You’re right, I don’t think it’s going to be simple. The planet also can’t support us very much longer at this rate of growth. It could be simple evolutionary biology trying to bring us into balance. Or all of these combined. 🤷

Nate Hagens has a podcast (The Great Simplification) just about these ideas. Looking at the system itself, its not sustainable but we also can't solve it with a simple "let's remove x" Reduce/stop consuming oil and go to fully electric? Well electric cars are heavier and will cause more wear to the road at a higher rate, meaning we will need to repair our roads more often. What is a major contribution to the material that makes roads? You guessed it - oil 🙃 I particularly like his episodes with Daniel Schmachtenberger

The birth rate in poor nations is also crashing.

I've become sanguine about it. There seems to simply be an evolutionary bottleneck caused by urbanization, digitalization, feminism and contraception. Traditionally, gaining a wife was hard and men without wives had few or no children. It is now like that, again.

I think the earth could support us, but not at the living standard we've become accustomed to. People aren't willing to have their living standard drop below a certain level, so fathers' income sets the paternal floor (and that floor is relative to the living costs of the country or region).

On the positive side, potential wives have gone up in value. When I was young, that was very different.

It can absolutely support us. But too many people have been convinced that they deserve, in excess, more than their current necessities. Humanity has an inherent addiction to what they want and not what they need. Consequently, far too large a portion of the global population seemingly adapt to this type of mentality without any consideration of the cost in terms of resources. "To me, the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable - the rhetoric of the powerless. The planet takes care of us, not we of it. Our self-inflated moral imperative to guide a wayward Earth, or heal our sick planet, is evidence of our immense capacity for self delusion. Rather, we need to protect ourselves from ourselves." -Lynn Margulis