Theoretically the world has a far greater carrying capacity, given human ingenuity. But how enjoyable is it for an essentially biophilic species to be living in an ever more polluted and claustrophobic human constructed environment, with little engagement with nature. Some people don't seem to mind it as it is better than alternatives. For provincial Chinese it might beat the periodic famines and disease of the last century. Still you have to wonder where they would be without the one child policy, whether any of this urbanization would even be feasible - and whether Erhlichs predictions wouldn't have been more accurate had they not been acted on.
I have been watching David Attenborough docos with my kids lately. Have found myself amazed that when he talks about "massive populations" of animals it might mean 200,000 in the case of snow geese, or 10,000 in the case of large mammals, in some cases the numbers are just in the tens, compare this to seven billion humans. This applies to so many well known species - the majority aside from the domesticated and vermin. Here's a story predicting the extinction of rhino in the wild by the year 2025 because the price of rhino horn has exploded and now more valuable than gold. Another China based commodity boom story ...
I guess strictly speaking we don't need these animals to survive, no point getting too sentimental.
But rather than famine and mass extermination, the real story is huge rises in agricultural commodity prices, riots and civil wars in countries where they matter, mass immigration from these regions, and environmental degradation in commodity producing nations and elsewhere. China has had the advantage of being able to import its resource needs from surplus in the rest of the world, and it at least has an upper limit on its population.
Will the same apply to other countries who failed to put a lid on population growth? Because we haven't yet reached a limit that someone famously said we would, will that always be true? Even if we could technically survive with a much larger population - is this desirable?
