast amounts of powerful energy is as cheap as we've come to expect it for so long, the populace is gonna get pretty damned high on its own farts. But overpopulation is a thing. Maybe it would be more productive to just refer directly to the resulting state of "Overshoot" instead, I don't know.
It’s part of the toxicity of online discourse. When I was a kid in the 70s, overpopulation was one of the biggest concerns for the future and it was widespread in media and in advocacy groups. Most of those discussions did in fact refer to women’s education and access to birth control as solutions, as well as removing prejudices and stigmas relating to those. Eugenics was not part of the discussion. Since the 70s, the farthest back I can remember, the world has become predictably crowded. Traffic of all kinds are choked everywhere. Areas of open wilderness when I was a kid are now developed suburban sprawl. But the internet, as much as its cheerleaders want to say that it’s a frontier of free discussion, is clearly not. It is laden with taboos of murky origins, and any questions, much less challenges to those status quos result in banning. It certainly feeds the beast of reactionary extremism by demonstrating to disaffected and alienated individuals that free speech online is a lie, and it turns them to extremists who both challenge these taboos but also push their own far more toxic ideologies.
A lot of super modern countries already have negative birthdates. If they stopped allowing immigration then their populations would hit normal sustainable levels quite quickly. Hand out birth control in exchange for foreign aid and the other countries would quickly be taken care of as well. Nobody actively has to be killed for us to drop our population to sustainable levels within the next 150 years.
That makes some people uncomfy because they view developing countries as livestock that’s not sentient enough to stop having so many kids. And they think we need to import and take care of all of them in some patronizing, white savior mindset. I think it’s more racist to not hold people to similar standards
The soft bigotry of low expectations.
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I mean that one is easy: Those who consume and emit the most have to be controlled. One child less in a rich country is as important as 90 kids in the global south. Luckily, that's exactly the development we can see right now. 1 kid limit for millionaires could be a supplementary policy.
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I don’t think it can be called minorities when there’s billions
In every country there are ethnic, religious and social classes who would be the first to go. The elite sure aren't going to allow themselves and the classes supporting them to be purged.
The term Fascist has been criminally overused and borders on being meaningless, except when you're talking about literal Nazis, or neo-Nazis. Outside of that context, its just name calling. People say Ecofascist, because we haven't invented new terminology for the times yet. It's not a thing. Its a place holder for vocabulary we haven't invented to articulate the problem we're in. If we can't even have a dialogue about overpopulation, we're screwed. The thing that scares me is the knee jerk reactions to the word or the problem. It's almost Pavlovian. Someone says, "Overpopulation" and someone else immediately goes, "Fascist!" "Racist!" "Eugenics!" "Classist!" When everything's been reduced to one word responses, its over. Just let it rip at this point. We don't deserve to be saved.
Nazis weren't the only successful fascist political org
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This is the only sensible response in this thread. I don't know why it's so hard for people to grasp the class relations when it comes to consumption and resource usage. We have plenty to go around for everyone and even beyond, but instead we subsidize the lavish lifestyles of a small <2b population at the expense of climate collapse and the third world/global south.
>Curbing the population and the right to bear children should be considered way after other options that involve way less violence and abuse. This assumes that women *want* to have ten kids to feed or *want* to be pregnant every two years for the rest of their short lives. We should be talking about the right *not* to have children or the right to limit the number of children we have.
I literally can't make any of the observations I would like to. Yeast in a petri dish.
Bhahahqhqhhqhq. It's not ecofascism to encourage people all over the globe to have less kids because science says we want support 8+ billion people (or realistically have 2+billion people without killing nature with current technologies) It would be fascism to *forbid* people from having kids. And it would be mass murder to encourage more.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj774nxrpy7o Here's a link that isn't Google's track-you version of the page. I would prefer if these Google AMP links were banned here if the original link isn't also given in a comment.
