I have been in a low grade panic about about resource depletion every day of my teen and adult life. Not even kidding.
That's pretty common, and very sad - because it's all based on a single fact about humanity that was observably true, and deeply alarming, in the 1960s; But which ceased to be true due to an invention, and an idea, that both became reality at just that moment in time.
Since the dawn of the industrial age, human population had doubled and redoubled about every thirty years, despite massive die-offs due to disease, famine, and war.
But then in the 1960s,
the contraceptive pill gave women the technological means to limit the number of children they bore; And the education and emancipation of women gave them the knowledge and desire to do so.
This took a few decades to have a significant effect, but by the mid 1990s it had become very clear that the "population bomb" had been defused. Today, world birth rates are below replacement level. The population isn't yet declining, but that's because the people who were born twenty or thirty years ago, when birth rates were still above replacement level, are more numerous than their parents, and so their children being born today are arriving at a faster rate than the (much smaller) grand and great-grand parental generation are dying off.
By about 2050, human population is projected to level off, somewhere between ten and twelve billion. That's a lot - it's four times the population a century earlier in 1950. But it's certainly not unmanageable - we already produce enough food for that many people today. Indeed, famine (common and widespread in the 1950s) has essentially ceased to exist. Back in the mid 1980s, Ethiopia suffered a terrible famine, and many commentators in the developed world said that this was inevitable, due to their excessive numbers. Today, Ethiopia has three times the population; And a few years ago, a similar drought. But no famine.
The reason? No war. Ethiopia can easily feed herself (or produce exports that are sufficient to purchase imported food, which is essentially the same thing). But not while it's a war zone.
Population was a problem. Past tense. Those who are still discussing it as something we need to solve are simply unaware that the solution was found sixty years ago, and has now been applied. There's nothing else left to do, but wait another few decades for the resolution to finish taking effect.
Worrying about population is unnecessary today; It's like worrying about the fact that you're still descending, after your parachute has deployed - yes, you're still falling, but it's no longer at a dangerous pace, and all you need do is relax and wait for the rest of the descent to be over. Screaming for someone to do something to save you is just needless panic.
