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We produce more resources than we could ever consume in the least sustainable ways possible.
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this post was submitted on 24 May 2026
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Overpopulation is not a myth. 36% of the earth's mammalian biomass is Humans, only 5% is wild mammals. 71% of avian life is livestock. https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass
Half of all "habitable land" (which includes everything except deserts, tundra, salt flats, beaches, or exposed rock) is used for agriculture. Half of all land, for agriculture. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2019/12/agriculture-habitable-land/
Industrial farming is not sustainable at the current rate and relies on either mined or petrochemical derived ammonia which supplies the nitrogen necessary for protein. Synthetic Ammonia alone feeds half the world population and requires an additional 2% of the world's power to produce.
The global ecoystem is in rapid decline.
I gave up finding appropriate sources halfway when I realized this post will just get removed eventually.
What is the ideal amount of biomass for humans? Same question for agricultural land. What’s the ideal amount? I’m torn between thinking this is just how things go or maybe I’m just terribly ignorant. At some point the majority of biomass was dinosaurs or something, so what? That’s the ebb and flow of life. It wasn’t the biomass of dinosaurs that caused their extinction. How do these biomass stats indicate overpopulation?
I can’t disagree with the industrial farming and overall ecosystem points you raise but the biomass bits seem awfully arbitrary.
I’d also say feeding 50% of the world’s population for 2% of the world’s energy seems pretty damn efficient.
Personally I'd say 10% each humans and livestock, or some similar ratio such that wildlife remain 80%.
Another option is to return as far as the proven stable number of 2 million humans total, though that would take many many many generations to do and isn't even guaranteed to be better for the environment since sometimes forest management and natural disaster response can actually be helpful.
Definitely lower than 2 billion. It's going to take a lot of figuring out since we clearly have no idea what number will bring global ecostability.
The 36℅ you cited is for Mammalians, that doesn't mean the rest of Biomass can be compared to it.
Animal Biomass is around 0.5℅, so that puts it into relation.
Also the earth consisist of 70% Water, this means Land mass is 30℅ and from that 30℅, around 46% is used by Humans.
Also Land use has been steadily falling with modern agriculture. There was a time when Europa barely had any forests left, because of the extensive agricultural need for Farmland.
I know "numbers scary", but I think a bit of contextualisation can't hurt.
NB: Ecofascism is still Fascism.
You're gonna sit there and tell me it's fine if only 5% of mammals are neither human nor livestock? That's a horrifying thought alone, it means we've consumed or destroyed all of nature that we had the capability of doing such to. We should not be the 95% under any circumstance. We should not be 50%. We need there to be nature, we need there to be a natural order.
For the record, the larger groups are fish and arthropods. That's it. Sauropsida or Reptiles and amphibians are such a small amount of biomass that they're completely negligible.
BTW, it's super cringe when you call the advocacy of women's rights and education as "Fascism". You know who else fights against the idea of allowing or promoting population decline? Christofascists and Technofascists like Elon Musk, they're pushing for population growth instead.
"(..) we need there to be natural order."
The natural order of things, does it involve a concept of degeneracy and normalcy?
Always funny how quick the mask slips.
Also humans are animals and therefore nature. There is no concept of nature versus humans, unless you enforce these boundaries to construct an ideology that needs it.
This idea of nature just means everything "that is good" is nature, which does not make sense. In that view a whale is nature, but the rabies virus is not.
Also to respond to your last sentence with an equal out of place diction.
Why can't you accept that Hubble's constant is universally equal. That is anti science.
It's not the growth of ethanol (maize) and animal feed (soybeans) producing crops on the last 30 years, highly fucking inefficient and produced in the worst way possible, not even that pasture uses A LOT more land than agriculture while being a lot less energy dense, both using a lot more water than producing direct food, it's the poors.
Edit: And also, beef is the major cause for deforestation too:
It doesn't have to be one or the other, we can tackle multiple solutions simultaneously.
Developing nations have proven to increase their carbon footprints over time, e.g. China, so the fact that they're the fastest growing populations on earth is a serious issue we can address with solutions such as: empower women's rights and advancing access to education and upward mobility in society. That was the same exact solution that the UN came to in their meeting in Cairo, Egypt in 1994.
EDIT: 3. less people consume less beef also
Producing beef is the most inefficient way to produce food, in both use of space and water, and energy. We don't need to impose things on people if humanity reduces its beef consumption.
