Industrial society is the only reason we have 9 billion or thereabouts people on the planet and they've all got roughly enough to eat, withe distribution problems the only reason anyone is missing out. It's the same reason we can contemplate an increase in that number to around 30 billion before we anticipate any reduction.

So I don't buy the author's argument, it's at best a rant against the very thing that makes it possible for him to live comfortably and have enough leisure time to spend some of it railing against his own good fortune.

I do, howeer, have some concerns about the continuous growth paradigm, simply because it must eventually run out of resources in a finite world. Are we so close to that point that it matters to us now? Possibly, but as others have said, it's beyond the control of any group or individual.

It will continue, because that's human nature. It's what has made us more than just another primate species eking out a precarious existence among the toothy threats in the jungle. Trying to change that is simply not going to be very effective, so inevitably there will be a collapse due to insufficiency of resources.

Human nature will come to the fore then, as well and there will be some suffering, but the species will survive and so will the planet. I'm not sure if post-collapse humans will enjoy the same free time that the author does, but that may also not be a bad thing.

Ludwig is right. The Global Footprint Network has done the calculations on comsumption. While there will be obvious differences for particular commodities, it is easy to work out from the tables in their 2010 Atlas that the top billion are responsible for about 38% of total global consumption, i.e., most of the consumption is being done by poor people. If there are enough people, it doesn't matter if per capita consumption is low. Even if people in the developed countries were environmental saints, the average global citizen would still be poor, and any benefit would be wiped out in a few decades, because the global population is continuing to grow at about 80 million a year.

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/ecological_footprint_atlas_2010

I also recommend Harvard archaeologist Steven LeBlanc's book "Constant Battles" as a corrective to ideas about the noble savage, where only the evil white man is vile. LeBlanc describes his surprise on excavating in the American Southwest. Instead of peaceful, noble Indians living in harmony with nature and with each other, he found widespread environmental damage, fortified communities, whole villages massacred and the bodies left unburied, and collections of trophy skulls. Judging from damage to skeletons, at least 25% of the men died in battle on a continuing basis. Some of LeBlanc's ideas are discussed here

http://discovermagazine.com/2003/may/featwar

Antiseptic, you probably have already watched a collapse on television, the one in Rwanda in 1994, and it is hard to see how you can be cavalier about it. It won't be the last. 30 billion people is a pipe dream. As described in the Atlas above, we are already in environmental overshoot. Developed countries already have low fertility rates and could quite easily avoid collapse, if they are not already badly overpopulated, by keeping their numbers down and managing the environment more sensibly, provided that such efforts are not undermined by greedy elites. What is wrong with using our intelligence to save ourselves?