One of the prominent elements that scientists believe will guide to life extinction in an overpopulated planet, is the developed human overconsumption. The concept of overconsumption refers to the circumstances in which the utilization of resources outpaces the sustainable capacity of the ecosystem. That is, the more the world’s population consumes, the fewer people people Earth can support. Overpopulation and overconsumption are unavoidably linked to each other -- It is due to our seven billion people that humans are subjected to continue producing and consuming, resulting in an endless overproduction of products, commodities, or substances that are wanted or needed. This progressive overproduction is truly disadvantageous because the planet counts with finite natural sources. Some of the most essential natural resources critical to sustain human life include clean air, fresh water, forests, topsoil, and marine biodiversity. By promoting overconsumption throughout the world, individuals also promote considerably to landscape degradation from mining, deforestation, pollution of rivers and oceans, deforestation, among other negative environmental outcomes resulting from production. Morrow, attempting to provide an academic opinion on this issue, interviews Karin Kuhlemann, population ethicist at University College London. She asserted that overconsumption is “vandalism to this planet. But consumption’s much more responsive to a crisis than population is” (Morrow, 00:11:20 - 00:11:26). Kuhlemann argues that overconsumption is neglecting and sacrificing the Earth’s natural resources in order to satisfy our needs and wants, and that overconsumption is associated with this issue in a greater scale than population alone. Therefore, inculpating overpopulation itself for the environmental problems that our planet is going through does not provide an accurate approach to this matter.

In addition to overconsumption, misdistribution of the resources and wealth is another outstanding factor that may lead to the sixth’s life extinction on Earth. According to the Institute for Policy Studies, three men, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffet, hold as much capital as the bottom fifty percent of Americans as of 2018 as shown in the graphics on the left. Indeed, many individuals and their obsession with the market economy, negatively affects society, creating a hostile environment in which the wealthy give themselves the pleasure to waste and pollute the planet, whereas, statistically, the poor class is not damaging the environment as much. To put this into perspective, Morrow presents an experiment about a society of mice in 1972:

They ran out of space and went mad – had an extinction event. But get this, they didn’t really run out of space, because a select few of them had hoarded a massive area. a few of the mice that the scientists dubbed ‘the beautiful ones’, blocked off giant chunks for themselves with the help of other stronger mice they somehow convinced to do that. The beautiful ones spent all their time grooming and eating in a wide-open space, while the rest of the mice all squeezed together in the remaining area, and then they all killed each other.

This experiment can be related to social class differences between the wealthy, who owns an immense part of the wealth, and the poor, who does not have other choice but to survive with their limited resources. To further develop his argument on misdistribution, Morrow interviews Joe Bish, director of issue advocacy population media center, who declares that "there's many resource injustice around the world. Some people are living very high on the hog, to the point of indulgence and extravagance, while other people are starving" (Morrow, 00:11:00 - 00:11:08). Undoubtedly, unequal distribution of the resources, in conjunction with overpopulation and overconsumption, are significant elements to theorize that the end of life on earth is not that far from us.