What if I told you that every human being possessed the power to stop the destruction of our planet?

That, through simple action that everyone could commit to, we could not just reduce but entirely cease our consumption of the planet’s limited resources? No environmentalists or ecologists talk about it, but you don’t need to be a scientist or an advocate to understand how effective this one simple thing is.

This trick? It’s called suicide.

Now, to be clear, I am not seriously, honestly advocating for suicide. If you or someone you know has suicidal feelings, please get help. Instead, I want you to understand one simple thing about our relationship with the environment: all the damage we do to the environment is because of our population. At the most fundamental level, there are 7.5 billion human beings on Earth who consume an average of 1500-2000 calories per day. That is 15 trillion calories that we need to produce every day to just feed those people who already exist.

It doesn't matter where we get these calories from. Paradoxically, industrial farming is actually the best way to feed the masses. Industrial farming requires less land, fertilizer, herbicide, and energy to produce more calories. GMO's can increase our efficiency even further than that, and also expand the areas in which we can grow essential crops like cereals. Organic farming is roundly worse for the environment when scaled up to a practical level, making it at best a bourgeois fad - a fact which trendy environmentalists desperately try to ignore, citing alternative facts and small-scale, incomplete analyses of organic farm performance (keyword: nitrogen fixing).

But the simple issue remains that the earth has a limited ability to support (feed) more humans. In ecological terms this is called "carrying capacity", and while the numbers people have used vary greatly (ranging from 2 to 40 billion people) depending on techniques used to calculate it and technologies accounted for, it is safe to say that it is a finite number that we will soon reach at our current rate of growth.

The boons of population reduction are many, as the Church of Euthanasia can attest. In the developed world, where living standards are high (lots of meat consumption, energy and fossil fuel usage, etc.), each life has a much higher impact on the planet than one life in the developing world. Conversely, however, the developing world is far more populous (more people means more food required) and has a much higher birth rate.

If we take 75 years to be an average human lifespan, and that person eats 2000 calories per day, that's 55 million calories which could be saved by choosing to not have children. In the developed world that would also save the energy equivalent of 300 tons of oil, and in developing countries where rapid population growth is a huge and ongoing crisis it could bring a better future that much closer.

Of course, it's not reasonable to suggest that people commit suicide en masse. It's also unhelpful to simply just say "stop having children" when that problem is more complex than choice alone. So what would we have to do if we seriously want to reduce the world population? Better access to education for women in developing countries is huge, as well as the availability of contraceptives and the removal of cultural and religious barriers to their usage.

In developed countries where the population is already beginning to decline further advances could be made by establishing incentives programs for not having children - though refraining from reproducing already has its benefits - and making intelligent choices as consumers. That means: buy as many GMO's as you possibly can, buy food from the most efficient industrial farms, and consider installing solar panels on your home. Avoid buying resource-intensive luxury goods (avocados and almonds, for example) and preplan meals to let less food go to waste. It's okay to fly- flying is actually more fuel-efficient per-person, per-mile than driving- but a general maxim to go by is all things in moderation.

Human beings, and the livestock we have, are the most populous large animals on earth. No other animal species of similar size and resource requirements has anything approaching the numbers we do. Ultimately, the issues we face are rooted in our massive population, rather than specific activities like industrial farming and fossil fuel usage. And while improving farming techniques and transitioning to green energy (like nuclear power) on a massive scale are important, they alone will not go far enough towards solving the issues facing our world.

Save the planet. Don't have children.