I mean, it sounds ridiculous when you put it that way, but it also sounded ridiculous in the 1930s. We're still within living memory of a time when such ideas of how to improve the world and give people more living space were discussed in polite society before polite society started politely shooting and gassing Jews and Gypsies. Reducing the human population so us and our kids have more land and resources sounds great but how? To the Germans, they didn't care how. They didn't really want to hear the details. Americans are exactly the same. Oh, look, there's all this open land with no one living here! Just some buffalos and savages right?
Oh no, that was terrible? You think that was all criminal? How could those people have been so cruel - wiping out whole races to take their land! You would never do that! So now, in the name of ECOLOGY you just want EXCESS PEOPLE TO MAGICALLY DISAPPEAR, no specific plan, just would be nice if they vanished, because there's too many for your taste or what in your opinion the world should be like? And this is supposed to be a liberal or humanistic notion? No, it's exactly the notion of the white American settler or the quiet German. "Too many of this or that - we need more space and more nature - of course I wouldn't kill those dirty people, but it would be great if they disappeared. Better for the planet and the environment, you see."
> So now, in the name of ECOLOGY you just want EXCESS PEOPLE TO MAGICALLY DISAPPEAR
Is this a statement about me specifically? I don't want excess people to disappear, and I didn't claim that. I think I made it clear (but I'll make it clearer now) that I wouldn't condone any plan that reduced the population via the premature ending of life, up to and including a magical Thanos finger snap. My point was that this does not conflict with the notion that, had fewer people been born with all else being equal, the resulting world would have certain positive ecological qualities in comparison to the world we have now.
Would it be better for me to deny this? It seems self-evidently true, and I feel it every time I look at a radar map and think about how much green space my home region has lost over the past few hundred years. I'd keep it to myself if I really thought it was a slippery slope to a world of eugenics, but I don't think that's necessarily the case. I don't want to make anyone disappear -- but I do think a world of declining birth rates would probably be a net positive.
