You say population increase is the major independent variable?

It’s the crudeness: As if more the sheer numbers of people were even a credible unit of analysis, full stop, for policy or management. As if complex could be abbreviated simply.

Not a scintilla of recognition:

• that perceptions and management of policies differ, at least, by a person’s age, education, income, gender, and ethnicity;
• that not-knowing, difficulty and inexperience with respect to population numbers and to perceptions, at the very least, set disciplines, fields and ways of being apart from each other;
• that what stops further polarization of disciplines, fields and ways of being are not fewer numbers but the not-knowing, difficulty, and inexperience; and
• that when the numbers do polarize, fear becomes a solipsism, believing itself to be an anti-politics machine.

Default to numbers on their own is, in other words, an Olympian capacity to deoxygenate all living matter.