A few days ago I was reading 
I've recently been watching an anime with my daughter called Dr Stone. In the anime, a strange wave has swept across the world turning all humans to stone. 3700 years pass and a highschool science enthusiast, Senku, is the first to break out of the stone into what is now, essentially, a stone age world. He figures out what helped to dissolve his stone casing and starts to revive others by mixing together a solution which speeds the process up. One of the earlier people revived is martial artist named Tsukasa who helps to protect the science nerd and his pacifist friend and girlfriend from a pride of lions which now roam Japan.
One day Senku finds Tsukasa destroying some statues, essentially killing the people within as they can no longer be revived alive. Tsukasa’s reasoning is that he doesn't want the adults revived and a return to the world of greed they had before. He believes that as soon as they wake up, those who had power and property will claim ownership of the areas they decide they still own and stop everyone else from hunting and gathering on it. He also believes that advancing scientifically will lead to the same point of being destructive to the environment and loss of freedom. Senku can't agree that killing is the right thing to do and takes a stand that he'll revive everyone and use science to return to the world they used to have.
After attacking Senku and leaving him dead, Tsukasa starts to revive his chosen people and form a tribe, with him as the leader, while continuing to smash the undesirable statutes. Senku survives and finds a village of people who are descendants of a small group who were in space at the time of the petrification. As Senku starts to gain the trust of the village, using science to assist and heal them, Tsukasa discovers he's still alive and prepares to attack the village.
Knowing how I value freedom and the natural world, my daughter asked me which path I'd choose. Would I pick and choose who I revived like Tsukasa, or revive everyone? My answer to her was I'd revive everyone, because as much as I agree with Tsukasa's sentiments, in the end human nature always brings us to the same place. Even Tsukasa himself has become the very person he claims to be wanting to stop as he dictates who gets to live or die and commands his own area of land. He wants to control everything for his own ends and in his mind he is acting out of love, but is he saving the Earth by doing this? Maybe he is in his way, after all, he's limiting the human population.
Another epiphany I had recently was while watching the series Vikings. I suddenly realised exactly why the world's population has exploded. I've realised for a long time it's not as simple as better healthcare and food. I now see that it actually takes an awful lot of deaths to keep the population in check. Back then you faced famine, sickness, plagues, childbirth and...well, other people, basically. It’s almost as if life had no value unless it was your own. Tribes and villages regularly fought over resources and land. Human and animal sacrifice helped bring fertility to the land. After all, if the harvest fails then you won't be able to feed everyone anyway, so why not offer others to the gods? If you don't trust someone or disagree with them, the problem is easily solved by killing them. Even cannibalism was rife in many cultures across the world. You don't let food go to waste in times of need, so it became almost ritualistic for some.
Over time we've grown in empathy as a race. The majority of us have stopped eating each other (we've had the odd modern cannibal, though). We still argue and disagree, but we no longer kill one another over it, most of the time (war excepted). Food can now be farmed for higher yields than nature provides and we make an effort to try and see that no-one goes without, mostly.
Now I reach another conundrum as I'm torn between revelling in how wonderful it is that the empathy of the human race has grown so far that we are heading for a population of 8 billion people on the planet and the realisation that our enmity towards one other actually helped to keep our population in check for thousands of years, as horrific as it sounds. In fact, even in the Viking period, around 800 AD, the population was still increasing, if you can believe it. The advent of agriculture seems to have played a big part in survival rates, so even that much death still wasn't keeping our population static.
The other day I overheard a YouTube video my husband was listening to, which pointed out that the amount of silver going to supply solar panels and electric vehicles means that we're likely to run dry very quickly. The price of copper is set to soar to create all those motors needed for electric vehicles and that could also end up a pretty scarce metal. This “periodic table” of elements made two years ago shows just how rapidly some of our elements are diminishing.
So we face another conundrum, as we try to work towards sustainable energy and retaining our way of living without further harming the planet, with the realisation that the Earth may still not have enough to give at our current population level for us to retain the standard of living that the western world is used to.
The truth is, we're reaching a breaking point. Can we sustain our growing population while allowing nature to regenerate and preventing further damage? In theory we can, but it would take the majority of the population to act. We'd need to choose to monitor everything that we're doing which impacts on nature and then choose to stop doing that. Most of all, and I know a lot of people don't want to hear this, we need to choose not to have as many children, because at the rate we're going, even if we did all devolve to live simpler lifestyles, we're going to reach a tipping point.
We now have the knowledge and intelligence to be able to see our impacts and what our choices can do to this planet we live on, so in theory we can make changes, but the truth is not enough of us are going to make those changes for it to make a difference. We see others around us enjoying better lives by not doing anything and wonder why we're bothering.
Of course the other way to save the Earth would be a drastic population reduction and no, I'm not advocating that, but there are people who are in positions of power who are. If they decide to act then there may not be an awful lot we can do about it and sterilizing us may well be the kindest approach they take. The good news is that population growth is slowing, but is it slowing fast enough for those in power to not take drastic action on the behalf of this mass of earth that keeps us alive?