OMNI's War and Warming Anthologies: POPULATION, CHOICE,HUNGER, CLIMATE NEWSLETTER #7

OMNI

OVER-POPULATION, GROWTH, SPECIES EXTINCTIONS, HUNGER, CLIMATE CHANGE NEWSLETTER #7, November 5, 2015.

Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology

(#1 July 8, 2010; #2 April 23, 2012; #3 April 4, 2014; #4 June 28, 2014; #5, June 5, 2015; #6, July 16, 2015).

See UN World Population DAY, July 11, 2014 and 2015)

http://omnicenter.org/donate/

What’s at stake: Reducing population growth and its consequences.

Blog:

War Department/Peace Department

http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/

Newsletters

http://omnicenter.org/dick-bennetts-peace-justice-and-ecology-newsletters/
Index :
http://omnicenter.org/dick-bennetts-peace-justice-and-ecology-newsletters/dicks-newsletter-index/

See: abortion.doc, OMNI Climate Change Forums. doc, Planned Parenthood, OMNI Population Poverty Hunger Watch.doc (these should be one with OMNI population warming watch.doc), Sierra Club Population Project, Worldwatch Institute , OneWorld US, Population Action International, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)

Contents #5 and #6 at end.

Contents Overpopulation Newsletter #7

PREVENTION, CHOICE

World Contraception Day, September 26, 2015

McClain, Long-Acting Contraception

Endangered Species Condoms

Men Are Responsible Too: World Vasectomy Day, November 13, 2015

Katha Pollitt, Population density affects everything: Women Must Have Power Over Their Fertility

POPULATION GROWTH: BIODIVERSITY LOSS, HUNGER, COLLAPSE

Geiling, Population Growth Causes Biodiversity Loss

Population Growth Produces Hungry People

Speth and Diamond: Planetary Collapse from Population Growth

Weisman, Countdown: 2 Reviews

PLANNING, PREVENTION, CHOICE ORGANIZATIONS

UNFPA

Pathfinder International

Planned Parenthood International Federation

Population Action International

PREVENTION, CHOICE FOR WOMEN AND MEN

World Contraception Day September 26, 2015

Purnima Mane, Pathfinder International via mta-poolc1.cluster2.convio.net

Sep 21, 2015 (5 days ago)

to me

Take the Contraception Perception Challenge

James –

Quick: Name something small enough to hold in your hand but big enough to actually, literally, massively change the world.

Give up? Contraception. Seriously. It is.

When women have access to reliable, effective contraception, they gain independence, health, equality – and the ability to change their communities and the world.

Yet... most people don't even know contraception basics. Do you? Take our quick challenge to see how you rank!

Take the Challenge

The timing couldn't be more perfect. In just a few short days, on Saturday, September 26, the world will celebrate World Contraception Day.

We're launching the challenge this week to help shine an even brighter spotlight on one of the world's most powerful weapons against poverty and inequality. Be part of it: Test yourself with our challenge in honor of World Contraception Day and spread the word!

Proving your contraception smarts is pretty satisfying – and so is spreading the word about such a critical cause. Right now, 225 million women around the world have an unmet need for contraception. It's an outrage, and one we need to work together to solve.

We're hoping to hear from you and all Pathfinders, so please take the challenge now – then share it far and wide when you're done to see if your friends are as well informed as you.

With your help we can give millions the chance to live the lives they choose, free from fear and stigma.

Purnima Mane, President
Pathfinder International

PATHFINDER INTERNATIONAL HEADQUARTERS
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Long-Acting Contraception Makes Teen Pregnancy Rates Plummet. So Why Are Some Women Still Skeptical?

http://www.thenation.com/article/long-acting-contraception-makes-teen-pregnancy-rates-plummet-so-why-are-some-women-still-skeptical/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New%20Campaign&utm_term=dailyChromeHTML\Shell\Open\Command

The Nation Magazine

NATION DAILY: October 28, 2015 Long-Acting Contraception Makes Teen Pregnancy...

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The Nation Magazine

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	The Nation

NATION DAILY: OCTOBER 28, 2015

Long-Acting Contraception Makes Teen Pregnancy Rates Plummet. So Why Are Some Women Still Skeptical?

