King has interviewed primary sources. That's a blow for the sterlisers who are using Youtube.

I politely suggest the writer is mining comments from the 'anti-pops' to use to wedge the Greens at the next election. I could be wrong. Some wonderful material here.

There's no doubt these people are imperialists of the worst kind - and elitist too. .000001 percent of the population want to force their eugenic views on 99.999999 percent of the world's population. Can't get much more elite than that.

This was all started by Kanck. Where or what is Kanck? Google says she wants or wanted to decriminalise Ectasy and reduce Australia's population by 70%. I make no inference.

Either the author is not the brightest of little buttons, or he
perhaps has some agenda to push, for we have been through these
arguments before on OLO and there is a simple solution.

Provide third world women with the same family planning tools
that Western women use every day and they will use them too, but
at present they are either largely not available or not affordable.

Thats not rocket science, not hard to understand and its not
imperialism, its simply giving people choices in their lives.

Does this simple, basic concept go above the authors head?

I can't help but think Malcolm King, director of Republic Media, was acting in his processional capacity when he wrote this article and previous ones on the same topic.

Correction is already underway, not always in the most obvious ways.

Step I: In order to maintain a larger population on the same area of land and the same resources, society needs to become more and more sophisticated.

Step II: To maintain a sophisticated life-style, one needs a more skilled work-force, thus higher and longer education.

Step III: To ensure that all children are educated to become part of the highly-skilled work-force, the government imposes miryads of laws, in all areas of life, that control how parents must and must-not raise their children.

Step IV: Parents no longer feel that their children are theirs - to a large extent the children become the government's cannon-fodder to fuel the ever more sophisticated work-force. The parents are drawn into lives of ever-increasing complexity just to comply with the law.

Step V: Parents strike and limit the number of children (if any at all). Who wants to bring up somebody-else's child anyway?

Children were anyway meant to grow up in the open and not in cities, so in a way it is good - it is amazing to see in how many and intricate ways Mother-Earth takes care of keeping its ecological equilibrium.

I cannot believe that not one poster has made mention of the exact
tracking of energy and population over the last 1000 years !

Do your own searching on the The Oil Drum. Its there.
As oil gas and coal deplete the population will fall with it.
It won't be pretty but who said it was supposed to be ?
Why will the population fall ?

When food production falls due to less energy for food production and
the use of more manual labour malnutrition will affect fertility.
It will be as simple as that.

As far as Australia is concerned we have problems surfacing already.
If we allow the building of more dense housing people will not be able
to supplement their purchased food with their own grown vegetables etc.
Our cities are too big now for the coming era and their growth must be stopped.

'Anti-pops' - good, a catchy name for this form of lunacy, and as the author rightly asserts it is lunacy. These groups insist that Australia's population be shrunk to eight million but they offer no crediable agenda for this to achieved, and I can't think how it would be this century.

Just as well for us then, that there is no real evidence, aside from strains caused by agriculture in the Murray-Darling, that we are well past any population limit. We could do with more water but then we can always go the desalisation route if there are no other options. If are politicians are given a choice between desalinisation plants and a one child policy, I know which one they will choose.