Its difficult to understand the impact of 8 billion people.
The only way to have your ideas be effective is to first reduce the number of people.
Imagine the true cost of one carrot from your garden.
The true cost includes everything it took both directly and indirectly for that carrot to get to your mouth and everything that ultimately happens to it after it leaves your body.
No matter what you include there is always more that is failed to be considered.
Multiply that true cost by 8 billion. That's just one carrot.
Now do that with everything you have in your life. Multiply those numbers by 8 billion.
Right now 7.7 billion people are alive eating and pooping. Making more people that eat and poop.
People consume and discard their waste.
Other people provide and remove that waste all while consuming and discarding their own waste.
Look around you right now.
How many things do you see made of plastic?
Imagine the true cost to make that plastic what you see right now.
When you are done with it, imagine the true cost of getting rid of it.
Multiply that by 8 billion.
A significant drop in population globally would put the brakes on.
The true cost of anything goes down as we use up the surplus left by the void in population.
Once that surplus is used or wasted away, you might find you didn't really need it to begin with.
The remaining population adjusts to fit the needs of the smaller population.
Less is consumed and less is wasted.
Because there are less people.
Oh, the carrot...
Did you walk out into the woods and harvest the seed yourself.
Where did you get the energy to do that?
You ate something right?
Where did you get the food you ate?
You dug the hole in the ground with your hands right?
If you used a tool, where did you get the tool?
Was it a tree branch your broke off a dead limb on the ground?
Did you buy a shovel?
Where/how did you get the money?
How did the shovel get to you?
Did you go to a store to buy a shovel?
Did you walk to the store?
Was the store just a bunch of stuff laying on the ground?
Was it a building?
How did the building get built?
Where did the materials used to build the building come from?
The hole you dug to plant your carrot seed was just anywhere or do you 'own' that land?
What did you have to do to own that land?
What do you have to do to maintain the ownership of that land?
Do you work?
What is involved with you being able to work?
Do you need electricity?
Do you need a fresh water supply?
Do you need food for energy?
What happens to that food when you are done with it?
Do you dig another hole in the ground to store it?
Who's ground is it?
How did you dig that hole?
Where did you get the energy to dig?
My point is, everything is connected in some way and once you consider all aspects to find the true cost you realize that 8 billion people are causing the problem.
Our species is operating on a diminishing return.
Its why we have mountains of trash, giant islands of plastic, polluted water, polluted land, polluted air, deforestation, loss of wildlife, noise pollution, traffic, junk yards, strange weather patterns, resource shortages, and on and on and on and on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll
World War Two: 6 years and 1 day
118,357,000 estimated deaths related to the events of that war.
118 million is insignificant to 7.7 billion.
War is not the solution.
We would need a war with a death toll of 3 billion in a few weeks.
Plus, after war there is always a baby boom.
War is not the fix we need.
The tv series Life Without People simulated the sudden disappearance of the human species. While it was entertaining it was fantasy. People are not going to just disappear. While it shows the planet finding a new equilibrium, what it depicts is not entirely accurate to the scenario they proposed.
The planet can recover but not with 8, 10, 20 or 50 billion people around.
We must stop our runaway population growth ASAP.