“Overshoot occurs when people use energy and biological resources faster than ecosystems can regenerate and pollute beyond nature’s assimilative capacity. It’s a meta-problem, the cause of most so-called ‘environmental problems’ including climate change. Overshoot means that we modern humans are consuming, polluting and destroying the biophysical basis of our own existence. …
“Climate change/global warming is merely one important symptom of overshoot. (Climate change is a massive waste management problem – carbon dioxide is the largest entropic waste by weight of industrial economies.) …
“We cannot solve climate change or other major symptoms of overshoot – biodiversity loss, tropical deforestation, overfishing, land and soil degradation, pollution of everything, the possibility of pandemics, etc., in isolation from the others. However, if we reverse overshoot, all its symptoms would be alleviated simultaneously.”
(Bill Rees: A Note on Climate Change and Cultural Denial; populationmatters.org)
I agree with pretty much everything he has to say. Except that I can’t imagine what “a global population strategy to enable a smooth, socially just descent to the one to two billion people that could live comfortably indefinitely without destroying the ecosphere” would be. How could that happen in an ethical, socially just way? If I find out more, I’ll let you know.