Yes we are still talking growth but ignoring the warnings.
We are past our manageable population now.
Symptoms tell us this if we only look.
Refugee movements world wide, far worse than Australia's current problems, and getting worse daily.
Starvation and it too is about to get far worse.
Floods and droughts, something we always have to live with, are reducing the northern hemispheres corn wheat and grain production this and next year to critical levels.
Western Nations , that is us, each of us, must stop the smug thought Nature will fix it.
The thought out future planning for great numbers of us, included the thought millions will die in war famine or plague is sickening.
And if it took place?
Based on current refusal to act we would start all over again to rebuild our numbers to critical mass then do it over again.

Ahh… eat, drink and be merry today. For tomorrow is fraught with trouble!

By what criterion do we say the world is overpopulated? While we have unproductive people whose philosophy of eat, drink and be merry at others expense is being normalised.

Josephus,
Not every country is over populated but the concern is for those countries that cannot produce enough food to sustain their population. Some of these countries endure regular famines and many die. So I guess that is the criteria upon which population judgements are made.

Belly,
We and the UN need to be far more active in promoting family planning in famine suseptable countries and the provission of the means of birth control. Iran and Thailand have demonsrated what can be done and we need to expand on their experiences.

95% of the world population don't even consider the fact that there are too many people in the world. They are only concerned with their own family and creating that. The big picture never enters their heads. When governments stop subsidising breeding and religions stop encouraging it, will be the time when perhaps sense will prevail.

Dear Belly,

Many people still make the assumption that human
beings will always be able to use the "ultimate
resource" of their ingenuity to find new technologies
to exploit the environment, and that the world will
therefore be able to support many more people, just
as it always has in the past.

This is a comfortable assumption, especially for those
who don't have to eke out an exitence on a daily basis in
an impoverished, overpopulated country. However eventually
we have to realise that the planet lacks the resources
to support many billions of people at anything remotely
resembling the standard of living in developed countries.

Nor is it easy to see how the environment can tolerate
the amount of pollution involved in a world consisting
entirely of heavily populated and fully industrialised
societies. The best that can be said at present is that
the demographic fate of the world and its peoples hangs in
a precarious balance.