Imagine you’re on a spaceship, and your crewmates begin dismantling the craft while you’re hurtling through space. What will you do? We’re facing that predicament now on Spaceship Earth, and 11,000 scientists around the world have issued a third warning. “Stabilize population growth” was listed as one of six ways to mitigate effects contributing to the climate crisis.

The World Population Balance staff gathered around the table to discuss how the warning addressed human population numbers, and to analyze some unwarranted criticism in the press. Was the language in the warning too timid? Why not just come out and say we need to contract our population? Well, they did. But they beat around the bush in getting there. Why?

Contracting our population can be accomplished humanely, ethically and voluntarily. Widespread adoption of one-child families as the norm can move our numbers back to a sustainable level in roughly 100 years.

The Overpopulation Podcast is produced by World Population Balance, a non-profit organization committed to alerting and educating that overpopulation is the root cause of resource depletion, species extinction, poverty, and climate change. Our mission is to chart a path for human civilization that – rather than causing greater misery – enables good lives on a healthy planet. We advocate and support a smaller, truly sustainable human population – through dramatic and voluntary reduction in birth rates. 

We envision a world where no one suffers in dire poverty and misery for lack of enough food, water, and other basic needs. We see a world where all species thrive and where lower consumption and population are in balance with Earth’s finite resources.

Discussed in this Episode:

More Highways won’t lessen traffic
Lois Braun’s Letter to the Editor in the Minneapolis Star Tribune

Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency (November 5, 2019)

Stabilizing the Global Population is Not a Solution to the Climate Emergency – But We Should Do it Anyway by Mark Maslin

Why Climate Change is an Irrelevance, Economic Growth is a Myth and Sustainability is Forty Years Too Late

This Controversial Way To Combat Climate Change Might Be The Most Effective

The Global Fertility Crash (in Bloomberg)

The End of Babies: Something is stopping us from creating the families we claim to desire. But what? (New York Times)

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