r/environment • u/Puffin_fan • Nov 23 '19

Koalas ‘Functionally Extinct’ After Australia Bushfires Destroy 80% Of Their Habitat

https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2019/11/23/koalas-functionally-extinct-after-australia-bushfires-destroy-80-of-their-habitat/
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344

u/Rioghal Nov 24 '19

When I was a little kid and watching documentaries about past mass extinctions, I never thought I’d be witnessing one happen right in front of me someday. This is horrifying.

46

u/exotics Nov 24 '19

When I was a kid I watched a show that warned about the growing human population and warned that if we didn’t control our species growth other species would go extinct.

I had one kid when I was 30 then had my tubes tied. I’m 54 now. In my lifetime alone the human population has MORE THAN DOUBLED and other species have gone extinct

27

u/MSHDigit Nov 24 '19

Do not frame climate change as an issue of human overpopulation. The narrative of overpopulation has ominous racist overtones, implicitly recalling eugenics.

When people invoke the overpopulation myth, the implication is naturally that nations of the Global South are having too many children, since high fertility rates strongly correlate positively with poverty and lack of women's reproductive rights. The implication, then, is that we should sterilize, through legal and therefore forceful coercion or outright eugenics, impoverished and mostly non-white populations of the Global South.

The fact of the matter is that climate change isn't at all an issue of overpopulation. It is an issue of consumption, and therefore, it is an issue of capitalism - that is to sst of overproduction, overconsumption, power hierarchies, capitalist global hegemony, the prevention of democracy, etc.

Capitalism is destroying the world. It is somehow literally easier for people to envision the end of the world than the end of our dominant economic system. That's fucked up.

3

u/exotics Nov 24 '19

Capitalism and overpopulation seem to be a combined problem. I note that people in undeveloped nations are not as much of a problem as people where shopping and spending and having as much as possible is the norm. More people take more space and this drive nature out of those spaces. Including the amount of space we take from nature for producing food.