There is a critical, yet commonly overlooked, theoretical nuance when it comes to conversation about curbing population growth.

This misconception is that those of us who advocate decreasing birth rates are advocating for the voluntary extinction of humanity. That is, antinatalists are commonly perceived as wanting to let humanity die out from the planet (see this post from Populationconnection.org).

While there certainly are organisations that endeavour towards human extinction, antinatalists concerned with population growth seldom advocate so extreme an end-goal. Reducing population growth does not imply the ultimate extinction of the human species, but rather to stabilize the world’s population at a sustainable level for the planet and its ecosystems.

Think more “replacing the number of people who die each year” over “letting people die off altogether”.

As you can see on the right of this page, we currently require upwards of 1.7 planet Earths’ worth of resources and waste absorption to sustain our current population.

Unfortunately, we don’t seem to have 1.7 planet Earths to live on.

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This page will offer some discussion on birth limits. By birth limits, I refer to the theoretical cap on what is the ideal carrying capacity of the Earth, and how we may sustainably reach such a goal.

By carrying capacity here, I refer to estimates of Earth’s maximum supportable human population (Cohen, 1995). In a 2012 review of the Earth’s carrying capacity, the United Nations Environmental Programme and the Global Environment Alert Service concluded that:

While there is an incredible range to the estimates of Earth’s carrying capacity, the greatest concentration of estimates falls between 8 and 16 billion people (Cohen, 2003). Global population is fast approaching the low end of that range and is expected to get well into it at around 10 billion by the end of the century. Many of us alive today will be alive when the planet is carrying (or not carrying) 9 billion people. (p. 131)

To be prudent, we must note that estimates of the world’s carrying capacity involve too many factors (and, accordingly, too many methods) to be considered in this blog. I therefore take this review to be a generally satisfactory summary of the Earth’s carrying capacity of human beings. Joel Cohen (1995) cites that there are three ways to approach resolving the issue of exceeding the Earth’s carrying capacity:

1. A Bigger Pie: Technological advances could help us to be more efficient and effective in our use of the Earth’s natural resources.
2. Less Forks: Less mouths to feed means less resources to consume.
3. Better Manners: Cooperation in improving the terms on which the global population consumes natural resources must be had to ensure sustainability.

It is obvious where antinatalism fits into Cohen’s picture. While perhaps technological advances in the future may promise to increase the world’s carrying capacity, reducing the general number of forks sharing the pie (to stretch the metaphor) is presently critical. We would be well-served not to be complacent since the world population is not yet at the lower-bound estimates of the Earth’s carrying capacity.

This is why it is important for us to reduce population growth. Remember: reducing population growth is not synonymous with advocating the extinction of the human race. It simply means that birth rates should meet death rates as closely as possible; we ought to “replace” the number of people who die in order to maintain our ways of living. At the very least, doing so now buys us time for technological progress to see us into a time where a larger population is less detrimental to the Earth as it is now.