The first sunburn of the year always feels like a mistake you should’ve seen coming. You stay on the beach a little too long, convinced your winter skin can take it, and by nightfall, you’re radiating heat like a broken stove. That’s overshoot: going beyond limits, not on purpose, but because you didn’t recognize where the line was until it burned you.

It happens everywhere, every day. You down too many espressos before an exam, and your hands shake uncontrollably. You crank the thermostat in mid-winter, only to sleep with the windows wide open hours later. You pile your plate at an all-you-can-eat buffet and realize halfway through the meal that your body has no intention of finishing what your appetite promised. We all overshoot, often enough that we’ve learned to deal with it — like when we test the water before stepping into the shower. Most of the time, the damage is trivial: a sunburn, a hangover, a bad night’s sleep.

Scale that pattern up to the entire planet, though, and the consequences may turn brutal.

Sustainable living requires staying within the regenerative capacity of the biosphere. In 1961, our collective footprint used 70% of Earth’s capacity. By the end of the 20th century, we had blown past 120%. Today, our species devours the equivalent of 1.8 Earths every year. One planet, drained at almost twice its rate of regeneration. We are the shrimp-red sunbather, the trembling caffeine addict, the party-goer having one too many drinks — except this time, there’s no morning after to recover.

Today, our species devours the equivalent of 1.8 Earths every year (Source: Earth Overshoot Day)

Overshoot follows the same recipe at any scale: rapid change and growth, hard limits beyond which the system can’t safely go, and a dangerous delay in recognizing you’ve gone too far. These three are necessary and sufficient.

The change may be technological — an accelerating adoption beyond the available resources. It may be ecological — expansion of farmland into fragile ecosystems that cannot sustain intensive farming. It may be social — a continuously expanding network of connections and consumption that fragments attention and strains real relationships.

The limits are just as diverse — defined by carrying capacity, by regeneration rate, by thresholds of human adaptation, or other physical, biological, or psychological features of a system.

The delays, too, arise in many ways: ignored warning signs, outdated information, moving too slowly, getting tangled in red tape, or misunderstanding how things work. This delay is the killer. A body that doesn’t register that extra drink until it’s too late. Politicians that don’t act on carbon thresholds even decades after climate scientists have sounded the alarm. By then, momentum locks us into trajectories we can’t easily reverse.

Overshoot has only two exits: collapse or correction.

A crash when limits slam back. Or a deliberate, careful easing down. And right now, we’re still accelerating toward the wall, burning through more than one planet at a time.

And today, the forces shaping our minds, beliefs, and decisions — media, governments, corporations — want us to believe that the cure to humanity’s overshoot is something that’s been in the works for over half a century: that the world population stops growing, as if sheer numbers alone were the lever that could pull us back from collapse.

It isn’t.

Folding The Sheet

Take a sheet of paper and fold it in half. Then again. Then again. With each fold, it thickens: 2, 4, 8, 16 layers. Before long, it’s impossible to bend further — it has physical limits. That’s growth: simple doubling, carried to its breaking point.

Growth is also the altar we’ve been told to kneel at. Bigger houses, faster cars, fatter economies, more jobs, more stuff. The story goes that growth means progress, and progress means life gets better. Governments call it progress. Corporations call it prosperity. And it has indeed delivered: vaccines, highways, electricity, and for a while, it looked like the only tool sharp enough to cut poverty down to size. That’s how growth became so sacred that we treat it like oxygen: unquestionable, essential, and celebrated.

But blind pursuit of growth is a boomerang: it circles back, heavier, and smashes the hand that threw it, making most of those problems worse.

Because, hello!, the Earth is finite.

For the past century, humanity has been folding the sheet of every physical thing with reckless abandon. Population, possessions, cars (combustion or electric, doesn’t matter) — doubled, redoubled, multiplied.

Today, the limits we face aren’t the number of people, cars, anything, in isolation. They’re the throughput — the relentless flow of energy and materials required to keep all those people, cars, and industries running. Extraction on one side, waste and pollution on the other. How fast we can rip minerals from the ground and forests from the soil. How much carbon and poison we can pump into the atmosphere, rivers, and landfills. Growth collides not just with physical boundaries but with the regenerative absorptive capacities of the world’s sinks (atmosphere, surface water bodies, landfills), the very systems we depend on.

Money In The Jar vs. A Multiplying Grain Of Rice

Most of us imagine growth as linear — add a mile of highway every week, save a few dollars in a jar every year. Manageable. Predictable. Not dependent on how much of the factor has already accumulated.