The history of birth control in America is littered with instances of coercion. Reproductive-justice advocates don’t want to see that happen again.

DANI MCCLAIN

WOMEN MUST CONTROL THEIR FERTILILTY

NATION DAILY: SEPTEMBER 9, 2015

· REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

· POPE FRANCIS

· FEATURE

· SEPTEMBER 28-OCTOBER 5 ISSUE

If Pope Francis Really Wanted to Fight Climate Change, He’d Be a Feminist.

The world will never be healed of its ecological ills as long as women cannot control their fertility.

By Katha Pollitt Twitter, The Nation, SEPTEMBER 9, 2015.

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Young mothers at a health clinic in Manila. In 2012, the Catholic Church opposed a bill guaranteeing access to birth control and sex education in the Philippines. (Erik de Castro / Reuters)

If the world consisted only of straight men, Pope Francis would be the world’s greatest voice for everything progressives believe in. He’s against inequality, racism, poverty, bigotry and, as his recent encyclical Laudato Si’ made eloquently clear, the rampant capitalism and “self-centred culture of instant gratification”—including excessive meat eating—that fuel climate change and may well destroy the planet. He has a gift for adding warmth to harsh and inflexible dogma, as with his famous comment on gays: “Who am I to judge?” As I write, he has just announced a special year in which any priest may absolve a woman for having an abortion, as long as she is “contrite.” No wonder leftists and liberals and even secular humanists love him. Naomi Klein seemed positively starstruck in her New Yorker piece about her recent visit to the Vatican, where she spoke at a press conference and symposium about the encyclical. Indeed, she was so impressed with the pope’s “theology of interconnection” and “evangelism of ecology,” she forgot to mention that he had nothing to say about the gender inequality that undergirds and promotes our onrushing disaster.

I know I risk being the feminist killjoy at the vegan love feast, but the world, unlike Vatican City, is half women. It will never be healed of its economic, social, and ecological ills as long as women cannot control their fertility or the timing of their children; are married off in childhood or early adolescence; are barred from education and decent jobs; have very little socioeconomic or political power or human rights; and are basically under the control—often the violent control—of men.

For example, consider population growth. Because of its association with coercion, racism, and doomsday predictions that failed to materialize, it’s hard for progressives to talk about overpopulation. But we must: There are 7.2 billion people on the planet—since 2000, we’ve added around 1.2 billion, roughly equivalent to the entire population of North America and Europe. At the current rates of increase, there will be 9.6 billion people by around 2050. Population density affects everything: climate change, species loss, pollution, deforestation, the struggle for clean water, housing, work, and sufficient food. How can we take the pope seriously if he refuses to face these facts?

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Pope Francis places the blame for the sorry state of the planet only on excess consumption by the privileged and says that international campaigns for “reproductive health” (scare quotes his) are really all about population control and the imposition of foreign values on the developing world—as if the church itself was not a foreign power using its might to restrict reproductive rights in those same places. But why is it an either/or question? Why not: There are billions of people who want a modern standard of living, which makes a lot of sense compared to the alternative—backbreaking farm labor in a poor village with no electricity or running water—and those desires can only be satisfied if people have fewer children, which happens to be what they want anyway.

True, Pope Francis did say that Catholics needn’t breed “like rabbits,” but he waved away the need for “artificial” birth control. If only those rabbits would use natural family planning! Interestingly, he made that comment as he was leaving the Philippines, a largely Catholic country where the powerful church hierarchy has fought tooth and nail against realistic sex education and government funding of contraception. Not coincidentally, the Philippines has the highest fertility rate among the 10 countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

According to a recent report from the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco, providing family planning to the 225 million women around the world who want it but can’t get it could meet 16 to 29 percent of the necessary decrease in greenhouse-gas emissions. Doesn’t meeting a desire that women already have seem a strategy more likely to succeed than turning the world vegetarian or keeping the new middle classes in China and India from buying cars and taking vacations? Educating girls, keeping women in the workforce, and providing good healthcare for women and children are crucial human-rights goals that also reduce the number of children a woman has.

