[url=http://rabble.ca/babble/environmental-justice/great-question-over-popula... from this thread-chunk[/url]. (Thanks, oldgoat, for the buzzkill on a very important discussion topic.)
Here is a repeat of my last post in the other thread:
It doesn't matter that humans can't live in "balance" with nature (in a strict physical sense). All life forms "use up" resources to some degree. In the long run, the heat death of the universe will mean that all life forms will cease to be, and entropy will prevail.
The question for us today is how do we organize ourselves so that we can survive comfortably in the meantime. We will obviously use up some non-renewable resources, but we can work to minimize that once we get rid of the profit imperative that drives capitalism; as a society we could make choices about how we will consume resources based on considerations other than private accumulation of wealth. We can choose to rely on renewable resources and renewable energies (i.e., those that are ultimately replenished by energy from the Sun, or gravity, or from the Earth's core as it continues to cool). That's not going to happen, however, in any society other than one organized on socialist principles.
The Earth receives enormous amounts of energy from the Sun. Only a fraction of it gets used up by humans; there is plenty of solar energy if we figure out how to use it. Ironically, it is energy from the Sun, trapped on the biosphere, that is powering global warming, which will in the long run kill us from an excess of such energy, if we don't find ways to put the Sun's bountiful energy into life-giving, rather than life-destroying uses.