Now, think of this Persian legend: a courtier presented a beautiful chessboard to his king, asking for it one grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard, two on the second, four on the third. By the 21st square, the demand was already over a million grains. By the 41st, a trillion. By the 64th, more rice than the planet could produce. That’s how exponential growth blindsides us — it looks manageable, until suddenly it isn’t.

Weather extremes, economic fluctuations, technical change, epidemics, or civil disruption may impose small ups and downs on the curves, but on the whole, the modern human socioeconomic system is built on this doubling machine. Three percent annual economic growth sounds harmless until you realize it means doubling the size of the economy every 23 years. There is a relationship between the rate of growth, the factor that has already accumulated, and the time it will take a quantity to double.

Population and capital fuel this acceleration.

Money making more money, fossil fuels enabling more machines to extract more fossil fuels, people demanding more and more, push the line steeper in a self-reproducing, growth-oriented fashion, no matter how close the edge.

And remember, overshoot has only two exits:

• Option 1: Controlled slowdown — We consciously bringing the throughputs that support human activities down to sustainable levels through better choices, and reorganizing how we live and work.
• Option 2: Crash into the wall — We keep accelerating until nature forces a painful correction through resource depletion (running out of food, energy, materials) or through climate feedback loops that spiral beyond our control. Exhibit A: sea ice vanishes in the summer heat, exposing dark ocean water that absorbs sunlight instead of reflecting it, which bakes the poles faster, melting even more ice. The planet’s reflective shield transforms into heat-trapping armor, the snake eats its tail, and suddenly the whole circle is on fire.

Yes, humanity has managed to pull back before. The Montreal Protocol is proof that cooperation and foresight can avert disaster. But that story is the exception, not the rule — and it illustrates the three ingredients of overshoot perfectly: rapid growth (in ozone-killing chemicals), hard limits (a thinning atmosphere), and deadly delays (scientific warnings ignored for years).

Which leaves us here: facing the first cause of overshoot — runaway growth — in a finite world. And still, we’re told the problem isn’t the throughput, the obscene levels of consumption of a species folding the same sheet of paper, pretending it will never tear. We’re told it’s just the number of people. That if population growth slows, the crisis will vanish.

It won’t.

The Vanishing Lineage

My name is Ricardo. So was my father’s. And his father’s. And his father’s. Four generations of Ricardos, each inheriting not just a name but the weight of continuity.

But here the tradition stops. My great-grandfather had seven siblings. My grandfather had 13. My father had four. I have one sister — and the neighbours’ dog I sometimes babysit. That’s the end of the line.

The pyramid has flipped, but my family isn’t the exception — more like the perfect example of our historical population growth.

In 1600, the world held half a billion people, with a doubling time of nearly 240 years. By 1900, it was 1.6 billion, with a doubling time of about 100 years. By 1965, when the population was at 3.3 billion, the doubling time had gone down to almost a third, or about 36 years. The number of people in the world grew not only exponentially from 1600, but in fact superexponentially — the rate of growth was itself growing, and for a cheerful reason: death rates were falling. Birth rates were also falling, but more slowly. Therefore, the population surged.

Between 1965 and 2000, Earth’s population nearly doubled from 3.3 billion to 6 billion people, but the pace of growth actually fell from 2 to 1.2 percent per year. Today, with over 8.2 billion of us sharing the planet, we’re still adding about 70 million people yearly (roughly the population of Thailand), but that growth is steadily losing momentum.

As seen with the Ricardos’ lineage, Fertility rates have been falling for more than 50 years. The global average hovers just above replacement (the threshold needed to maintain a steady population) at 2.2. Anything above the 2.1 threshold will theoretically generate exponential expansion, and anything below it will generate exponential decay. So small changes in these numbers can have strong effects. If each pair of adults only has 1.5 children on average, our population would shrink by two-thirds every century. Well, by 2050, three-quarters of countries will fall below it.

The slope has turned into a demographic cliff.

The drivers are everywhere: contraception, money stress, declining sperm counts, shifting social norms, women reclaiming autonomy, even porn reshaping desire. Governments now beg for babies, dangling cash, housing, or tax breaks like coupons nobody redeems.

But the silence is spreading. Playgrounds are quieter than they used to be, and schools are consolidating classrooms.

China’s population might already have peaked around 2022, at 1.4 billion. India’s could do the same in the early 2060s, reaching 1.7 billion before declining. Cuba is projected to lose over 15% of its population by 2050. Even the Nordic countries — long celebrated as models of gender equality, family-friendly policies, and social cohesion — are seeing their birth rates steadily decline.

