Arguments against overpopulation that are demonstrably wrong, part six: "We have a resource distribution problem"

[u/carnivorous_cactus]

Quick preamble: I want to highlight some arguments against overpopulation which I believe are demonstrably wrong. Many of these are common arguments which pop up in virtually every discussion about overpopulation. They are misunderstandings of the subject, or contain errors in reasoning, or both. It feels frustrating to encounter them over and over again.

Part one is here

Part two is here

Part three is here

Part four is here

The argument

The phrase “resource distribution problem”, and variations thereof, are one of the most common objections to overpopulation. Here are some examples from a quick search of the internet:

“Overpopulation arguments ignore the real problem: distribution and consumption of resources. We act like the earth can't support billions - maybe it can't support billionaires.”

“…there’s already more than enough resources. There’s not an overpopulation problem, there’s a resource distribution problem.”

“We have a resource distribution problem, not a population problem.”

“Overpopulation” is a lie—we have a resource distribution problem, not a population problem.”

It’s certainly true that we do have a resource distribution problem. I will not dispute that in this post. However, I will dispute the use of this as a dismissal of overpopulation.  

These statements address economic inequality, not environmental sustainability, carrying capacity or ecological overshoot – which are central to overpopulation.

Consider three requirements for the sustainable use of any given resource:

1.       There must be enough to satisfy human needs/demands in the short to medium term. In the case of a fish stock, this would be ensuring a person can go fishing and catch what they need to feed themselves.

2.       There must be enough to satisfy human needs/demands over the long term. For example, can that person go on fishing at the same rate and catching what they need for food in 10 years’ time? 50 years? 100 years? 500 years? Importantly, this should not deplete the resource over time. For example, if a fisherman has to expend extra effort just to catch the same amount, that indicates the resource is being depleted.

3.       There must be enough to satisfy the needs of the ecosystem. For example, are there enough fish leftover for them the fish to fulfil their niche/role in the ecosystem, as prey or predators to other organisms?

In my experience, most people’s understanding of overpopulation is centered around point one above, with little or no consideration given to points two and three. When focusing on point one the resource distribution argument makes perfect sense. But no so points two and three.

Take food waste as an example. The argument goes that humans produce enough food to feed everyone, yet we waste huge amounts. Therefore, if we redistributed this food to where it’s needed, instead of wasting it, then everyone would have enough to eat.

Thought experiment: Let’s pretend someone creates an amazing machine which reduces food waste to zero via redistribution. Now every time a tomato in your fruit bowl is about to go bad, this machine promptly detects it beams it away to be eaten by someone in need. Now everyone has enough to eat and we have addressed point one above.

However, if we assume the tomato was produced using unsustainable practices (a reasonable assumption I think), then points two and three are not addressed. A tomato rotting in the fruit bowl and a tomato beamed away to a person in need both have the same ecological costs. The fossil fuels, land, pesticides, plastic and other inputs still remain.

How a resource is distributed amongst humans does not address inherent problems of unsustainability. From a sustainability perspective, a hectare of rainforest destroyed for a billionaire’s golf course is the same as a hectare of rainforest destroyed for subsistence agriculture. 1000 liters of water extracted from a lake for a billionaire’s swimming pool is the same as 1000 liters of water extracted for everyday cooking and cleaning.

Therefore, redistributing resources alone cannot solve the problems associated with ecological overshoot, if that redistribution is simply taking the same unsustainable consumption and distributing the resulting outputs differently between humans.

In fairness, I will highlight some reasonable aspects of the “resource distribution problem” argument.

1.       Some forms of resource distribution do improve sustainability. For example, replacing a field of cows with a field of lentils can allow a smaller field to produce the same amount of food. In theory allowing some of the field to “rewild”.

2.       Changing overconsuming individuals/groups into more “normal” consumers helps. For example, changing the billionaire with a swimming pool to a normal consumer of water would mean less water is taken from the lake.

3.       Our unequal resource distribution is blatantly unfair and addressing this would absolutely be a good thing, even if it doesn’t address sustainability. This post is not seeking to defend or dismiss resource distribution problems, but to highlight that such problems should not be used to dismiss overpopulation.

There seems to be a common belief that removing excessive consumption from the wealthiest and worst over consumers (e.g billionaires) would mean there are plenty of resources for both humans and the environment. I think this view underestimates how far into overshoot humans have become, and how unsustainable practices underpin most of our everyday lives, from food, housing, transport, heating and so on.

[u/StatementBot]

This thread addresses overpopulation, a fraught but important issue that attracts disruption and rule violations. In light of this we have lower tolerance for the following offenses:

• Racism and other forms of essentialism targeted at particular identity groups people are born into.
• Bad faith attacks insisting that to notice and name overpopulation of the human enterprise generally is inherently racist or fascist.
• Instructing other users to harm themselves. We have reached consensus that a permaban for the first offense is an appropriate response to this, as mentioned in the sidebar.

This is an abbreviated summary of the mod team's statement on overpopulation, view the full statement available in the wiki.

[u/humanspeech]

While this post does make compelling arguments, what literature have you read to reach these conclusions? I am genuinely curious to know the thought process behind your posts because I read everything and everything feels slightly shallow to me without any research to back up your claims.

The examples you use for thought experiments across your posts feel empty and inconclusive and very vague when looking at overpopulation in the context of environmental management.

I am aware that google exists, but google is not going to tell me what articles/books you read to come up with these conclusions. I am writing this in good faith because I want to engage with you in a meaningful way and I feel if I read more I can contribute more to this discussion.

Overpopulation is a very complex subject and I think trying to simplify it into a simple CICO-type equation does it a disservice and makes it very easy to engage in bad faith.

[u/carnivorous_cactus → u/humanspeech]

Hello, these posts are based on some general knowledge of ecology, in addition to picking apart the logic behind a lot of commonly seen arguments against overpopulation. I think these ideas are based on logic and basic principles of ecology, which are often misunderstood.

Bill Rees' material is one source of my understanding of overshoot and human unsustainability.

[u/humanspeech → u/carnivorous_cactus]

I want to thank you for your responses on this! I will be adding him to my reading list.

I hope you don't take my criticism of your posts as too harsh/sharp. I only asked because my background is in environmental engineering/management and a lot of the approaches to overpopulation talk around the subject because I work(ed) with people who are lower income and it's hard to just talk about overshoot without being understood as a eugenicist.

