a naïve faith in stasis has repeatedly led to prophecies of environmental doomsdays that never happened. The first is the “population bomb,” which defused itself… birth rates peak and then decline, for at least two reasons. Parents no longer breed large broods as insurance against some of their children dying, and women, when they become better educated, marry later and delay having children… The other scare from the 1970s was that the world would run out of resources. But resources just refuse to run out.

Steven Pinker, Enlightenment now: the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress, New York, 2018, pp. 125-126