TL;DR: Want to read these kinds¹ of novels together in sync?
DM me, u/mgcypes, if you want to join a discord server that exists to organize exactly that!

In short, the discord server seeks to organize synchronized reading of novels, usually in the format of reading a target amount of chapters pr. week, with a concurrent dedicated text-channel for discussion.
Alongside a co-read, we also have optional opt-in events, ranging from trivia minigames, weekly riddles, to full events like a jeopardy.

TL;DR: Want to read these kinds of novels together in sync?

DM me, u/mgcypes, if you want to join a discord server that exists to organize exactly that!

• "Ah Shit, Here We Go Again!" is a meme-line from the protagonist ("CJ") of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
• The giant head to the left? That's Thomas Malthus himself.
• Behind him to the right is William Robert Catton, Jr., the author of Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change.
• The graph in front is essentially a simplified version of what ecological overshoot looks like in practice.
• For some odd reason, both Catton and the graph are overshadowed by Malthus ...

• The Overpopulation vs. Over-consumption Debate: Why Not Address Both? [In-Depth]
• "Good Job, Homo Sapiens!" & The Tragedy of Malthus
• Do you intend to have children? Why or why not? [In-Depth]

The Malthusians Are Back - Alex Trembath and Vijaya Ramachandran
In recent years, many climate advocates have emphasized human population itself—as opposed to related factors such as consumption and technology—as the driving force behind environmental destruction. This is, at bottom, a very old idea that can be traced back to the 18th-century cleric Thomas Malthus. It is also analytically unsound and morally objectionable. Critics of overpopulation down through the ages have had a nasty habit of treating people less as individuals with value and agency than as sentient locusts.
Malthus argued against aid to poor Britons on the grounds that they consumed too many of the nation’s resources. In making his case, he semi-accurately described a particular kind of poverty that we still refer to as the “Malthusian trap” today. Agricultural productivity in poor societies is not high enough to support the population without significant labor input, so most people work on small subsistence farms to feed themselves and their families. The inescapably linear growth in the food supply could never outstrip the exponential growth in human populations, he argued.
But human societies have proved repeatedly that they can escape the Malthusian trap. Indeed, agricultural productivity has improved to support a British population seven times larger than in Malthus’s time and a global population eight times larger. As a result of these stubborn facts, most Malthusian imitators haven’t come out and said they’re Malthusians. And instead of focusing on famine, they have tended to emphasize humanity’s destruction of nature.

The Real Error
Malthus did indeed err, but not in the way that has been commonly supposed. He rightly discerned “the power of population” to increase exponentially “if unchecked.” He rightly noted that population growth ordinarily is not unchecked. He saw that it was worth inquiring into the means by which the exponential growth tendency is normally checked. He was perceptive in attaching the label “misery” to some of the ramifications of these means. Where he was wrong was in supposing that the means worked fully and immediately. (That this was his error has not been seen by those who reject his views.)
Being himself under the impression that it was not possible for the human load to exceed the earth’s carrying capacity, Malthus enabled those who came after him to go on misconstruing continued impressive growth as evidence against, rather than as evidence for, his basic ideas. Carrying capacity was a concept almost clear to Malthus. He even sensed that the carrying capacities of earth’s regions had been repeatedly enlarged by human cultural progress.20 If he was not yet able to make clear to himself and his readers the distinction between means of enlarging carrying capacity and means of overshooting it, we do ourselves a serious disservice by perpetuating his shortcoming. And we do just such a disservice by continuing to mistake overshoot for progress, supposing drawdown to be no different from takeover. By erring thus we prolong and deepen our predicament.
Despite Malthus’s belief to the contrary, it is possible to exceed an environment’s carrying capacity—temporarily. Many species have done it. A species with as long an interval between generations as is characteristic of ours, and with cultural as well as biological appetites, can be expected to do it. Our largest per capita demands upon the world’s resources only begin to be asserted years after we are born. Resource depletion sufficient to thwart our children’s grown-up aspirations was not far enough advanced when our parents were begetting, gestating, and bearing us to deter them from thus adding to the human load.
By not quite seeing that carrying capacity can be temporarily overshot, Malthus understated life’s perils. He thus enabled both the admirers and the detractors of his admonitory writings to neglect the effects of overshoot—environmental degradation and carrying capacity reduction. In his analyses he assumed linear increase of carrying capacity. While this fell short of sustaining exponential growth of would-be consumers, it was, even so, a far brighter prospect than carrying capacity reduction.