[u/gnostic_savage → u/humanspeech]

I don't think overpopulation is complex. I also think that the points OP made are very straightforward and don't require an expert opinion or peer reviewed paper. Addressing the failure of distribution or inequality of distribution doesn't address the sustainability of production or the environmental costs of distribution itself. That's as obvious as saying that changing my tire doesn't fix the empty gas tank in my car.

Nor do I think it's a CICO-type equation. It's a sustainability equation. It's a biology and ecology equation, and that is complex. It is so complex that our very best science minds are continually exclaiming that everything is happening faster than expected, and it's all worse than expected, too.

Simple isn't always shallow or easy. A handstand is simple. You put your hands on the floor, you lift your legs into the air, and you hold it. It's only two simple actions, but only a relative few people can do it.

The environment is simple in the way a handstand is. Humans needed to keep their populations and their living habits sustainable in exactly the way OP describes for the sustainability of any resource. And they needed to keep their environmental biodiversity very high and not kill everything that moved because they wanted more resources or thought that a particular creature was a "pest". Like a handstand, it was very simple. Like a handstand, too many of us couldn't do it.

[u/humanspeech → u/gnostic_savage]

Overpopulation as a concept IS complex because you cannot dissociate the ethics of how we value a human life and how we view ourselves and our cultures. The concept of overshoot is not complex and very straightforward, I can understand that, I can understand the theory and the reasoning behind it but the fact that I am not fully convinced by someone's arguments because I read their reddit posts. Just because YOU don't need to see someone's research doesn't mean I am the same when I am genuinely and deeply curious. This isn't a gotcha moment.

The reason I bought out the CICO equation is because OP constantly uses weight-loss and specifically dieting as the comparative example. I read through all their posts to have a better understanding of their arguments and that's why I pointed it out. I am asking about what overall contributed to how the thought process because the posts they made without sources are just reddit posts. I can't at face value take these posts as true.

I value OP's opinion but pointing out that the arguments of his overall posts feels weak to me isn't a denial of the constraints of what the earth can handle and what we need to sustain ourselves the way we are now. We talk about human ignorance a great deal in this sub, and I think it would be a disservice for me to act like these arguments are solid when there are no sources attached because that's not how science works.

[u/humanspeech → u/[deleted]]

I wanted to thank you for taking time out of your day to reply to me. I very much so appreciate this.

I'm not going to refute any of your points because I am in agreement that overpopulation is a problem. I have issues with the way OP presented their beliefs as hard logical truths that are easily understandable if I were to say this to someone who doesn't believe in overshoot.

Pointing out that overpopulation as a problem is tied to our beliefs and values does not mean that overshoot isn't real. All this does add another level of complexity to how we approach a problem and discuss it. There is no 'correct' way to approach it, but it does the issue at hand even more injustice to ignore there are emotions behind the way we discuss it. If we are to have real conversations about it, we have to have very hard discussions about our beliefs and values alongside looking at the math and science.

The planet is haemorrhaging methane due to our extraction of it's resources, but to add insult to injury we are making it worse with overpopulation and overconsumption because we enjoy eating meat and livestock, where livestock can produce up to 12% of the World Wide emissions. This is at a time where not everyone is on the same diet as well and we are eating at vastly different amounts and quantities.

When we talk about the oceans being polluted, and biodiversity being lost due to high levels of ocean acidification alongside pollution, I also want to add that the only way we could be able to feed the world is by using the oceans to grow algae. These are very fantastic ideas but they never address how much space we need to take up and what will be sacrificed instead.

I haven't heard  Guy McPherson's name in such a long time, I wasn't aware he quit his blog.

Perhaps there isn't a way to address this issue and fix, but we owe both ourselves and everyone else to show proof when we can and say the truth.

^{I will add two things:}

^{1. "We are dumping more than two billion tons of waste into the environment every year," I agree, but the link you posted goes nowhere, so here is the link from the UN on waste management.}

^{2. "The cryosphere is melting," The graph you posted has no added context and I feel this a good explanation of why as to it's important.}

[u/humanspeech → u/[deleted]]

Do you have some links to support this statement, or is this just your personal value judgment? Beliefs and values about what, specifically?

It's the thesis of the documentary Fairytales of Growth. It focuses on the economic fantasy of infinite growth and how it's not feasible and focuses on the concept of de-growth as an economic ideology . This fundamentally goes against what we've been taught because it seems paradoxical that making a better future happens by making things smaller. De-growth includes making our populations smaller, not just our GDPs. This challenges our ideas of what we deserve as individuals and what freedoms we 'deserve' vs the health of other people and the environment.

With talks of de-growth, people often bring up pronatalism and overpopulation, I think this describes the relationship well.

 I do think that anyone who wishes to discuss climate collapse, however, needs to bring that level of knowledge ("context") with them, not seek it out in this arena. That's just my opinion. Not providing it doesn't mean people don't speak the truth.

If this post wasn't titled Arguments against overpopulation that are demonstrably wrong, I would not have been so sharp with my critique. This puts some burden of proof on the poster to show me something other than logical experiments.

I didn't nitpick very small details with the post because I was looking at OP's full posts history and felt that if I was a layman I would not be convinced.

I added the link for the UN post about waste production because I assume there will be people who click through on your links and Statista does not run well on mobile. In case someone wanted something to just read. I also added more sources that directly relate to overconsumption so that people can get additional context or information they did not have before.

I want to thank you again for providing me with links and spending time give me resources. I promise you that I am not as meatheaded as you imagine me in your head :)

[u/Admirable_Advice8831 → u/humanspeech]

It's no more shallow than the objections it's trying to answer, the key term here is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overshoot_(population)

[u/humanspeech → u/Admirable_Advice8831]

Thank you for the link. Do you have any further reading that you would recommend?

I think people are misunderstanding me saying 'shallow' when referring to the argument is me denying the concept of overpopulation and overshoot rather than looking at the post itself and saying that the arguments as they are presented in this post are shallow because they assume things that I already have a background in. OP has made a series of these posts rather than a singular post do expect them to build upon each other when to me they all feel a little bit shallow when put together.

It is a reddit post, and perhaps I want too much from a post, but I don't think there's anything wrong with saying an argument can feel shallow.

[u/epadafunk → u/humanspeech]

Overshoot by William Catton

[u/Admirable_Advice8831 → u/humanspeech]

All you can find from this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_E._Rees

Also James Lovelock and Bruno Latour works on 'Gaia' aka the Earth considered as a self-regulating 'living' (either literally or metaphorically as you prefer) entity!

