Kulu - as a geologist, I was taught there is more gold in one cubic mile of seawater than has ever been mined from the ground. The green revolution of the 1970s increased food production hugely to feed most of the extra billions of people who now live on the planet. And we all accept there's abundant energy falling on or occurring within the planet but we haven't yet worked out how to access it sustainably.
Human history is actually not full of devastation and destruction: instead, it's a history of mostly positive human achievements. There's no shortage of resources or of human ingenuity and I'm optimistic about the future of our planet, even though we have our most serious challenges ahead of us as we reach our peak global population in 30 to 40 years' times.
Talk of population control implies the use of force which is totally unacceptable. Education and provision of contraception are essential but I do not agree with China's enforced one child policy nor India's enforced sterilisation programs of a few years back.
The future is unwritten but we can choose to make it one where we avoid the pessimistic predictions of a small number of academics and anti-populationists like Ehrlich and sections of the green movement, and instead work to provide the sustainable means whereby global population stablises and then decreases.

Geez Bernie,
First I'd like to say that we 'do' have the skills to harness all that energy we just need to get rid of politicians and go make the equipment.. the skills lie in the voter yes? Bobby Brown would have it in the pipeline by now.
Second.. Your Quote (Human history is actually not full of devastation and destruction: instead, it's a history of mostly positive human achievements. There's no shortage of resources or of human ingenuity and I'm optimistic about the future of our planet, even though we have our most serious challenges ahead of us as we reach our peak global population in 30 to 40 years' times)
Bernie I would ask what is it that you think is ' positive human acheivments'
I'm tickled pink thinking of what it is that you may suggest if you want to bother.
On a local view we have destroyed everything good in australia and it only took a few generations. We are shovelling coal and native hardwood woodchips out of here at an ever increasing rate. Homes now are made of crap materials that have so many man made ingredients in them they are toxic places. Oh yes all good stuff on a long list of destructive human ingenuity.

Bernie, you say that "there's no shortage of resources," but surely you must be spending much of your time on a distant planet? Two rapidly diminishing resources spring to mind, oil depletion and Phosphorus. Without an ever increasing supply of cheap oil, the world's population will begin a rapid reversal. Without Phosphorus, nothing living on earth can survive.

Whilst we can do something about Phosphorus, example, collecting urine for use as organic fertiliser, the world has most likely reached peak oil. Anything we could have done to minimise the collapse that peak oil will cause should have been put in place 20 years before the peak. It's widely considered that oil peaked in 2007, total oil liquids including condensates in 2008.

In the meantime, due to the GFC, investment in oil development and infrastructure has dropped dramatically. Oil rigs are old and are literally rusting away. Very soon a leg could break off a deep sea rig with terrible loss of life and many of the rest will be forced to shut down for inspection causing an overnight rocketing of oil prices and massive loss of agriculture and industry since everything in our current Westernised world relies entirely on oil to survive.

I've focused on only oil and Phosphorus, but what about rapidly diminishing fish stocks and loss of arable soil, particularly in Australia? Anyway, too late to stop it now. The analogy of the Petri dish is quite accurate. Humans may think they are pretty clever, but in reality they have only the brains of a microbe in a dish!

The discussion of how scientifically-based the anti-pops are, ignores the fact that science, by definition, doesn’t supply value judgements.

Science, as science, provides precisely *no* justification for or against a particular policy. Only if the underlying value judgments are common ground does the positive science clearly indicate one way or the other. But the underlying value judgments *are* in issue.

When the anti-pops question what positive things humanity have done, and refer to a record of wastage and destruction, you have to remember that they don’t regard human life as a positive value. On the contrary, they regard it as negative. They think of humans as a form of noxious pest. ‘The problem’ is people, and the instrument they are urging to fix the problem is policy – the organisation of force.

By definition *all* human action produces a better environment, from the point of view of making conditions for humans more satisfactory – otherwise they wouldn’t do it. By replacing the stones and bark of my home-site with roof and doona, I have made the environment better.

No-one has a right to speak for values over and above human values. When people speak for ‘the environment’, they are merely asserting that their preferred use of scare resources should be preferred by others as well, even if they have to use force – the law – to make those others comply.

Ultimately all the environmental questions boil down to the ethical one – whether social co-operation is to be based on violence and threats, as anti-pop policy assumes, or not.

Policy to restrict the use of resources that support life is policy to kill people.

Those worried about the excessive or unfair use of resources need not resort to policy: let them grasp the nettle and reduce or eliminate their own use of resources which they, not others, regard as unjustified.

What we are witnessing in the anti-pops movement is an epidemic of pious neo-religious hypocrisy, like the public parades of ostentatious self-flagellation in Christian history.

What we are witnessing in the overpopulation denial movement is an epidemic of speciescentric arrogance, very much like that displayed by past civilizations just prior to their collapse.

I think we should arm all the experts to the teeth and then set them upon one another … a huge war game with real bullets and bombs

The ensuing death and carnage will provide :

the depopulation demanded by some,
the purism demanded by others

and leave the rest of us (the real people who simply wish to get on with their lives, without being micro managed by a bunch of ivory towered academic intellectual elitists and self appointed social despots) with a much improved gene pool.