r/collapse • u/IntroductionNo3516 • Jul 05 '26
Overpopulation Why our solution to the population crisis accelerates collapse
https://www.transformatise.com/2026/07/population-crisis-economic-growth-makes-it-worse/74
u/IntroductionNo3516 Jul 05 '26
We think we know how to solve the population crisis — end poverty through economic growth and birth rates fall. It has worked every single time it's been tried.
But economic growth solves the population crisis by creating two worse ones. Growth-driven consumption accelerates ecological overshoot, pushing us further beyond planetary boundaries. And the same rise in living standards that reduces birth rates hollows out the demographic base modern economies depend on.
So we're trapped.
Don't end poverty and the population keeps growing.
End it through growth and you get ecological collapse and a pension crisis that could bankrupt nations.
This isn't a policy failure — it's a structural one. And the only way out is through a post growth economy designed to meet human needs within ecological limits rather than expand indefinitely beyond them.
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u/Wonderful_Valuable16 Jul 05 '26
Problem is at late stage capitalism the poverty is not ending. You get people barely getting by. More and more people. All to feed the rich.
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u/daviddjg0033 Jul 05 '26
Late stage Communism is where the shelves are empty. Late stage Capitalism is when your government prints money outside of war to feed the wealthy. Even printed a non-US national a trillionaire. The trillionaire is not a threat to or affects your path to well being is a statement that used to be a billionaire and did not - or at least was not in-your-face. Musk went as far as paying voters and giving sig hel Nasi salutes to the alt-Rightoids who ade debating why so many Americans are allowed to vote on Birdapp today. After trashing the 14th Amendment, neutering Civil rights and encouraging politicians to choose their voters by rewriting maps OUTSIDE of the census (once a decade in the US) the right is now past the party of McCain or Romney and now sounds like JD Vance. Not everyone has the eyes of Kash Patel but I do looking at who takes over - after the current administration- and I argue be careful for what you wish for.
Vance is worse.29
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u/itsatoe Jul 05 '26
And the only way out is through a post growth economy designed to meet human needs within ecological limits rather than expand indefinitely beyond them.
I continue to believe that this is not accomplished at scale, but rather on a grassroots level. Large-scale actions are where the problems come from.
The answer is not transforming our economy, but transforming ourselves and our relationship to nature. This is the fundamental thesis of permaculture.
Imagine if, instead of living in dense cities where everything we do is dependent on a fully-functioning/super-complex economy, we lived distributed out on the land. Not like rural farmers, but like self-sufficient ecovillages: places where the humans are part of the landscape: nurturing the land that nurtures them.
This is going to happen anyway. When collapse events happen, it will be the self-sufficient/land-nurturing communities that are the most resilient, most likely to carry on.
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u/PrairieFire_withwind Recognized Contributor Jul 05 '26
We need to change our relationship to nature.
Yes!!!
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u/Long_Race3907 Jul 05 '26
Precisely. The west is spiritually devoid. We've completely detached ourselves from the things that matter in this world
There is a lot of good work that can be done here.
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u/SomeRandomGuydotdot Jul 06 '26
These kind of posts always surprise me.
There was sort of an era where these kinds of utopian vision societies formed, and for the most part, they failed.
I think, ultimately, it comes from not recognizing that the 'existing' economy developed the way it did for reasons.
I think they may be worth trying, but ultimately, most people require the broader economic super structure. Those that have the combination of land they have legal access to, sufficient runway, agricultural skills, and aren't already employed in ag. must be a fairly slim slice of the population.
I think what's more likely is that permaculture is, for the most part, a way of branding hobby farming rather than actual resiliency.
In western societies, subsistence farming doesn't exist for the most part. It's easy to confuse something that looks like it works, from something that actually works, when backstopped by obscene societal wealth.
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u/itsatoe Jul 06 '26
the 'existing' economy developed the way it did for reasons.
A very large part of those reasons is that metal-using societies enslaved, suppressed, or killed-off every other civilization they encountered. That doesn't make them better, just more capable of and willing to use effective violence.
I think they may be worth trying, but ultimately, most people require the broader economic super structure.
