this post was submitted on 24 May 2026
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[–] JayDee@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] FiniteBanjo@feddit.online 3 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

The core premise of overpopulation is that humans can no longer produce enough food to sustain its 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.

[–] JayDee@lemmy.world 4 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] FiniteBanjo@feddit.online -1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

Well I can compare your anti-population-reduction stance to Elon Musk. Do you feel good knowing that Christofascist and Technofascist oligarchs hold the same view as you?

As for your absolutely bonkers claim that sustainability isn't directly proportional to population size, I feel need to argue such a blatantly false statement.

[–] Senal@programming.dev 1 points 34 minutes ago* (last edited 33 minutes ago)

I'm not the same person btw.

Genuine question, wouldn't a directly proportional link require that sustainability efforts go up in a direct mirror to population?