Steven LeBlanc's book "Constant Battles" provides a good perspective on this. LeBlanc is a professor of archaeology at Harvard. When he did field work in the American Southwest, he found (pre-Columbian) evidence of fortified communities, collections of trophy heads, and whole villages massacred with the bodies left unburied, along with evidence of malnutrition and serious environmental damage. From examining evidence of war wounds on skeletons, he estimates that about 25% of the male population regularly died in battle (similar to the death rate from battle in the New Guinea Highlands at first contact in the 1930s). He found similar patterns in excavations around the world, and his photographs are particularly convincing.

He found a recurrent pattern. People outbreed their resources and overexploit their environment. When they become desperate enough to take the risk, they then try to kill or drive off their neighbours to take what they have, as in Rwanda in 1994. Occasionally there is a peaceful period, when new technology or a new crop has expanded carrying capacity, or there has been a big die-off due to some disaster, but the population grows again to restore the previous level of misery. Under these conditions, people are forced to overpopulate. A community that cannot field enough warriors will be wiped out.

We in the developed world have actually gotten out of the trap, with birth rates that are down to or below replacement level, although allowing people to externalise the costs of wasteful consumption is still a problem. We have effective contraception, and children are no longer economic assets or needed in large numbers for future defence. Population is only an issue because of past high population growth (as in Europe) and because governments promote mass migration and bribe people to have babies with various subsidies.

In poor countries a lot can be done by promoting the same conditions that worked in developed countries, including compulsory education and a ban on child labour, as Grim has said. Iran brought its birth rate down very quickly.

Divergence and/or Grim,

Could either of you explain how Iran brought their birth rate down?

I looked back at Grim's posts and got a link that mentioned Iran but, as far as I could see, did not say how they acheived that. Then I may have missed it.

My thoughts are that the lack of education and religous reluctance is the main problem, together with lack of available contrception.

I think it is really encouraging that over population is becoming more widely discussed, and that a sensible article like this one has not degenerated into vitriolic exchanges, even breaking the rule that once the Nazis are introduced, all hope is lost for a reasonable discussion.

Leaving rug rats aside (I have a former rug rat myself), I have to object to the assumption that Gaia theory is the preserve of nutters. James Lovelock has demonstrated that the earth always behaves like an organism (which he calls Gaia), and will adapt to whatever changes happen. The critical point is that it may not adapt in a way that is good for humankind, which is why some are desperately trying to rein in carbon emissions to keep us in the goldilocks zone for our own benefit.

There is an interesting book called Plague Species published some years ago which argues that the human population is following the same trajectory as any animal plague, and predicts it will crash to around the 1900 level by the end of this century.

Can't supply a definitive answer on Iran, Banjo, but I suspect the fact that more than half the University entrants this year will be women, has more than a little to do with it. Cheers.

If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I'm calling it a duck.

I would leave the Nazi analogies aside, if only the anti-humanists would refrain from comparing humans to cancers and plagues, the recurring motifs of the eugenic and anti-Semitic propaganda of the early 20th Century.

The author of this article and his cheerleaders in these comments may not be Nazis, but neither were Ernst Haeckel or the Romantic Nationalists of the Volkische movement. With hindsight, however, the evolution of genocidal ideology from Johann Frichte to the sinister Eugen Fischer is depressingly clear.

Of course, our nascent genociders here may not be explicitly racist (although as has been pointed out, they do seem mostly to be worried that the teeming brown masses of the developing world aren't dying off as efficiently as the used to), but they certainly *are* species-ist; and there's only one species they seem happy to earmark for vernichtung: homo sapiens.

It may be more than coincidental that the Volkische movement shared a romantic, mystical view of the natural world and an anti-urban "back-to-nature" fantasy not unlike the airier witterings of the Gaia worshippers.

I might also point out, merely by way of observation of course, that doctors joined the NSDAP earlier and in greater numbers than any other professional group.

"you must face the alternative ... we must drastically reduce the human population!"

Replace "human population" with "number of abortions" and this rhetoric seems frighteningly familiar.

Wow, it really does work with any group you don't like, doesn't it?