The Malthusians Are Back - Alex Trembath and Vijaya Ramachandran
Oreskes draws attention to the same problem that Ehrlich did in his day: biodiversity loss associated with high-fertility, low-productivity societies caught in the Malthusian trap. Because subsistence farms have low yields, and because the farmers tend to rely on wood and other biomass for energy, they remain a major driver of deforestation, land-use change, and wildlife extirpation.
In Oreskes’s recent Scientific American op-ed, she acknowledges that her ideas have a tarnished legacy. “Population control is a vexing subject,” she writes, “because in the past it has generally been espoused by rich people (mostly men) instructing people in poor countries (mostly women) on how to behave.” Her workaround is to emphasize educational opportunities as a “reasonable” way to “slow growth.” In an email, Oreskes said that she does not consider herself a Malthusian and that she focuses on education “because we know that it can work, and unlike some other approaches it is good for women, and non-coercive.”

Elias Ganivet (Growth in human population and consumption both need to be addressed to reach an ecologically sustainable future) as quoted by u/myth_of_progress in The Overpopulation vs. Over-consumption Debate: Why Not Address Both? [In-Depth]
"For instance, regarding climate change, I would slightly qualify the impact of population growth vs. consumption (the 10% richest are responsible for more than 50% of GHG emissions). [However], this is not true when you look at the environmental problems all together (pollution, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, land-use change, climate change...). Thus, the main point is still the same: population and consumption are two faces of the same coin and we need to do as much as we can in both."

The Malthusians Are Back - Alex Trembath and Vijaya Ramachandran
Rough contemporaries of Malthus, such as the Marquis de Condorcet, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, argued that improvements in economic productivity would allow humans to grow enough food to meet rising population levels, and they were right.

Marx's and Engels' Concept of Malthus: The Heritage of a Critique, Richard J. Wiltgen
To Marx and Engels, the primary problem with Malthus's population principle was that it was ahistorical. According to Marx (1967), Malthus had attempted to explain "'overpopulation' by the external laws of Nature, rather than by the historical laws of capitalist production (Vol. 1, p. 529n). In a fragmentary note that Engels had intended to include in his Dialectics of Nature, he presented an analysis of Darwin that paralleled his and Marx's discussion of Malthus and capitalism. Engels (1964) stated that Malthusian overpopulation problems "do in fact occur at certain stages of plant and lower animal life" (p. 311). His discussion of Darwin reflects the complexity of the relationship he envisioned.

The Malthusians Are Back - Alex Trembath and Vijaya Ramachandran
Vogt’s pessimism lost out to the ingenuity of, among others, the Nobel Peace Prize–winning agronomist Norman Borlaug, as the historian Charles Mann recounts in his 2018 book, The Wizard and the Prophet. Borlaug’s innovations in wheat and maize cultivation helped stave off the famines Vogt and other eugenicists had predicted.