It’s remarkable that the pope didn’t address a single sentence of his encyclical to these issues, especially since it otherwise deals so intelligently with the interconnection of so many disparate phenomena. Francis has often said that men and women have different gifts and “complementary” roles. He has spoken sweetly of motherhood and femininity and derided the movement for women’s equality as “female machismo.” Yet in Laudato Si’, the word “women” appears only in the phrase “men and women”—that is, people. Don’t women have anything special to contribute to solving climate change beyond serving their too-numerous children less fast food?

As climate change heats up, it’s women who will bear the brunt of it, because they are the majority of the world’s poor. Especially in the developing world, they’ll be contending with drought, food shortages, flooding, and forced migration, along with increases in the usual brutalities like rape, violence, trafficking, and war. Under such circumstances, to deny them the ability to control how many kids they bring into the world is to condemn millions of women to the hardscrabble desperation that the pope says he wants to prevent.

There is a great deal of research on how women’s rights, including reproductive rights, can ameliorate a range of global ills, including poverty and ecological disaster. The pope prefers to elide the whole issue, except when it comes to abortion, which he sees as close to the root of the problem: “Since everything is interrelated, concern for the protection of nature is also incompatible with the justification of abortion. How can we genuinely teach the importance of concern for other vulnerable beings, however troublesome or inconvenient they may be, if we fail to protect a human embryo, even when its presence is uncomfortable and creates difficulties?” Given that the church is such a latecomer to concern for the earth—until recently, the standard theological view held that God put nature here for humans to use—there’s a certain chutzpah in using this last-minute conversion to push the same old forced-birth agenda.

Never mind the 47,000 women who die every year in illegal abortions, and the even greater number who are injured: Abortion causes glaciers to melt and species to vanish. From Eden to ecology, it’s always women’s fault.

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KATHA POLLITT TWITTER Katha Pollitt is a columnist for The Nation.

MEN ARE RESPONSIBLE TOO: WORLD VASECTOMY DAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2015

Center for Biological Diversity
P.O. Box 710
Tucson, AZ 85702-0710

Did You Get Whacked for Wildlife? Tell Us Your Story.

One of the calendar's most underappreciated awareness days is fast approaching: World Vasectomy Day, Nov. 13. The population conversation often revolves around the need for reproductive justice and access to healthcare for women, but the other half of the population has an important role to play, too. World Vasectomy Day, started by filmmaker Jonathan Stack, is the perfect opportunity to talk about why men get vasectomies and celebrate those who have already made the choice as an act of love -- love for their families, their partners and, of course, the planet.

A vasectomy is one of the best ways to avoid unplanned pregnancy, reduce your carbon legacy and help leave space for wildlife. If you chose to get a vasectomy -- or are thinking about it -- for the sake of the environment, we want to hear from you. Send us a few sentences about why you "got whacked for wildlife" and we'll send you our conversation-starting "Get whacked for wildlife" T-shirt. We'll share your story online (first name and state only) to help inspire other men.

World Vasectomy Day isn't all talk. On Nov. 13 more than 650 doctors around the world will be performing thousands of vasectomies, many of them for free or at a reduced cost. The Center is supporting New York City doctors working to expand access to the procedure by sponsoring 20 vasectomies next month.

Learn more about World Vasectomy Day and send us your stories.

To sign up for Endangered Species Condoms, click here. If you'd like more information on the Center's Population and Sustainability program, visit our website.

To make a donation, click here.

Center for Biological Diversity
P.O. Box 710
Tucson, AZ 85702-0710

POPULATION GROWTH AND WORLD BREAKDOWN

JARED DIAMOND IN COLLAPSE follows James Speth in predicting “catastrophes, breakdowns, and collapses” (Speth, The Bridge at the End of the World). Diamond (as described and quoted by Mary Wood in Nature’s Trust), “Observing no fewer than a dozen environmental time bombs with short fuses—crises relating to water, soil, toxics, overpopulation. . .he notes, “If we solved 11 of the problems, but not the 12th, we would still be in trouble. . . .” (5). But many other observers believe population numbers and growth to be a root problem, not merely one among 12. –Dick

'Countdown,' by Alan Weisman - The New York Times

www.nytimes.com/.../countdown-by-alan-weisman....

The New York Times

Oct 11, 2013 - As Alan Weisman's “Countdown” amply demonstrates, we are well on our way. Some seven billion people are alive today; the United Nations ...

