{"id":28815,"date":"2017-12-13T07:53:39","date_gmt":"2017-12-13T12:53:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=28815"},"modified":"2017-12-13T07:53:39","modified_gmt":"2017-12-13T12:53:39","slug":"overpopulation-is-a-problem-but-capitalist-overdevelopment-is-a-bigger-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=28815","title":{"rendered":"Overpopulation is a Problem, but Capitalist Overdevelopment is a Bigger Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

Overpopulation is a Problem, but Capitalist Overdevelopment is a Bigger Problem<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Ed. note: This is a response by Richard Smith to Saral Sarkar\u2019s commentary<\/a> on Richard\u2019s original article\u00a0<\/em>Climate Crisis and Managed Deindustrialization: Debating Alternatives published on Resilience.org<\/em>\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/div>\n
\n
\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
\n
\n
\n
Saral misreads my statement. He says<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

\u201cRichard writes, \u201cCapitalism, not\u00a0population<\/i><\/b>\u00a0is the main driver of planetary ecological collapse \u2026 .\u201d. It sounds like an echo of statements from old-Marxist-socialism. It is not serious. Is Richard telling us that, while we are fighting a long-drawn-out battle against capitalism in order to overcome it, we can allow the population to continuously grow without risking any further destruction of the environment? Should we then think that a world population of ten billion by 2050 would not be any problem?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By emphasizing\u00a0population<\/i><\/b>\u00a0in bold italics he distorts my meaning. What I said was that \u201cCapitalism, not population is the main driver of planetary collapse. . . \u201d \u2014 that is, the MAIN driver, not the ONLY driver. Though I\u2019ve never written about this topic at length, I\u2019ve never claimed that population growth is no problem at all. Saral\u2019s right that some Marxists claim that the whole problem is capitalism, that there is no population problem, that the human population could grow more or less forever. They\u2019re mostly responding to Malthusians who contend that overpopulation is the whole problem, not capitalism. I understand where they\u2019re coming from. But both approaches seem simplistic to me. Of course overpopulation is a problem, a huge problem. Look around. I live in one of the most crowded pieces of real-estate in the world, in the middle of Manhattan. Sometimes the sidewalks are so full I have to walk along on the street to get by the crowds of people. By any rational measure there are just way too many people here.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Overpopulation is a Problem, but Capitalist Overdevelopment is a Bigger Problem Ed. note: This is a response by Richard Smith to Saral Sarkar\u2019s commentary on Richard\u2019s original article\u00a0Climate Crisis and Managed Deindustrialization: Debating Alternatives published on Resilience.org\u00a0here. Saral misreads my statement. He says \u201cRichard writes, \u201cCapitalism, not\u00a0population\u00a0is the main driver of planetary ecological collapse \u2026 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[17482,606,6665,17337,769],"class_list":["post-28815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-capitalist-overdevelopment","tag-overpopulation","tag-resilience-org","tag-richard-smith","tag-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28815"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28816,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28815\/revisions\/28816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}