While some of this seems to be playing with statistics of dubious validity, I do like the parts about the vaccines, the antibacterial soap, and the carbon offsets.

Wow, this article is so full of disinformation it makes me sick. Half of the links are dead, others go to totally unrelated articles. Not one citation of a peer reviewed article to back anything up, this guy needs to get his facts straight if he wants to do anything besides humor.

The journal of horticultural science seems to disagree with you about organic food. And wow, the article is from feb 2009 not 1996.

Tastier and more nutritious food is not the only reason to go organic, insects can gain resistances to pesticides and herbicides which means we have to use more and more of them. These don't just "disappear" after we use them, they run off into our water streams and act as endocrine disrupters which cause infertility, abnormal sexual development and a whole host of learning disabilities. Currently our water filtration systems can not deal with endocrine disrupters.

Now as for the recycling bit, that is even more of a joke. He first states that we have increased the number of trees, but fails to mention that he is talking about trees in the US. In reality, the US now imports a lot more trees than they did in the past. Also, it takes FAR less ENERGY to recycle paper than it does to cut down trees, transport them to a mill, mill them, bleach it and make paper.

And that only addresses paper! those hardworking citizens who sort our recycling also find metals(meaning less mining), glass(takes FAR less energy to melt down recycled glass than to make new glass) and plastics(which also break down into endocrine disrupters that make their way into our water).

I agree with the vaccinations bit, but admittedly I don't really know much about them. After checking out a few of his sources I definitely don't trust anything in this article.

The recycling bit is absolute bogus.
A significant percentage of the trucks collecting the recyclables in my city run on electricity - the electricity comes from dams, wind turbines and wave energy farms set up in the coastal regions (we're trying to ditch the kind generated by burning fuel or gas).
Recycling saves energy and raw material, and recycling metal in particular is very profitable and it's been done for years everywhere in the world, even when it wasn't even called 'recycling'.
Oh, and everywhere in Europe (and I suspect in the US may have them as well) there are 'methane farms' being set up to safely collect gas emissions from landfills to be used as eco-friendly fuel. A landfill where biodegradables are the rule will generate more, safer gas.

On food: organic food (animals included) has been grown successfully by many of my relatives who still live in the country and have their own little farms - they're healthier and happier people than I am, living in the city. They don't use that many pesticides and none of them were ever 'contaminated' by manure on their food. They just wash their food thoroughly before they eat it. The water comes from a well drilled almost 30 years ago in their property, like it was when there wasn’t even electrical power available in their village.
But what they don't produce, they buy locally - and that makes a huge difference in price, not to mention it boosts local economy and saves fuel.

And vaccination actually hurts the planet - disease is a natural form of control, and though it's uncomfortable to think about it, more people around means less resources for each of them. Actually, population control (not through disease but parental planning) would benefit the earth a great deal.

Uh... anti-bacterial soap doesn't save the world - it would save humans if it wasn't so useless, not the PLANET.

The rest is ok, I guess…

How is vaccination unnatural? Vaccination is only doing what surviving the disease does- prepares your immune system. Unlike antibiotics, it does not make the germs adapt. What would be unnatural would be to let people die from easily preventable diseases. And what if the disease doesn't kill them, it only cripples them for life?

And just because their are more people doesn't mean that there are less resources for them. Obviously, if the population grows too fast, this is what happens, but if the population would grow responsibly and not get out of control, then the large population would mean more people doing useful work, making things better than if there were fewer people.

(1st off, let me just apologize for the lengthy reply. If you'd rather go and have a Mars bar, be my guest. We're just talking, here...)

Uh…I never said it was unnatural... I said it wasn't good for the planet.
There is a HUGE difference between saving the world and saving humanity.
When the article mixes these two very different things it stops making sense.

Well... that is completely wrong. If you take in consideration the advances in modern medicine, vaccination programs, sanitation and industrialized agriculture are the reasons why the human population has grown at a geometric rate in the last century, increasing it to never before seen numbers, you'll realize most of the world's problems would be solved if there simply there weren't so many of us around.
We're quickly running out of land to farm, as well as water to drink and use on crops, and there are more people starving now than there ever were in the history of humanity.
It used to be diseases kept numbers under control, but we've eliminated part of that problem, so now, there's more of us, we live longer and consume more and for a longer period of time.
How can you say more people simply means more useful work? There are more people living under the line of poverty now than there ever were before! That doesn't mean they're all lazy, does it? No, it means they can’t work land that is not available, drink water which is polluted (try sanitizing waste produced by 1 billion people everyday in China, where they’re also running out of farming land, for example) or get food which is never enough for everyone. More people means more work, sure, but it also means more mouths to feed.
Buying 2 pounds of rice at the local supermarket is easy, cheap and it will get you though a few days – but try growing, milling and processing it before it’s sold. It will not take a few days, and all those who are working the rice fields also have to eat every day for a longer period of time than it will take the 2 pounds of rice to be consumed in your house.

