NO one can even begin to bring this 800-pound gorilla in open conversation..."what do you have against children, you were one yourself!"..."Would you wish you were never born?"..."If we have less people then we will miss out on God knows how many Einsteins, etc. to enrich our society and solve our problems"..."Global warming is a conspiracy by enviro-nazis who can't get real jobs and who want to stick it to rich people"..."There's global warming on Mars, Jupiter, Saturn!"..."we have enough oil for Millions of years, all this talk is a bunch of hot air"...

You forgot "why don't you kill yourself," I love that one.

What we cannot talk about is the one thing that's going to ensure our species demise.

BTW, did Erhlich mention a "hydrogen economy" as something viable, or did I hear that one wrong?

Well said moonwatcher.

Thanks for having the cajones (I speak metaphorically so it still stands even if you were to be a wahini) to talk truth.

This truth has reached its zenith with this current administration where "Ideology and theology trump science".

We are so screwed up.

Moonwatcher, I like the religion aspect of your point. Very interesting.
But your concluding comment about the "environmentalists and Peak-Oil Aware types" underestimates that they are growing in numbers, and rather than be shooed away, can closely resemble the Lilliputians when the time is right. Wishful thinking? Time will tell.

The causes of the population explosion are simply man getting better at extracting resources, or producing /growing them (eg. agri) and creating what is called wealth, added value, etc.

Back in the Paleolithic, or more recent Sumeria, or in some ‘primitive’ more or less contemp. communities, when there was not enough to feed extra children, or keep alive old ppl who contributed little or nothing, these died in various ways. Cultures differ. Anyone can come up with examples, folklore.

Industrialization, which btw was incredibly slow, much slower than most suppose, did eventually hike household income, in Britain first of all...then, moving along, ww2 or post brought us to the oil age and its fantastic bonanza. In life-times that we can see, the Green revolution, that is the mechanization of agriculture (fossil fuels, fertilizers, infrastructure for watering, so called modern seeds and so on), the giving up of the slaves, rationalization and best practices, transport -rail, road and river- an explosion of trade provided, world wide, more edible stuff, even a glut at some point.

People finally ate to their hunger - yes they did, despite serious sad pockets of famine, as a % of world food they were small, of course deplorable for all that.

And so we all multiplied, had children. Many.

Children, in much of the world, represent comfort and future wealth. They are a stake for the future, if they can be kept alive beyond 6-10, as they can then work, contribute, extract more from the environment, physical or financial (jobs of one kind or another, agri, gov, finance, war...all in in the greater, expanding world) - in any case conditions were so much better, full speed ahead.

Add in simply that women who eat sparingly but enough for life, have minimal health care, and no contraception, low status, will produce many children. A stab for the future (EROEI), pride and joy, status in the community, love, a tribe to gather round.

The demographics of our population problem are such that even if governments imposed a one child per family limit our global population for the next three decades would continue to grow because the majority of humans on the planet are entering or will enter their reproductive child bearing years up ahead. So this tabu topic of population actually has to address the question of How do we increase the death rate to really be affective let alone how do we control our birth rate. In the same way that mitigating peak oil required actions 35 years ago so does the subject of population control because today we find ourselves in the situation that any real affective solutions are morally reprehensible.

"Here is where I venture into the tar pit...what is the root cause of overpopulation?

Religion."

Sorry, but that tune doesn't play very well in China or Italy now a days. (Or France or most any other country in the EU.) Maybe you should do a bit of research before you make an outlandish statement like that. In many other regions and cultures, especially the third world, most people have many children for purely economic/practical reasons not because religious beliefs saying something to the effect of, "Go forth and multiply."

Religion is just a subset of all forms of tribalism. Humans are a pack animal. Religions and nation-states are social structures that expand the size of the pack, but the tribal instinct remains the same. If it wasn't religion, people would be fighting over something else.

This relates to population growth because in any kind of power struggle, whether it's an election or a civil war, population is everything. The lone exception is industrialized warfare. Therefore, birthrate and surplus food all translate to more power. You can augment birthrate with an evangelical ideology to convert non-believers. I'd lump Christianity, Islam and Consumerism into that category.