If we cut beef consumption by half, literally oligarchs would not have an economic reason to deforest the Amazon, because of the price drops. But no one wants to do that.
You're conflating a lot of words, gives an example for China, while Chinas population is not growing even (or will start to diminish on some years), associating different things into the same sentence is hard to pick what exactly you're talking about, China or Africa (the last place where population growth is happening at large beyond the 2.1 fertility rate).
This mix of "things that are possible/reasonable" and "things that are wildly speculative" is interesting.
Reasonable/possible
Wild speculation / nonsensical.
This is not at all how large societies have worked, in any time period, ever.
While it might be technically true, it's missing a whole bunch of steps in the middle for it to be a practicality.
And that was just off of the top of my head.
Oligarchs gonna oligarch, removing one revenue source isn't going to suddenly kill interest in the amazon, with it's abundant resources and space.
As I said in my comment:
And about this:
Beef is the major factor in the amazon, by a large margin, as in my original comment. Palm Oil is not a significant part in Brazil, nor real state. Mineral is mainly in Roraima, but not as big as beef, because it's based on small operations, there are a lot of sources on this for gold mining and the local Yanomami indigenous population that fights agains this (as this is done on their land).
If you’re going to cherry pick at cherry pick from the text being mentioned.
Your whole comment was :
and wasn’t the comment to which i was responding.
Cool story, still irrelevant to my point which was:
Create a revenue vacuum (like removing the biggest value stream in a region) and oligarchs gonna oligarch right in and expand another value stream to make up the difference.
I’m not advocating for this to happen, I’m saying that expecting beef reduction to remove oligarchs from the amazon is unrealistic.
They also sell the rainforest lumber, but lifestyle changes aside we should always pursue a lower total population via lower birthrates until we can restore natural order.
China was a developing nation a long time ago, and since 1700 their population has grown 11x over, and now they produce more emissions and utilize more landmass than any other nation on earth.
Wrong place, my bad
NP we good.
edit: dammit, real-time updates kicking my ass
Did you check it again?
Yeah, about China I agree that they generated a lot of pollution and CO2 emissions and I hope that their energy transition goes faster in the future. Coal seems nice (supply, price, etc) until it isn't (It's getting a little toasty hahah).
Edit: About the population thing, idk
Those numbers mean nothing to refute the overpopulation as a myth. The core premise of overpopulation is that humans can no longer produce enough food to sustain its people. So mammalian biomass doesn't matter, total amount of farmable land doesn't matter, and percent of avian life does not matter.
It's never been a question of our impact on the environment. it's a question of our impact on ourselves and how much past our means we are.
How much of our farmable land is currently being used to produce non-edible crops such as maize used for fuel additive or soy used for cosmetics? How much farmable land are we sabotaging with pollution which could be cleaned up? These are more pertinent questions for this, because if we could be making more food instead of maize or soy, we could still feed our people.
No, it absolutely isn't that, idk where you even got that from. The core premise is that it is unsustainable for any reason.
Producing food is one reason for evidence of current overpopulation, as I mention 50% of the world's food production is with synthetic ammonia sourced from mining and petrochem which are finite nonrenewable resources.
Another reason is that the world ecosystem sustains all life including humanity, and when it collapses the human population will collapse with it.
Literally from Malthus himself. He argued that due to overpopulation we'd cause mass famines, leading to war and societal collapse. And he solidly pointed blame on developing countries overbreeding and called for population control and oven culling in those nations. All arguments directly derive from his original argument.
Because that is the only solution to overpopulation, is population control and population culling. Population too big, either start killing people or forcing couples to not have children. That's what you're arguing for every time you agree with an overpopulation argument.
The new twists of ecological destruction are also highly misplaced. You'd have to pin the blame on the places which are reproducing the most, which is not the case. The damage we do with deep sea fishing, fish farms, and meat farms is not the fault of the poor nations overbreeding - the only groups we could blame for overpopulation right now.
In reality, we'd not be causing nearly as much damage to our environment if we weren't using fossil fuels, weren't transporting a massive portion of our goods from overseas, weren't getting most of our meat from cows and other methane producers, weren't fishing in such a way that destroys the seafloor, etc. There's literally hundreds of ways I could list that we're doing which if we switched to an alternative would solve large portion of our ecological damage.
We all are carrying out these unsustainable practices, regardless of population. Those practices are the problem, not overpopulation. We could still be producing enough food with sustainable methods that don't destroy the world ecology.