Even now, many wrongly believe that there would be no food crisis anywhere if only those Africans would stop having so many babies, and that for that reason famines they suffer are fundamentally “all their own fault”; of course actually the reason they have no food is because the international market puts a vastly greater value on food for my cat than food for the average Somalian.

The Optimum Population Trust talk a lot of pseudo-science about maximum yields from fertile soil. I’ve been to one of their talks and about half of it consisted of a list of assumptions for their agricultural calculations, 95% of the assumptions totally unrealistic and verging on the absurd. From this they “calculate” that the “optimum population” for X or Y country is a fixed figure much lower than it is now, and suggest that all would be utopia if this decrease were achieved.

Yes, population is an issue. But the fundamental problem that the OPT miss is that population and consumption per head are linked – backwards. To put it simply: if the population were smaller, there would be less people to consume oil, the market price of oil would be lower, and so each person would very likely just consume more of it – more holidays, bigger cars, more imported goods, less incentive to be efficient.

The capitalist economy’s ability to increase consumption per head to fit the size of the resources that person can afford is incredible.

It is? Someone had better tell the UN pretty quickly then. They are saying that the rate of increase is slowing and that the growth itself will reverse around 2050.

Whatever that is, it really ain’t “exponentially”.

If we don’t confront and slap down fanatical authoritarian nutcases whenever they pop up we might “very well see a future of forced family planning, Malthusian drills and Brave New World dystopias.”

I will leave it to others to dwell on whether or not China’s exponential growth in emissions and the like suggests that the link between population control and environmenalism is less strong than some suggest.

On a separate point, ‘the authors just wanted to discuss the possiblity of making contraception more avalible.’ I think that they need to take that up with the church rather than the BMJ’s readership.

With the right education and outlook on life inspiring the next generation on to positive change, I hope that we can turn it around and maybe even produce children who’s actions in life cause net consumption of CO2 rather than net build-up of it.

We can go way beyond just carbon-neutral lifestyles to actual carbon-negative ones; to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and return it to a safe level again. It can be done, and action in that direction needs to happen here more urgently than it needs to happen in Ethiopia.

I’m about to become a dad in something like three weeks time. Sure, the two of us are not going to be having more than two children. I’m pretty convinced by the idea of aiming for zero population growth, though I also believe that the world could easily support more people if we actually shared resources fairly.

But the point is: more people doesn’t necessarily have to mean more CO2 emissions – it could actually mean much less, if we make a concerted effort to do it right and to really change the way we live.

In my opinion, pushing for massive social change to prevent climate change is the most important step. That means changing society right the way through, so that we just bloody well stop doing things which damage the Earth! (It ain’t rocket science! This is our home we’re destroying!)

Then changing our individual lifestyles, because individual changes don’t mean much without significant numbers of people doing them.

But as I’ve said before, the biggest hurdle is one of mindset.

Does human existence really have to damage the Earth? Absolutely not! Despite our attempts to escape from nature, we are as integral a part of the Earth’s ecosystems as the birds and the bees.

As self-aware sentient beings, we can make the choice to become positive contributors to the ecosystem we live in, rather than destroying it.

In all honesty, I believe it’s as clear-cut as: choose not to damage the Earth, or perish.

It was a good article, but you may have missed the point.