Just to agree with you, from a moderate religious viewpoint, in Genesis it says:

"Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it"

Notice the word 'fill'. Not 'overfill'. This planet is full, past full. We have completed our task, now we should stop before we go too far.

You ask: "...what is the root cause of overpopulation? Religion."

I could not disagree more. You might as well blame "culture" itself, for that is all religion is.

You'd just as well ask: "What is the root cause of religion?" To which the answer is "biology, sex, fecundity, and death"

In fact my question is a much better question, I would humbly suggest.

Because people are animals they have evolved to reproduce efficiently, to derive pleasure from sex, to derive pleasure from children, and all to avoid the full consequences of personal mortality.

Religion and all culture helps organize all that mad shtuping and birthing and dieing so that humble apes can experience some modicum of meaning as the are born, blossom, impregnate, become impregnated, give birth, nurture a few young and die. Our brains force us to try to make sense of this mad dash from womb to grave.

The very idea that "thinking" affects behavior is a very religious idea, and one that I would question. It is behavior that leads to thoughts... to religious ideas and to religions. And the things that lead to behaviors are the material conditions of life... the availability of resources, food, land, etc.

Religions do nothing but put a belated stamp on what we are and what we do. If you would change Man, change the circumstances of his life and his religion will follow rapidly behind. Religion is but the tail on the dog of the human condition.

Witness for example the disappearance of Christianity in Europe. It can happen in a moment, as the world changes. In contrast, fighting religion directly, as if this religious idea or that matters for people's behavior seems extremely foolish. Religions express underlying realities... they rarely determine them.

I respectfully disagree that the root cause of overpopulation is religion.

Look at the forces that are driving overpopulation today: industrialism, consumerism, advertising, factory farms, industrial agriculture, destruction of communities, etc. These are all secular forces which transcend religions; they were and are as common in the atheistic Soviet Union and modern China as in the United States and Europe. Sure, Genesis 1:28 may have had a marginal effect, but it was written when population was perhaps 1% of current population.

Religion today has been co-opted by secularism. In fact, Christianity was co-opted by secular society after Constantine and the council of Nicaea. Periodically there have been protests against this: the Desert Fathers, the Anabaptists, and others who all protested against the secularism of the church in different ways. Similar protests have erupted in other religions. So far they have failed. Periodically also people revolt against secularism in other ways and you have fundamentalism of all stripes. But most fundamentalists have rejected secularism in irregular and uninformed ways (rejecting birth control, but accepting war and consumerism).

So yes, religion can be held responsible for overpopulation. But religion is not the root cause. Secular forces are the root cause, with religion an accessory after the fact. If religion returned to its roots, say to a Jesus who rejected war and materialism and said "blessed are the poor" and "love your enemies," it could be a force against the powers driving overpopulation and destruction of the earth.

Keith

You need to read Dawkins: "The Selfish Gene" to understand why people are unwilling to control population. It's built into the way all life works. It expands to fill it's niche. We are simply better at expanding our niche.

Tell you what. Just make sure you don't have kids.

What a bunch of bollocks. Religion is the cause of explosive demography? What the hell is wrong with your head, man?

1. That rule of "go forth and multiply" isn't even necessary to get to your point. Natural Selection does that far better than you: those who wish to go forth and multiply are exactly the ones who will make sure their own genes will survive.

What I mean is that if all intelligent people stopped having babies, then this wouldn't become a sustained subpopulated world. It would become an idiocracy, get it? It's not a matter of choice, it's a matter of survival of the most fertile. Completely pragmatic in nature.

2. If religion was the cause of explosive demography, then why didn't we have such an explosion in the middle ages, wise guy? Why did it happen precisely in the most open atheistic of times so far, the nineteenth and the twentieth century? (and no, I am not theistic, I'm just stating a fact) Your theory does not hold.

In fact, all your rambling is a call to emotion, without any substantive facts whatsoever backing them up. It's also a call to a decayed society, one that hates children, for it sees them as a threat. I know well where you think you are going in there, but you are appallingly wrong.

Just so you know.

"If we have less people then we will miss out on God knows how many Einsteins, etc. to enrich our society and solve our problems"

But then again, how many Hitlers, Jim Joneses, or John Wayne Gacys do we not get because these people weren't born?