From the time of the appearance of modern humans it took 200,000 years to reach the first billion in population in 1840. As late as 1750, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, world population was only an estimated 725 million. Then from improved living standards - marked especially by increased food production, advances in sanitation, and medicine - population began to grow exponentially, so that by 1930 it was globally two billion. As recently as 1960 world population was only three billion, but by 1975 it had reached four billion. It is now 7.3 billion, and it took only 12 years for the most recent billion to arrive. This scale of population growth has no precedent.
The United Nations now projects world population will reach 11.2 billion by the year 2100. Humans are now appropriating Earth's finite resources to support the growing numbers at exponential rates...
To call for "stabilizing" population is not acceptable. The need is to reduce population to the size that can be sustained indefinitely in the forthcoming time of permanent dependence on the annual increment of resources obtained from renewable resources on a finite Earth. This sustainability can only be achieved with a smaller population.