Alan Weisman's 'Countdown' points to Earth's population ..., LA Times

articles.latimes.com/2013/.../la-ca-jc-alan-weisman-countdown-2013092...

Sep 20, 2013 - Alan Weisman, the author of bestseller 'The World Without Us,' says population is going in the wrong direction to let us achieve ecological ...

POPULATION GROWTH Increases Meat-Eating Increases Biodiversity Loss
Meat-Eaters Are The Number One Cause Of Worldwide Species Extinction, New Study Warns

BY NATASHA GEILING AUG 17, 2015 1:39PMDIT: TERSTOCK

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A meat-inclusive diet often comes with a side of environmental caveats, including livestock’s contribution to global warming, its contribution to deforestation, and the stress it places on a bevy of increasingly precious resources, from water to land. Now, a group of researchers want to add another concern to the meat-eater’s plate: worldwide species extinction.

According to a recent study published in Science of the Total Environment by researchers at Florida International University in Miami, livestock production’s impact on land use is “likely the leading cause of modern species extinctions” — a problem the researchers think will only get worse as population growth increases the global demand for meat.

The study is particularly interesting to scientists because research linking livestock’s relationship to biodiversity loss has been lacking, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at Bard College who was not involved in the study, told Science.

“Now we can say, only slightly fancifully: You eat a steak, you kill a lemur in Madagascar. You eat a chicken, you kill an Amazonian parrot,” Eshel said.

To understand livestock production’s impact on biodiversity, researchers at Florida International University mapped areas that have exceptionally high percentages of native plants and animal species — known as biodiversity hotspots.

The researchers then mapped areas where livestock production is expected to increase in the future, and determined how much land would be lost as a result of expanding meat operations, using data from the Food and Agriculture Organization and other studies about historic livestock production and land use conversion in those areas. Then, they compared the biodiversity hotspots with the expected expansion of meat production.

They found that of the areas expected to have the greatest conversion of land use for agriculture — from forest to land dedicated to livestock production — 15 were in “megadiverse” countries that have the greatest diversity of species. The study concludes that in the 15 “megadiverse countries,” land used for livestock production will likely increase by 30 to 50 percent — some 3,000,000 square kilometers (about 741 million acres).

“These changes will have major, negative impacts on biodiversity,” Brian Machovina, the study’s lead author, told Science. “Many, many species will be lost.”

Several studies have suggested that the Earth is currently in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, caused largely by human activities. Animals are hunted and sold for trade, climate change is disrupting migration and mating patterns, extreme weather is threatening animal populations, and deforestation is fragmenting crucial habitat. But all of those causes, Machovina and his colleagues claim, pale in comparison to the threat of habitat loss driven by demand for meat, which the study claims “will cause more extinctions than any other factor.”

And though meat consumption in the United States has fallen steadily since peaking in the 1970s, meat consumption worldwide continues to rise, driven by technological advancements, liberalized trade, and growing economies. Livestock production is also an incredibly important source of economic security for millions of the world’s poor, providing stable income for 987 million around the world.

Machovina and his colleagues do suggest some mitigation efforts that could curb the loss of biodiversity from meat production — namely, eat less meat. The study says that in order to limit the worst biodiversity losses, the average diet should get no more than 10 percent of its calories from meat, and that pork, chicken, and fish are less resource-intensive options for meat eaters.

But while meat production can have a negative impact on species biodiversity and climate change, it’d be unwise to quit meat production altogether, Clayton Marlow, a grassland ecologist at Montana State University, Bozeman, told Science. He argues that the real issue facing biodiversity loss isn’t the expansion of meat production, but the expansion of urban sprawl, which takes away land that could potentially be used for agricultural production.

PLANET IS OVERPOPULATED AND PEOPLE ARE HUNGRY

FAIR August 25, 2015

NYT: Not Believing in Climate Change Is Like Believing in Food Shortages

Children being fed in Kenya (cc photo: FMSC)

Do you believe there are many hungry children in the world? If so, the New York Times thinks you may be suffering from confirmation bias. (cc photo: FMSC)

Last month, the New York Times‘ David Leonhardt posted an interesting interactive feature on confirmation bias. It’s a fun little game that illustrates something about how our minds selectively process information. (For what’s it’s worth, I correctly figured out the rule behind the game.)

