Population growth is now a menace

August 18, 2025

Julian Cribb rightly cites “Soaring populations which strain cities, their food and water supplies, to their limits” as a major challenge to our survival “that even good people choose to ignore”. Back in the 1970s, thanks largely to Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, people rightly saw overpopulation as a major environmental issue. Most of my contemporaries limited the number of children they had to two, or at least felt guilty about having a third. Then a combination of misplaced feminist rhetoric plus the Catholic Church conspired to discredit the movement, not helped by coercive birth control policies in India.

Now the global population has more than doubled to 8.2 billion and, as Cribb notes, we face rapidly rising temperatures, accelerating collapse of the Earth’s life-support systems, extinction of species, spreading deserts and ocean dead zones, and growing scarcities of water, forests, topsoil, fish and other life-sustaining resources.

Of course, rising consumption — a good thing in poorer countries and bad in wealthy ones — is as much to blame. Nevertheless, consumption and population are simply two sides of a rectangle, the area within being the impact on the Earth. Restraining both are critical to our remaining within resource limits.