Iain, while I certainly agree with some of your criticisms of Rapley, I think it’s important to at least concede that he is right on his central point: that, all things considered, the planet is overcrowded. Of course, it is. In the short-term, there’s not much that anyone can do about it (I don’t intend to hurl myself off a cliff any time soon, and I don’t see why anyone else should take the plunge either), but what they can do is avoid allowing the current fashionable myth of a demographic ‘crisis’ (you now, the one supposedly caused by ageing societies) to push the world into the embrace of natalist policies that will only make things worse.