Yes, the planet is overpopulated

Eight billion people. Almost three times as many as in 1960. And still we are told the real crisis is that there aren’t enough of us.

In 1960, there were about 3 billion human beings on Earth. Today, there are around 8.2 billion, and projections suggest we may touch 10 billion by 2050. India alone now holds nearly 18 percent of the world’s population. When a human being is added to the planet, it is not merely another body that occupies a few square feet. What is added is a lifetime of consumption: food, water, energy, metals, plastics, transport, housing, electronic devices. Overpopulation is not about how many people can stand on a piece of land. It is about how many lifestyles the Earth can afford to support.

Yes, fertility rates have already crashed across most of the world, from nearly 5 children per woman in 1960 to about 2.3 today. The United Nations’ medium projection expects global population to peak below 11 billion around 2085 and then slowly decline. Explosive growth is ending. Yet because of demographic momentum and the rapid spread of high‑consumption lifestyles, especially in Asia, humanity’s total ecological footprint is still rising and will continue to do so for decades even if every country dropped to replacement fertility tomorrow.

And yet, a strange denial persists. While scientists warn that the human footprint has pushed the planet into emergency, influential quarters—celebrity billionaires, sectarian zealots and jingoists—keep repeating that the “real” crisis is population collapse. They push policies that encourage people, especially women, to have more children. Due to their reach and glamour, people listen more to the showmen and politicians than to the data.

Overpopulated with people, overpopulated with desire

A common argument goes: “Only about five per cent of the world’s land is densely settled, the rest is still open.” This is deeply ignorant reasoning. The question is not whether there is physical room to stand. The question is whether there are enough forests, rivers, fertile soils, minerals and a stable climate to support the way eight billion of us want to live.

Look at what the ecological data is saying. The IPBES Global Assessment warns that up to one million species are now threatened with extinction. WWF’s Living Planet Report 2022 documents an average 69 per cent decline in monitored vertebrate populations between 1970 and 2018. These are not small fluctuations. This is a civilisation‑scale crash in the rest of life; some call it the Anthropocene.

Yes, the planet is overpopulated, but not merely with human bodies. It is overpopulated with high‑consumption lifestyles and with the ideals that glorify them. The way we are living, every additional human birth often means one more wound to the forests, the rivers, the climate, and the other species that must make space for us. When one more human is added in this prevailing culture of ignorant consumption, the rest of existence has one more burden to carry.

But the cost to the planet is not evenly distributed. The richest 10 per cent are responsible for about half of global carbon emissions, the richest 1 per cent for roughly 16 per cent, while the poorest half contribute only around 10 per cent. In other words, the problem is not just how many bodies there are, but what those bodies are consuming, aspiring to and imitating.

Not every additional child carries the same weight. A child born into an affluent urban household in Shanghai or Dallas and raised to expect air‑conditioning, meat‑heavy diets, frequent flying, and the latest gadgets will, over a lifetime, consume many tens of times the resources of a child born into a rural family in Chad or Bihar that may never own a car or refrigerator. The planet is not uniformly overpopulated with people; it is overpopulated with high‑consumption lifestyles and with the universal aspiration to imitate them.

The planet is not only overpopulated with people. It is overpopulated with wrong ideals.

When a billionaire with multiple mansions, private jets and a large brood of children lectures the world that we need “more babies”, he is really saying something very simple: “Multiply, and live like me.” Look at what is being presented. Lavish lifestyle on one hand, seven children on the other. Multiply per‑capita consumption of that kind with a population growing at that rate. What do you get? You get tragedy.

It is true that many countries now face birth rates far below replacement—Japan, South Korea, Italy, and soon China and parts of India. Demographers warn of shrinking workforces, collapsing pension systems, and the heavy burden of caring for rapidly ageing populations. Some sincerely argue that encouraging higher fertility in these societies is necessary for economic survival and cultural continuity. Fair enough. An aging population does strain pension systems, caregiving arrangements, and certain models of economic growth. But if the cure for these anxieties is to add more high‑consuming bodies to an already overstressed planet, then the cure is worse than the disease. Any honest solution must begin by redesigning economies and welfare systems within ecological limits, not by sacrificing the planet for misplaced nationalism or affluence.

