Population Decline and Environmental Crisis as Ontological Outcomes of Survival-Based Civilization Why Life Understood as Cost and Resource Undermines Its Own Continuity

This paper argues that population decline and environmental crisis are convergent outcomes of a shared ontological limitation rather than independent policy problems. Both emerge from a civilizational framework in which life is understood as a collection of separated entities to be managed, optimized, and controlled. Under this framework, human life appears primarily as demographic cost, while nature appears as resource stock. The paper demonstrates that once life and nature are reduced to administrable nouns, civilization loses the capacity to sustain generative biological and ecological processes. Attempts to address demographic or environmental crises through incentives, regulation, or optimization therefore repeatedly fail. Artificial intelligence further amplifies this condition by perfecting the illusion of manageability. This paper is part of a theoretical series initiated by the overview DOIː 10.5281/zenodo.18193256“Rationality Without Transition: Why Advanced Civilizations Remain Trapped in an Animalistic Mode of Survival”. It connects population decline and environmental crisis as unified ontological outcomes of survival-based civilization, forming a conceptual bridge to subsequent analyses of artificial intelligence as an ontological exposure device.