Talk:Overpopulation

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Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 18 August 2021 and 16 December 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Jmm00007.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 05:57, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Requested move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the proposal was moved. --BDD (talk) 18:50, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

Overpopulation (biology) → overpopulation – When I came across the page Overpopulation, it was a redirect to Human overpopulation. Since overpopulation is a more general concept than this, I attempted to G6 the page and replace it with this article (which was then titled Overpopulation in wild animals but which I have now expanded). The speedy was declined as "not a clear G6" by User:Secret, who recommended either a talk discussion or a dab page. I created a dab page, intending to leave things like that, but it was then tagged under WP:CONCEPTDAB by User:R'n'B. I don't think that there's another article that could reasonably be moved to the name Overpopulation. I don't feel strongly in either direction; I'm just starting this discussion to resolve the contradiction.  Sunrise    (talk)  18:14, 30 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Support. Overpopulation by humans, wild animals, whatever, are all subtopics of the general topic of overpopulation. Absent a robot boom, this is going to be restricted to overpopulation as an aspect of biology. bd2412  T 22:17, 30 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Support. The disambiguation page currently at Overpopulation should be replaced by this general article.  The disambiguation page's two other links, to Human overpopulation and to Overpopulation in domestic animals would naturally be linked from the general article. -- do  ncr  am  22:46, 30 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Support, for all reasons mentioned above.--Animalparty-- (talk) 02:22, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Support precisely per nom Red Slash 21:45, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Support Otherwise it's just a concept dab based on overpopulation themes. -- Ja Ga  talk 18:34, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Main link + summary
The purpose of a section that has a "main" link is to summarize the main article, in this case "Human overpopulation". It isn't a place to branch out, that just risks creating a WP:FORK. I've therefore boldly replaced the contents with the lead material from the main article. If it's a bit too short as a summary, a few more sentences can be added based on the materials and citations already in the main article, mentioning that you're copying if you copy. If the main article isn't adequate, then it should be improved, and reflected in the summary over here. Chiswick Chap (talk) 05:42, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

Overheared statements. (Includes climatic change).
Overpopulation:

Did you know that there is a black dress sect whose primary is the renascents of all animal extinctions resurrected into ' human ' beings?

There is also a black dress sect that decided that it would be best to wipe out the entire planet, there being too many rats, mice, cows and pigs, not to mention chickens, whom would be resurrected into ' human beings '.

Now you know where your overpopulation comes from, a sublimal want to have cows turn into 'humans' to maybe reverse climatic change, or would that be to stop pig roasting ...

An opinion to the above stated (a professor emiritus): "I don't think so, I think they want female cows to have some normal time with their kalfs, before they are both slaughtered for beaf WITH androgens, for the army steroid dependency folks." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 186.92.241.163 (talk) 18:05, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

"Population explosion" listed at Redirects for discussion
A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Population explosion. The discussion will occur at Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 August 2 until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Soumya-8974 talk contribs subpages 11:52, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

Reverting

 * Okay, my edit summary about Ehrlich was not polite. Maybe you are a fan, in that case I'm sorry. This guy is a very fringe author, in my opinion. For some reason his opinions have been splattered all over Wikipedia. I will try to be less annoyed with his theories, but this article is supposed to be about the (scientific) ecological theory of overpopulation, for example as it related to overgrazing, not to propagandise the 'deep ecology' movements' belief that most of humankind must die. There is already an incredibly long article on that subject. His beliefs are not the definition of overpopulation, they are one rather extreme definition.

You further state that the text is long-standing. No, it isn't. It was c&p'ed from the Human overpopulation article in 2017. And even if it were "long-standing", that doesn't mean it's correct. 1 + 1 does not equal 3, no matter how many times you repeat it. I will restore the non-contentious edits I made, such as misleading wikilinks and removing references which do not mention the subject matter at all. The website you added confuses the meaning of carrying capacity. By definition, we reach carrying capacity when the population growth begins to decrease because there are no longer sufficient resources. Ergo, the website is wrong, as the human population is still growing.

Remember, although someone may hold specific beliefs dear, Wikipedia is not meant to "right great wrongs". This is the problem here, the text would like to insinuate that there are too many people on Earth. This is contentious. Regards, Leo Breman (talk) 20:37, 11 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Whether I'm a "fan" of Ehrlich or not is hardly the point. You removed literally everything from the article except the one Ehrlich source from 1990. Normally, before one takes a hatchet to an article they discuss it on the talk page, kind of like several of us are doing over at the Mass killings under communist regimes article for example. Wikipedia is a collaborative project, so one editor with an axe to grind coming in and obliterating large amounts of sourced material is likely to get pushback, especially when they come off as arrogant and belligerent in their edit summaries, and their edits do not improve the article at all, but are made to simply make a point. It's as if the issue was not the subject of human overpopulation of which this is supposed to be a summary of, but that Ehrlich was wrong in his 1968 book. Could the text use some improvement? Of course, but what you added was far from that.