Yet almost none of the voices crying about “baby busts” couple their call for “more babies” with any serious proposal for the already‑rich to reduce their own ecological footprint, nor do they acknowledge that the same technological, urban, consumerist civilisation driving fertility collapse is simultaneously driving planetary overshoot. Wanting both endless growth and endless consumption while asking women to solve the demographic consequences is not responsibility—it is evasion.

Two arguments of the many‑child world

Now look at how both extremes of the economic spectrum approach having many children.

In very poor societies, the reasoning often is: “More children means more hands to earn.” Seven mouths, but fourteen hands. This is a tragic, yet often rational, calculation: in the absence of pensions or social security, children are the only reliable insurance against a destitute old age. Never mind that the same poverty, lack of education and lack of healthcare ensure those hands stay trapped in low‑productivity labour and cyclical misery.

At the other extreme, the ultra‑rich say: “We can afford many children.” They treat children as they treat everything else, as proof of what they can afford. Just as they can have seven mansions and four holiday homes, why not seven children as well. When questioned, they add a noble‑sounding excuse: the world will supposedly suffer from population decline, so they are “doing their bit” by reproducing more. It is a fig leaf, nothing more.

Both arguments—one born of desperation, the other of extravagance—evade the same truth: the planet’s limits. Neither takes responsibility for what each additional, high‑consuming human costs the water, the forests, the climate, and the countless other species.

And let it be clear: the overconsumer is not only the billionaire with private jets. It is also the middle‑class man or woman who, within their means, keeps imitating the same ideals of endless buying, endless travelling, endless display. You may not be able to afford a mansion, but you can still worship the same god of consumption; the damage then is psychological first, environmental next.

Beneath these economic extremes lies a deeper injustice: the one written on women’s bodies.

Overpopulation is a crime against women

If we look more carefully, overpopulation is inseparable from the condition of women.

We already know that when women are educated, when they have access to healthcare, when they are financially independent and participate in the workforce, fertility rates fall. These are good developments in themselves. The fact that they also reduce population pressure is an added blessing.

India’s own numbers are telling. Our total fertility rate has fallen below replacement to about 1.9 births per woman nationally. But this average masks stark regional divides: Kerala below 1.5, Bihar still above 3. Where women are more educated and freer, they choose fewer children. Which means that runaway population growth is not just an economic or ecological problem. It is a symptom of women’s continued bondage.

Let us speak plainly. When society declares that the highest or only calling of a woman is to bear and raise many children, often at the cost of her education, her dreams, her health, and her inner life, we do her profound violence. Motherhood can be joyful, if the mother is a conscious individual and the child is raised in nourishing conditions. But forcing motherhood as duty and destiny is theft of potential. There is nothing wrong if a woman consciously chooses to have one child or many, and takes deep joy in raising them. What is wrong is when family, religion, or state turn that intimate choice into a demand, a duty, or a measurement of her worth. No one, woman or man, is born merely to reproduce and serve. We are born to awaken, to know ourselves, and to live fully. Reducing brilliant, conscious beings to decades of repetitive caretaking while praising it as the ultimate virtue is one of the deepest tragedies of patriarchal culture.

This is not theory. In barely one generation, Iran went from around 6–7 children per woman to under 2 by making female education universal and contraception free and widely available, with religious leaders publicly supporting family planning. Bangladesh, Tunisia, Thailand, and Costa Rica achieved similar plunges without coercion or penalties. When women are truly educated, healthy, and free to choose, fertility falls voluntarily, swiftly, and sustainably. The path already exists.

The common man’s punishment

There is another kind of injustice that comes with overpopulation: environmental apartheid.

Clean nature, pure air, green spaces are rapidly becoming a limited asset. Just as money was once scarce, just as good food was once scarce, now clean air and clean water are becoming scarce. And when something becomes scarce, the powerful capture it.

