Do we, as an earth ecosystem, have too many people? Maybe that is the wrong question, Jared Diamond is urging us to consider. In his interview on Living on Earth earlier this year (mp3), as well as a New York Times Op-Ed, he suggests that it ain’t the people, it’s the consuming.

[W]e’ve got the equivalent, not of the six and a half billion people we can’t support now but the equivalent of 72 billion people who we won’t be able to support even faster.

America and the rest of the so-called “first world” (Western Europe, Japan, Australia) have produced the consumption template which many other people around the world are trying to use. India, Brazil, China, Russia, Argentina, Vietnam, the entire Middle East, Nigeria, and so on, have images in their heads and on their buildings of success, happiness, and a worthy life, and all of it has to do with using more stuff.

One wonders what it would take to internalize and act on these facts on large scale, rather than individually and occasionally. Is there something which could actually create adequate counter-force to the inertia of creeping worldwide consumerism? That exercise is left for the reader.