Not so fun, I thought, were Leonhardt’s examples of confirmation bias in real life.

Most of us can quickly come up with other forms of confirmation bias — and yet the examples we prefer tend to be, themselves, examples of confirmation bias. If you’re politically liberal, maybe you’re thinking of the way that many conservatives ignore strong evidence of global warming and its consequences and instead glom onto weaker contrary evidence. Liberals are less likely to recall the many incorrect predictions over the decades, often strident and often from the left, that population growth would create widespread food shortages. It hasn’t.

Is rejecting climate science, though, really like having believed that unchecked population growth would lead to food shortages? Contrary to Leonhardt’s glib “it hasn’t,” food shortages are a serious problem in the world right now. According to the UN World Food Programme, “Some 795 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life…about one in nine people on Earth.” The WFP notes that about 3.1 million children die from malnutrition a year–and that one in four children on Earth are stunted by lack of food. That seems fairly widespread.

Unlike climate change denial, which if anything has exacerbated the problem of global warming, warnings about overpopulation may have had the intended effect of curbing population growth. China’s draconian one-child policy was directly inspired by the warnings of limits-to-growth advocates like the Club of Rome, along with numerous less coercive family planning initiatives. Partially as a result of these programs, the global population growth rate declined from above 2 percent in the 1960s and early ’70s to close to 1 percent and falling today. Without this reduction in growth, the population would be about 2 billion higher today than its current 7.3 billion.

Would the world now be providing enough food for 9.3 billion people? That seems unlikely, given that it’s currently not providing enough food for 7.3 billion.

Of course, world hunger could be greatly reduced if not eliminated with a fairer distribution of global income and a shift in developed countries to a more plant-based diet. But how likely is this to happen when “widespread food shortages” are tossed off by the New York Times as the go-to example of the kind of thing liberals mistakenly thought would happen?

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org.

Read the original post here.

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ORGANIZATIONS (see newsletters 1-6)

UNFPA - United Nations Population Fund

www.unfpa.org/

UNFPA addresses reproductive health and population issues, and raises awareness of these issues in all countries. Information about programme, activities, news ...

United Nations Population Fund .... Population and Sustainable ...

Contact

- How we work - Executive Board - Funds and funding - ...

State of World Population www.unfpa.org/

State of World Population 2014. The Power of 1.8 Billion. No. of ...

Funds and funding

Funds and funding. In 2013, UNFPA total gross contribution ...

Worldwide

Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati ...

Pathfinder International: A Global Leader in Sexual and ...

www.pathfinder.org

Pathfinder International

a non-profit family planning and reproductive health organization working with developing countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Careers Every day, Pathfinder and its committed staff change lives ...	Board & Staff Board & Staff. Pathfinder is fortunate to have an incredibly ...
Employment Opportunities Accountant - Quality Health Services for Haiti (SSQH), Port ...	Nigeria Pathfinder International's work in Nigeria includes developing ...
About Us Pathfinder International is driven by the conviction that all people ...	Contact Us Pathfinder Headquarters. Pathfinder International 9 ...
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Center for Biological Diversity

International Planned Parenthood Federation 11-4-15

Donate now http://www.ippf.org/

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UN adopts Sustainable Development Goals to end poverty by 2030: A win for women & girlsHealth and Gender Equality prioritized!

IPPF works in 170 countries to empower the most vulnerable women, men and young people to access life-saving services and programmes, and to live with dignity.

Supported by millions of volunteers and 30,000 staff, IPPF Member Associations provide sexual and reproductive health information, education and services through 65,000 service points. Those services include family planning, abortion, maternal and child health, and STI and HIV treatment, prevention and care.

Every year, our Member Associations help millions of poor and vulnerable people avoid unsafe childbirth, unsafe sex, unsafe abortion, STI-related illnesses and HIV-related stigma and discrimination. And together, we fight for local, national and global policies which recognize a fundamental human right - the right to sexual and reproductive health.

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OMNI's War and Warming Anthologies

Thursday, November 5, 2015

POPULATION, CHOICE,HUNGER, CLIMATE NEWSLETTER #7

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