Following up my post a couple days ago Some early thoughts of a new way to quantify population and overpopulation, we would all benefit from developing ways to speak about population calmly. Currently, people think others with differing views risk destroying humanity and act as if their lives were at stake, willing to say and do what it takes to win.

I’ve come up with a view I think may help. I’ll say it about Hawaii, but it likely applied to many places humans lived over the last 250,000 years.

As I understand, after Polynesians discovered the Hawaiian islands, they created settlements there that traded with the rest of Polynesia, but that trade eventually stopped. Hawaiians lived on Hawaii for something like five hundred years without contact with anyone else. That time seems to have been enough that if Malthusian collapse was inevitable, they would have collapsed.

That they survived implies they found some way to keep their population from overshooting their resources. If so, they must have managed their population. Many other populations in isolated areas, even if not as isolated as Hawaii, would have had to keep their populations from overshooting their resources.

It seems they would have had to manage their population, which would mean if some people on Hawaii lived longer, some couples would have had to wait longer to have their children. If some people died, other couples could have children earlier.

I suspect cultures in such situations made the underlying calculations and cultural change to survive and thrive living in balance. I suspect they learned to talk about such issues calmly, not that I have any data on how their cultures acted.

Thinking and talking about that balance is human, life-based, and healthy, not anti-human or ghoulish, as Steven Pinker described in his otherwise lovely book Enlightenment Now, ascribing a “quasi-religious ideology … laced with misanthropy, including an indifference to starvation, an indulgence in ghoulish fantasies of a depopulated planet, and Nazi-like comparisons of human beings to vermin, pathogens, and cancer.”

I hope we reach to where we realize that if our culture risks overshoot, we should be able to calmly and reasonably make similar choices. If Hawaiians and countless other cultures living in harmony with nature for millennia found a balance, we can too.

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