 * Your opinion of Ehrlich is that he is "fringe" and "stoopid", well, I would say that's probably overstating it at the very least given he continues to collaborate with other scientists on major peer reviewed studies published in such journals as Science and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, among others (the latter as recently as the summer of this year in fact, which was picked up by over 200 news outlets). Clearly he has something to offer, otherwise would be rejected by such prestigious peer-reviewed journals, no? And where has Ehrlich ever advocated for such a thing as wiping out most of the population? Nothing of the sort was even discussed in the text of the article. In my opinion, it seems to me this is basically fearmongering and an attempt to marginalize anyone who dares to discuss the issue of population size and growth and the impact it is having on the natural world as unhinged radicals. Sure radical deep ecologists exist, but they are hardly the only ones discussing the issue, and are a tiny minority at that. It's not much different in my mind than the endless reactionary propaganda directed against advocates for workers rights, universal healthcare and education, branding them all as "communists" who would to turn the capitalist Western world into murderous totalitarian regimes, or Venezuela, but I digress...


 * Sure the issue of overpopulation might be contentious, and Wikipedia has many articles on issues regarded as contentious, but if its mentioned in the relevant literature, why should it be omitted from articles on such topics? Why float the strawman of "righting great wrongs"? Respected institutions and myriad peer-reviewed papers have discussed the relationship between the size and growth of the population and the decline of nature. The IPBES and IPCC, among others but they are particularly notable, have both stated that population growth is a factor, along with increased consumption from mostly rich countries, in the acceleration of biodiversity loss and climate change respectively and they are not advocating for a mass culling of populations. Even the recently released Netflix documentary on the life of David Attenborough discusses the issue of overpopulation impacting biodiversity and climate, and even has a counter displayed periodically showing the rapid growth of the population and the decline of wild habitats during his lifetime, emphasizing the inverse relationship between the two. And what was Attenborough's solution to the issue of population? Providing universal healthcare to the global population and making sure women are educated to ensure populations stabilize sooner and at lower levels; no discussion of mass culling or population control. More significant to this discussion, the Communications Earth & Environment source you keep removing summed up the issue quite well I thought, which is one reason for the lengthy quote included in the citation. I'll quote it here for others to read, with bolding mine:


 * "'Human population has exceeded historical natural limits, with 1) the development of new energy sources, 2) technological developments in aid of productivity, education and health, and 3) an unchallenged position on top of food webs. Humans remain Earth’s only species to employ technology so as to change the sources, uses, and distribution of energy forms, including the release of geologically trapped energy (i.e. coal, petroleum, uranium). In total, humans have altered nature at the planetary scale, given modern levels of human-contributed aerosols and gases, the global distribution of radionuclides, organic pollutants and mercury, and ecosystem disturbances of terrestrial and marine environments. Approximately 17,000 monitored populations of 4005 vertebrate species have suffered a 60% decline between 1970 and 2014, and ~1 million species face extinction, many within decades. Humans' extensive 'technosphere', now reaches ~30 Tt, including waste products from non-renewable resources.'"


 * Certainly relevant to the topic I would say. I think that one should be restored at the very least, perhaps with the quote omitted. The emphasis on Ehrlich in the very beginning is also WP:UNDUE IMO, especially given that is the entire first paragraph.


 * Any other editors or contributors here have any opinions on these issues? Please feel free to join the discussion.--C.J. Griffin (talk) 03:06, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

All these walls of text as to why humans are bad is perhaps relevant to the human overpopulation article. As far as the concept of overpopulation in ecology, it is questionably relevant. As far as I understand the concept from a practical ecological point of view, is that the concept was used to, rightly or not, say that hunting certain populations of certain animals was a 'good' thing, i.e. culling red deer in Scotland or lions in Kruger National Park: wildlife management and fisheries. If I remember the classical experiments correctly, they had to do with sheep in Australia. You seem to believe that carrying capacity (K) can be arbitrarily chosen, no, we can only approximate it from the logistic function where populations plateau, or in the case of finite resources, such as yeast cells in a Petri-dish, start to decrease. So all this stuff about humans is very theoretical, mathematically incorrect, AND there is already a ginourmas article on the subject.

