Reply #8: They're the same thing. Food=People, People=Food

[GliderGuider]

If we each need 2500 calories a day to live, then every new mouth adds a constant burden to the planet's food supply, and all the ecological devastation that goes with it - greenhouse gases and nitrogen runoff and deforestation and habitat loss and falling water tables and pesticide pollution and the release of GMOs into the biosphere.

Forcing everybody to become vegetarian (really???) would allow us to feed 9.5 billion people instead of today's 7 billion, but with no reduction in agricultural devastation. The UN figures we're going to have that many people by 2050. Unfortunately, they're all supposed to be getting richer at the same time. And what do rich people eat more of? Right.

So yes, it comes down to this: how many human beings is enough?

IMO, we probably need there to be fewer than a billion of us if we want to achieve any kind of sustainability - even the fake UN-calculated kind. "True" sustainability probably requires that there be fewer than 250 million of us.

It's a nasty little conundrum, isn't it?