Putting more people in the equation is just like having an ant farm for 100 ants and then dumping 500 more in there all of a sudden. And this has happened in the last 100 years. We were 2,5 billion in 1950, we are now a whopping 6,5 billion, and the number is still growing.

I'm for population control - no question; but again, not through disease, but through parental planning – I said that in my 1st post. Just, have less kids! If you live in a poor country, why have 10 kids, when you can have 3, since these 3 will now survive, when they probably wouldn’t in the past?

We who live in developed nations keep forgetting we're among the most fortunate, that the vast majority of the population of the world are extremely poor compared to us. They don't eat as much, they don't use up so many resources, and yet, they suffer the consequences of our lust for luxury in ways we can never even imagine.

Strange, in many advanced industrialized nations, the population is declining even though they have very good health care, and they don't seem to have most of these problems.

Well, that's the thing - there're more non-industrialized countries than industrialized ones.
And there, the population has been increasing too fast for their own good. Those governments can’t rely on taxes as revenue, since most people don’t even pay them. A poor government can do little for their people and most of the time, those in office don’t really care much and very quickly turn to corruption to serve their own interests, embezzling what little there is to spend. It’s a vicious cycle and one seriously hard to break.

You're very right about the population decline - in Northern Europe a lot of financial incentives are given to couples so they’ll have more children (a cousin of mine lives in Switzerland and receives a monthly sum as compensation for having three kids).
The concern about the decline in population has to do with social security and (universal) health care; you need a substantial workforce sustaining the country’s economy, and when you have an increase in the elderly population (who depend on the active workforce for their social security/pensions/health care) things begin to get a little tricky. The GDP depends forcibly on the workforce and what the country produces/sells.
Fewer people, means less money, yes, but in industrialized countries, where the governments are relatively rich and infrastructures (taxes, welfare, social security, healthcare…) WORK for everyone. Those countries who need more people are trying to find some ‘balance’.

But when you compare a country like, say, Brazil, where the population is close to 200 million to Sweden, with a mere 10 million, and you consider Brazil has a GDP only 5,5 times bigger, you start to get an idea why Sweden is a rich country and Brazil is not.

I am not saying that everyone needs to have twenty children and make the population get out of control, I am saying that more people is not always bad, and that not vaccinating people is not the right way to go about keeping population down. I think that while populations in third world countries are way out of control, but if they could be gotten under control, and if their agriculture and even their industry were to develop more, then I think that with the new technologies that would be developed if the minds of the third world were not wasted on merely trying to survive, but could be used to improve technology, the world would be able to support more people than it is inadequately supporting now.

Population increases aren't always bad because they sometimes have led to more agricultural innovation. It is just when the countries are not ready to develop along with their population's needs that more people is a clearly bad thing (like right now in Africa, or if the earth will reach its carrying capacity).

Again, this is another looooong reply. Sorry about that. But I'm not disagreeing with you ;)

We just need to determine when the numbers are enough, don't we? And right now, they’re clearly much higher than what the Earth can handle.

I don't mean to say we should 'eliminate the excess' (by failing to vaccinate everyone, for example) but we SHOULD exercise control where we can. And we can do so by having less kids - well, not us in industrialized countries, because we have very few, two on average, but those who still find it normal to have 20 kids. It just so happens that people in poorer countries are misinformed and still HAVE those 20 kids.

My grandparents had 8 kids (seven survived), because the family lived off the land, times were different and once the older ones grew up and left home, new babies could take their place (even if poverty was still the norm and food was scarce).
But my parents only had two, six years apart, because they were aware they simply couldn't afford more children and provide equally for all of them. I, the younger one, was planned only when they had a steadier, better income.

The difference is, we in the rich nations more often than not plan our families, whilst those in poor countries don't. Birth control should be encouraged and available, just like Planned Parenthood. Can you believe there was one woman in Mexico who had more than 60 children? (Guinness Book of Records will confirm it). Imagine feeding this family…

Knowledge is the key to success, and there are still too many people who don't know enough.
An example are myths like the ones in South Africa where some people believe having sex with a virgin girl will cure AIDS (there’s also the one about drinking Coke and its magical power to cure the disease). This led to an increase in rape of young girls and young women, the consequent further spread of the HIV virus among the populations, not to mention the pregnancies, the economic pressure on victims and a new infected generation. If they’d known this myth is as insane as we, informed people, know it to be, it’s quite possible these situations would never happen.
Condoms aren’t the devil, they need to know that.
And the Catholic Church isn’t helping in this aspect… Just take a look at the ‘Every sperm is sacred’ sketch on Monty Python’s ‘Meaning of Life’.

I just think we’re very lucky, you know? Many of us who live in rich nations aren’t aware of how lucky we really are.