Whenever I hear someone say something like this, I mentally picture a locust with a speech bubble in a locust swarm saying it... "population growth is a given"

Whenever I hear someone say something like this, I mentally picture a locust with a speech bubble in a locust swarm saying it... "population growth is a given" it is definitely not a given. We will suffer the fate of every other organism that exceeds the carrying capacity of their environment. And right now our civilization is based on mining energy from previous hundreds of millions of years in the form of (C-H bonds) which is the definition of unsustainable. It doesn't logically follow that anyone controls birth rates by force, you don't need to invoke authoritarianism. Increased death rates/lower life expectancy and infant mortality can and would accomplish the same, entirely with no external driver. But statistics really bury the lede there, since the mechanism for those would be mass starvation, war, and decreased standards of living.