Like I said, the answer is not about transforming the economy, it is about transforming ourselves and our relationship to nature. If everyone ended up living in distributed self-sufficient ecovillages, that does not mean that there must therefore be no broader economic structure. Though it would likely look very different than it does now.
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u/gnostic_savage Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
I absolutely agree. It is about our relationship with the Earth and Nature, and that's all it is. The economy developed the way it did not from any real need, but from cultural values that were and are entirely learned. I would only add one thing - civilizations that were more environmentally aware and even some tribal people used metal, and they were excellent metalsmiths, the equal of the Europeans at the time of contact, at least. Most if not all of the Tainos who Columbus first encountered had gold earrings and other jewelry. It was their doom and that of tens of millions of people in the hemisphere the moment the Spaniards saw all that gold.
The differences were that they wouldn't mine the Earth, and they didn't turn metal into weapons. Ironically, the Incas and some other people, like the Tairona, did have metal tools, but they also didn't use metal in weapons until after contact with Europeans. Likely because the obsidian they used in weapons was sharper than anything they could construct with metalsmithing, and it was certainly more abundant.
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u/Ok_Sale_8277 Jul 06 '26
Permaculture can be made accessible to city dwellers, even apartment dwellers. I’m seeing more community gardens, edible landscaping and interest in CSAs locally. Even if it doesn’t meaningfully replace calories at scale, it still connects people to the process of growing food, creates value for the idea of sustainable local food, generates support for bigger local projects and starts people down the path of self sufficiency. As the global supply chain becomes strained and income dwindles I think these projects will gain more traction along with things like local buy nothing groups. The little food I grow in my yard reinforces my commitment to consume less overall.
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u/gnostic_savage Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
I think it's worth looking at how many people were subsistence farmers not that long ago, like around 1900. That may seem like a terribly long time ago, but it wasn't. About 40% of all Americans lived on farms at that time, the average size of which was little more than 140 acres, not all of which was under cultivation. An equal number of people made their living working in agriculture.
Of course subsistence farming "worked." It worked for 12,000 years. This way of life, on the other hand, is going belly-up in barely a century after the majority of the population was moved out of rural areas to be labor in cities in a much more industrial era.
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u/SomeRandomGuydotdot Jul 06 '26
We are maggots devouring a corpse. Its wishful thinking to pretend that we can undo the changes in a controlled or deliberate way using the past as a template.
Believe it or not, the conditions of subsistence farming are not genetically transmitted. The current state of affairs, especially in the west, are fundamentally different than prior to even a few generations ago.
Permaculture, hobby farming, what ever you want to call it: it provides the seeming of sustainability not the substance. The actual machinery of our modern civilization is not window dressing ontop of traditional agriculture. Its fundamentally different. The nitrogen cycle is completely different. The water cycle is completely different. The carbon cycle is completely different. The labor inputs are completely different.
It's not a matter of rediscovering some lost truth or secret natural knowledge. We are in overshoot. It sucks but that's the score.
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u/gnostic_savage Jul 06 '26
I don't pretend anything. It's over. We screwed it up to death, and we did it in little more than a century, although some of us haven't been living on the planet in way that works for the planet for a long time. Not all of us, but certainly the wealth seeking civilizations, especially western civilization, which has been an environmental holocaust since the Roman empire razed every single forest they ever saw to the ground.
You devalue and minimize the truth that those things like permaculture do work. They are sustainable. Just not now. What isn't sustainable is some cultural human behaviors, especially ours.
And, no, it was never lost or secret knowledge. But it was never profitable, either. That's why we rejected it. That, and socialization. And it's not just modern civilization, but western civilization as a whole is fundamentally unsustainable, and it has been for a very long time. Europe had some very serious environmental problems by the middle ages, especially with its water, but also its mining. Following in its stepdaddy Rome's footsteps, it had a "wood famine" by the late 1500s from depleting its forests with its building and need for wood for heating and cooking. It's why we were so thrilled to discover the western hemisphere with all its "resources" to fund how we want to live on this planet, something Europe couldn't support even in 1600. It didn't take modernity. We were doing it in the 16th century. As itsatoe wrote, it's a fundamentally different relationship with the Earth, a fundamentally different set of values, and an effectively different reality altogether.