The Nobel Peace Prize 1970 - Acceptance Speech, Norman Borlaug
It is true that the tide of the battle against hunger has changed for the better during the past three years. But tides have a way of flowing and then ebbing again. We may be at high tide now, but ebb tide could soon set in if we become complacent and relax our efforts. For we are dealing with two opposing forces, the scientific power of food production and the biologic power of human reproduction.
Man has made amazing progress recently in his potential mastery of these two contending powers. Science, invention, and technology have given him materials and methods for increasing his food supplies substantially and sometimes spectacularly, as I hope to prove tomorrow in my first address as a newly decorated and dedicated Nobel Laureate.
Man also has acquired the means to reduce the rate of human reproduction effectively and humanely. He is using his powers for increasing the rate and amount of food production. But he is not yet using adequately his potential for decreasing the rate of human reproduction. The result is that the rate of population increase exceeds the rate of increase in food production in some areas.
There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort. Fighting alone, they may win temporary skirmishes, but united they can win a decisive and lasting victory to provide food and other amenities of a progressive civilization for the benefit of all mankind.

The Malthusians Are Back - Alex Trembath and Vijaya Ramachandran
Ehrlich, infamously, lost a bet with the libertarian economist Julian Simon over resource scarcity. (Simon goes completely unmentioned in Ehrlich’s autobiography.)

The Revenge of Malthus: A Famous Bet Recalculated, The Economist
Mr Simon duly won the bet. The economic boom of the 1980s and 1990s also contradicted Mr Ehrlich's wilder claims—that a billion people would starve to death and that, by 1985, America would be trapped in an “age of scarcity”.
But what if Mr Ehrlich had taken up Mr Simon's 1990 offer to go “double or quits” for any future date? All five have risen in price since the rematch was proposed. Furthermore, Jeremy Grantham of GMO, a fund-management group, points out that Mr Ehrlich would have won the original bet were it recalculated today (he is still alive; Mr Simon died in 1998). An equally weighted portfolio of the five commodities is now higher in real terms than the average of their prices back in 1980 (see chart).
The Cornucopians might argue that today's metals prices are due to the buoyancy of demand in the developing world rather than any cataclysmic shortages in supply. But the Malthusians might retort that man's famed ingenuity has not stopped prices from rising in real terms over an extended period. Place your bets.

The Malthusians Are Back - Alex Trembath and Vijaya Ramachandran
Thanks to innovation and technological decoupling, an average American today is more than twice as wealthy as an average American was the year The Population Bomb was published, yet generates 30 percent fewer carbon emissions and uses 50 percent less land for their diet.

"Energy-Smart" Food for People and Climate - Issue Paper (UN FAO) [PDF page 14, paper page 3]
The ‘green revolution’ of the 1960s and 1970s solved the food shortage problem at the time. This revolution was accomplished not only through improved plant breeding, but also by tripling the application of inorganic fertilizers, expanding the land area under irrigation and increasing energy inputs to provide additional services along the food chain. Today, the annual incremental yield increases of major cereal crops are declining and fossil fuels are becoming relatively more scarce and costly. Historical trends indicate an evident link between food prices and energy prices (Fig. 1). Further intensification of crop and animal production will be required to feed the world’s population, which is projected to expand to over 9 billion people by 2050. The report, “How to Feed the World by 2050” (FAO, 2009a) indicates that a 70 percent increase in food production compared to 2005-2007 production levels will be needed to meet the increased demand. This equates roughly to the additional production of around 1 000 Mt of cereals and around 200 Mt of meat and fish per year by 2050. These production gains are largely expected to come from increases in productivity of crops, livestock and fisheries. However, unlike the 1960’s and 1970’s green revolution, our ability to reach these targets may be limited in the future by a lack of inexpensive fossil fuels.

The Malthusians Are Back - Alex Trembath and Vijaya Ramachandran
Like Oreskes, the scientists at TOP and Population Connection insist that their proposed solutions to the population “problem” are non-coercive. They just want to nudge people in the direction of fewer people. Another of TOP’s priorities is to “reduce immigration numbers” to developed countries with low fertility rates. Additional ideas include proposals to lower government support for third and fourth children and for medical fertility treatments.
But Ehrlich said the same thing. “I’m against government interference in our lives,” he told an interviewer in 1970. How that sentiment squared with Ehrlich’s demands in The Population Bomb for “compulsory birth regulation” and “sterilizing all Indian males with three or more children” remains unclear. And it didn’t stop powerful institutions from taking his warnings about overpopulation literally as well as seriously. As Betsy Hartmann recounted in her 1987 exposé, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, the Population Council, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and other organizations funded fertility-reduction programs that, in tandem with sometimes coercive government policies, led to millions of sterilizations in China, India, Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and elsewhere. China’s one-child policy can be directly traced to Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome’s famous Malthusian screed warning of resource shortages and overpopulation.

