Time to come to grips with overpopulation

April 14, 2026

Julian Cribb rightly argues that “having too many people destroys the living environment that supports them” and that there “are far more and greedier consumers than the Earth can carry.” Overpopulation is indeed pushing the Earth past breaking point.

We knew all this over 50 years ago when the global population was 3.6 billion, less than half what it is today. Yet the combined forces of misplaced feminism and the Catholic Church at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994 essentially turned back the clock. At first glance it seemed a reasonable argument that human rights should take precedence over concern with numbers, but in effect it led to another form of human rights abuse. Women were often not able to control the size of their families through lack of family planning or because of cultural preferences for large families, and the population/resources imbalance worsened. Now climate change - made worse by overpopulation - is threatening food security and there is no guarantee we will be able to feed everyone in coming years. Add to that the biodiversity crisis, the main cause of which is loss of habitat, again a direct result of human overpopulation.