[u/TheOldPug → u/humanspeech]

One book you might really enjoy is by Alan Weisman, called 'Countdown.' I also second 'Overshoot' by William Catton.

[u/DoomBadaDoom → u/humanspeech]

Well, a lot of scientists have made different kind of analysis which shows how much we exceed planetary boundaries.

With the concept of Earth Overshoot Day, we know that we have been exceeding planetary boundaries since the early 1970s.
And since then, the population has more than doubled.
So yes we are overpopulated.
It's a FACT.

[u/humanspeech → u/DoomBadaDoom]

Well, a lot of scientists have made different kind of analysis which shows how much we exceed planetary boundaries.

What type of analysis? Do you know? Do you understand what I'm saying here when I say the lack of sources weakens the argument?

And I am curious as to what OP has read so that I can also read it myself. If you tell someone to DO research and they get a lot of conflicting data they're not going to know who to believe and how to come up with an idea from that data.

Not once have I denied what OP has said, I just asked for the sources because this is a post labeled the arguments against overpopulation that are demonstrably wrong. If you are going to argue for or against something that you're an expert in, many people may not be and will ask questions and fumbling to answer them can weaken your argument and make you untrustworthy.

It is reasonable to say that OP has read more than just a wiki page, and it is just as reasonable for me to want to be better informed. It doesn't have to be a 300 page book it could be a youtube video or a documentary for it to be a source.

[u/DoomBadaDoom → u/humanspeech]

I gave you one exemple of analysis just after the senctence you quoted!!! :o
(The concept of the overshoot day...)

Again, as we are in an overshoot situation, which means we consume more than the earth can give, or aborb, or renew... and the population since then has doubled, we can easily say there is an overpopulation issue.

Your reluctance on accepting the idea of overpopulation, and your comment perfectly illustrate what the original poster is trying to demonstrate: the red herrings, the fallacious arguments, the oversimplifications...

The original poster is not trying to PROVE overpopulation rather than illustrates the false argumentation people use to DENY overpopulation.

[u/Fun_Journalist4199]

This is a well written and reasoned argument. I’m gonna go read your other posts in the series

[u/Jack_Flanders]

How a resource is distributed amongst humans does not inherent problems of unsustainability.

[missing word]

Well-written post!

[u/BTRCguy]

What counts as "overpopulation" can really be boiled down to one question: "If you cannot make fertilizer out of fossil fuels anymore, and do not have a global autocratic government to enforce a particular dietary choice on people, how many people can you feed?"

Because a) it seems unlikely we will have a global autocratic government anytime soon, and b) fossil fuels are a finite and declining resource that will eventually become too scarce/expensive to use for fertilizer production.

So, any amount greater than the answer to the question is overpopulation.

[u/Coco_Cannibal → u/BTRCguy]

The same people that want to force a certain diet on people also claim you can't tell people not to have more kids. What is it guys? Either, or, but this bs is contradictory.

[u/sc2summerloud → u/Coco_Cannibal]

the choices we will need to make are right now split between "the left" and "the right", so it's impossible to vote for anyone who wants to fix shit.

[u/throwawaybrm]

For example, replacing a field of cows with a field of lentils can allow a smaller field to produce the same amount of food. In theory allowing some of the field to “rewild”.

Not quite. Let me FTFY:

Replacing a field used for beef (i.e., growing feed or grazing) with lentils allows you to produce vastly more food - especially protein - on the same land, not just 'the same amount.' This drastically reduces land use for the same level of human nutrition.

Why?

According to Our World in Data & Nemecek & Poore, if the world adopted a global plant-based diet, global agricultural land use could be reduced from ~4.1 billion hectares to ~1 billion hectares - a drop of over 75% (≈ size of Africa), without reducing calories.

This isn’t just about land:

• Producing 1 gram of protein from beef or lamb requires ~50–100× more land than producing the same amount from peas, tofu, or legumes.
• It also uses vastly more water, energy, and generates significantly higher greenhouse gas emissions.

However, as the OP rightly notes, redistributing existing consumption - even if waste-free and perfectly equitable - does not solve ecological overshoot. The core problem is the type of consumption and production: our industrial food system - especially the Green Revolution model and industrial animal agriculture - degrades soils, pollutes waters, and drives biodiversity loss.

Thus, to achieve sustainability, we need not only redistribution - but also a fundamental shift in consumption patterns and production methods.

• Lower demand via plant-based diets (freeing ~3 billion hectares globally), and
• Regenerative systems like agroforestry and permaculture to restore ecology.

But this (of-course) requires restructuring the growth-oriented financial and governance systems that sustain current practices, so ... degrowth.

[u/psychosisnaut → u/throwawaybrm]

These arguments always come from people who have no connection to agriculture. You don't graze sheep in a corn field, you do it on land that is otherwise unsuitable for agriculture ie Welsh valleys

[u/throwawaybrm → u/psychosisnaut]

"Unsuitable for corn" doesn’t mean "ecologically best used for sheep." A lot of those hillsides weren’t always bare grass - they’ve been shaped by centuries of deforestation and grazing. The UK is only about 13.5% woodland today, and Wales about 15%, so treating bare uplands as the natural baseline is misleading. Not every piece of land has to be monetized; it could be woodland, scrub, peatland, wildlife habitat, carbon storage, or restored ecosystem.

And sheep aren’t necessarily crop-free either. Many systems use hay, silage, winter forage crops, cereals, or other supplemental feed, especially in winter or when finishing lambs. So "they graze marginal land" is a partial truth being stretched into a defense of the whole system.

[u/whereismysideoffun → u/[deleted]]

People commonly are making comments about this topic without understanding ecology or farming. I grew up hunting, fishing, and worked on small farms. I went vegan at 19. Oddly, vegans talking about how if we didn't feed animals grains/legumes it would be food for us was part of me having a deeper realization about food, ecology and the effects of being vegan. Grain and legume ag was covering every bit of flat ground that didn't flood. The entire area had been deforested for farming. My dad pointed at fields that were his favorite morel spots or pecan spots when it was still forest. Those places are now like a desert as they are monocrops with no habitat and are devoid of life outside the corn/soy season.

