[Serious] The Post-Technological World.

[Smaug]

I agree that space colonization without changing the attitude would not be a completely proper solution. Moreover, in such a scenario the Humanity could become a sort of 'Space Locust'. But there's a principal difference. Space colonization helps spread human species which technically rises its chances for survival in general and buys Humanity more time. While on Earth humans are much more cornered with the problem of limited resources. So I had to mention it to specify the conditions for my further reasoning.

To add to what you've mentioned, limiting the consumerism alone would not be enough. Humanity will inevitably face the over-population problem. Even if the society you've described is possible it would still hit certain limits. So it's either environmentally healthy way of life has to include Medieval-style medicare to 'naturally' limit the lifespan or people have to get more reasonable about having and raising kids.

I think that not having too many children would be a natural part of living an environmentally responsible life. There is some cause for optimism on that front. There has been some evidence that people a sort of hardwired to want 2 to 3 surviving children. Throughout history, women who were able to survive it basically had as many children as they could. And despite having so many children, population growth was very, very slow. It took about a thousand years from 1 CE for the population of the world to double. Every woman who could survive it basically had to have as many children as she could, just to maintain global population, and create just a very slightly positive growth in population.

Evidence indicates that once a society has experienced a generation or two of a high survival rate among their children, then they naturally dial back the number of children that they have. We are more or less hardwired to want two or three surviving children. So in a sort of neo-luddite world like I described, where most people are just living pleasurable low carbon footprint lives which is basically their job, they would likely have an accompanying ideology about keeping it to two children or less.

I have frequently argued that people don't have reproductive rights. Despite believing that reproductive rights are an imaginary concept, I usually don't push the population angle very much in discussions about global warming. In fact, some of the people who have argued most vigorously for population reduction have then become very angry at me when I agreed that people don't have reproductive rights. As it turns out, most of these people want China and India to somehow reduce their populations because apparently the Chinese and Indians don't have reproductive rights, but when the matter of their own reproductive rights comes up they get sort of angry. And then it goes sideways even further when I point out that we would have to reduce the population by three average Chinese folks to reduce carbon emissions by the amount of one average American's emissions. So if we are going to eliminate carbon emissions by population reduction, then it is the American population that should be targeted most aggressively.

I get your point although I'm not sure it's correct to compare China and the U.S. head on in this respect. While China is one of the leading economies it still has much larger percentage of poor population with very low quality of life than the U. S. does. India is even poorer. I doubt that hardly anyone from Western world would want to live in Indian suburbs. It's not about excess but about basic commodities to live a healthy live - clear water, good nutrition etc.

In the more distant past the population growth was more limited by epidemics, lack of basic medicine and other such factors influence of which has since been reduced with the help of science and technology.

My point is that most people would naturally like to live longer and safer lives. I doubt that anyone who knows better would enjoy a life of a Medieval peasant where one could rather easily end up dead by catching a flu or having a light wound. But providing high-standard life conditions to ever-growing population would inevitably become a problem even if 95% lives 'eco-friendly' lives. Since 'natural' ways of population control are not an option it's only philosophy, ideology or legislation that is left. I wonder how this can be carried out without plunging into a dictatorial dystopia. Knowing that human societies tend to only learn from great catastrophes it's very interesting how handle all this in a reasonable way.