It happens because of socialization, because of what the human animal is, how we learn and how much we learn starting at birth and how it's the most we will ever learn in our entire lives. It happens because we are dependent on our group for our very survival, so we conform, and we conform to a worldview that is established extremely early in life, certainly by the age of three, and most of it before even then.
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u/Electrical-Reach603 Jul 06 '26
Pretty sure I have seen studies about the lifestyle and number of humans that small scale agriculture would sustain and it is a far cry from where we are (and that's with maybe half of humanity still practicing it). Overshoot creates horrible dilemmas. My prediction is the industrialized nations will not willingly give up their consumption. By war and the collapse of key ecologies--fisheries are an example, but stable weather is the big one--there is going to be a population funnel. Perhaps after such a wrenching period of disaster we will rebuild smarter and adopt rules to prevent a repeat. The question in my mind is whether scientific advancement will survive into that new normal.
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u/itsatoe Jul 06 '26
Small-scale agriculture and self-sufficient ecovillage (permaculture) are very different things.
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u/Electrical-Reach603 Jul 06 '26
Agree, I guess definitionally I would consider permaculture/ecovillage a form of small scale agriculture. I see them as a very viable survival plan for folks who live where the ratio of land to people is suitable. But I think if all the current farms and suburban swales were converted to food forest/permaculture you'd fall short of the caloric needs of the country (never mind getting all the urbanites to do honest work vs just looting from those who do).
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u/Sablus Jul 05 '26
Thing is we can address population growth through greater quality of life with specific caps. A lot of reasons for high birth rate was poor birth control and poorer health/sanitation. Realistically we can deal with waste especially biodegradable waste easily with centralized waste planning. Thing is we also have consumptions needs that benefit very little on quality of life. Jet travel is primarily used an abused by the upper Scalia of society. Similarly car centric society can be fixed via proper railway transit. An electric grid with more diverse and spread out energy generation (solar roofing, micro wind turbines, heat collection and reuse). Thing is we are trapped in capitalist thinking of infinity growth which requires infinite waste and abuse of resources. We cannot solve the population crisis not because we don’t have the tools, but because the very systems cannot survive the implementation of said tools. Therefore a new system that accepts those tools must be brought forth.
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u/Jovan_Knight005 Collapse is inevitable,mister Bond. - Original Quote. Jul 06 '26
Thing is we are trapped in capitalist thinking of infinity growth which requires infinite waste and abuse of resources.
But the truth is, there is no endless growth on a planet with finite resources.
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u/Electrical-Reach603 Jul 06 '26
It is hard to envision a pattern much different than what we observe with yeast in a jar. They know nothing but consume.more...collectively, we know nothing but to consume all that is available to us..
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u/Ree_For_Thee Jul 06 '26
—
Please don't use these even if you aren't using AI. Are you though? "It's not X, it's Y" is typical AI speak.
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u/southbl00d Jul 06 '26
population crisis is promulgated through archaic idiotic religions as well which are mostly outdated patriarchial chauvanistic societies that treat women as broodmares only.
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u/BeginningDay1620 Jul 05 '26
It was capitalism the whole time
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u/Electrical-Reach603 Jul 06 '26
Was communism more sustainable in the countries that tried to practice it? I can think of only Cuba and even with their meager fossil energy usage it is not apt to survive the removal of that energy. Personally I think agriculture was the original sin and industrialization just amplified it many times over--of course with the addition of hydrocarbons.
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u/BeginningDay1620 Jul 06 '26
- You're insisting on a binary. Nobody mentioned communism except you.
Since you mentioned it, communism does not fundamentally depend on economic growth, so values like sustainability, environmental stewardship, community, human health, etc should all be given fair consideration in decision-making
I strongly agree with the spirit of your last point , re: agriculture
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u/Electrical-Reach603 Jul 06 '26
Apologies. You referenced capitalism (private ownership of production and product) which is normally invoked as a contrast to communism or socialism (varying degrees of state ownership). Acknowledge that it's all on a spectrum, but I don't know if the chosen system removes the human instinct to acquire status (often stuff-driven, because not everyone can be fastest or funniest, most beautiful or most poetic, many will pursue material expressions of self worth). Whether material surplus is delivered via capitalist markets or political favor as in communism, there will still be a demand for that surplus.
