Did I read correctly?
The Environment has improved as the population has increased.
As someone who is not blind and has lived for 70 years I find this a bit hard to take seriously.
The Environment MUST take first place.
No clean healthy Environment, no us.
Pretty simple really.....

'Tis simpler than that. Where we've made a collective decision to fix it, the environment has improved.
Where we haven't, it's generally worsened.

That must have been 70 years with your eyes shut ateday. Living on a yacht in Sydney harbour I was up close & personal with it's state. The difference between the 60s & the 70s alone was immense. I don't think Sydney's population went down in that period.

Air quality was the same. In the 60s, many mornings you could not see Sydney from Frenchs Forest, just a few of the tallest buildings poking up above the smog. By the 90s such an event was so unusual, it was remarked on.

Just 2 examples of how we now avoid polluting our environment. What is really important is not wasting our effort on nonexistent problems, dreamed up by the greenies, such as CO2 & global warming. All money wasted on such concocted trivialities is money not available for real problems.

Question: How to we reduce population?

Answer: One child policy.

The Chinese did it. Any country can do it. It was the main reason that the living standard in China went up so much.

No, plerdsus, the main reason that the living standard in China went up so much was that they finally got an economically competent government. And such an intrusive and unnecessary restriction would be one of the greatest possible declines in the standard of living.

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Hasbeen,

The effects of CO2 are real. Just because you don't believe them doesn't give any justification whatsoever for your vicious lie that they were "dreamed up by greenies".

The real thing that's holding us back is not any actual spending of money; it's the resources wasted on trying to balance the budget before the private sector's properly recovered.

Max Thomas correctly points out that not all our environmental problems are related to population and that some can be corrected or ameliorated with better management, most notably urban air quality. It only took one fool to introduce the rabbit. Nevertheless, population is very much relevant to a lot of them. See this submission by the Australian Conservation Foundation nominating human population growth in Australia as a Key Threatening Process under the Environmental Protection Act. The problem is not just the space and resources used directly by the additional people, but the damage done in producing the exports to pay for the imports that they will want and need.

http://www.acfonline.org.au/sites/default/files/resources/EPBC_nomination_22-3-10.pdf

A lot of population denial is caused by the guff about "boundless plains to share". From World Bank figures, only about 6.2% of Australia is arable, and the average quality of that arable land is low by international standards. When I multiplied hectares of arable land by average grain yield per hectare, I found that in 2012, a very good year for Australia, when we got 2.28 tonnes per hectare, that France (with 7.52 tonnes) could grow a third again as much grain, even though they have a lot less arable land. Furthermore, the French have much more reliable rainfall and can count on good harvests almost every year. Belgium and some other countries regularly get more than 8 tonnes per hectare. Australia only got 1.06 tonnes per hectare in 2006, a drought year. People who call for some enormous future population here are clearly ignorant.

People have always been able to degrade their local environment, sometimes to the point of collapse, but until recently, they didn't have the numbers or technology to seriously interfere with the great natural cycles that support life on Earth. Now they can.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/full/461472a.html
open version: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/

Even if we were environmental angels - and we aren't, we would still be at risk from what the other morons are doing. It isn't smart to erode our safety margins.

It is doubtful that Aidan understands China's problems better than its own government.