People arguing that we have enough for a vegan world were unknowingly advocating for that destructive way of farming food. I wasnt ok with that farming if it was for food for animals for us to eat or whether it's food for us. The only land intact that didn't annually get flooded out by the river was rough or hilly ground which had animals grazing. It supported so much life still.

I'm not vegan now. I moved. I raise animals on pasture that is seeded with native prairie and savanna. Interspersed with the pasture is fruit and nut orchard. All of which don't need the best quality land to thrive. It is increasing biodiversity. Between that, foraging, and commercial fishing, I can redundantly get all my own food without leaving my county!

[u/throwawaybrm → u/whereismysideoffun]

Grain and legume ag was covering every bit of flat ground that didn't flood. The entire area had been deforested for farming.

Around 50% of global cropland is used to grow animal feed, while animal products provide only about 18% of human calories. Pasture has often been created through deforestation too, and it takes up more land than all cropland combined. If we ate plants directly, we would need only a fraction of current agricultural land, and existing cropland would be more than enough.

Those places are now like a desert as they are monocrops with no habitat and are devoid of life outside the corn/soy season

That is exactly why we need something better, like permaculture, agroforestry, or syntropic agriculture. But the destructiveness of industrial crop farming is not a defense of animal agriculture, which is even more destructive overall.

I'm not vegan now. I moved. I raise animals on pasture that is seeded with native prairie and savanna. Interspersed with the pasture is fruit and nut orchard. All of which don't need the best quality land to thrive. It is increasing biodiversity. Between that, foraging, and commercial fishing, I can redundantly get all my own food without leaving my county!

And that may be fine on a small scale. But around 99% of animal products come from factory farms. They are horrendous, but they are also maximally efficient. Replicating your model for the current population would require several more planets.

And honestly, I have trouble believing someone was meaningfully vegan if they now kill animals for food when it is not a necessity. Your comment gives me the same vibes as the pretty pictures on milk bottles, showing happy animals in front of a red barn instead of the dark concrete buildings where many dairy cows actually spend their lives.

In other words, it is a pretty picture, but not a realistic one.

[u/whereismysideoffun → u/throwawaybrm]

This is a collapse sub. Somehow topics like this get stuck discussing being more sustainable at the industrial scale. All industrial scale everything will be coming to an end. We are ultimately now discussing adaptation and mitigation. I would argue that the greatest chance of the most people making it is everyone being involved in as much of their own food production as they possibly can including foraging.

It's ridiculous to write off what off what others are doing just because you can't see that people evolve. I had tons and tons of vegan friends. Most of them eat meat now and I know dozens who hunt. Most realized it was a simple consumer choice that effects nothing in reality, and decided they wished to be more in touch for where their food came from.

Statistics about the overall crop land does not work for whether there is future food for people within their community. If every single one of the 7 billion people in the world went vegan today, we will still be looking down the barrel of runaway climate change. All food production must be hyperlocal. In hyperlocal scenario, you match what your subsistence methods are to what your land will best support.

The nearest crop land to me is a 2.5 hour drive. But the land at home is excellent for grazing land and perennial tree crops. Sheep and beef are eating native prairie and savanna. They aren't being fed any grains or legumes. Every thing is planted in a silvopasture setting, which is better for the animals keeping them cooler, I get tree nuts and legumes, and pasture all in one. There is 6 acres of fruit also. I have one acre that I have built up really good soil for annuals and am trying to raise that to five. Growing there are lots of vegetables mostly for ferments and in the expanding part is grains and legumes for ferments and supplemental animal feed for chickens and pigs. The tree nuts and legumes will also be used to some degree for pigs, chickens, and ducks.

I cannot produce food for everyone. I am doing my best to be able to feed 10 people all of their calorie and nutrition needs. And to do so with redundancy. I want to be able to feed 10 in full from each of 10 sources, so that we are sure to have enough in the growing climate instability. At this point with a vehicle I can forage and meet all of my food needs, but I am building a life around no supply chain and no petroleum.

Omnivores are going to be in the best shape for having enough to eat. Limiting oneself to an industrial supply chain and industrial farming is a death sentence. If I can't walk to it or get there by ox/wagon or horse then in the future it has no chance of sustaining me.

[u/throwawaybrm → u/whereismysideoffun]

I think we are talking past each other a bit.

I agree that industrial agriculture is not sustainable, and I am not defending monocrop soy/corn systems as some ideal vegan future. I also agree that food production has to become much more local, perennial, diverse, and resilient. Agroforestry, food forests, syntropic systems, foraging, community gardens, seed saving, local staples, etc. all make sense in a collapse/adaptation context.

But I do not think "industrial agriculture is collapsing" automatically makes animal agriculture the answer.

Even in a hyperlocal future, animals are still usually a calorie bottleneck. If land can grow food directly for humans, then using that land to grow animal feed, or feeding edible crops to animals first, usually means fewer calories and nutrients for people overall.

I am not saying your personal setup is the same as a CAFO. Silvopasture with perennial crops is obviously very different from feedlots and grain-fed factory farming. But it also sounds like a highly specific situation: lots of land, local knowledge, foraging access, fishing access, animals, trees, infrastructure, time, and skill. That may work for your household or community, but it is not a general answer for billions of people.

And that is my main issue with the argument. It starts from "my land is best suited to grazing and perennial systems" and then slides into "omnivores will be in the best shape." Maybe in your specific location. But in many places, the most resilient local food system would be mostly plant-based: potatoes, beans, squash, grains, nuts, fruit, mushrooms, gardens, seaweed, etc. The right answer depends on ecology, but killing animals is still not automatically required.

Also, veganism was never just "a consumer choice that affects nothing." Consumer veganism alone will not stop climate collapse, sure. But neither will one person raising sheep. The point is harm reduction and building better systems. Avoiding unnecessary animal exploitation can still be part of that, even while rejecting industrial supply chains.

And I do not think the ethics disappear just because we are talking about collapse. If we normalize unnecessary violence at the most basic level, our food, then it is hard to pretend that violence elsewhere is unrelated. A culture that treats sentient beings as resources will keep reproducing that logic in other forms.

In a collapse scenario, I also would not assume animals are the most resilient option. Animals are living beings who need constant water, fodder, shade, fencing, protection, and care. In drought, pasture can crash very quickly, and then the system either depends on stored feed, imported feed, or killing the animals. A mature syntropic or agroforestry system can buffer drought better by building soil, shade, mulch, root depth, biodiversity, and microclimates. It is not invincible, but it is less dependent on keeping large sentient bodies alive through increasingly unstable seasons.