"The emphasis on Ehrlich in the very beginning is also WP:UNDUE IMO": this I agree with. Why add him at all then, instead of a less contentious source.

With "strawman", you mean to say that me insinuating that adding all this activist text is "righting great wrongs" is a fallacious argument for not letting you adding all this activist text? How is that? Isn't adding walls of activist text exactly what you are doing here! I have another logical fallacy for you regarding what you wrote about Ehrlich: 'appeal to authority'. Leo Breman (talk) 04:11, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Pardon? I was not advocating for "walls of activist text" in this summary article. The only source I mentioned restoring to the article was a scientific paper published in a peer-reviewed journal (minus the quote I cited for emphasis on its significance), not some blog of the Earth Liberation Front. I would have had no objections with modifying the summary so that it's not just the lede ripped from the main article. What I opposed was reducing, without any consensus, the entire summary down to one or two sentences on a book by Ehrlich written decades ago, making the article more about him than the topic, and done so in a way which was highly POV, which is why I restored the previous version. I never added that source from Ehrlich in the first place and would not object to its removal from this article given the text in question has been restored.--C.J. Griffin (talk) 05:02, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

Okay, we're getting somewhere.
 * Ehrlich's old book can go.
 * "modifying the summary so that it's not just the lede ripped from the main article"; yes, yes, I'm good with that. We'll likely still argue about wording, but that's okay. For example, why mention anthropocene at all? That is a different subject matter, mentioning it in an article about biology comes across as soapboxing. Assumedly, it is the human impact on the environment that is causing the anthropocene era, that is not necessarily due to (a subjective) 'overpopulation'. The text as it stood, made that synthesis. To wit, the USA harbours a small percentage of humanity, but is primarily responsible for most of the anthropogenic greenhouse gasses.
 * The remaining second paragraph as it stands now is not contentious to me, this is a starting point.

