The wealthy class is destroying nature, but as a solution it proposes reducing the number of poor people.

People have dealt a devastating blow to Earth’s biosphere over the past decades — wildlife populations have declined by 73%, meaning that the remaining 27% are now struggling to survive under human pressure. Human beings themselves have already transgressed seven of the nine planetary boundaries, the very boundaries that define the planet’s life-support systems. Put simply, scientists identified these planetary boundaries long ago as the conditions within which life on Earth can remain viable, but if we cross them, our own safe habitat will cease to exist.

That is correct: by destroying the living world around us, we will ultimately drive ourselves to extinction as well; modern civilization will simply commit collective suicide, and Earth will have to begin all over again — rebuilding life through millions of years of evolutionary history, piecing back together, fragment by fragment, everything that humanity has destroyed.

You and I are trying, by our own efforts, to slow this madness right now, but beyond that, we are also proposing a real and effective plan to prevent the crisis from deepening further. In essence, our Concept of the Territories of Full Ecological Tranquility (TFET) is a “global safety fuse” that must be triggered in order to halt the destruction of the biosphere and give humanity time to rebuild the entire world system.

But within today’s capitalist system, a tiny percentage of people hold dominant power, and they are proposing something entirely different as a solution to stabilize the crisis — reducing the human population. They blame the destruction of nature on the bulk of humanity, arguing that it is necessary to get rid of the poor and, in their view, unnecessary people. These are precisely the people who actively promote the idea that the planet is overpopulated today!

Recently, I wrote an article about a new scientific analysis published in March 2026 under the title “Human population exceeded Earth’s sustainable carrying capacity” — a very strong piece of work that compiles data from global scientific research, including evidence on planetary boundary overshoot. Many people, after reading my publication, did not fully understand the meaning of that scientific analysis. The reason is that it emphasizes one central point: planetary boundaries are influenced not so much by population size as by the capitalist system that has been constructed — a system based entirely on overconsumption and imposed as if it were the only possible paradigm for everyone. That is the key driver of the crisis.

People correctly pointed out to me in letters that if you took the entire population of Earth and placed everyone side by side, it would occupy no more than the area of a city. And people ask: “Can the planet really not sustain that many people and feed us?”

Indeed, according to UN data, the world population currently stands at 8.2 billion people. If we allocate 1 m² for every 4 people, that amounts to only about 2,050 km² of land area — for comparison, Moscow covers about 2.6 thousand km², which means that the entire population of the planet could fit into an area equal to roughly 0.79 of Moscow’s total size.

But this is the wrong way to think if we are talking about planetary boundary transgression. To assess the ecological crisis by how much physical space a human being occupies is roughly the same as assessing cancer by the size of a tumor in the arm and saying: “It is not that large, so it is not dangerous for the body.” I think physicians would confirm that in medicine, danger is determined not only, and not even primarily, by the geometric size of a lesion, but by its systemic effects: tissue destruction, metabolic disruption, involvement of blood vessels and organs, and the spread of the pathological process throughout the body. The same principle applies to the biosphere. This is critically important to understand so that the problem is not distorted.

Humanity as a collection of bodies does indeed occupy a relatively small space. But humanity as a technosphere occupies incomparably more: cities, roads, quarries, fields, dams, clear-cuts, energy systems, landfills, transport infrastructure, chemical pollution, water extraction, soil destruction, and the breakdown of biological relationships. In our case, the scale of the threat is defined not by the “area occupied by a human being,” but by the depth of systemic intervention into the planet’s living fabric.

Just as a small tumor can prove fatal to an organism, a human civilization that is relatively compact in area can still be destructive to the entire biosphere. And if, at the everyday level, we keep distorting this reality — denying modern scientific data in the process — then the crisis will only deepen, and no real solution will follow.

We must collectively move from subjectivity toward an objective understanding of the world.

Therefore, the main problem in today’s planetary crisis is the existing system of consumption, which has in effect become an ideology promoted by a small handful of those who build and control that system.

And here is what they say:

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (the husband of Queen Elizabeth II), who died in 2021, said the following:

“In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solving overpopulation.”

“I would prefer that humanity voluntarily limited its numbers…”

In general, Philip said many correct things in his writings. He understood ecological problems and the growing crisis. But he was a representative of the elite, and he looked at all of this through the prism of protecting the capitalist system, while placing the blame for the planetary crisis on ordinary people.

And I know that, based on superficial phrases alone, many people would agree with representatives of the wealthy class. It sounds reasonable, does it not? We ourselves often see comments from ordinary people saying things like, “If only a deadly virus would come and wipe out humanity,” and sentiments of that kind. From that same perspective, Bill Gates’s statement also sounds logical. I quote:

“When our foundation first started, it was focused on reproductive health. That was the main thing we did because I thought population growth in poor countries was the biggest problem they had.”

Population growth is the biggest problem in poor countries — not the capitalist system that has been constructed. So the problem, supposedly, is that “people are reproducing too quickly”?

CNN founder Ted Turner went even further, stating that climate change comes down to the fact that “we have too many people,” and he advocated measures such as China’s “one-child policy.”

Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank, also once declared population growth to be more dangerous than thermonuclear war.

“This is a problem of population growth. In the absence of thermonuclear war, it is the greatest single problem facing the world in the coming decades. Indeed, in many ways uncontrolled population growth is a greater danger to world peace than thermonuclear war because it is less subject to rational control and less easy to direct toward rational ends.”

The 37th President of the United States, Richard Nixon, stated the following in a special message to Congress:

“Population growth is a world problem that no country can ignore.”

