Very good James.

I find it fascinating as to how the growth lobby has so comprehensively consumed our governmental system and made it a slave to their greed. They’ve managed to make rapid never-ending population growth seem as though it is a fundamental necessity, questioned only by a very small number of know-nothing ratbags.

I've been quiet for too long on this issue. This argument is foolish and dangerous. It steers dangerously close to the whacko economics of the National Socialists in the 30s and smacks of protectionism in a recession.

Whoever the hell the growth lobby is, I want a membership. Count me in. What's first? I 'll tell you. First we get these nitwits, take them in a bus to Treasury in Canberra and talk about GDP slide over the next 30 years as a function of declining youth cohorts.

The environmental movement have been banging on about cutting immigration for ages. This doesn't sit too well with the social justice side of the party, and shows, if anything, that bigotry and racism can get in to bed with those who advocate saving the trees if they ignore the methods and just look at the outcomes.

Articles like this are life negating rather than affirming. Once every new born baby is dehumanised in this way, represented as a professional polluter who is a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions, it becomes difficult to feel anything other than apprehension about the future of the human race.

In tough times, people's true colours come out.

Endless growth in a finite world is impossible. Already the results are fully apparent. Declining water and air quality, climate change, shortages, overcrowding, pollution, soil loss and erosion, conflict and wars, floods and fires, economic collapse and ecoligical disaster.

Capitalism is the driver of this endless growth and that paradigm will be its death. Capitalism will go the way of feudalism, slavery and the kings as an old, superceded ideology and humans will have to come up with a new system suited to changed conditions. Capitalism has served us well as a system of growth but now we need to stabilise that growth and become sustainable. A steady state economy is the only way.

An economy where we only use resources at the same rate nature can replenish them. Where we can only produce waste at rates that nature can cope with. A system where products that last are far more valued than the disposable crap of today. Tax the things we want to stop like pollution and waste would be a good start. Giant multinationals will have to go. Replaced by small firms serving the community and under strict regulations regarding inputs and life cycles of their products.

Either that or we suffer the fate of the Easter islanders who fouled their nest so badly that they declined into savagery and destruction until there were none left.

Mindless anti-empirical apocalyptic commentary.

Why do you hate capitalism? Steady state? What's that? If you don't like the food or housing, see ya later. What psychological dispositions causes these people to go all doom and gloom?

Easter Islanders? They chopped down all of the trees to roll those bloody big statues up the hills. Stupid and a worthy symbol of anti-intellectual thinking.

I'm more inclined to think that much commentary about zero population growth and the end of the world type dialogues is born, quite possibly, from penis envy.

If you don't want to have kids - no problem. You want to tell me not to have kids - BIG problem.

Some of this thinking is so wooly it belongs on a behemoth.

Like CherylL I want to join the growth lobby, but I suspect that it does not exist in the form that Sinnamon suggests. Like most of this sort of material, the article confuses agricultural sector growth with overall economic growth. The main burden on the ecosystem is, and remains agriculture. It is certainly the reason why, for example, the Murray-Darling basin is under strain. The eco footprint of the major cities are nothing in comparison. Mining also hardly counts overall, although ther may be significant local affects.
So I would be interested to see a more focused argument from Sinnamon on how he plans to reduce the agriculture sector, but he should also bear in mind that the size of agricultural sectior, in turn, has no bearing on the size of Australia's population. Most of the food grown here is exported, although its importance to our trade balance is far less than it once was. Another problem with the article is that to control population growth Australia would have to drastically reduce immigration. Is this really his intention? What suggestions can the author make about reducing immigration?

Interesting to see your view in action, I often wonder what on earth goes on inside the heads of enviro warrior types.

"An obvious example is that Australians are paying extra water rates to finance costly water desalination.." they have to pay for water desalination in Victoria because the Greens did a preferences deal with the ALP and the price was locking up the Mitchel River, which floods regularly, thus depriving Melbourne of adequate water resources for its growing population - I wonder if people would have voted for the greens if they knew this sort of rubbish was behind it, or if it was then going to be used as justification for yet more anti social behaviour.

So you stop a city getting water, then state how terrible it is .. what hipocracy. How you all must regret doing this since now they need a new Coal Fired power plant to run the desalination plant - is that an own goal?

I see you dislike landlords too, probably the ones who pay for your day job as a cleaner. Another person who hates anyone who has worked hard to get somewhere.

There's no thought to the consequences of your actions or your supported idiology is there? It's all someone else's fault and problem.

I have no issue with bringing more people to Australia, we can convert the deserts in time, if only some idiot enviro-mujahadin would just stop trying to convince everyone that growth, wealth, progress and science (unless it is doom and gloom end of the world type science) is bad.