The problem is not necessarily the population growth, but the growth in aggregate demand. The rich demand more and more every year, the middle-class demand more and more every year, and the poor demand to live like the middle class.
Your population can be stable, but the economy is not.
While economy has historically been coupled to resource and energy usage, recently we have decoupled economic growth from things like that, countries can and do have economic growth with stable or decreasing ecological footprint as the service economy and digital/attention economy can provide more and more things people want without necessarily consuming more physical resources.
> While economy has historically been coupled to resource and energy usage, recently we have decoupled economic growth from things like that
I get what you are saying but I would need to see this sustained before I believe that we have finally broken the back of GDP to Ecological Footprint linkage. I'm not optimistic about mankind's ability to keep its footprint under control.
A lot of the time, that is only achieved by outsourcing production and other high-environmental tole activities to the third world. I am extremely skeptical of most countries claiming to have achieved this.
Do you have a source for this? Considering the basic improvements seen in the efficiency of various devices and processes, I'm dubious that the outsourcing of environmentally costly activity is the cause of this GDP-resources trend.
Your population can be stable, but the economy is not.