Ecology and Human Overpopulation

<Needs Revision>

Recently I was reading responses to an article in MotherEarth News that advocated reducing the number of children you have as the earth is becoming overpopulated and is close to being unable to sustain the sheer number of humans who live here.

Most of the responses were very, very negative towards the idea and the author. "...Please tell me which of my five children shouldn't have been born...." and other equally angry and hate filled responses were published ( and kudos to MotherEarth for publishing them) most stating that the respondent would "cancel my subscription".

I have one thing to say. How selfish are you? You think you can have all the kids you want and use all the resources you want and as long as you try to live "Green" it's ok?

Living sustainably it takes around 5 acres per person to live a modern western lifestyle. There is only around 12 million square miles of arable (farmable) land on earth and 7 billion people. Simple math says that (even allowing for smaller farm plots on less productive land) we are at or over the number of people the earth can sustain. Using just arable land, the earth can support 1,536,000,000 people ( 1.5 billion). We already support 5 times that.

Ok, Ok we aren't includes "victory gardens" and other small subsistence and hobby farms. So... Lets triple the amount of land available for growing food. Also lets say we are using the most environmentally destructive, High-Yield, farming techniques. That gives us 36 million square miles of land and only 2.5 acres per person needed to grow food. Using this new numbers we can support 9.2 billion people.

Hmm... 9.2 billion people using practices that only work about 20-50 years before the land is worthless or we're out of stuff to "enrich" the land so it still is arable. 9.2 billion just happens to be about the projected world population in 2050.

To answer one woman who asked "Which of my five children shouldn't have been born?". The answer is All of them. Because of a combination of the selfishness of people who think they have a right to all the resources they want, and the lack of infrastructure in 3rd world countries (where most of the growth is going to occur) instead of one or two children you have a lifetime of happiness for themselves and their children. She selfishly says her 5 children are too precious to her to give up. That's great enjoy watching your precious children starve. Or maybe she's just condemning some foreigner's extended family to starve while her's live in the lap of luxury using the cheap labor of under developed societies.