Very few ideas seem to be new.

[Enrique]

Perhaps some of you has sometime been concerned about the huge number of people populating the world and its impact on the environment (and on the famous quality of life). This is from Wikipedia:

Concern about overpopulation is ancient. Tertullian was a resident of the city of Carthage in the second century CE [by this time Carthage was a Roman city, after its rebuilding], when the population of the world was about 190 million (only three to four percent of what it is today). He notably said: "What most frequently meets our view (and occasions complaint) is our teeming population. Our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly support us... In very deed, pestilence, and famine, and wars, and earthquakes have to be regarded as a remedy for nations, as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race."

Personally, I have long since viewed modern medicine as one of the scourges of our time. Mother Nature has always had some mechanisms by means of which she controlled the size of a population. Man has laboriously managed to dismantle them one by one. Infant mortality was one of those mechanisms. Let alone natural selection. Human biological evolution is being put in a cul de sac. I cannot say something like "this is my opinion", for I've been influenced by ideas thought before this post (by whoever had them). So I will let this sound as categorical as it does.

[Peter]

Yes well we have had this topic before and I know there are strong views about it. Personally I do think over-population is a problem, but as to the solution I dread to think where we may be heading. Still there have always been doom-mongers amongst us so I'm cautious about joining their ranks and prefer to take a positive view that we will come through and meet the challenges as we have in the past.

[Enrique]

The dreaded solution will never come from government quarters or from people having incorporated the problem into their consciences or from any other instance that depends on human action. Too many created interests for a government to act or letting people get informed. Only particular cases constitute an exception.

Let's concede that the Earth can sustain the present or a larger population for indefinite time. What would be the nice thing of living in a human corral. Also, I see the subject of the ozone layer, of deforestation, soil loss and so on being mentioned in the information media. And people being solicited to act against that deterioration. But the matter of overpopulation is seldom touched in those media and, when it is, only in a slight and incidental way. The concerted action of people can slow down the deterioration. But it would only be a palliative. The population size is at the root of all those problems that do get some attention. And we insist on acting against the effects rather than on the cause.

[RobertH]

I've always deeply distrusted the Malthusian argument.
There are vast areas of the world that are vastly underpopulated - Europe and the US have declining real numbers that are only partially masked in Europe by Islamic immigration and in US by illegal aliens from Mexico and the Third World.
Look at the melancholy sight of the rust towns of the US and Europe - urban flight, depopulation, crime.
Then, who is to define overpopulation and who then gets to starve and dispose of the excess? - this stuff easily morphs into a very dark agenda where only the likes of H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Soros ,Gore, the Bilderbergers etc, do not fear to tread.

[Megan]

Well haven't we killed millions of people in Iraq, people who meant not the slightest harm to us, but whom we decided were excess to requirements, so we just got rid of them.
Seems to me some people need to grow a conscience.

[Peter]

I've always deeply distrusted the Malthusian argument.
There are vast areas of the world that are vastly underpopulated - Europe and the US have declining real numbers that are only partially masked in Europe by Islamic immigration and in US by illegal aliens from Mexico and the Third World.
Look at the melancholy sight of the rust towns of the US and Europe - urban flight, depopulation, crime.
Then, who is to define overpopulation and who then gets to starve and dispose of the excess? - this stuff easily morphs into a very dark agenda where only the likes of H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Soros ,Gore, the Bilderbergers etc, do not fear to tread.

Perhaps we should be talking more about population density - the UK is certainly not one of the underpopulated countries you refer to. What is extraordinary about the EU is that it actively encourages people to move around within Europe causing the depopulation of countries such as Bulgaria, Poland and inflating the population of already crowded countries such as the UK. There is a madness in this that only politicians are fully capable of.

[Enrique]

...Then, who is to define overpopulation and who then gets to starve and dispose of the excess? - this stuff easily morphs into a very dark agenda where only the likes of H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Soros ,Gore, the Bilderbergers etc, do not fear to tread.

There is general consensus about what a definition of overpopulation should be like. The definition is based on the relation between the carrying capacity of a region and the size, and eventualy behaviour of the population living on it. As an example, Holland has a high population density. However, it is not overpopulated, because the Dutch import most of the raw materials they use, in this way reducing the burden on the land to a minimum.
Regarding the agent that must operate in order to lower the numbers it is the people themselves. But first they should be properly informed and educated. Otherwise, they won't do anything.

As to coercive action, it depends on an appreciation of the seriousness and urgency of the situation. Clearly, if it were certain that the human race will perish in the near future,
for lack of food resources, then some coercive measures would have to be taken now. But famine would automatically readjust the size of the population to make it match the availability of resources. Nature would be in command here and there would be no need for fearful measures. So, perhaps coercion is not a danger in the horizon.

Frankly, it is the present which I am concerned about. We have already gone far beyond the limit, and the immediate consecuences can be seen everywhere. The human population must be fed, dressed and given shelter. As its size increases, the quality of these three things, and many other ones, not all of them material things, must necessarily go down. As a tiny example, I spend a considerable part of my time typing on the machine console, as I do right now. The keyboard (along with the display) is for me the main means of interacting with the computer. As this is also the case for many other people, the keyboard should be a comfortable thing to use and an effective means of entering data. When the first IBM and Macintosh desktop computers appeared, they were supplied with a keyboard which, far from being that of a data entry for entering data into punched cards, in use at the time, nonetheless met up to a certain degree the requirements mentioned above. If I compare those keyboards with the one I have recently bought, I should say that this one is sort of a joke, or some kind of a toy, but never a computer console keyboard.

