The following quotation is from www.sciam.com, accessed 16 March 2009 [slightly abridged]:

“Every environmental problem is ultimately a population problem. If the world’s population were only 100 million, we would be hard-pressed to generate enough waste to overwhelm nature’s cleanup systems. Population experts agree that the best way to limit population is to educate women and raise the standard of living generally in developing countries. But that strategy cannot possibly happen quickly enough to put a dent in the population on any useful timescale. The U.N. projects that the planet will have to sustain another 2.6 billion people by 2050. But even at the current population level of 6.5 billion, we’re using up resources at an unsustainable rate. There is no way to reduce the population significantly without trampling egregiously on individual rights (as China has done with its one-child policy), encouraging mass suicide, or worse. None of those proposals seems preferable to focusing directly on less wasteful use of resources.”

===== BUT THAT WON’T WORK — attempting to solve the problem through ‘less wasteful use of resources’ is an absurd dream; we’ll never be able to un-waste ourselves out of our mess even with today’s population, much less the future’s. Seems to me, we can either (a) Restrict human reproduction, starting as soon as possible, until we reach a sustainable number of people on this planet, or (b) Wait for our inevitable die-off, when we take with us most of our fellow mammals and everything else but bugs and slugs.

Alternative (a) will be unpleasant and repressive, but no one need be physically hurt.

Alternative (b) will bring millions (at least) of agonizing deaths and, probably, devastating resource wars as well. And even then, we will leave a ruined earth.

What will it be, brother?