I appreciate this counterpoint. There are a couple of quantitative points and persistence points to consider. I think it was Raj Patel who said, "Crying 'OVERPOPULATION!' is yet another means of shifting blame from the rich to the poor." This is a psychological point, but it becomes physical when we ask how many resources are being used by the poorest vs the richer middle and top, and what part of those resources are going toward improving places' natural and anthropocentric needs for the long term. Competitive toxicities (communism vs capitalism) are too often creating battles where none are needed, but cooperation with soil and water is desperately needed. The current rate of resource depletion and contamination is directly connected to a blind faith in competitive monetization (knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing, and fighting over it). The coercion of advertising algorithms is putting contempt, paranoia and wasteful economics at the top of the news (war sells). People believe the stock market is more important than clean water to drink. They actually believe good education and health are luxuries that uncompetitive poor people shouldn't be able to afford.

Meanwhile, our grandchildren wonder why so many rich people have so many cars and houses, but their classmates live in boxes on the street. We have made most traditional jobs obsolete by replacing people with oil and tech, but we haven't done much of anything to encourage humans to be useful to their places or each other. This competitive consumptionism is digging up good farmland to plant expensive houses in places that have no need for people at all. The greatest proportion of resources is being applied to making people competitively useless to each other's future, and then using the psychological feelings of inadequacy to sell each other crap they don't need. Resource husbandry is not zero sum. When people cooperate to improve soil fertility and watershed stability, the population will take care of itself. When the only path is competitive extraction, there is no viable population number.