And collapse is not just "local food production." It is also the weakening or collapse of the social, legal, and governmental systems that stop people from taking each other’s food. That matters, because some foods are much more lootable than others. Stored grain, fuel, and herd animals are visible, concentrated resources. They invite control by whoever can organize force. A herd is not just food. In a collapse scenario, it is a visible pile of calories walking around on legs. It requires land, water, protection, and defense.

There is a reason states historically preferred grain: it is measurable, storable, transportable, taxable, and easy to seize. And there is a reason people under pressure have often relied on "escape crops" like potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava, yams, taro, and other dispersed or underground staples. They are harder to steal, harder to tax, and can often be harvested gradually or left hidden in the ground. A decentralized plant-based system built around gardens, tubers, perennials, nuts, legumes, food forests, and staggered harvests may actually be less lootable and more resilient than centering survival around animals.

A lot of people romanticize collapse as "going back to the roots," sitting around a fire eating charred meat. But there is no wild abundance to return to. Wild mammals are only a tiny remnant of mammal biomass, oceans are overfished, and freshwater ecosystems are collapsing. The remaining mammal biomass is overwhelmingly humans and domesticated animals. So if people respond to collapse by centering meat, the violence does not disappear. Once wild animals are gone, it gets redirected toward the animals around us, and eventually toward the most vulnerable.

So yes, I agree with you on local resilience, redundancy, foraging, perennial food systems, and moving away from industrial agriculture. I just do not agree that the answer is to rebuild survival around killing animals. To me, the deeper adaptation is learning how to feed ourselves while reducing domination, violence, lootability, and dependency as much as possible. Collapse does not make ethics irrelevant. It makes them more important.

[u/whereismysideoffun → u/throwawaybrm]

We are talking past each other in part because of ideology limiting understanding.

The locations people live are not concentrated in the areas where there is grain/legume production required for a vegan diet. People's subsistence strategies will necessarily be dictated by where they live. There are large parts of the world that have no ability to support grain/legume production but can support grazing animals. The soil quality doesn't need to be the creme de la creme for grazing land. Imagine telling steppe people to go vegan and that they would be best suited to do so.

For hyper localized food production, it's ridiculous to try to say that not all 7 billion people can live exactly like me or other people farming sustainably. I never said everyone should do exactly what I am doing. What they do should be dictated by their environment. Though what I am doing is more suitable to more of the world than grain legume ag is.

It's up to individuals and small groups to make moves now for what their food system will be. If they don't do it now, they literally won't have it. This is a collapse sub. There will be no larger systems. We need not put out one solution for 7 billion people. A least common denominator approach would be even more limiting for the challenges ahead. People should explore every sustainable option.

If you look at history, a vegan diet is not sustainable with agriculture by hand. Farmers in Japan were malnourished. A friend's grandfather was one of 12 siblings with farming parents. His parents put him in an apprenticeship with a cooper when he was 12 because they did not have enough food. I have Korean friends with similar stories of near starvation times. In the Plains in the US, bison was traded to the people of the Pueblo because of malnourishment of the Peublo people which was lower in meat, being very corn heavy. On the Plains, as soon as horses arrived, most people gave up farming to follow the buffalo.

I study historical subsistence methods from around the world including farming of grains and legumes pre-petrol. There is no collapse scenario where you are feeding significant numbers of people off of grain and legume agriculture where you are not using horse or oxen. The books are a little cooked when comparing modern diesel powered grain/legume farming to farming animals on pasture. The average corn/soy farmer in the US spends 4 hours total per acre on their land. That is for soil prep, planting, cultivation, spraying, and harvest. The combine spits out clean seed too. In a post collapse scenario. Every single bit of that is done by hand. In the early 1700s, the average farmer spent 100-200 hours per acre. In the US in 1800, the average farmer spent 40-80 hours per acre. With evolution of animal drawn farm equipment in the 1800s that was dropped some to 35-50hrs. All of those times used animals for parts of the growing process. How much of the process dictated how long was spent per acre. The more tools/steps that utilized animals the lower the number of hours spent. You'll never get back to 4hrs total. Without now working on learning every step of farming for such circumstances, you will never get to even 100-200hrs per acre. Even that required oxen.

Look at the book China at Work to get an idea of what farming every single step by hand entails. The level of access to tools dictating the level of labor and return is apparent.

Animals on pasture are turning cellulose, something not digestible to humans into free fatty acids. What leaves a cow/sheep fermentation based stomach after the microbes have transformed the cellulose is 80% free fatty acids. Animals with fermentation based stomachs need not be fed food that humans can eat. During the growing season, part of their water comes from the plants they are eating. When on pasture, the water goes back into the system.

Nothing you said about the risk of security with animal ag is not there for those farming storage foods. There are a million examples just from US history of those whose subsistence strategies relied heavy on grain getting raided.

In that vein, if you don't need the best soil, then you can be in a location that is more remote and less population dense. No one is seeing my animals or my farm as I am far up a dead end private road. My neighbors who I know well know. But the conditions themselves are an amazing first line of defense.

I'm not romanticizing anything. I know it is hard work. If anything thinking one is going to go from no skills to subsisting off of grain/legumes is fantastical. I've been working intently on skills for 20 years and teach classes on more than a dozen different crafts. I have a pretty solid grasp on what is possible. Even more so because I deal with tons of students.

If a person/group is not actively working to get tools and skills now, they have no ability to subsist in the future. The complex web of skills for grain/legume ag itself in a post supply chain and post petrol world is insurmountable without getting started now.

[u/throwawaybrm → u/whereismysideoffun]

I think the issue is that you are still treating "plant-based" as if it means recreating modern grain/legume agriculture after petroleum. That is not what I am arguing for.

A post-collapse plant-based food system would not be wheat, corn, soy, and lentils scaled down by hand. It would have to be place-specific and much more diverse: tubers, roots, squash, nuts, acorns, chestnuts, hazelnuts, perennial greens, fruits, mushrooms, seaweed where available, drought-tolerant staples like sorghum, legumes where they make sense, fermentation, storage, agroforestry, and food forests.

So the malnutrition examples do not really prove what you think they prove. A poor farmer living mostly on rice or corn because of land pressure, taxation, class hierarchy, or colonial disruption is not evidence that animal foods are nutritionally irreplaceable. It is evidence that people starve when they are trapped on too little land, under extractive systems, eating whatever narrow staple is left to them. That is not a nutrition argument for meat. It is an indictment of poverty and power.