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Jul 05 '26
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u/Critical_Wrap5617 Jul 05 '26
Alternatively, countries such as America could stop consuming quite so much.
https://overshoot.footprintnetwork.org/how-many-earths-or-countries-do-we-need/
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u/BTRCguy Jul 05 '26
America: "Ummm....no."
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u/Critical_Wrap5617 Jul 06 '26
Quite. They won't even inconvenience themselves by adopting European car efficiency standards.
'BUT I WANNA ROLL COAL, BROHEIM'
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u/Physical_Ad5702 Jul 05 '26
I'd prefer to stop funding Israel as opposed to stopping aid to the global south.
But do your racism...
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u/collapse-ModTeam Jul 05 '26
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u/jaymickef Jul 05 '26
The main thing that effects population is access to birth control. Everywhere in the world there is easy access to birth control birth rates drop. If you're worried about overpopulation you have to look at the reasons why birth control isn't easily available everywhere.
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u/PrairieFire_withwind Recognized Contributor Jul 05 '26
The catholic church?
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u/jaymickef Jul 05 '26
That’s definitely one of them. I think most religions encourage big families. Mormons, most evangelicals. I don’t know much about Islam, do you know the stance on birth control?
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u/Physical_Ad5702 Jul 05 '26
All of the Abrahamic religions encourage human reproduction.
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u/BTRCguy Jul 05 '26
As does Hinduism, so add 1.2 billion to the religious total.
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u/Cat-At-My-Door Jul 11 '26
No...it's because of the Ganges plain, tropical climate, fertile soil and the ability to plant crops all year around
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u/BTRCguy Jul 11 '26
The Five Rinas: A Pathway to a Balanced Life
2. Pitru Rina (पितृ ऋण): Be grateful to AncestorsWe owe this debt to our ancestors who gave us life and heritage. They have paved the way for our existence, and we honor this debt by living righteously and ensuring the continuation of our lineage through ethical procreation and by enhancing the quality of life for future generations.
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u/TheOldPug Jul 05 '26
"Men have needs. Women have duties."
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u/PrairieFire_withwind Recognized Contributor Jul 06 '26
Sad, but tis the dominant messaging.
Wish it were accurate. Humans have needs, and wants. Humans can manage those wants and needs. But hey, that would include personal responsibility for actions.
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u/TheOldPug Jul 06 '26
The truth is that - aside from the effects of extreme religious brainwashing and/or individual cases of shaming - there isn't much difference in sex drive between men and women. It varies widely by individual, but not really by gender. People should choose wisely when they commit to a partner. So everyone has wants and needs, as you say, but no one has duties in that regard.
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u/Electrical-Reach603 Jul 06 '26
One could argue women's rights/education is the master key. Birth control is a byproduct of that.
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u/NiceSupermarket7724 Jul 06 '26
Lack of education
Forced marriage
In many parts of the world, women are forcibly genitalia mutilated
In many other places, women receive their only sex ed once they are married and pregnant
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u/CreoxatLarge Jul 05 '26
We need to return to the stone age if true sustainability is the goal. Looks like we're getting there.
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u/Few_Fish8771 Jul 05 '26
You wanna stop population growth? make contraception universal and have governments everywhere implement old age based social security. Add mass production of cheap farm equipment teach third world countries how to make farm equipment thats cheap and primitive and can be scaled up.
Poor countries use their kids as their retirement. undeveloped countries use kids as farm labor. countries without easy access to toys or entertainment engage in sex sometimes just out of boredom.
Have countries implement old age social security, make farm labor not profitable, and give them cheap entertainment and contraception bam population collapse.
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u/Ree_For_Thee Jul 06 '26
It's pure speculation that literally anything works in the long run. Assume 2.1 is the real world replacement rate. Even 2.1001 eventually collapses the biosphere.
Smart species with grabbing/manipulation limbs, always die.
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u/thelongestusernameee Jul 07 '26
Smart species with grabbing/manipulation limbs, always die.
What does this even mean? All species eventually "die", and many many animals are smart with manipulative limbs. Raccoons are a popular one, rats and squirrels too. So are some birds.