I want to vigorously chop up the population ecology & population dynamics articles next (in a day or two), and in those cases I did leave something in talk (apparently I find those more important subjects worthy of discussion, haha), so if you have opinions, have at it. Leo Breman (talk) 05:53, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
 * I agree with points 1 and 3. Regarding point 2, I don't see it as synthesis if reliable sources are discussing human population growth/overpopulation (along with consumption, energy usage, pollution, etc) in relation to the Anthropocene, as the source I included above does. I am in agreement that the US is responsible for a significant amount of GHG emissions, although China has us beat as I understand it.
 * Off-topic on my part, but that is yearly emissions: China only passed the US recently, the USA is responsible for some 80% of all the GHG additions to the atmosphere today (if I remember correctly). Furthermore, China has 30% of the world population (historically this is even higher), per capita, each American is still over 4 times as polluting in this regard. It is not the population of China which is the problem, it is the massive polluting nature of individual Americans. With the recent government of that country advocating screwing the rest of the world for short-term economic gain by ignoring the science, this is a good reason to the rest of us to impose green taxes to force reform and provide a climate fund for countries which will be affected without significantly contributing to the problem, except that the US is too powerful to get anywhere with that right now. See, there I go with personal opinions and politics -this article should strictly stick to the science, the human overpopulation article is for that type of stuff.
 * I actually agree with much of this. Profligate consumption by the US population is a huge problem, one noted by Ehrlich himself recently "If everyone consumed resources at the US level, you will need another four or five Earths". But population size and growth is still a factor, even more so given that global capitalism is spreading Western consumer cultures around the world, including unsustainable meat-intensive diets which are supplanting more traditional plant based diets. Over 80% of deforestation of the Amazon rainforest has been attributed to cattle ranching. This reminds me of something Attenborough pointed out in the aformentioned documentary, that "the planet cannot support billions of meat eaters." Certainly appears to be true.--C.J. Griffin (talk) 06:31, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
 * I haven't contributed to those particular articles and they aren't on my watchlist, so I probably wouldn't have even known you were chopping them up. That you notified other editors on talk is good starting point, so you probably won't get pushback like you did here.--C.J. Griffin (talk) 13:15, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't mind pushback, I can argue my points (without calling you 'belligerent', 'fearmongering' (eh?), etc.), otherwise I wouldn't make the changes. Here's the thing: this article is about overpopulation in an ecological sense (as it says at the top of the article, as well as at the bottom), the 'anthropocene' concept is off-topic, adding it comes across to me as 'soapboxing' to 'right a great wrong'. That is my argument. Maybe the pure science of ecology is not your cup of tea, but you must recognise that some of us have spent some time studying this stuff, and like to think they know a bit about the subject.
 * Please suggest some prose you would like to add, then we find some way to massage it into something we can agree on. In the meantime, I will make the changes we have agreed on. Leo Breman (talk) 15:23, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
 * I was okay with your rewrite of the material, maybe with a tweak here or there (like replacing "people" with "academics") that would work. The only real issue I had was you removed the strongest source.--C.J. Griffin (talk) 02:09, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I've been trying to finish some plant articles, thought I'd leave this for a bit. Hmmm. I was thinking the most simple, neutral, verifiable sentence I can come up with here is: "Some people claim there is an overpopulation of humans on Earth". We mentioned Earth Liberation Front/misanthropic groups. What sort of bothers me, is that when in ecology/wildlife management we talk about overpopulation, we are talking about calculating how many we should kill. That inherently suggests people should be slaughtered. Who? Yemenis? Migrants?
 * The "strongest source" you mention is the one you recently added I presume? Extraordinary human energy consumption and resultant geological impacts beginning around 1950 CE initiated the proposed Anthropocene Epoch: No where in this article do the authors mention the word 'overpopulation', instead the authors are talking about (total) 'energy expenditure'. If the subject matter of this article is not even mentioned in your source, it is not a good source, IMO.
 * Another point I would like to make is that UN projections of human population growth predict a plateau around 2100 - 2150, totally decoupled from projected resource depletion, but having more to do with trends in family planning. Some countries are facing population declines: Japan, Russia, Bulgaria. In the case of the first two, the governments have initiated programs to encourage population growth. So I do not think we can really talk about global human overpopulation -definitely not from a mathematical/ecological sense; as usual, it is unfair resource allocation and educational deficits which cause so much suffering in our world.
 * And to go back to my original point, all this is beyond the scope of this particular article, which should just be about the neutral scientific concept -as it says at the top, bottom and "main article" template of this article to stop people from adding what you added!
 * I did not look at the history before I started to edit this article, so it is not what you recently added, that set me off by the way! Regards, Leo Breman (talk) 02:46, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
 * But we are not talking about wildlife management. Can you name one of these misanthropic groups you speak of that advocate genocide? I can't think of one, at least one that is a serious organization. No groups that are serious about slowing population growth, like Population Matters for example, advocate culling the population. What most do is advocate lowering the fertility rate by providing universal healthcare and education, and unfettered access to family planning, including abortion when needed. Sharply increasing the mortality rate would probably be counterproductive to reaching ZPG/modest population decline anyway if history is any guide, as mass mortality events are often, but not always (i.e., the indigenous populations of the Americas), followed by population booms (e.g., the Black Death, WWII, etc). I say this is a strawman because almost no one speaking on the issue of population growth/overpopulation seriously supports such draconian and genocidal measures, including the ELF and most deep ecologists, with the only exception I can think of being the Finn Pentti Linkola, and he seemed to direct much of his wrath against the wealthy capitalist West than those in the developing world.
