But stabilising the global population would not cause ecological damage to automatically level off, in and of itself. In the absence of more consumers, capital finds ways to get existing consumers to consume more. Indeed, that has been the dominant story for the past few hundred years: the growth rate of material use has always significantly outstripped the growth rate of the population. Indeed, material use keeps rising even when populations stabilise and decline. This has been the case in most historical examples of population stability under capitalism.
