Most certainly too many people are a luxury which planet Earth can't afford.If we combine too many with too much consumption then the result is disaster on the Malthusian level.

Do a significant and game changing portion of Homo saps have enough nous to realize this and force effective action before it is too late?
I'm not optimistic but reluctant to give up hope entirely.

Read Clive Hamilton's latest book,"Requiem For A Species" to get a realistic handle on where we are now.

Unless we change our mindset there will be indeed a requiem but most of us won't be around to hear it.

Why are so many environmentalists so hateful of their own species? It seems to be they have a gross misunderstanding of the world combined with a kind of arrogance which is particularly disturbing.

While Nature can be beautiful its also violent, exploitative and the ultimate expression of the weak being dominated by the strong. Animals kill each other, not just for food but sometimes for fun and practice. There is little benevolence in the animal world. Left to its own devices, life on Earth is vicious and uncompromising. The idyllic pre or post human world does not exist. All animals exploit the environment and will dominate resources if they can. Many also produce chemicals which are destructive of other species.

This anti-human rhetoric is becoming worrying. Some of our fellow humans seek our own extinction. Surely that's a first in the animal world?

P.S. I notice that while they regard the human race as destructive,environmental extremists believe THEY should keep living, because THEY are special even though they are as much part of the consumer society they hate as anyone else.

Atman
How is population sustainability anti-human? We are not separate from the environment but part of it and the environment's demise is our demise.

Nature is violent and many times unpredictable tumultuous but what has that got to do with the subject of populations?

We depend on natural resources as a species and to survive we need to protect that which sustains us.

If human populations continue to grow more forests will be cut down losing critical carbons sinks, mineral resources will eventually diminsh, water in some countries is scarce. You will need to farm more food on scarce arable land which is continually being taken up by urban expansion.

You cannot keep damming rivers and interfering with water cycles just to cope with continually expanding populations. Look at the damage to the Murray Darling.

It is indeed anti-human to continue to grow populations and to continue the cult of consumerism and greed which is what is feeding this push by governments and corporates for a Big Australia.

What utter twaddle, with due respect, of course.

Christine you might do better trying to get our national parks to be something other than a refuge for ferrals, [flora & fauna], so we can trample on them in comfort.

The blue planet doesn't give a damn wether it is a wet blue thing, or a white snowball, the latter most probably it's ultimate fate, if not swallowed by a supernova.

I wonder if that alge pontificated on the effect it was having on it's environment, or just got on with it's job, of preparing the place for oxygen breathers.

Did those dinosaurs worry about it, or just keep on bulldozing trees to make way for our cattle.

No they didn't.

So come on Christene, get on with your job.

We are here to consolidate diverse resources into the material stockpiles we call cities. These cities are to facilitate the development of cockroach intelligence, until, with our demise, they can generate a great civilisation, utilising these gathered resources.

Do you really think it is by accident that the cockroach has the greatest resistance to nuclear radiation of all the creatures on earth?

No of course not, & lady, you are not pulling your weight. Get to it.

the problem is patriarchy not humanity.
human communities have lived sustainably for tens of thousands of years with decision-making conducted
by agreement between women's and men's councils and committees.
unsustainable habitation arose with the male domination of decision-making.
the solution is to transform the patriarchies of the modern world with equal rights governance.
Australia is poised at the vanguard of this transformation with a referendum enabling an equal
rights republic with a parliament enacting law by agreement between a women's legislature and
a men's legislature a certainty to receive overwhelming support.

Environmentalists are so sickeningly morally rightous and yes they are anti-human at times. There are serious issues to deal with regarding the environment but ... "the luxury of people"? Just nonsense.

Our Earth is always in dynamic balance. Change one thing and everything else changes to maintain the balance. If our decisions create a balance where we are redundant then we shall become redundant.
There is nothing moralistic or right and wrong about that. It is simply 'what balance do we wish to create?' One that includes us or one that does not?

Actually Lucy is spot on. It goes to the core of Western philosophical thinking. Almost all anti-pop thinking is predicated on systems thinking and closed thinking at that. They believe the earth is a ball spinning in space and that people are nothing but rampant consumers. They have no concept of creative intelligence or technology. There's no subtly in their thinking - it's' all or nothing. They completely ignore human agency. It's what you get when some scientists have a crack at public policy - just get rid of the humans.

In fact, if one wanted to take this further, there's considerable force of argument for declaring intellectual war on people who advocate such extreme measures. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Pelican, The article is clearly about ridding the world of human habitation, not sustainability.

As Cheryl says its all or nothing thinking. The author cannot consider combining human progress with environmental sensitivity, which says a lot about thought processes and belief systems.

If you trace the history of the Environmental movement you can see that the "misanthropic" thread is of fairly recent origin but is now beginning to dominate the movement.

the author is perfectly correct that something, i would argue patriarchy, has brought humanity to the brink of
extinction over the past half century, the essential concern behind President Obama's complementary initiative
to decrease nuclear weaponry.

in the circumstances, shooting the messenger is the worst of all possible responses.

What is really anti-human is leaving the next and later generations with an impoverished, degraded environment.

I am a scientist and have worked over the years with many other scientists and engineers. I can't think of one of them who shared Cheryl's childlike faith that technology will solve all of our environmental problems, at least on a time frame that matters to us. This also ignores mankind's long history of societal collapses, every one of them representing an instance where human ingenuity didn't ride to the rescue. We have been lucky in the past century with the Green Revolution and other discoveries, but this is no guarantee that the luck will continue, especially since a number of the natural systems that provide us with our life support are in trouble.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/full/461472a.html

If Cheryl wants a reality check, she might take a look at some of the science fiction and popular science writing of the 1940s and 50s. It is quite true that we can now do things that the people then never imagined, but many of their predictions were definitely overly optimistic. Where are our flying cars and robot servants? Where is our nuclear power that was going to be too cheap to meter? Why can't most of us make a good living on 20 hours work a week? Why don't we have bases (let alone colonies) on the Moon or Mars? Why can't we regrow amputated limbs? The list could go on. What about the people who kept on smoking because the doctors would surely find a cure for cancer? On the statistics, half of them ended up dying prematurely.

Well put Christine, humans are mindlessly creating problems throughout the globe which will cause our downfall, and take the planet with us. Its the only one we got - but if our own lives only last 80 years its impossible to get people & govenrments to do any long term planning. We probably dont even know the worst of it.

It's clear to me that any article on the internet that advocates respectful cohabitation between humans and our planet is met with spluttering outrage from the true misanthropes.

Average folk are aware of the signals being transmitted by our natural environment. These signals transcends the noise of the culture warriors. The reality of our experience overwhelms their bellowed commands. The neurosis is palpable when they espouse their ideological orthodox.

For all their accusations of "religious zealotry", their own refusal to acknowledge the weight of empirical evidence wreaks of paranoid, fundamentalist psychopathy.

There have been many times in my life when I've happily, and often with relief, decided that self-preservation supersedes evangelism. Now I've reached a stage whereby I can comfortably pass by these wells of superstition and anger.

Sure, there is a political fight, but you have to know what you're fighting.

I've got bats in my roof....and solar panels on it...and a water tank in the yard...and, like my parents who grew up in the Depression, I take pride in skimping on crap.

I'd like to thank these angry culture warriors because they've payed for my shift to a cheaper, lower consumption lifestyle.

By being pontificating, bloated ignoramuses their pigheaded non-subscription subsidises my vision because they can't see a good thing when it's stuck under their nose. Suckers.