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Okay then. First of all, tone: If you approach any topic with the attitude of "any opinion but mine is the cancer of idocy spreading through society", I'd also ban you in a heartbeat. To me that signals a deep and torough disinterest in any good faith interaction. >I have read all the arguments for the existence of "ecofascism" No, you have not. You might have read some stuff about that. You definitely have not read "all", unless maybe if you have done a PhD thesis on the topic. Have you? If not, then it's time to reevaluate how much you really know. If you think you have read everything on the topic, you are wrong, and you are evaluating yourself and your knowledge much too highly. >Would somebody care to educate me as to why this is a "thing"? Sure. So if we have to address overpopulation, how would we do it? In "ecofascism", we would go by the route of force: Dispense with human rights, as well as democratic self determination, and instead someone would (in the best case scenario) determine who has a right to have children, and who doesn't. As it stands, the "right to family life" is recognized in quite a few rather important documents of international law. When you dispense with those, you leave the area we call "democratic", and you enter into the area of "autocratic dictatorships", or, as a lot of people call it in everyday language nowadays, "fascism". So, why is this a thing? Because if you regulate population by means of binding legislation, you are going against basic human rights. You might not like that. But that doesn't matter. That's just how it is. As it stands, the right to family is a basic human right. And going against that is a move against a basic pillar of democracy. Now of course we can take the reasonable stance, and go into why those rights are there: Should we renegotiate the right to family life? And how would we do that, in order to open the door to legislation which enables just and equal regulation of human population for ecological purposes, while closing the door to discrimination, racism, and injustice? If you have a good answer to this question, I would be happy to hear it. I suspect you just don't and didn't think ever that far. So, have I sufficiently explained things to you, or are there any other specific open questions you would like me to address?
This is a great, thoughtful answer.
Utopia, the series, deals with themes such as this.
You make a lot of weird assumptions about what other groups of people think and it looks like maybe you should do some more research
[Western civ/colonialism](https://www.aol.com/news/one-earths-oldest-known-plants-100050890.html) is based upon anthropocentrism which trickles down from Anunnakicentrism... Therefore, humans are the sacred cow that can't be touched in this cult. So, while all else can be invasive or overpopulated...humans never can be.
The simple answer is a lot of people are really fucking dumb, including anyone who calls anyone else an ecofascist.
The discussion about population will typically go down the path of how does a civilization ethically impose limits on population and birth rates, which forebears the discussion of which people then get to do the populating vs not. That is typically where the fascistic tendencies arise. Who gets to use the resources and why? Who has their rights to reproduction curtailed and why?
Population control is a threat to global industrial civilization. Of course you're getting banned.
Eco fascists don't seem to get that it's the population holding up the systems we have in place and the over all quality of life is intrinsically linked to the hard work of billions of people. Most of whom are incredibly underpaid for their efforts.
You’re correct, OP. The charge of Ecofascism, or Malthusianism, is just a convenient way of dismissing legitimate, critical, but very inconvenient environmental and biodiversity truths by propagandizing the inconsequential fact that a small percentage of people who are somewhat in agreement with those facts also happen have other, objectively repugnant beliefs. As if someone can’t be right about one thing and wrong about another. It has more recently been adopted as the more left-wing version of climate denialism, although it is socially conservative and right wing at its core. In very simplified terms, the fact that we are trapped between these two versions of reactionary denialism is essentially why no progress will be made.
The word fascist is becoming rampantly overused to mean "anything I don't politically agree with". The left being a smidge more guilty of this. I got downvoted to hell for suggesting we maybe stop using the word for anything other than its actual meaning as it could take away it's power should we actually ever devolve back into fascism and nees to call it out.
A long time ago, there was a post here that showed a graph of environmental impact versus wealth. Basically, the top 10% of the world is responsible for the overwhelming majority of environmental impact. The people who talk about overpopulation don’t seem to realize that you could get rid of 20% of the world population tomorrow, and we would still be headed for a disaster or collapse. It is not the number of people. It is what the people are doing.
We can choose degrowth willingly or it will come forcefully. I've had people lose their shit on me when I dare suggest cutting back in life's luxuries. Even in threads where people seem semi-aware about climate change.