 * Regarding the source above, the issue of population/population growth is discussed throughout, as it is correlated with increased economic activity and energy consumption in the middle of the 20th century (i.e., The Great Acceleration) which the paper says marks the emergence of the Anthropocene epoch (as opposed to earlier periods which have been discussed, such as the emergence of capitalism and European imperialism in the 16th century). Just because the term "overpopulation" is not used does not mean the article is irrelevant to the topic. Like the passage I quoted above says, "Human population has exceeded historical natural limits, with 1) the development of new energy sources, 2) technological developments in aid of productivity, education and health, and 3) an unchallenged position on top of food webs," and that these developments have "altered nature at the planetary scale" with "1 million species face(ing) extinction, many within decades". This clearly pertains to the topic of human overpopulation, and other topics such as overconsumption (the two are often mentioned in tandem in many peer reviewed articles on various ecological crises, at least those I have read through). I figure the topic has become so taboo in recent decades that some academics refrain from using the term. In fact, I can't think of one paper I've read on the various ecological crises, especially biodiversity loss, that did not include population growth and increased consumption as the main underlying drivers. Some use the term "overpopulation", but carefully.
 * I don't see it as beyond the scope of this article, as this is supposed to "SUMMARIZE the main article on Human overpopulation," as it says at the bottom. The copy and pasted lede of that article was apparently supposed to serve as that summary (it was added by someone else).--C.J. Griffin (talk) 06:31, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
 * We are talking about wildlife management! We are talking about ecology, and in ecology, overpopulation is per definition a measure of how many seals or deer or what ever should be culled. The founder of the "Deep Ecology" movement (which has nothing to do with actual ecology), claimed the "natural" population of human should be 200,000 people; assumedly, he would like the other 7 billion people to die. Then there is eco-fascism and various online groups =all white people in the west generally. But we are veering into politics, again! That academics refrain from using the term "overpopulation", should tell you enough about its unsuitability in discussing humans. What you are doing, concluding that your source is actually talking about overpopulation despite never mentioning it, is classic OR! None of what you are quoting is pertinent: it really looks to me like you are soapboxing, your source appears not relevant. As you say, the point is to summarise the main article. I still do not see a sentence proposal from you. How's "Some people claim there is an overpopulation of humans on Earth". It should be easy enough to find a source for that! Leo Breman (talk) 12:35, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
 * I already gave my proposal above with the source, which was actually something you rewrote with slight modifications suggested by myself. The source discusses the negative impacts of population growth and that human populations have exceeded natural limitations only because of developments which are largely unnatural and detrimental to biodiversity. It seems to be that this is being reduced to a debate on semantics. You claim that the source in question is OR or undue for an article on overpopulation as it does not reference that specific term. This seems silly to me. Looking over the source again, references to population size and growth are ubiquitous throughout it, and it notes, for example, how "fully 96% of today’s mammalian biomass is represented by humans and their domesticated animals," meaning all other mammalian biomass combined constitutes only 4%. Similarly for birds, 70% are now poultry raised for human consumption or egg production, with only 30% being wild. Jaw dropping statistics, IMO, which can also be found in the 2019 IPBES report on the biodiversity crisis. (Given this, it seems to me the only need for "wildlife management" is to remove wild animals who stand in the way of an expanding human civilization with a fixation on capitalism, growth and consumption, but I digress yet again). In my view, this is a source which is certainly relevant not only to the issue of overpopulation but also a variety of issues and topics including biodiversity loss and overconsumption, and hardly OR. However, as I grow tired of going around and around with this, what you propose I can live with for now until I have the time to dig into more sources, although I think the text should be more specific than just "some people..." And you are wrong about the founder of the Deep Ecology movement wanting to kill off billions of people by the way, as Arne Næss was deeply opposed to violence and "was horrified by suggestions of enforced sterilisation and that droughts and famines were good." So basically you cannot provide one example of an individual or group which specifically addresses the issue of overpopulation or population stabilization that advocates for this level of genocidal violence (white nationalists omitted as they don't care about the issue of population really, and would happily allow white folks to breed out of control once those they didn't like were removed). Now that Linkola has recently passed away, they are seemingly nonexistant. Every single paper I have seen which discusses the issue of population growth and how to deal with it goes in the opposite direction, including those in which Ehrlich is a contributor, and propose reducing fertility rates via education and family planning as solutions (another good example is the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice, which has over 15,000 co-signers and supporters in the scientific community). It is a strawman, plain and simple. In fact, you have provided very little sourcing for anything to back up this assertion, just your own postulations based on your background, whatever that is.--C.J. Griffin (talk) 15:21, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
 * My background is immaterial. As yours is. You want more examples: John Muir's views on race are also well known, and how about this group Deep Green Resistance? Sure, Næss said that once, he also said there should only be 200,000 people, an inherent contradiction. Also, your claim that eco-fascists which believe in overpopulation somehow don't count because you don't like them is the same argument as "Christians don't kill people, because those aren't Christians". For a guy who complains about wanting to discuss things and being constructive, you are quite bad at it, pontificating with off-topic walls of text, and blind to things outside of your POV. The claim that "96% of today’s mammalian biomass is represented by humans and their domesticated animals" does not mean that there is an overpopulation of humans and that they must be culled. I have significantly expanded this article with the actual subject matter. Please familiarise yourself with the topic at hand! Leo Breman (talk) 20:13, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

lead paragraph
I'm thinking of making the lead paragraph flow better, and take out a few errors. The first of which I believe is the use of "active intervention". It implies human interaction to mitigate the problem. This is information better suited in another section in the paper, and should not be part of the definition. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Feeble Jam (talk • contribs) 01:17, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Only animal species, or plants too?
Please clarify whether overpopulation only happens with animal species, or with plant species also? Nurg (talk) 05:00, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

The word population is from the Latin word for people. "Human" is redundant.The entry about people should be moved to the currently disambiguation page for overpopulation. Mackerm (talk) 21:31, 26 December 2022 (UTC)