I encourage you to revisit what you know about the club of rome and what was actually published in the Limits to Growth paper. We have been disturbingly on track for a lot of the variables that were of interest back then in the “business as usual” model.
People tend to dismiss anything and everything around resource constraint thinking by doing the quick Ehrlich quip, and never really dig deeper into where people like Ehrlich ever got their ideas to begin with.
What's fascinating is the the Rat Utopia[0] experiment in overpopulation from the late 60's that Dr. John Calhoun ran.
As a result, more than fifty years ago, on tape, Dr. John Calhoun made some eerily accurate[1] extrapolations of where human population is going to be now, and how our TFR (total fertility rate) would collapse (which they basically are, particularly since Millennial & Gen Z generations).
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOFveSUmh9U "John B. Calhoun Film 7.1, (NIMH, 1970-1972)"
Since nobody pointed that out yet: rat utopia results are questioned now, based not only on a fact that the enclosed space where rats resided were sitting in direct spotlight, but also on a replicability issue. An experiment with results that couldn't be replicated should be dismissed.
It's entirely possible that the mice in this experiment were overheated, and dominant males didn't fight to "stay in solitude" but rather to be out of direct sunlight.
That's to say, if the cause for such mouseslaughter really was in the temperature, climate change could make original experiment relevant again.
What were those variables?
The scenarios were calculated based on hypothetical 'policies' of a society and the availability of natural resources. The scenario (from the 2004 book) we are tracking most closely is no.2, i.e 'business as usual' but with twice as much resources as was assumed in the 70s.
I don't know the work in question, but the extremes of agriculture we have gone to aren't sustainable simply from a soil destruction standpoint. We may figure that problem out too, but just assuming our ingenuity will get us out of any predicament we create will eventually leave us with a catastrophe. Carefully planning demographics is going to be necessary for stable long term well-being. Doing that in a way that isn't dystopian is a good problem to point our ingenuity at.
Why would we ever want to revisit people like Erlich and the Club of wrong who were famously extremely off in their predictions? And when some of the writings contributed to forced
The claims that theyll be proven right /on track any day now decades after their predictions failed is hard to take seriously.
It's not the business as usual people who made sure that their predictions fail its people working to either improve the world or sometimes to make money that actually changed things. In fact it was the people who pushed neo malthusian thinking that assumed things would continue as usual and therefore get worse