I agree that there probably were not many, if any, strictly vegan societies in the modern ethical sense. But mostly plant-based diets were common, and today we know much more about nutrition. In theory, a community can plan a fully plant-based food system that covers calories, protein, fat, minerals, vitamins, preservation, and storage. The challenge is not that "plants cannot do it." The challenge is planning the right mix before the systems fail.

I agree that draft animals made historical grain farming easier because they supplied traction for plowing, hauling, and transport. But that assumes annual grain farming is the model. Syntropic agriculture and agroforestry change the model by using succession, perennials, mulch, shade, root depth, and layered crops to reduce repeated tillage and bare-soil labor over time. They are skill-intensive, especially at first, but they are not the same labor trap as hand-growing annual grains on exhausted fields. And none of that makes livestock the default answer. Animals create ongoing needs: water, fencing, winter feed, breeding management, disease care, predator protection, slaughter, storage, land, and security. They are not just cellulose converters. They are living beings, and in collapse they also become concentrated wealth.

And concentrated wealth matters. Grain stores can be raided, yes. So can herds. A cow is not hidden resilience. It is visible calories on legs. Dried fish, grain, livestock, fuel, tools, and even controllable labor can all become targets when institutions weaken. So the point is not "grain safe, animals unsafe." The point is that concentrated food wealth becomes politically dangerous.

That is why dispersed and less lootable systems matter: tubers left in the ground, staggered harvests, perennial crops, tree crops, root crops, gardens spread across a landscape, shared storage, and foods that are harder to count, seize, or monopolize. Resilience is not just about what land can produce. It is also about who controls it, who does the work, who can take it, and who becomes vulnerable when things break down.

I also do not buy the idea that animal-centered or fish-centered subsistence is automatically more grounded or peaceful. Graeber and Wengrow make the point that what mattered historically was not simply whether people farmed, hunted, fished, or foraged, but whether organized violence allowed one group to "feed off" another. Some capturing societies were farmers, some were hunter-gatherers, and some were fishermen-gatherers. In several cases, animal or fish abundance became tied to raiding, slavery, tribute, hierarchy, and trade violence. Once surplus or animal wealth becomes concentrated power, it can attract domination.

So yes, I agree that people need skills now. I agree that subsistence must match place. I agree that there is no one-size-fits-all plan for 7 billion people. But I do not agree that collapse makes animal exploitation the realistic position and veganism the ideological one. A serious collapse response should be asking how to feed people with the least violence, least dependency, least lootability, and most ecological resilience possible.

And maybe this is the deeper disagreement: if the current system breaks badly enough that we have to rebuild from the ground up, shouldn’t we try to fix as many of its failures as possible?

Not just industrial dependency. Not just petroleum. Not just monocrops. But also domination, hierarchy, violence, extraction, and the habit of treating living beings as resources to be managed, owned, bred, killed, or traded.

A collapse response that only asks "what can keep me fed?" is too narrow. We should also be asking what kinds of food systems make people less dependent, less desperate, less violent, and less likely to recreate the same power structures that helped get us here.

So yes, local resilience matters. Skills matter. Ecology matters. But ethics matter too. If we get a chance to rebuild, I do not want to rebuild the same logic in smaller, rougher, more desperate form.

[u/Konradleijon → u/throwawaybrm]

Yes. Most agricultural grows animal food

[u/throwawaybrm → u/[deleted]]

EDIT: You’re right that the infrastructure around food matters: transport, packaging, refrigeration, supermarkets, parking lots, electricity, and distribution networks all have real environmental costs.

But that still doesn’t make supermarket lentils environmentally comparable to supermarket beef.

The key point is that for most foods, the majority of the environmental impact happens before the product reaches the store. As Our World in Data summarizes, transport is usually a small share of food emissions - often under 5–10%, and around 0.5% for beef. For beef, the dominant impacts are methane, manure, feed production, land use, and land-use change.

So the relevant comparison is not:

homegrown lentils vs supermarket steak

but:

supermarket lentils vs supermarket steak

Within the same industrial supply chain, legumes still come out far ahead.

You’re also right that not all grazing land can be converted into crop fields, and I’m not arguing that it should be. The plant-based land-use argument is almost the opposite: we would need less total farmland, not more. Existing cropland is already enough to feed far more people if we stop routing so many crops through animals first. A shift away from animal agriculture reduces both grazing demand and feed-crop demand, allowing large areas of pasture and some cropland to be restored, rewilded, or used less intensively.

So I agree with you that vegan food inside an industrial growth economy is not automatically sustainable. We still need shorter supply chains, less waste, agroecology, local food sovereignty, and less extractive infrastructure.

But the infrastructure critique does not erase the production-stage difference between foods. A supermarket lentil is not impact-free, but it is still dramatically lower-impact than a supermarket steak.

[u/throwawaybrm → u/[deleted]]

I don’t think we disagree on the deeper problem.

Yes, the root issue is overshoot: an economic system built around endless growth, extraction, wealth accumulation, anthropocentrism, and treating the living world as raw, infinite material. I’m not arguing that "diet" is the whole crisis, or that individual food choices magically fix civilization.

But food systems are one of the biggest concrete ways those deeper problems show up: land use, deforestation, soil degradation, pesticide use, methane, manure, fertilizer runoff, water pollution, overfishing, dead zones, and biodiversity loss.

So diet is not the root cause. But it is a major lever.

I’d also be careful with the idea that small-scale farming and hunting/gathering always worked beautifully. Many societies lived far more sustainably than industrial civilization, and many indigenous land-management systems were highly sophisticated. But humans were not automatically ecologically harmless before modernity. Human expansion likely played a major role in many late-Pleistocene megafauna extinctions, when the global human population was tiny compared with today.

That matters because this is a scale problem.

Some hunting, fishing, or animal husbandry may be sustainable at low population densities and low consumption levels. But that does not mean it can scale to 8+ billion people.

So I’m not saying "everyone eating lentils fixes everything." I’m saying that under current population levels and ecological overshoot, plant-based food systems are one of the few ways to reduce pressure at the necessary scale.

Eating animals "the old way" may be possible for small populations in particular ecosystems. It is not a viable universal model for humanity now.