Once again, the growing size of the population is presented as the main danger. The 42nd President of the United States, William Clinton, also supported his earlier colleague and, in a special remark to the National Academy of Sciences, mentioned the need to slow population growth. Other U.S. presidents advanced similar arguments as well — almost as though there were a single agenda for every occasion. Jimmy Carter, for example, the 39th President of the United States, said the following in his Message to Congress on the Environment:

“Rapid population growth is one of the most serious environmental problems of the world. During the past 15 years the world’s population has grown from three billion to four billion people, greatly offsetting increases in world food production and economic growth during the same period.

Without effective control of population growth, the prospects for providing enough food, housing, and other basic necessities for all the people of the world are dim. Where human existence is already marginal and insecure, efforts to provide for basic human needs often lead to further deterioration of the environment for future generations.”

In general, the problem as defined by the wealthy class is, undeniably, that there are too many people. Softly, cautiously, and with carefully chosen “politically correct” language, they all converge on the same point: the Earth’s population must be reduced, and then, apparently, no serious problems will remain.

Who is destroying the world?

What is “capitalism,” after all? It is a system built around capital accumulation through constant market expansion, production growth, and profit extraction. Capital, as we know, tends to concentrate: those who already possess property, assets, access to credit, technology, and markets gain an advantage over those who live solely by their labor. This allows wealth and influence to flow upward over time. And once concentration becomes sufficiently high, wealth turns into political power — a power capable of influencing laws, taxes, media, and even the scientific agenda itself: whatever serves our interests, we lobby for. Any system, even the most democratic one, begins to serve not the majority but the owners of these resources.

In real terms, one could say that the wealthy class separates itself from the poor and builds around itself the very capitalist system that secures and defines its wealth. Its power.

Where financial return is the sole criterion of success, healthcare, education, housing, transport, forests, water, soils, and even information begin to be treated as commodities. And any decision, even when wrapped in rhetoric about “public necessity,” is in fact made exclusively according to the principle of profitability. Anything that is not profitable is simply not funded and is ignored, while everything that can be sold receives systemic support. This is exactly where the main drivers of biosphere destruction emerge — protection of nature does not generate profit, so it interests no one, and any real concern for the world around us does not matter in the slightest to the capitalist system that has been constructed.

More than that, this system is directly interested in having large numbers of sick people, chronic illness, and so forth. That is how major corporations enrich themselves through the sale of health insurance, the production of drugs that cause dependence and are nearly impossible to stop taking (which means you become a permanent customer), and so on.

For capital, living nature appears only as a source of raw materials and a free waste dump. That is precisely why the capitalist system created and maintained today is quite literally devouring the biosphere faster than it can regenerate. That is what the scientists in the analysis I mentioned earlier were trying to convey.

Endless growth in material consumption inevitably collides with the limits of ecosystems. That limit is exactly where we now stand.

At the same time, in studying extensive scientific data, I do not see any research establishing a real permissible human population in the form of a precise universal number. Any such “norms” in modern science are considered conditional, because that so-called “permissible population size” depends on how people actually live.

All the models presented in recent studies point to an admissible population of roughly 10 billion people under the continued existence of the same capitalist system based on consumption and profit extraction. But an admissible population under high-consumption conditions and an admissible population under a moderate, just, and resource-efficient way of life are obviously not the same thing. I think everyone understands that.

Moreover, population size has natural rhythms and demographic transitions. For example, according to UN data, the global total fertility rate has already fallen to 2.3 births per woman, compared with 3.3 around 1990. More than half of all countries are already below the replacement level of 2.1, while scientists expect the world population to peak at around 10.3 billion sometime in the mid-2080s, after which a gradual decline will begin. These are UN data from the 2024 report “World Population Prospects 2024 Summary of Results.”

Thus, calls to “cut down the poor until we wipe out half of them” are an agenda promoted by the wealthy class, and it runs contrary to scientific assessments. The real problem is not population size, but the existing system of consumption sustained by that same wealthy class.

Readers wrote to me recently saying that all people destroy the planet equally and that ordinary citizens also “pour chemicals everywhere and consume too much.” That is a classic substitution of cause with effect, and a shifting of responsibility onto the mere biological fact of human existence.

One person living modestly and a transnational system of extraction, logistics, agribusiness, chemical intensification, and overconsumption are not the same burden. The problem is not the existence of billions of people as such, but how production, distribution, and consumption are organized. Capitalist ideology makes a fundamental substitution: it turns nature into a resource, and the human being into a consumer and a labor unit. Its basic premise is growth for the sake of profit, not the preservation of living systems. That is where chemical intensification, soil depletion, deforestation, overproduction, the disposable economy, and the constant expansion of markets all come from. Thus, the destruction of the biosphere today is not an inherent property of humanity, but a consequence of the model of the system in which all of us are entangled.

Calls to “reduce the little people” come from the wealthy class, which shifts responsibility onto ordinary people, while those ordinary people then internalize the idea of “overpopulation” and, cursing themselves, blame themselves for the destruction of the planet. Perhaps this is because people “on the ground” still retain empathy and a sense of concern for the planet, whereas the wealthy class is completely detached from reality.

And now look at what scientific assessments say:

1. The wealthy class is currently promoting a “carbon agenda,” calling for people to be compelled to pay taxes on carbon emissions. A new mechanism of enrichment has been invented. Yet in 2022, a scientific study titled “Global Carbon Inequality over 1990–2019” presented data showing that in 2019 the bottom 50% of the world’s population were responsible for only about 12% of global emissions, whereas the top 10