[robbomacrae]

You might be interested in Jared Diamonds "Collapse". He's aggregated a lot of evidence of many societies that over populated, over consumed and died out. Not all did though and your technically right in that the survivors (our ancestors) avoided this fate. I just think we should be weary about any claims that peoples of the past were any smarter about their self preservation than we are..

[kaycebasques]

Fair enough, I'll check out the book.

I'm not trying to argue that ancestors were smarter.

For our own political purposes, it's probably best if the narrative becomes "all of our ancestor societies binged themselves to collapse, so we need to be very careful about our own habits" although it's not exactly true that all groups did that.

[jopsen]

Wfor political purposes this doesn't matter...

Ancient civilizations rarely had a clue of how a desert came to be. Certainly, we today understand the environmental impact we have.

Furthermore, we posses many tools to combat the problem: resource taxation; development of sustainable technology; reduction of waste and consumption.