Population

All environmental issues are ultimately population issues. Even the most wasteful and polluting industrial processes would have minimal environmental impact if the population were small enough.

While this might lead some to say "Thanos was right", this is fortunately a problem can easily solve itself without resorting to genocide or authoritarian limits on births.

All evidence shows that education, especially women's education, low infant mortality, and access to birth control naturally result in a declining population.

We just need to avoid creating economic systems that rely on an increasing population to fund things like retirement pensions and growth for growth sake economics.

Overpopulation Analysis

There are a number of good videos online that break down the issues surrounding overpopulation in a very informative and entertaining way. However, they tend to ultimately dismiss the issue of overpopulation as one that will either self-correct or become irrelevant dues to some optimistic future tech.

This perspective helps eliminate the concerns of those with limited vision who hear "overpopulation" and assume that means an increase in the death rate, which is good. But they largely ignore the question of whether even our current population can be sustained without permanent damage to vital parts of our ecosystem.

Nor are the quality of life issues surrounding population ever part of the discussion. There is only so much land available to live on if we still want to have a nature. This analysis by Derek Parfit is one of the only articles specifically addressing the quality of life concerns surrounding population. It is also a great demonstration of utilitarian ethical calculation and the problems with counting theoretical people.

Why Population is Actually a Problem (Video)

This video gives a detailed and nuanced breakdown of the way population issues are approached by mainstream left and right politics. It rightly points out that population trends are already self-correcting, and that fossil fuels are the primary driver of climate change. However, this argument focuses on solving climate change to the exclusion of all the other environmental and quality of life issues caused by overpopulation.

It is important that population continues its downward trend and we don't start listening to those who are saying we need more people. There are a million ways we can destroy our ecosystem, and a million annoyances caused by too many people. Reducing the population helps prevent all of them.

Overpopulation Facts (Video)

One of the few videos to mention the quality of life issue and it gets about 20 seconds out of an 8 minute speech.