I mean, was he proven wrong? How many people face food and water insecurity daily (~2 billion and ~3 billion, respectively)? Life is not binary, it is a spectrum of quality of life, and hope is not a strategy. The damage we’ve done is clear (see my citations above), as is what we’d do on our way from 7.4 billion to 11 billion people (by 2100).
Population and resource contention are inherently linked.