But 150 million computers have been sold (worldwide) this year in only the intervening months. To be able to sell so many computers, prices are forced to go down. One way to do it is, precisely, to sell many computers. They will be able to sell them, because the market is huge, there being so many people over the surface of the Earth. The other one, is to lower the quality of their components (microchips possibly excluded). Computers today are within reach of our pockets (actually, this is true for only a small number of people) so, maybe, we must not complain. But I do complain. If the keyboard does not serve me, neither will the computer. Thus, overpoputation is a stupid thing in my case. Without overpopulation I would not have a computer. And with overpopulation, my computer is useless.

[Peter]

There is general consensus about what a definition of overpopulation should be like. The definition is based on the relation between the carrying capacity of a region and the size, and eventualy behaviour of the population living on it. As an example, Holland has a high population density. However, it is not overpopulated, because the Dutch import most of the raw materials they use. The agent that must operate in order to lower the numbers is the people themselves. But first they should be properly informed and educated.

What about other factors? - housing capacity (which impacts on environment), Health care (over-burdened in the UK), transport (congested beyond belief in the UK), education (way too many pupils per teacher) etc...

[Enrique]

As far as I know, carrying capacity is defined by demographers only in terms of natural resources and the rate at which these resources are being exploited by a human group. This makes sense, for suppose the world oil resources have been exhausted. Then they are gone for good, I mean nature cannot renovate the petroleum within the next thousand years. If, on the other hand, there are too few teachers for a given number of students, this situation could revert (unlikely but possible in principle) in a near future. Example: the proliferation of documentary films on biology (and certainly on the superficial aspects of biology), among other things, has made, in the past years, many young people to choose biology as their carrier, crowding, in this way, the classrooms. But these stimuli could in the future no longer exist and the scenario could go back to normal. Of course, professors are made out of students. However, it is more likely that a person motivated by a true vocation gets a PhD, enabling him to get a chair in a university, than a person who has been motivated by watching a documentary on penguins.

However, it seems parameters like sanitation and health care, among other non trivial ones, are sometimes taken into account. There are many persons that won't recognize that the world is overpopulated. I think that these excentrical opinions are more likely to be found among people ignorant of demography than among those who have dedicated their lives to the study of these problems, I mean demographers.
SOME ISOLATED REMARKS:
I have not the authority to speak about demographic issues. But when we read or listen to somebody speak, we can choose (rightly or not) to say "this knows what he is speaking about". Or "he doesn't". You hear some people say: Oh, no, energy resources do not really pose a problem. We can have as much energy as we like. All you have to do is to build enough wind turbines. Some other guy will say: there we have an infinite source of energy: the Sun (see note below). Apart from the little attractive idea of filling the dry land with wind turbines and solar cells, a rather depressive landscape, these ideas are sheer utopia. In the present state of the art of technology, the answer is nuclear power. The ghost of Chernovil agitates before people and this is a very unfortunate thing. It has retarded the development of power resources by a century. Government and private organizations have funded many of those utopian projects. It's reasonable to expect that they know what they do. But they don't. It's all people with good will, but little knowledge. But this is a personal opinion.

Be the world overpopulated or not, but if it is, I repeat, it makes little sense to attack the effects and not the cause, some things are disconcerting. Take the city of Las Vegas. Is the existence of that monster justifiable? An extraterrestial watching the city would think: "In the Earth they have no problems at all with energy supply". In fact, it would be enough for him to go into any shop in the US or Europe, a supermarket, for instance, to think exactly that. The temperature inside those places in winter is so high that it makes the employees to feel comfortable dressing a mere shirt for the upper part of the body. In summer, the analog situation prevails. It's not only that in that way we are giving our backs to the energetic crisis, or plainly negating the crisis. Is there not a problem with the atmosphere (carbon dioxide)? And what does the generation of electricity do in this regard?

The great cities are overpopulated while the countryside is depopulated. The mechanism by which world overpopulation causes this effect (but there are other parameters of course to consider) is very complex and this is not the place neither am I the proper person to speak about it. In the Rome of the 1st century BC people flew from the country towards the great city, making it crowded. Women had few children and Augustus had to encourage fertility. The poets in that time wrote works praising life in the country. The history of agrarian reforms is very old. Perhaps somebody remembers Roman history figures like those the Gracchi. Few people had extensive land possessions and the little farmer had to go to the city to earn a living. Well, I am sure a demographer could, however, show us that Italy was overpopulated.

Leaving the subject of overpopulation behind, I wonder how a human being can stand having to spend two hours of his day to go from home to work and then back home. How is it possible that car manufactures put such an enormous amount of vehicles on the streets and governments do not do anything to avoid it? The fact that people has to devote two of his/her sixteen hours to do nothing but drive a car or sit in a bus is sheer aberration. This only fact, among the myriad of inconveniences of modern life qualifies, to make great urban conglomerates inhabitable.

There are so many things in our world that can be properly called aberrations and pure nonsense, that it would be impossible to name them all. And so many people viewing them as the most natural thing in the word! As some of them come to my mind, I will be mentioning them in this thread (from within those I know).

Note:
This reminds me of the projects devised by some people to deviate an asteroid that could be reaching the Earth. Also, XVI century Spain was overwhelmed by several major issues. Some people, called "arbitristas" (problem solvers) in that time, used to send Charles V and Philip II "arbitrios" (solutions) to solve those problems. For instance, one of them was, in view of the imminent danger of invasion on the part of the Turks, to through large sponges into the Mediterranean so all of the water would be absorbed, in this way drying the see an avoiding the Turkish fleet to reach the coasts of Spain.