You should rewind your timeline further back. Thomas Malthus was whinging about how overpopulation was gonna mess everything up, especially global food supply, in the 1700s.
Overpopulation is off the environmentalists' agenda for um political reasons.

We also have Victoria aged authors complaining about pollution.

Then there are all the Mayan amd Biblical predictions which may have been local, but many of those civilizations collapsed partly because of environmental factors.

I despise single use plastics and conserve way more energy than my neighbors (they put the average up and I think they lower it to encourage conservation). However, I can't really get on the whole carbon trading scheme because it is just monetizing the whole thing.