Is global over-population the root cause of environmental problems?
The genie was out of the bottle the moment we came down from the trees and formed settlements. ‘Carbon footprints’ are just the latest popular sub-set of environmental issues arising from human activity. Even with a drastically reduced population, we cannot go back to a lifestyle that has no adverse impact on the environment. Given sufficiently few people living an existence close to that of our stone-age ancestors it might be sustainable had we not already changed the mix of flora and fauna to such an extent. Even that assumes that we deny man’s natural intelligence and refuse to invent or create anything beyond stone tools. We cannot now live in a way that does not disturb the balance of nature, does not consume resources and does not pollute. If we could ask mother nature what the problem is, the answer would have to be ‘mankind’. The hard question is what, if anything, we do about it. So far, I’ve seen nothing to suggest there is a solution to that basic problem that includes the l
