population vs. technology/consumption

2 points for the discussion:

1)
One of the major sources of environmental devastation in the world today
has nothing to do with capitalism or the core.

I'm referring to the huge fires set every year in the rainforests of
Brazil, Indonesia and elsewhere by poor peasants clearing land.

Unsustainably high population growth clearly has a more direct connection
to this catastrophe than capitalist overproduction.


2)
The Indian state of Kerala is an exemplar of how to solve this sort of
problem.  With an incredibly low GNPPC (don't have the stats at hand),
Kerala has achieved nearly universal literacy, has improved the status of
women tremendously, has improved health and thus lowered mortality, and
has as a consequence of all these things, (without attaining a core
standard of living with its attendant ecological destruction, which 
is seen in the standard model as a necessary condition for the demographic
transition), lowered "its" fertility rate dramatically.  More precisely
and correctly, the women of Kerala have chosen to have fewer children.

RH