Confronting the inevitable: Population reduction, voluntary and otherwise

Editor’s note: One can run into a good report on a critical subject, only to find the author has a deficit of understanding on peak oil, for example. Or one may encounter the delusion that population growth is a problem basically in “Third World” countries. Not with this new essay for Culture Change. Professor Ken Smail has put together the best argument for facing depopulation.

Its full title was Acknowledging and Confronting the Inevitable: A Significant Shrinkage in Global Human Numbers, and Other Inconvenient Truths. Some readers may find Ken’s timing-scenario for depopulation optimistic — picturing it further off into the future than the 21st century — but he acknowledges its possibly being played out earlier due to today’s “toxic brew” of crises.

Assuming then, my postulata as granted, I say that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.
– Thomas Malthus (1798)

It has become increasingly apparent over the past half-century that there is a growing tension between two seemingly irreconcilable trends. On one hand, moderate to conservative demographic projections indicate that global human numbers will almost certainly reach 8 to 9 billion by mid-21st century, only two generations from the present. On the other, prudent and increasingly reliable scientific estimates suggest that the Earth’s long-term sustainable human carrying capacity, at what might be defined as an