Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The scale of the future problem.

All those people wringing their hands over this don’t want to have to admit that the logical solution is to allow young immigrants from countries with more people than they can support period. But we must prevent the influx of the “wrong” people by encouraging more of the “right people” to breed. The demographic upheavals of declining and aging populations are going to be a rough phase for societies to go through, but we managed to get through the upside of the hump of increasing populations. Unfortunately the cost of that was our current crises of climate instability and loss of biodiversity, both of which were exacerbated by the existence of more humans. We’re in uncharted cultural territory; the recent explosion of human numbers and power have given us no tools or trasditions at hand to fall back on. We’ve blown past the millenia-old cultural wisdom instilled by generations of humans living in smaller numbers, closer to the local conditions which dictated and limited the numbers of humans that could be supported sustainably over long periods of time. Local overuse resulted in local displacement, competition, or extinction of both human and other-than-human populations. Our “local” is now planetary, and the displacement, competition and extinctns our activities produce are global. Maybe this was inevitable. Maybe not. It’s always been easier to discount the needs of a future yet to come in exchange for the boon that’s in front of us at the present moment. Whether or not it was something we could have avoided or prevented, here we are, like it or not.

The unprecedented explosion of human numbers was powered, quite literally, by the equally unprecedented, massive, one-time injection of fossil fuels, which offered a huge boost in quality and ease of life that would have otherwise been impossible. But much, if not most, of that expansion and boost was completely unplanned and unregulated. Upon learning (again) that there is (still) no free lunch, such wild abandon, free-for-all, unfetttered, every-corporation-for-itself anarchy, will not serve us to escape the long term consequences of our short term “success.” Getting out of the multi-dimensional corner we’ve painted ourselves into is going to take a lot more care, skill, and planning than was on display when we blindly got ourselves into it. We’ve seen how the short-term greed of energy companies prevented timely implementation of measures to counter the CO2 crisis that their own researchers predicted and warned about decades ago. We can’t afford to let the same kind of vested interests dictate the degree and shape of the solutions we will need to get out of the crisis they helped magnify.

Having fewer humans in total reduces our footprint and pressure on the biogeophysical resources and services that all species rely upon. Certainly the issues of fewer younger people supporting more older people are real, but figuring out a way through this rough patch without birthing more humans, and allowing the movement of those who are already here, is the better solution. Over the long run, things will work themselves out. It might not be easy or simple, but “easy” and “simple” (as well as profitable for some) is what helped create much of this problem in the first place. Surely we’re clever enough to come up with something safer that is workable?

The apparent rise of right wing populism worldwide is going to make it more difficult to avoid the efforts of xenophobic nationalists of all stripes to bolster numbers of the “right people” within their borders. The erosion of women’s reproductive rights will undoubtedly increase under this international natalist campaign.