The coffee table book of doom! Do more people mean more trouble for the planet?

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Overdevelopment Overpopulation Overshoot

JUST IN TIME for the 45th anniversary of Earth Day, populationspeakout.org got into the business of reviving good old-fashioned doomsaying.

The organization issued a large-format 316-page coffee table book, Overdevelopment Overpopulation Overshoot, filled with spectacular photographs intended to alarm people about the problems created by growing human numbers. In fact, if you agree to scare your friends and neighbors the group will send you a copy as a free premium to display on your coffee table.

The book, edited by Tom Butler of the Foundation for Deep Ecology, opens with a photo of giant Easter Island moai statues depicting "a civilization that overshot the land's carrying capacity." This is not an auspicious beginning. The parable of Easter Island ecocide--in which a small territory is overwhelmed by furiously multiplying humans--has been thrown into question by recent research demonstrating that it was European disease and enslavement, not population-driven warfare, that spurred that society's demographic collapse.

To alarm readers about overdevelopment and overpopulation, Butler chooses a Google Earth aerial photograph of the New Delhi city grid to make the point that human beings are now "urban animals." The caption notes that the city has an average population density of 30,000 per square mile. Sounds bad, right? Not when you consider that the population density of Brooklyn averages 35,000 people per square mile. Manhattan's population density today is 70,000 people per square mile, down from 87,000 per square mile in 1910.

Butler is right that humanity is urbanizing. The United Nations estimates that 54 percent of the world's people now live in cities and that the percentage will increase to around 80 by 2050. But this is good news, not bad. Urban dwellers have greater access to education, medicine, and market opportunities, and they have fewer kids. Meanwhile, reducing the number of people tearing up the landscape as hardscrabble subsistence farmers ultimately means that more land can be set aside for nature.

In fact, recent research by Jesse Ausubel and his colleagues at the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University finds that humanity may have reached peak farmland. Agricultural productivity per acre is improving faster than the demand for food; as a result, fewer acres are needed to grow crops.

These trends suggest that as much as 400 million hectares could be restored to nature by 2060, an area nearly...