Democracy has evolved, now environmental protection needs to evolve

Most voters know that crowding and congestion isn't because of poor planning, because every side of politics has had a chance to "plan better" and none has done it. The real reason is that there isn't enough tax money to keep up with high population growth. The average voter also doesn't want to pay higher taxes to increase population. Shamelessly, the same business interests that want high population growth also want lower taxes for themselves. That means they want the short term profits that come with high population growth, but they don't want to pay for the infrastructure needed to service the increased population.

Any discussion of population and the environment centres on long term impacts, which makes the discussion more difficult. Humans have not evolved to consider the long term. Humans have evolved with a fight or flight response to danger, which only reflects short term danger.

All these factors mean it will take some very special people to move us toward a stable population future, just like it took very special people to improve democracy. An example is women's suffrage. Only a small minority believe women should NOT have the right to vote, but only about 100 years ago, only women in New Zealand and Australia could vote.

In far less than 100 years there will only be a tiny minority who want to cram more and more people onto our finite planet.

A critical difference between women's suffrage and reducing population growth is that once the decision was made, women could vote as soon as the next election. The suffragettes were fighting for their own rights, as well as the rights of their daughters and granddaughters. With population stabilisation, demographic factors mean that it can take decades to stabilise the population. (A good example is that even though China's "one-child" policy was successful, it still hasn't stabilised the population 38 years after it was started.) That means that the activists that are fighting for population stabilisation now, are fighting for a result that many of them won't see.

It is difficult to determine the precise impact of women's suffrage and the flow-on effects of equal treatment of women, but it is hard to find anyone who thinks it has been negative.

It is also difficult to predict what will happen the longer we wait to stabilise the world's population, but it is likely that the same negative impacts that are happening today, will just continue to get worse.

• More people will die from pollution
• More people will become refugees
• More wild animals will be starved and killed. Fisheries will continue to be exhausted
• Commodity prices will continue to rise
• Traffic congestion will continue to get worse. Road tolls will be more expensive.
• More people will live in apartments that are more expensive than today's free standing houses.
• The levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will continue to rise, increasing the impacts of global warming.
• Soil erosion, soil salinity, air and water pollution and groundwater depletion will continue to get worse

These signs are all around us now, just like the signs for women's suffrage were all around one hundred years ago.

• Madam Marie Curie won 2 Nobel Prizes
• Clara Barton started the American Red Cross.
• Florence Nightingale was the founder of modern nursing.
• Women wrote many of the greatest works of literature of the 19^th century
• Many women became doctors, lawyers and business owners despite the prejudice and restrictive practices of the times.

These signs for women's suffrage seem obvious now, but they weren't then. It took remarkable people to change the long held beliefs that women did not have the knowledge to cast a responsible vote and that giving women the vote, would upset traditional family institutions.

It will take remarkable people, now, to change the long held belief that more people always makes life better for everyone.

If these people are found and take action, it will be unprecedented in the history of activist movements because they will be fighting for the long term future of the environment and our civilisation, instead of something that has immediate consequences. They will be fighting for their children and grandchildren and everyone else's children and grandchildren, rather than for themselves.

Nothing like that has ever happened before.