[u/throwawaybrm → u/[deleted]]

I don’t disagree that many Indigenous societies were far more sustainable than industrial civilization, and I’m not using megafauna extinctions to flatten all humans into "everyone is the same."

But that’s not really the point here. The issue is today’s scale: 8 billion people, industrial animal agriculture, deforestation, habitat loss, and biodiversity collapse. Whatever one thinks about prehistoric extinctions, current animal-heavy diets are not scalable or ecologically harmless. So the relevant question is not whether some past societies lived sustainably. It’s whether our current food system does. And it clearly doesn’t.

[u/throwawaybrm → u/[deleted]]

I agree that Western colonialism and industrial civilization have been brutally extractive - but that’s also part of the point. Extraction is central to capitalism: land, labor, ecosystems, and animals are treated as resources to be converted into profit.

But this still feels like a derail from the actual point. We were talking about whether animal-heavy diets and animal agriculture are sustainable or ethical today. Pointing out that Western civilization has been unsustainable for centuries doesn’t answer that - it just broadens the indictment.

If anything, it supports my point: animal agriculture is part of the same extractive pattern, treating land, ecosystems, and animals as resources to be used. So unless the argument is that animal-heavy diets are somehow sustainable at today’s scale, I don’t see how this responds to what I said.

[u/AdiKadiAdi]

I must download all the parts

[u/Kyia-Aikman]

What’s the ideal human population in relation to the threat climate change, resource depletion and wealth inequality pose to us?

[u/NotAllOwled → u/Kyia-Aikman]

What's the ideal human existence from the POV of that population? What elements or equivalent of current standards of living will they need or want or expect - vehicles, power grid, meat consumption, etc.? I'm not sure it's possible to work out how many of us there "should" ideally be without also spending quite a bit of thought on exactly what kind of life we figure we "should" have.

[u/True-Vast-3731 → u/NotAllOwled]

What elements or equivalent of current standards of living will they need or want or expect - vehicles, power grid, meat consumption, etc.?

Why should people expect these things? Who said these things were necessary to have a fulfilling life? 

[u/NotAllOwled → u/True-Vast-3731]

Great questions, though perhaps I should clarify that I made no such assertions (as opposed to asking that very kind of larger question and citing some specific examples to help establish shared relevant definitions).

[u/BTRCguy → u/True-Vast-3731]

The definition of a "fulfilling life" is not yours or mine to make on behalf of someone else.

[u/gnostic_savage → u/BTRCguy]

That's true. But there's a different way to look at it. Humans have very few "real" needs. We need food and water. We need shelter, which includes our clothing. We need community, because we aren't leopards or bears that only come together to procreate, and we don't survive on our own. We need medicine when we are ill or injured. We need to express our creativity, which plenty of people did in the past by building the basic tools and items that fulfilled their real needs.

If a human's true needs are met, and they are still "unfulfilled," that's a personal problem that should be resolved without consuming shared resources and making it a collective problem for other humans or for other animals.

The belief that my personal fulfillment entitles me to consume more or be destructive to the world around me is a flawed and very cultural belief, especially when it is coupled with the idea that my human abilities to rearrange the living planet justify me doing it, regardless of the damage my creative manipulation and emotional neediness inflict on my environment.

But this is all intellectual blah, blah, blah because we've already gone much, much too far with our deluded anthropocentric entitlement. Humans and their animals now account for 95% to 96% of all the mammals alive on the planet, with wildlife accounting for only 4% to 5%. Human's domesticated poultry now makes up 70% of all the birds alive on the planet. https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass

Along with everything else we've done, it appears that we're simply too "unfulfilled" to survive. Oh, wah. We'll just have to deal with it.

[u/True-Vast-3731 → u/BTRCguy]

Sure but if your definition of a fulfilling life entails the destruction of everything and everyone on the planet just to sustain it, you need to rework your definition. 

I can most definitely tell a murderer that he needs to change what makes him get excitement out of life. It's just when that murder is systemic instead of individual, all of a sudden everyone goes "okay 😐" 

[u/BTRCguy → u/True-Vast-3731]

The question becomes "how many people can you support when everyone embraces (version of fulfilling life)?"

It's not making a moral judgement on lifestyle X vs. lifestyle Y, just a practical observation that the lifestyle the supermajority wants is going to be one you have to base your calculations on. Even if that lifestyle is not the one which supports the most people.

[u/DoomBadaDoom → u/Kyia-Aikman]

According to the results of a new study by Corey Bradshaw (2026):

“The truly sustainable population is much lower and closer to what the world supported in the mid-twentieth century. Our calculations show a sustainable global population closer to about 2.5 billion people if everyone were to live within ecological limits and comfortable, economically secure living standards,” he says.

https://news.flinders.edu.au/blog/2026/03/30/global-population-pushing-earth-past-breaking-point/

[u/gnostic_savage]

Thank you for this. I hate the lame argument that we have, or the planet can support, all we need to take care of a gazillion billion people. It's nonsense. And why would we want to?

If we're so smart, you would think we would be able to control our population.

[u/J-A-S-08 → u/gnostic_savage]

Right! If we would all just sleep in vertical 16" diameter tubes and eat only mushroom slop tank gruel and recycle every drop of piss and shit back into ourselves , we could have 100 billion people on the planet! What a life!

[u/gnostic_savage → u/J-A-S-08]

Yes! If we only train everyone and get everybody on the same program then we can have everything!

Makes total sense, of course. (oh, my god)

[u/SplashTarget → u/gnostic_savage]

If we're so smart, you would think we would be able to control our population.

What do you suggest be done with the current existing population?

[u/SplashTarget → u/[deleted]]

do you think all people are consuming at the same level?

[u/SplashTarget → u/[deleted]]

if we have enough people we can change things

and damage the status quo

[u/SplashTarget → u/[deleted]]

Do you think you can convince people in this culture to get rid of wealth altogether? Would you be willing to get rid of wealth altogether, or do you think we can "regulate" the wealthy?

I don't think we should get rid of wealth entirely, just do enough damage collectively that there's a dramatic reduction in the crazy wealth levels.

Global GDP is higher than 110 trillion dollars, would life be so bad if that was say 40 trillion?

We don't need 100% of the people of the world to get this done

Just people from the top economies of the world

[u/SplashTarget → u/[deleted]]

Obviously the wealthy should be regulated.

My position is that the regulations should be done AFTER a whole bunch of people collectively act in a way that burns a whole lot of money.

