Both the points you make, Sololeum--population control's being a red herring and our needing to simplify and humanize our lives--seem right on to me.

Population control is a red herring in the current clear and present danger of peak oil. Population measures take decades to work while we only have years to deal with declining energy. In addition China with its draconian measures has not been able to reduce population - there is absolutely no chance of doing so in the white west, let alone using more draconian measures that would work, including euthenasing the chronically ill and infirm.

Talking about draconian measures is a strawman argument. The United States takes over a million legal immigrants (and the number keeps increasing) each year and God only knows how many illegals - the conservative estimates were always 300,000 - now Wikipedia has 1 million - and that number keeps increasing each year as well. That's a bare minimum of 15 million people, but more likely over 20 million entering each decade. And then they begin bearing children... I hope you will volunteer to stop using oil-based products and stop using oil-based transportation in order to save some oil for the coming tens of millions we will see in the short years ahead. What is unfathomable is how we have guys like Gore talking about Global Warming and he sits silent as we build coal and gas-fired power plants left and right in order to accomodate the incoming millions.

As Hirsch depressingly intones, Peak Oil cannot be solved in "years". So hoping for some solution that takes place in "years" and which renders our massive population growth (highest in our history) meaningless is an exercise in futility.

People of good will must concentrate on things that will work and that is moving to a radically simpler lifestyle that eshew the using and abusing materialism and affirms the non material - dare I say spiritual - things like;-
Loving, crying, touching, helping, sharing, laughing, growing, loyalty, generosity, peacefullness, kindness, repairing, re-using - being human beings not consumers...

People of good will need to get the cajones to speak out against population growth. The longer they stay silent, the longer they engage is self-righteous wishful thinking on the issue - the worse it will be in the end. Wait long enough, and it will indeed be draconian. The kind of draconian that mother nature deals out.

Fertility rates are declining in many countries once famous for high population growth, like Mexico. see: http://globalis.gvu.unu.edu/indicator_detail.cfm?IndicatorID=138&Country=MX

Problem is, it takes a generation or two for a fertility decline to translate into slowed or stopped population growth.