> There is a chasm between "we do not need to extract every last resource we find" and "no resource extraction".

That is rather redundant seeing as
we already do not extract every resource available - we extract to meet demand.

> still have the fish and the birds and the insects intact as well.

Another redundancy as the large part of the human population would face doom if most animals cannot survive. We do not have the means to engineer survival for even a fraction of 8 billion people without ecosystems.

> There are environmental costs at play and they should be considered and balanced against our need to continue consuming more and more of the planet's surface.

They are. And the growth in consumption is largely driven by emerging middle class in China and other countries. It would be inhumane to demand that they do not improve their quality of life.

> Actually the people who already have contraceptives use the most resources, so instead of pointing fingers at "them" we would do well to look at our own resource consumption.

You still don't see the big picture.

Fertility rates in the west are stagnant. Growth rate is pegged through policy, as a device to prop up the GDP (primarily benefiting the rich).

This is a measure of consumption. Immigration is the reason total GDP (consumption) grows over time. It should be trivial to infer that those elements that lead to our individual carbon footprint are what constitutes a better life for those moving over - the houses, infrastructure, food, comforts, etc. No one moves here to lower consumption.

Notwithstanding, the significant increases in consumption are in emerging economies, not ours. This will continue as more of the world is lifted out of poverty. It's a positive, but will lead to more emissions. Fertilizer, steel, cement, and plastics require it. The basic pillars of modern living, even if you keep gadgets like iPhones out of the picture.

Ultimately, the global population growth is projected to level off in 100 years. If you care so much about birds and fish though, you would do well to support initiatives to expedite the stagnation. The numbers don't lie.

Blaming consumers in abstract is ineffective and absurd. We could and should target some problem areas through policy (greener homes grant to improve insulation is a good real world example, also reducing food waste), but ultimately consumption will rise with our growing population and you cannot outrun that.certainly not with innanities like scolding people about arbitrary consumer choices like buying a phone or driving a car to meet their needs.

Since the radical leftists have appropriated the green sphere, I detect more cognitive dissonance, such as the notion that it is imperative that any and all should have the opportunity to emigrate here owing to better standard of living while simultaneously calling on people to lower their standard of living in completely arbitrary ways.

This bears repeating: even if you hypothetically lowered consumption of a large demo of westerners through messaging (unlikely), the govt policy is explicitly to increase consumption. Immigration would just increase. Consumption WILL increase, at least for 100 years. The anti-consumer rhetoric is pissing in the wind.