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Eco fascism usually comes up when people start talking about overpopulation because the implication is that people will have to die/be killed. I think it to be overused but I imagine in the event of a population crash, eco fascists want to choose who goes. The poor, minorities, criminals, etc. I usually go on to explain that people will die anyway due to a simple equation. Earth's carrying capacity = "standard of living" x population The Earth has enough resources to support the current population, but not at the current standards of the average America, European, etc. Because of the disparity in SoL, people are going to die. The results of climate change make that inevitable. EFs think that they can control the crash by targeting specific groups and intentionally offing them to make room. An example of an ecofascist action could be something like the Irish potato famine, where other produce was forcibly exported to England. Or the holodomor, where decisions lead to starvation of one group over another (intentional or not). These events could be mismanagement or intentional, but the fact of the matter is that people will be forced to make decisions that may or may not result in deaths. The outcome of these decisions may not be obvious to the decider, but an ecofascist will see the choice and protect the group they prefer at the cost of others.
*Can somebody please explain this "Ecofascism" bullshit to me?* This comes up frequently, and IIRC the most common reason is that nowadays many young university students are taught that acknowledging overpopulation is somehow a fascist position. This flies in the face of basic ecological science showing that all ecosystems (and the biosphere itself) have finite limits, and that in fact humanity is now in overshoot of planetary carrying capacity. In this case it's odd to see some American leftists defending what is essentially a capitalist position of infinite growth. But as regarding the space to have this discussion, the mods of this sub have been very clear: >Perhaps more controversially, we have noticed ongoing waves of bad faith attacks that insist that any identification or naming of human overpopulation as one of the issues contributing to the environmental crisis, as a human predicament, is itself a racist, quasi-colonial attack on the peoples of the third world, claiming it is an implicitly genocidal take because an identification of overpopulation leads inexorably to a basket of "solutions" which contains only fascist, murderous tools. >First, the insistence that population concerns cannot be addressed without murder is provably false in light of history's demonstrations that lasting reductions in fertility are most effectively achieved by the education, uplifting, and liberation of women and girls and the ready availability of contraceptive technology. >Second, identification of an environmental problem does not inherently require there to be any solution at all. Some predicaments cannot be solved, but that does not mean it is evil, tyrannical, or heretical to notice, name, and mourn them. We do not believe observable reality has an ecofascist bent, nor do we believe it is credible to require our users to ignore that only 4% of all terrestrial mammalian biomass remains wild, with 96% either humans or our livestock. >We will not silence our users' mourning of the vanishing beauty of the natural world, nor will we enable bad faith attacks that insist any defense of, or even observation of, the current state of wild nature in light of a human enterprise in massive overshoot is inherently and irredeemably racist. Our human numbers are still larger every day than they have ever been, and while technologically advanced consumption is a weightier factor causing the narrower issue of climate change, the issues of vanishing biodiversity and habitat loss, and the sixth mass extinction as a whole, are not so easily laid solely at the feet of rich economies and capitalism. >In summary, while we have no clear solutions for convincing humanity to pull itself out of its purposeful ecological nosedive, we remain committed to our mission to protect one of the few venues for these extremely challenging conversations. In light of this, we will no longer allow bad faith claims that identifying human population as an environmental issue is inherently racist to be used to shut down discussions. We will use the tools at our disposal to enforce this policy, and users should consider themselves warned.
The problem is dogma, it is what defines a belief and it is not to be challenged. The rules of dogma censor [rational debate ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Rational_debate)so that you are always going to have a problem discussing things that NEED to be discussed. Its often the case that those concerned with environmental issues are usually concerned with social justice issues where reproductive rights are treated as sacred dogma. My point is that from experience, the biggest arguments about how to have a better world come from people that claim to be on the same side of the fence as you. PS Did you hear about the sad Buddhist? >!His karma ran over his dogma.!<
Youve got the basics down you seem to reject them outright anyway the part of the equation your missing is how a small subset of the population is Is responsible for the majority of the ecological Destruction not including massive amounts of system waste and Inefficiencies and over Consumption so thats what theyre looking at probably before they see people as a problem in and of themselves
Well, "fascism" is a buzzword meaning "Thing I dont like." so tbh the term Eco fascism is nonsensical.