Eliminating forced, coercive and otherwise involuntary sterilization: An inter-agency statement, UN-WHO Joint Document
During the period from the 1960s to the 1990s, coercive sterilization has been used in somecountries (including in Asia, Europe and Latin America) as an instrument of populationcontrol, without regard for the rights of individuals (57–59). A range of incentives or coercivepressures have been employed to secure agreement to sterilization, including offers offood, money, land and housing, or threats, fines or punishments, together with misleadinginformation. Under some government programmes, rewards have been provided forhealth workers who met sterilization targets, while those who missed the targets were atrisk of losing their jobs (7, 60, 61). People living in poverty, indigenous peoples and ethnicminorities have been particularly targeted by such programmes (7, 44, 61). In many countries, information is not made available in accessible formats and local languages, and informed consent is not obtained before these procedures are carried out (62). Moreover, these procedures may be carried out in unsafe and unhygienic conditions, without follow-up care(7, 60–62).
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Special care must be taken to ensure that every person makes a voluntary and informedchoice regarding the use of any contraceptive method (3). This is particularly important forsterilization, since it is a surgical procedure that is intended to be permanent.
[...]
Accountability is central to preventing human rights violations and to ensuring that laws,policies and programmes are properly developed and implemented. Accountabilitymechanisms also assist in identifying individual and systematic human rights violations, asthey provide victims with an avenue to air their grievances and seek redress.
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Accountability, however, rests with states, to prevent coerced sterilization, to explicitly prohibit such practices, to respond to the consequences of these practices, to hold the perpetrators responsible, and to provide redress and compensation in cases of abuse.

The Malthusians Are Back - Alex Trembath and Vijaya Ramachandran
And these concerns are being raised at a peculiar moment in human history. The total population of human beings on Earth is expected to peak and decline later this century, not because of war, famine, or disease, but because of secularly declining fertility. The challenge that nations including Germany, South Korea, Japan, and even India and China are dealing with today is underpopulation, not overpopulation. Migrants, particularly those who are young and skilled, will be crucial to generating economic growth in these countries. This makes the neo-Malthusian dismissal of technology, infrastructure, and growth particularly troubling. Supporting an aging population will require an economic surplus that has traditionally been supplied by a favorable ratio of younger workers in the labor force to retirees. As that ratio reverses, it is not clear how infrastructure maintenance and social-services financing will fare.
Given that the Malthusian dream—a peak in global population—is already in sight, one might think that single-minded efforts to further suppress population growth would wane. But the old population-control movement is still alive and well today.

The Malthusians Are Back - Alex Trembath and Vijaya Ramachandran
As The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas put it, “Enough with the innuendo: If overpopulation is the hill you want to die on, then you’ve got to defend the implications.”

The Breakthrough Institute's Inconvenient History with Al Gore (2014), Paul D. Thacker (Harvard University - Edmond & Lily Safra Centre for Ethics)
While sometimes functioning as shadow universities, think tanks have been exposed as quasi lobbying organizations, with little funding transparency. Recent research has also pointed out that think tanks suffer from a lack of intellectual rigor. A case in point is the Breakthrough Institute run by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, which describes itself as a "progressive think tank."
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TLDR: Jodi is overwhelmed by her life and also affected by diet culture.

Jodi is THE desperate housewife.

On Jodi's "lost youth"

Almond Analysis