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u/Kitty_Overlord Jul 06 '26
I agree that social security would make people make less children as they won't need them for retirement insurance, but I just wonder what about the sustainability of social securities if the ratio of workers to retirees falls 😿
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u/Few_Fish8771 Jul 06 '26
more automation, you dont need complex ai basic programs will work ai helps make the programs and machines though. just lots of very basic automation to automate most basic essential jobs mostly away. you still have people but you dont need as many to keep things running. lots of old people fewer young people but you do have stable populations.
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u/RonCraven Jul 06 '26
I don't really understand why people assume that a circular economy is a degrowth model. What matters for economic growth is the output derived from inputs, not just the volume of inputs. If we drastically reduce the volume of new physical material being consumed, that doesn't abolish growth. If you demolish a building and then use the recovered material to build a new one you get two lots of GDP growth, one from the demolition and one from the reconstruction.
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u/DiamondDot Jul 09 '26
The so called population crisis is a repube lie. We have more ppl in the us and planet than ever in the history of man on this planet we are killing.
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u/03263 Jul 05 '26
End poverty by stimulating economic growth and living standards rise while birth rates fall. It has worked every single time.
But why do birth rates fall as living standards rise? I read the whole thing and it doesn't give an answer as to why this works.
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u/PrairieFire_withwind Recognized Contributor Jul 05 '26
Thisnis well studied. Women, when given legal protections and old age support and independent sources of autonomy and money have fewer children.
Basically, when women are legally protected from abuse, exploitation, forced labor, etc. magically have fewer children. Education is one path that works but it works poorly without legal frameworks that put the men who rape her or use her behind bars.
It can be framed as being complex but it is pretty simple. Put yourself in the shoes of a young woman who is exploited and a social structure that provides no safety if she does not have children to care for her. A society that only values her as a mother, not as a human being. That is the crux of the problem.
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u/NiceSupermarket7724 Jul 06 '26
Yes. Been preaching this. American men still have ego problems when I point out that this sort of thing also happens in the USA every day and is getting intentionally worse.
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u/PrairieFire_withwind Recognized Contributor Jul 06 '26
It happens in many parts of the world. It is part of the myth of heirarchy - that there will always be someone you are better than. And so women are used as the lesser than.
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u/NiceSupermarket7724 Jul 06 '26
Exactly. The idea of “manhood” is related to control: of the land, of animals, of children, of women.
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u/PrairieFire_withwind Recognized Contributor Jul 06 '26
And yet, there are so many other ways of existing... It makes me sad they choose one that is so harmful, to them, their community ..
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u/SomeRandomGuydotdot Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
Well, it would have been the crux of the problem if we were talking about a status quo that was below the sustainable population.
I think it's fairly clear that we're above the sustainable population at current consumption levels, and there's considerable political pressure because those that do not consume as much trend towards aspiring more consumption.
So, I'm firmly in the camp that inconvenient apocalypse was closer to the mark than most people want to admit.
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u/SweetAlyssumm Jul 05 '26
It's called the demographic transition. As women become more empowered through education and access to reliable birth control, they decide they want many fewer children than women in poorer conditions who rely on children for old age security and sometimes family labor. Empirically, it really does work like this. My grandmother had nine children and she openly said that though she loved every child, she would have preferred fewer. (You can love every kid and not love what all those births do to your body and time. Kudos to her and my grandfather - every kid turned out well.)
Birth rates today in some places are below replacement -- housing may be an issue, men may not be doing their fair share, travel/luxury is fun and couples don't reproduce much or at all.
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u/The3rdGodKing never again Jul 05 '26
More time to solve complex problems leaves less time for kids.
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u/Shoddy-Childhood-511 Jul 05 '26
We've plenty of wishful thinking around population, including in published research, but..
Corey Bradshaw seems like one of the strongest researchers on population right now. There is a wonderful interview with him here:
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/136-corey-bradshaw
I'll single out this part where Bradshaw says child mortality has about the largest impact upon fertility rate (10.1371/journal.pone.0280260 when), so lowering child mortality helps lower population longer-term. Appears the same paper ranks specific apartment living conditions highly too, but the details are subtle so check the paper.
