“We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so…either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us.”
David Attenborough
@AlexandruDiacc:
[Greenwashed] is the most horrifying movie I have ever seen. I mean, the fact that everything is true, is happening. And our future will look even worse than any zombie apocalypse movie
@StevePaulSounds:
It’s selfish and evil to have babies bringing a child into this dystopian world with looming disaster from every corner in the next 30 years. Don’t people watch the news or do they all delude themselves into believing they’ll have a baby that will save the world. Am I missing the part where it’s a positive world?
In my view, humans are, for the most part, selfish and cruel, that’s why they have and push for babies (to create something of themselves – not for the baby’s sake, and force suffering on another). The more “modern” or advanced we become, the more cruel we get. Look at the Nazi tech billionaire bros and their vile Nazi AI encouraging mass shootings, complete with detailed instructions on how to get best media coverage of the murders, with Palantir demanding no regulation for AI globally. Add fairy tale religion to the human mix, propagandizing for more and more babies and more and more cruelty (because religions are misogynistic and the most cruel aspect of humanity), Hell is Born again with every human baby born. I saw the true nature of our species before I finished grade school. Vicious. Toxic. I knew there was no fucking way I would or could create a child and force them to suffer the cruelty of humanity and human life, compounded with the suffering caused by our greed and escalating toxic pollution.
Sofia Pineda Ochoa’s documentary Greenwashed contains an image that doesn’t fade: two elephants running in terror, their bodies on fire after people hurled burning objects to drive them away.
After “Hell Is Here”: What Honesty Reveals Next, Why overshoot isn’t just about population—and never was by Lyle Lewis, Apr 29, 2026
After “Hell Is Here”: What Honesty Reveals Next
When I wrote Hell Is Here, I meant every word.
I still do.
Nothing in the months since has softened that conclusion. If anything, the pattern has become clearer, not less.
But there is a risk that comes with clarity.
When a truth finally breaks through—when something we’ve avoided becomes undeniable—the mind looks for a place to anchor it. Something to point to. Something to name as the cause.
Overpopulation becomes that anchor.
And it’s not wrong.
But it’s not the whole structure either.
The Danger of a Single Truth
Overshoot is real.
Biophysical limits are real.
Eight billion high-impact humans cannot exist without consequences that scale beyond anything the biosphere can absorb.
That remains true.
But the system we are inside is not driven by population alone.
It is driven by interactions.
Population interacts with:
- energy systems
- material extraction
- landscape transformation
- water redistribution
- technological amplification
- and the accumulated momentum of decisions made long before any of us were born
Remove one piece, and the system doesn’t reset.
It shifts.
Why “Less” Isn’t a Lever
“Less” is still the most honest word we have.
But it is not a lever we can pull cleanly.
Because “less” doesn’t operate in isolation either.
A declining population in one region doesn’t reduce global pressure if:
- consumption elsewhere expands
- infrastructure continues to scale
- energy throughput increases
- or ecological simplification has already crossed irreversible thresholds
At the same time, increasing efficiency or changing technology doesn’t solve the problem if scale continues to grow.
And even if scale stops growing, a system already in overshoot does not return to balance simply by holding there. Stability at the wrong level is still instability.
This is where most arguments—on all sides—begin to fail.
They assume the system responds proportionally.
It doesn’t.
The Weight of Time
There is another layer that almost never enters these conversations.
Time.
The pressures we are seeing now are not the product of the last few decades.
They are the accumulated result of:
- thousands of years of land use change
- the long simplification of ecosystems
- the loss of megafauna and megaflora
- the restructuring of water systems
- and the steady narrowing of ecological function
- the behavior of a species shaped by millions of years of evolution, now operating at a scale those instincts were never built to navigate
By the time overshoot becomes visible, the system that created it is already deeply embedded.
Which means the question is no longer:
“How do we fix this?”
But:
“What is still structurally possible?”
The Constraint No One Escapes
There is one more layer that sits beneath all of this.
It isn’t population.
It isn’t energy.
It isn’t technology.
It’s us.
We are not outside the system trying to manage it.
We are the dominant force reorganizing it.
Human beings are not wired for long time horizons.
We discount the future.
We respond to immediate rewards.
We expand into available space.
We normalize gradual decline.
We defend what we’ve already built.
We tell ourselves stories that make continuation feel reasonable.
None of this is unusual.
The first impulses are how successful species behave.
The last are how humans make those impulses feel justified.
The problem is scale.
What once allowed small populations to survive and expand now operates at planetary level. The same instincts—growth, competition, short-term optimization, narrative reassurance—no longer just shape local outcomes. They shape the entire biosphere.
That’s why the system doesn’t respond the way we want it to.
It’s not just that the levers are complex.
It’s that the entity pulling them is constrained by what it is.
What Honesty Actually Requires
Honesty does not end with naming overpopulation.
It continues into harder territory.
It requires acknowledging that:
- there is no single variable to reduce
- there is no clean solution waiting to be implemented
- there is no return to a previous state
It requires acknowledging that we are the same species we have always been. We may wear suits and drive automobiles, but we are still operating with instincts shaped in a world of scarcity, expansion, and immediate survival—now expressed at a planetary scale.
We are inside a system already in motion, responding to forces that do not simplify—and a species that cannot.
This is not a retreat from the truth.
It is a deeper version of it.
Seeing the System Clearly
“Hell I
s Here” remains accurate.
But what that hell consists of is not one thing.
It is the convergence of:
scale
structure
momentum
time
and human behaviorcruel greedy raping destructive polluting selfish behaviour, amplified by the vicious cruelties, rapes and destruction of religion. Our species is inhumane.
Population is part of that.
A critical part.
But not an independent one.
The Next Step After Naming
We are not choosing between population, technology, or consumption as “the” answer.
We are navigating a system where all of them are already in motion—
shaped by time,
constrained by structure,
and driven by a species that cannot step outside its own nature.
The setting has changed. The species has not.
The danger isn’t that one side is wrong.
It’s that we keep trying to simplify a system that includes us—
and we are not simple.
If you haven’t read Hell Is Here, start there.
HELL IS HERE: What Greenwashed Reveals About the Truth We’re Not Allowed to Say by Lyle Lewis, December 13, 2025
Refer also to:
@race2extinct.bsky.social:
Money can’t buy water that isn’t there.
I heard somewhere that someone turned water into wine. Maybe the same guy can turn dirt into water? How is that for delusionally optimistic?
2026 US Palmer Drought Severity Index is worse than the dirty thirties, with El Niño ahead .. mega wildfires, crop failures (if farmers can get fertilizers and put in crops) and much more horrific suffering ahead. Only thing I did right in my life, was have no kids.
Too funny, the science and truth haters in cartoon above look like Alberta’s separatists!
No humane being would frac, or pimp CCS, or engage in space travel, etc. etc.