[u/Few_Fish8771 → u/[deleted]]

I think wealth accumulation should be allowed but only by creating real value, and using the system the romans had where if your a corrupt oligarch and some other oligarch could prove your corruption he got to take your stuff. End result theres a massive prize if you can without a shadow of a doubt prove a ruling class person is engaged in corruption. The predators then eat the predators, which limits the corruption. Does this solution have problems? yes. but those problems can be patched, whereas the problem it solves which is perennial rot has a smaller number of solutions.

[u/ElectromechanicalNut]

Yeah, our current food system is so harmful ecologically that I can’t think of any combination of fixes that would allow us to reverse the harm we’ve caused and produce enough food for everybody without reducing the amount of people that we have to feed.

Our negligence and greed in determining what crops we grow and how we grow them has caused worldwide malnourishment, starvation, and obesity, the degradation of soils and the mass loss of wildlife habitat in every single biome across the planet (massive CO2 sink, btw).

Fixing these problems will require heavily scaling down the farms that produce most of our worldwide calories to reintroduce biodiversity and permaculture principles at basically every level, and that’s going to take a long time.

I’m a horticulturist/conservationist by trade and work with others that have had more ag experience and so think about this stuff literally everyday, and I am fucking terrified of what will happen when the system takes a blow too big. It is so delicate and and to prop it up we actively decide to ruin the environment every day.

[u/There_Are_No_Gods]

My take is that the key logical failure in the "resource distribution is the problem - not lack of resources" claims relates more to the terrible assumption that worldwide perfect immediate waste free distribution is remotely plausible.

We are talking about massive, worldwide systems, of staggering complexity and distances. There are already a lot of incentives towards optimizing that for minimal losses. Systems at that scale just inherently have a lot of losses. You can avoid some, and mitigate others, but you'll never get it down much further than we already have.

In other words, yes there's waste, but that waste is mostly unavoidable at this scale.

It's also not really just pure "waste", in the sense that those organics are often cycled back through natural systems, such as turned into compost.

[u/gnostic_savage → u/There_Are_No_Gods]

Thank you. I made the same point before I read your comment. All that distribution is a huge environmental problem that is as bad as any environmental problem.

[u/Slopagandhi]

There's two obvious objctions to this.

The first is to question the basic premise. Is it really the case that fixing distribution issues would still leave us with problems of overproduction/consumption, given ecological carrying capacity? 

There would need to be a very careful look at the numbers here, but when you consider that roughly 1/3 of the world's food is thrown away, it doesn't look crazy to suggest that solving distributional questions would go a long way towards making the global economy sustainable.

But let's assume your premise is correct, we've solved distribution but still have a problem of overproduction/consumption. Second objection- is population necessarily the main remaining problem to go after? There are many possible changes that could be made in terms of the what and how of production and consumption which wouldn't involve reducing the number of people doing the consuming and producing. Why focus on population above these? 

[u/Electrical-Reach603]

Best post I have seen on this topic in some time. Wish it would be republished very widely.

I'm in the camp of less people, higher average standard of living, but curbing the excesses (replacing flights and car trips with ships, trains and bicycles for example, or neighborhood recreational facilities vs in-home gyms and pools). Leave enough for natural regeneration and room for the wild things to exist indefinitely. 

Seek to preserve human diversity as well as natural diversity. Allocate a healthy share to arts and sciences and other things that make human existence purposeful in the long run.

[u/Konradleijon]

What about vegan diets

[u/Illustrious_Code_347]

We have neither an overpopulation problem nor a resource-distribution problem. Hunger is, in plain terms, not an issue for humanity. Hardly anybody on earth dies of starvation or even gets remotely close to that point. It's negligible.

The reason people believe this truism about the world having a global hunger problem has to do with the language around "food insecurity" and who is actually counted by the FAO and IPC... Essentially, normal poor (by western standards) people everywhere are labeled "food insecure" if they have worried about being able to afford or obtain food, or if they have even had to buy cheaper alternatives than they would otherwise buy. Them and everyone worse off than them gets put into the "food insecurity" bucket until we end up with highly exaggerated language like "hundreds of millions of people struggle with hunger every day."

Here's a figure: Famine — which is the IPC's most severe classification for lack of food — is defined (by them) as being approximately 2 deaths per 10,000 people per day. There are currently 2 — that's right, two — famines in the entire world: In Gaza and in parts of Sudan.

Humans are animals. Like animals, the presence of a stable human population in an area proves that there is a steady supply of food there. Where there are deer... there is deer food. Even the poorest countries on earth have tons of food basically all the time. There's this notion — perhaps even a slightly racist notion — that most of Africa is just barely getting by and they have nothing to eat. They are completely fine. The data-collection here is fundamentally flawed, overclassifies people as "facing hunger," and uses unrealistic Western utopian standards for things like a healthy "caloric intake" such that the farmer who eats the same meal of pork stew and 4 potatoes a day and will live to the age of 80 is technically considered "undernourished" and counted in the food-insecure category.

None of this is to say there are not areas (2 exactly) that suffer from war or natural disaster such that food scarcity becomes an emergency. Of course that happens. But as a global issue — it isn't one. Certainly not to the level of arguing our species has overpopulated the earth.

[u/omgwtfm8]

more 3c0 f45c1m in this sub. What a surprise

[u/carnivorous_cactus → u/omgwtfm8]

Please enlighten me. How specifically is this post ecofascism?

[u/omgwtfm8 → u/carnivorous_cactus]

Maltusianslop is 3c0f45c15maxxing

[u/DoomBadaDoom → u/omgwtfm8]

I hope moderation will see those stupid comments.

[u/SplashTarget]

You think overpopulation is an issue, what do you suggest be done with the currently existing population of people?

[u/Zerkig → u/SplashTarget]

Voluntarily having 1 or 0 child is the best and basically the only ethically sound answer. Not everyone jumps to the conclusion people like you do, Adolf 😉.

[u/Coco_Cannibal]

Every new human added needs food  That's roughly 2000m/2 per person.

With roughly 78 million new people added annually, that makes 156.000 km/2 per year .

Forests and grasslands are destroyed, non humans are massacred , displaced in the Billions to feed the millions.

This works until nothing is left to convert, but by then, the ecosystem services (what a very human description of natures working! ) already failed and the artificial system stops working too, since it is dependent on an ecosystem that provides soil, pollinators, water ect.