Map of the year that the net reproduction rate falls below the replacement level (Source: Fertility, mortality, migration, and population scenarios for 195 countries and territories from 2017 to 2100)

But no country illustrates this like South Korea. Its fertility rate plummeted from 4.5 in 1970 to 0.72 in 2024 — the lowest on Earth. Daycares are now nursing homes. Dog strollers outsell those for children. By 2100, the country’s population is expected to be half of what it is today.

Meanwhile, sub-Saharan Africa is the notable exception. Nigeria had 36 million people in 1950, 125 million in 2000, and over 223 million today. By 2050, it’s set to grow another 76%, vaulting into the world’s top three. By century’s end, more than half the world’s babies may be born there, in a region with some of the weakest health systems and most fragile food supplies.

Rich countries are like families with a fully-paid house, savings accounts, and steady jobs. They’ve got their basic needs covered, so they can invest extra money in growing their wealth rather than just keeping the lights on. With fewer kids to raise, they can focus resources on economic growth instead of building more schools and hospitals. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle of prosperity.

On the other hand, poorer countries must use most of their resources just to provide the basic needs for their growing populations. With little left for economic development, they stay trapped in slow growth. When women lack education and job opportunities, having children becomes one of their few available investments for the future. The result is a growing population without growing prosperity.

Like the old saying goes: “The rich get richer and the poor get children.”

Sure, we are living longer. But the demographic future is a ticking recalibration of what it means to build, age, work, love, retire, or even exist in a functioning society.

We were promised collapse by overcrowding. However, the panic about too many people is giving way to a quieter fear: what happens when the population pyramid flips, and the weight of our systems sits on a shrinking base?

Global population is projected to peak at around 10.3 billion in the next 30–60 years, then decline — one of the first such declines since the Black Death in the 1300s.

Then, what does that mean?
The end of the world or the solution to our overshooting problems?

There’s Only One Reason For Overshoot

So yes, you might be tempted to cheer falling birth rates as a win. Fewer people, fewer emissions, fewer mouths. A tidy solution for overshoot, right?

Not exactly.

Just because two things happen at the same time (population growth and planetary overshoot) doesn’t mean one directly causes the other. Sure, population growth does contribute to ecological strain. But depopulation doesn’t fix climate change. It doesn’t bring back forests, or reverse extinction, or dismantle inequality. Especially when driven not by sustainability but by anxiety, precarity, and burnout.

We’ve been fed that “people are the problem.” However, this narrative conveniently blames newborns — especially the poor, Black, rural, and southern — while an oppressive, predatory minority consumes like emperors and demands the rest of us keep the furnaces roaring. We would need more than five Earths if everyone lived like people living in the United States, but just 0.7 if we lived like Nigerians. But hey, let’s put the blame on the rising population, just like blaming a crowded bus for traffic while ignoring the single-passenger luxury SUVs taking up most of the road.

So why does the myth keep coming back?

Because it’s simple. Because it feels scientific. Because it lets the systems off the hook — the supply chains, the fossil fuels, the billionaires, the borders, the bankers. And because, for over a century, population control has been a proxy war: a polite veneer over fear of race, class, migration, and control. “Too many people” has become an embedded scapegoat in our beliefs, while the real wreckers profit and pollute.

And so, generation after generation, the lie survives. Blaming poverty on family size while ignoring colonial theft. Blaming instability on fertility rates while propping up authoritarian policies. Even Nature’s latest coverage avoids fossil fuels and consumption habits and instead speaks about resilience and adaptation, and begs for “a stable economy.”

Seriously?

The only reason for overshoot is what a powerful slice of humanity is doing with an outsized portion of our energy — and intends to keep doing so. Globally, the top 10% of emitters are responsible for almost half of global energy-related CO2 emissions, compared with a mere 0.2% for the bottom 10%. Even more, the world’s top 1% of emitters produce over 1000 times more CO2 than the bottom 1%. And still, our imagination is so colonized that we’d rather force women to have fewer children than force billionaires to have fewer yachts.

The top 10% is responsible for almost half of the worlds emissions (Source: IEA)

Depopulation without dismantling the fossil-fueled, profit-driven machine is only a conveniently engineered distraction. Fewer people won’t fix a damn thing if power and wealth keep flowing uphill. Because when the pie shrinks, inequality only scales.

The “population problem” was never about numbers. It was about control. About misdirection. About turning wombs into sacrifices for wars, oil fields, and profit.

Some lies are so pervasively effective, they just need to be repeated often enough until they become the truth.

We don’t need to shrink humanity to save the planet. We need to tear up the script.

So be loud.