This is already happening. The best public parks in many cities are reserved in the morning hours for VIPs. The cleanest beaches will become VIP beaches. The best hill stations will be reserved, or priced so high that ordinary people cannot enter. Entry will require ten thousand rupees for an hour, framed as an “environment tax”. The common man will be told: you are dirty, you will spoil the place, stay in your dusty city lane.

And who will roam freely in those last green pockets? The very people whose consumption destroyed everything else.

Extend this to the planetary level, and you get the final obscenity: a rocket lifting off for Mars, carrying a few billionaires, while the burning Earth is left behind for the common man and the other species to suffer in. The tragedy is that the crowd below is still asking for selfies and autographs from those who are fleeing. Still saying: “Sir, I am your biggest fan!”

What a sane response would look like

Step 1: Secure reproductive freedom

Governments already know what works. Make contraception free and universally available. Make girls’ education truly compulsory and excellent through secondary school. Build reliable old‑age social security so parents do not need children as their retirement plan.

But knowing is not doing. Political will falters because population growth serves vested interests: cheap labour, expanding markets, and expanding electorates. The same forces that profit from excess consumption profit from excess people. Until that nexus is broken, even the best policies remain on paper.

Step 2: Make excess expensive

Tax not just production, but destruction. Implement sharply increasing carbon and luxury taxes on private planes, multiple properties, and other lifestyles that use a lot of resources. Along with this, there should be heavy public investment on clean energy grids, circular-economy infrastructure, and cellular agriculture so that living with less carbon impact is the easier and cheaper choice. Use this revenue to fund universal healthcare, education, and old‑age security in developing regions. This shifts the burden from policing women’s bodies to regulating the wealthy’s footprints. Policy must begin where power lies: with the over‑consumers, not the over‑burdened.

Step 3: Redefine success itself

Move beyond GDP as the main measure of success and use national scorecards that track ecological health, mental health, social cohesion, and time for life, not just production. Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness index and New Zealand’s wellbeing budget are imperfect but important signals: governments can decide policy and allocate money by asking, “Does this protect nature and human wellbeing?” instead of only, “Does this raise GDP?” Countries that have combined such shifts with investments in girls’ education, healthcare, and social security have seen fertility fall rapidly without coercion, while basic wellbeing improved.

Women, given real freedom and security, choose smaller families naturally. That is the sane, humane response. But policy without cultural shift is coercion dressed as planning. The deeper change must be cultural.

Challenge the idea that procreation is the central purpose of life, especially for women. Speak frankly about the opportunity cost of multiple pregnancies on a woman’s inner and outer growth. Literacy is a decent contraceptive. Wisdom is a far better one. Only an awakened mind, one that has dealt with its core fears, can see that you are not born merely to extend your genetic line. You are born to know who you are, and live freely without false identities and burdens.

The real “population control”

Overpopulation is not only an environmental statistic. It is a measure of how unconsciously we have lived. A planet on which one million species are edging towards extinction, and wildlife populations have dropped by more than two‑thirds in just half a century, is clearly home to too many human beings living in the wrong way.

Yes, the planet is overpopulated. The solution is not panic, coercion or cruelty. The solution is the most demanding thing of all: inner revolution, supported by radical, structural change. Without education that kills the ignorant, consumption‑driven ego, no law, no tax, no demographic chart will save us; with such education, population and consumption begin to fall voluntarily and intelligently.

Yet, the need is immediate. The wealthy must be legally compelled to reduce their footprint now through steeply progressive carbon fees and legal caps on the most wasteful activities—private flights, luxury water use, excessive property—so that law at least restrains the worst expressions of an uneducated ego. This does not replace inner work; it merely creates a little ecological space and time for real education and cultural awakening to happen. This policy enforcement provides the necessary ecological space for the cultural shift to catch up.

If women are free, if men are less afraid, if success is not defined by consumption and if self‑knowledge replaces cultural conditioning, the population will stabilise and then fall. If inner life remains dark, no amount of demographic chart‑making will save us.

The question is no longer whether the Earth can carry more of us. The question is whether we can become the kind of species that this Earth can bear even one more of.

Acharya Prashant
Teacher, founder of the PrashantAdvait Foundation, and author on wisdom literature.