With this in mind then, you can tie in traditional religion with over-population, because the two things religions tend to have in common are objections to birth control and encouraging patriarchy. I could finger Islam and the Catholic religion as two extreme examples of this, but the other more limp wristed religions (Anglican Christianity for example) are culpable to some degree (can you believe the Anglican Church is still split over whether to allow women to be priests at all!?).

With respect to Malthus, it’s true that his predictions failed in his time. But of course he doesn’t factor in the destruction of natural habitats, fisheries and so forth in his calculations. So the question really should be, “what population level is sustainable and when will we reach it?”. There must be a limit, surely?

I’m not a “believer” in the Environmental Project as it stands in its more extreme forms, but I do think over-population and the strain that is putting on the natural world is one of the problems facing humanity. Of course, apart from the heat island effect, I don’t think it has very much to do with climate change either.