Good on you Cheryl, don't you fall for it. I could take you to a thousand places more beautiful than Byron Bay, & another thousand places less polluted, less spoiled, just as uninteresting, & not a dancing fire stick to be found.

KAEP, you'll have to buy a new violin mate, the energy is no longer dwindling. Haven't you heard, they have found out how to access the huge known reserves of shale gas. They haven't started seriously looking for the stuff yet, & have enough reserves to supply over a century of our energy requirements.

I know it is a terrible disappointment to you & the doom brigade, but you will have to get used to it. All the population will be living just like me soon, better than a 17Th century king.

Better tell your mates to get rid of all those solar & wind shares, there like Confederate money, worthless, just they don't know it yet.

So now there'll be no reason to have to fight each other, & there will be plenty left over for us peasants, even after those dreadful CEOs have had their fill. Even the All Gores of this world become sated sooner or later.

I'm afraid if you can't handle the good news, you may just have to slit your wrists, because there will be no stopping it now. Those who see no reason why life should not be fun, will not stand for it.

Surely the simile of “elephants in the room” refers to thing that people are aware of but are afraid to discuss? The supposed threats of materialism and over-population population are about the most discussed perennial in newspapers, books and sites like this.

Curmudgeon

This alarmist goes back a lot longer than the 1930s. Aristotle, Tertullian, Confucius all wrote of the perils of over population. It’s astonishing that over 2,000 years of failed apocalyptic predictions of catastrophic over-population have not deterred the doomsayers.

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/overpopulation-the-perennial-myth/

'within our control'.
Who's control?

'despite all of our focussed efforts,'.
At control?

'We in the West have fallen hook, line and sinker for the myth of happiness from materialism...'.
Who's the we here? Should we ban consumers or just re-educate them? How about camps for recalcitrants? Who'll decide who are recalcitrants? Do we appoint a departmental committee or just leave it up to those 'in the know'. You know the 'correct' thinkers?

'Our entire consumer society is based on the concept of dedicating almost all of our waking lives to the pursuit of more'.
Is it? By all of us or just all those recalcitrants, in desparate need of re-education, who seem to want more comfortable lives?

'Innovation in our education, business and economic systems and models is essential in transforming individuals, communities and nations towards happiness, wellbeing, engagement and collective impact for a better future'.
Yea, let's innovate and re-educate.

'...our fundamentally flawed economic reliance (on population growth). We we can get past that by instead concentrating on removing poverty and injustice in all its guises and forms...'

Yea let's just impose a socialist regime ... that'll fix it all.

Damn I didn't want to sound at all idealogical I just wanted to sound fair! Did I say that or did the of Director of thinkEd, want that?

Sheesh won't these leftie dogooders ever leave us alone to decide what's best for ourselves?

I guess the men(oops People) in the white coats and re-education pick ups and cattle trucks will be out to 'select' me.

I'll have to change my name and sail away.

I suspect that Confucious and his contemporaries were needlessly alarmist given their era. However, can someone explain how graphs like the one below could *not* raise alarm bells, or at a minimum point to real environmental solutions?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b7/Population_curve.svg/360px-Population_curve.svg.png

And there is no bloody room on my enviromentally savvy tiny floating palace for any bloody elephants... or idealogical control seeking gooses. I have a bloody big weapon to deal with them and it also involves the use of a very short plank and some very hungrey but rapidly disappearing threatened sharkes ... Byron Bay sounds an ideal location dor such rudinmentary enforced 'self-discipline'.

I'd soon see how many 'know better than me's' (and most of the historical western writers and phisolophers) would actually be able to walk on bloody 'enviromentally perfect' water.

Greg

I’m not surprised by the fact that there are a long more people now than there were in the stone age, let alone alarmed.

It’s a mathematical inevitability that any measure that grows on average a little each year will produce a graph this shape given a long enough time frame. If your graph finished in say 1800 rather than 2000 then its shape would be almost exactly the same, only the axis values would be different.

I’ll cheerfully concede, however, that a more informative chart would show population growth rates being very slow up to about 1000 years ago, picking up a little through the middle ages and accelerating significantly at the time of the industrial revolution, before slowing somewhat lately.

The key question for me is WHY there are so many more people now. The answer is a trivial truism, but one with profound implications - it’s because more people are being born than are dying. Yet if we look at fertility rates, we can see that these have been declining for decades, first in developed countries, more recently in developing ones. The reason for global population growth is that death rates have been falling even faster than birth rates. This has many causes, including more productive farming, improved medical science and improved public health, utilities and education. It is something I think we should celebrate as a colossal achievement. To bemoan human population growth knowing that it is a product of improved life expectancy seems to me a miserable and misanthropic ideology.

I’ll also accept that current population growth rates can’t go on for ever. But I see no reason to expect that they will. The best explanation by far for recent demographic trends is the “demographic transition” from a subsistence world of high birth and death rates to a prosperous one of low birth and death rates. During that transition, population growth temporarily accelerates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition