Here’s Why Overpopulation is Just a Myth

Stopping overpopulation isn’t how we save our planet.

Zulie Rane
5 min readMay 24, 2019

The favorite pseudo-intellectual topic lately seems to be how to stop overpopulation in order to save our planet. What’s consistently passing people by is the fact that overpopulation is a myth.

Whether people are talking about famines, natural disasters, the choice to become a parent, birth control, abortion, or our own soon-to-happen extinction event, folks will wade in to discuss it in terms of human overpopulation. How can we stop poor people from making so many babies? Is it morally right to permit people under a certain IQ to reproduce?

If you haven’t gotten the gist of why certain people are arguing, let me put it in simple terms: a surprisingly huge number of people believe that overpopulation is imminent, caused by human pressures and that only if we start throttling the reproduction of undesirables can we continue to live safely and happily on earth.

Here’s why that’s all wrong.

Our production consistently overmatches our consumption.

“We’re running out of food!” cry the hoarders. “Soon we will be eating more than we’re producing!”

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Zulie Rane

Writer and cat mom. Opinions are my own. This is my just-for-fun profile! My official Medium profile is @Zulie_at_Medium.