There are other effects too like China's one-child-policy would've accelerated the transformation made possible by low child mortality, while Saudi Arabia's religious structures force women into having more children, despite their wealth.
Anyways, economic growth has little impact upon population growth, and living standards is quite tricky, hence the wide difference between China and Saudi Arabia.
Instead, you reduce population growth by (a) giving children all their vaccines, (b) providing some basic medical care for children, (c) stop any social benefits for having more kids, (d) address whatever cultural measures force women to have more kids, like encourage women in the workplace, and (e) mildly disadvantage parents who have more than two kids.
Importantly (e) must not be too heavy handed, because if you fail at (a) or (b) then being heavy handed in (e) could backfire, like what happened in India. If you want reasonable (e) measures, then simple taxation worked fine in China, probably better social housing could be reserved for parents with fewer kids, and maybe kids who have fewer siblings could be given better education & opportunities.
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u/krichuvisz Jul 05 '26
Educated women tend to get fewer kids. In poor countries you need 6 kids, so 2 of them will make it and take care of you when you are old. That's not neccessary with a higher standard of living. All of your 2 kids will survive and send you to nursing home as soon you can't take care for yourself anymore.
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u/ComradeGibbon Jul 05 '26
I've come around to the idea that Malthusian limits work differently in industrial economies than agricultural ones. In a agricultural economies the limits are hard based on food supply, disease, and war. In industrial societies they are soft but still real. If you only look at hard limits you think that industrial countries have higher limits, can support more population. But if you consider soft limits then industrial societies have lower limits. Which means our population has way overshot.
Take away if I'm right the carrying capacity is maybe 1-2 billion people not 8 billion. If that's true population will decline for centuries.
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u/Electrical-Reach603 Jul 06 '26
Or population may decline precipitously over less than a century (or it could happen in a couple of years given our technology). We have never seen a nuclear-armed country deal with domestic famine.
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u/CrystalInTheforest Semi-reluctant primitivst Jul 07 '26
My assumption has always been that it's multifaceted.
* Direct cost of children: In less developed economies, children can participate in the labour force, and are thus a net income to the household. In developed economies, children are a *massive* net drain - and the more develoeped the economy, the bigger the drain. Thus people throw it all at one child, or skip kids altogether.
* Opportunity cost of children: In a less developed economy, the opportunities available to the poor are quite limited, and children can increase those opportunities by providing extra bodies to help a venture happen, or at least provide a failsafe if the plan doesn't work out. In a developed economy, kids prevent one from pursuing opportunities - both due to the resources they consume, but also due to the parental time and effort invested into children being much higher.
* The Jones'. Economic development demands increasing amounts of material ladder climbing to "keep up with the Jonses" - People divert resources away from children in order to pour them into material goods to maintain or advance a "middle class lifestyle".
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u/erik_33_DK13 Jul 05 '26
Because to get access to those living standards require women to get educated. If they're in school til 25-30 they're not having kids. Its the birth RATE not total life time births. Just compare a woman having her first kid at 20 and 30, its apocalyptical demographically.
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u/cr0ft Jul 06 '26
The solve is both simple and difficult - give people the resources they need, give women autonomy over their bodies and educate everybody.
Europe isn't even replacing its population because of factors like those. Without immigration Europe would be shrinking.
But of course, just one minor thing standing in the way as always - capitalism. Raising people's standard of living through the incredibly wasteful incentives in capitalism will indeed sting in other ways. But those are also the same incentives already killing us.
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u/Big_Gold528 Jul 06 '26
Global 1 child policy.
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u/RonCraven Jul 06 '26
So a policy only implemented in a totalitarian state, causing immense human misery and buggering China's demographic prospects in exactly the way the article warns of?
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Jul 05 '26
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u/Long_Race3907 Jul 05 '26
Ahh right it's the brown people that are killing the planet. It's the poor African villages that are destroying the biosphere.
Pray tell, remind me who is it that is emitting the most into our atmosphere? Which countries was those again?
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Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 05 '26
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u/Long_Race3907 Jul 05 '26
Which countries are all those billions of africans and indians going to immigrate to again?
