It's not how many we are, it's how we're organized.

• Author: Dodson, Edward J.
• Position: From Readers - Letter to the Editor

Thomas Prugh and Erik Assadourian make a strong case fur a reduction in the human footprint upon the Earth. As they point out, "BounD' is taken for granted, especially by those societies in which the hallucination of limitless wealth is sustained by importing carrying capacity from elsewhere."

Ironically, one of the great threats to the Earth's ecology is that in much of the world, population growth is slowing. In his 1999 book, Gray Dawn, Peter Peterson asked, how will the needs of a huge elderly population be met when fewer and fewer adults will be working, producing goods and services, and paying taxes? A resurgent birth rate is hardly the solution. Yet, that is exactly how some governments are responding--by providing incentives for families to have more children.

In my view,, the need to stabilize and reduce human population is not a validation of Malthusian forecasts. The problem is not the size of the human population itself. Rather, it is that the mass of people are prevented from securing a decent human existence by the manner in which human societies are organized.

An atmosphere of scarcity, whether natural or artificially contrived, tends to reduce our cooperative behavior and exacerbate conflict. Here we arc in the...