Globalisation troubles me we are told its new but is not colonialism globalisation? Were there not pan oceanic flights making news one year and a passenger service a few years later? Did not The Americas and Australia and Southern Africa recieve in total millions of immigrants over the last 4 centuries? How fast did we in Australia get the telegram ? This country was built during the Industrial revolution with foreign technology. Our lives are not so different from the 19th Century. Howard has forced 19th century working conditions on us, most Australians live in suburbs as they did when Darwin visited Australia. We commute to work as we did in the 19th century its only the car replacing the tram. There was no major change in between. Granted there was more regional infrastructure in the 19th Century and we have improved toys but from a global standpoint there has been no major shift in our culture or the way we live except where regional towns are slowly becoming ghost towns.

If TurnRightThenLeft thinks we have to eliminate poverty to solve the various threats to our existence then we really are doomed. Environmental footprints are a way of converting average consumption levels into notional hectares of land so that comparisons can be made. Visit the Redefining Progress website and you will find that the sustainable global capacity per person would involve an environmental footprint of about 1.8 hectares. (By their calculations, Australia has a footprint of around 7 hectares per person and the US 9.5.)

El Salvador has an average footprint of about 1.7 hectares, and Iran 1.85. El Salvador is so poor that it is giving Mexico an illegal immigrant problem, and not just to get through to the US. If we divided the resources equally, that is how we would all be living. None of this allows for climate change, peak oil, further environmental deterioration, or the expected global population of 9 billion.

In pre-industrial societies population growth normally stops when not even child slave labour can raise production enough to pay for itself. If opportunities allow, ethnic cleansing may seem a more attractive alternative, as Plerdsus suggested.

Divergence: you speak of the problems that would still exist if we divested resources equally - I don't doubt that you are correct in your suppositions that this would not be a solution to the world's problems.

My point is that over population does not occur as rampantly in first world countries as it does in impoverished ones.

The problem you allude to is overconsumption, not necessarily over-population but the two obviously have a relationship.

Now if population's weren't spiralling out of control, we would be halfway to solving the problem.
The population of first world nations aren't increasing in the same way those of the third world are... theoretically then, if the third world was affluent like the first, they wouldn't be increasing so rampantly.

The problem is, if we were to bring the third world up to the level of the first, we would run into the problems you describe via the environmental footprint.

The question then becomes... if the first world can reduce consumption, does that mean that birth rates would increase?.. to me this is an important question, though I doubt it's one that has been considered at length...

I suppose what I'm saying is that you're right in that the problem isn't just about poverty... when I say I believe it is the world's largest problem, I do believe that is the case, though this is after considering other factors such as conflict, which consumes vast resources in itself.

Though it is not the only problem, I grant you.

TurnRightThenLeft,

Virginia Abernethy's 'Population Politics' is good on this. Family planning isn't something that was just discovered by the rich countries in the 20th century. Human societies have always had the problem of keeping the population big enough to keep the society running and deter the neighbours from invading, but not so big that after a below average harvest or two they ended up with huge numbers of hungry, desperate people who would degrade the environment in the interests of immediate survival and possibly revolt against the elite. They also needed to rebuild their numbers quickly after a disaster (or the neighbours would invade). Since parents could benefit from child labour and growing their own pension plan, population would normally grow until the labour market collapsed. There were different solutions to the problem of what to do then, most of them pretty brutal.

The population size that was in the interests of the elite and maybe defence was much greater than optimum for the welfare of the people. On the ABC's Thousand Years in a Day series (2000) it was explained that the high living standards enjoyed by survivors of the Black Death weren't matched until the late 19th century, despite all the intervening technological progress. Aristocrats of the time complained that common ploughmen were demanding to be paid in silver.

Rich countries can't allow child labour and are defended by technology, not masses of cannon fodder, so birth rates fall, even while people are well off. However, with their policies of baby bribes to the underclass and mass migration, our elites are effectively trying to revert to the natural state of mankind since the early Bronze Age: a tiny, bloated upper class sits perched atop a vast pyramid of human misery and maintains its position with State terror.