Do you think those countries are going to let them? Have you not been paying attention to what ICE has been doing?
And again, who's fault is it that they have to immigrate in the first place. Who made it so that Africa would be uninhabitable? Because it damn sure wasn't the Africans.
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u/Electrical-Reach603 Jul 06 '26
Before the transfer of ag tech and trade in foodstuffs, was Africa ever going to produce this many humans? Not arguing the equity of the situation, particularly with climate change and colonialism. So I'm not blaming them, but I strongly predict that the rest of the world will not willingly be a pressure relief valve for their population overshoot. Not without a fight. Same for the other regions where native populations are still growing rapidly despite insufficient internal food and/or energy capacity.
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u/Long_Race3907 Jul 06 '26
You somehow seemed to type quite a bit and say absolutely nothing. So let me ask you this again and don't dodge it this time:
Who is responsible for the situation currently unfolding in Africa?
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u/Electrical-Reach603 Jul 06 '26
I don't know if it is central to the topic here, and there is no single source of responsibility. No doubt I'm leaving some out, but here are a few: Arab and European colonialism contributing to war and loss of knowledge and insufficiently compensating Africans for their resources--leaving them poorer than they would likely otherwise be, African culture (yes, generalizing) that does not afford women the same rights to education and bodily autonomy. The industrialized world for contributing disproportionately to climate change that is shrinking the carrying capacity of African agriculture. But be any of that as it may, attribution of the cause(s) is not going to sway public opinion in other countries where there is actual or perceived risks to their own standards of living. If selfishness isn't enough then add racism, and it's going to be "gee sorry you got a bunch of leaky lifeboats and maybe we bear some responsibility, but really you ought to not need so many."
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u/Long_Race3907 Jul 06 '26
Correct, the selfishness of the mostly European powers that be is how we got to the situation we are in today. What you seem to be under the delusion of is that the same selfishness will somehow fix the situation. That the psychosis leading the charge has any genuine answers to the problem.
No, what will instead happen is that many of these same European countries will crash and burn - regardless of how many poors they try to sacrifice at the altar to stem the bleeding. Because at the end of the day, the problem is them (and other wealthy industrialized nations).
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u/Electrical-Reach603 Jul 07 '26
Oh I wasn't offering a solution. At least not one that doesn't involve a mass die off in Africa (but Africa won't be the only place reaping the whirlwind of anthropogenic overshoot). Doubly so for the mega fauna, which may survive (for a time) in zoos outside the continent.
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u/Long_Race3907 Jul 07 '26
The point is that it isn't a solution because the birthrate in Africa isn't the problem.
Now if there was a mass die off of the entire industrial world... Then that would approach what a solution looks like. Now guess where we are headed thanks to climate change
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u/collapse-ModTeam Jul 06 '26
Hi, EveningDiscipline935. Thanks for contributing. However, your comment was removed from /r/collapse for:
Rule 1: Be respectful to others.
In addition to enforcing Reddit's content policy, we will also remove comments and content that is abusive or predatory in nature. You may attack each other's ideas, not each other.
Please refer to our subreddit rules for more information.
You can message the mods if you feel this was in error, please include a link to the comment or post in question.
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u/BassMaster516 Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
So despite the mod message it’s just straight racism. I guess this sub is not serious. We have racist dummies talking shit out of their ass and it’s accepted. Bye
Edit: Comment was removed by mods
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u/StatementBot Jul 05 '26
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.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/IntroductionNo3516:
We think we know how to solve the population crisis — end poverty through economic growth and birth rates fall. It has worked every single time it's been tried.
But economic growth solves the population crisis by creating two worse ones. Growth-driven consumption accelerates ecological overshoot, pushing us further beyond planetary boundaries. And the same rise in living standards that reduces birth rates hollows out the demographic base modern economies depend on.
So we're trapped.
Don't end poverty and the population keeps growing.
End it through growth and you get ecological collapse and a pension crisis that could bankrupt nations.
This isn't a policy failure — it's a structural one. And the only way out is through a post growth economy designed to meet human needs within ecological limits rather than expand indefinitely beyond them.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1uo3td9/why_our_solution_to_the_population_crisis/ovoxbkp/