Ricky Lanusse wrote, "Shrinking Humanity Won’t Save a Burning Planet: How population panic became the ultimate cop-out, " in in The Medium, August 2025. I will spare readers here the text of the article, which you can probably imagine. I responded as below.
Response from Mark O'Connor
It’s hard to check your logic, Ricky, since you assert rather than argue. Phrases like “population panic” and “ultimate cop-out” are not rational argument; they are rhetoric. Some other
samples:
“Fewer People Just Means More Suffering Per Capita” – really Ricky? Try telling that to a farmer, or a single mother, who’s trying to support six children on a piece of land, or a salary, that is barely adequate for 2 or 3.
“Women were told their poverty stemmed from childbearing, not from the economic structures designed to keep them poor.” Wasn’t keeping women ignorant of birth-control, or unable to get it, an essential part of social, religious, and economic structures that may have been “designed to keep them poor”—and perhaps to provide the economic system with cheap labour and ever more consumers?
“How many people the planet can support depends entirely on how those people live — not how many of them exist.” Really? Mightn’t each of these two factors be equally important?
“We are not in overshoot because of numbers. We’re here because of this predatory [economic] system.” Fine, Ricky. Let’s see you stop shopping at Walmart and the supermarket--and then persuade a billion or two other consumers to do the same, and then we might be able to test your claim. Meanwhile, let’s stick with the common-sense assumption that extra people—unless you’ve got some plan to keep them all in poverty and misery—will mean more consumers and more pressure upon the planet’s other species.
Those who want to speed up or to slow down population-growth don’t really differ, because “Each blames population for our problems.” No, Mr Lanusse, they do flatly disagree. They only agree in rejecting your claim that population-growth makes no difference.
In fact, your account of the supposed history of population-debates is largely factitious—not so much the way the debates actually went as the way you might like to think they did. (And some of this supposed history seems borrowed from Vatican prop.)
If you want to offer us a just estimate of the planetary and societal costs of the staggering increase in human numbers in the past 300 years, you should produce factual evidence. Don’t assume that the views you personally find congenial must be true, and that therefore those who suggest otherwise must have some evil agenda, or are neo-colonialists or Nazi stooges or whatever -- which can easily lead to the reductio ad Hitlerum argument.
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