OMNI
OVER-POPULATION,
GROWTH, CONSUMPTION, WARMING, CLIMATE
CHANGE NEWSLETTER #10, July 8, 2016.
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;
#7, Nov. 5, 2015; #8 Jan. 8, 2016, #9 March 17, 2016).
What’s at stake:
Years it took
for the human population to grow from 1 billion to 2 billion: 123;
Years it took to
grow from 6 billion to 7 billion: 22 .
From YES! (Summer 2013).
Contents:
Stabilizing Population Newsletter #10, July 9, 2016
Contexts: Brown’s Plan B
(World on the Edge, 2011)
What we can do
Population Today
Endless Growth Watch NWA
Seeking Stabilization:
Individuals
Katha Pollitt: If Pope Francis Really Wanted to Fight Climate
Change
Monbiot, Don’t Overlook Overconsumption
Books
Two Books by Alan Weisman
Angus and Butler, Too Many
People? Don’t Overlook Consumption
Organizations (see earlier newsletters)
Population Connection
Questions Answered by PC personnel
Contexts: Brown’s Plan B
(World on the Edge, 2011)
The goals for a
sustainable planet (p. 183)-- “stabilizing climate, stabilizing population, eradicating poverty, and
restoring the economy’s natural support systems—are mutually dependent.” Which is the most important, for which the
others serve? “All [goals] are essential
to feeding the world’s people.” That is,
humanistic values, especially inclusive compassion and generosity, are primary
to Brown.
“The fossil
fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy that evolved in western
industrial societies is no longer a viable model….we need to build a new
economy, one powered with carbon-free sources of energy—wind, solar, and
geothermal—one that has a diversified transport system and that reuses and
recycles everything.” (183).
What
we can do to stabilize population:
Change
the economic system. Brown: “The key to restructuring the economy is to
get the market to tell the truth through full-cost pricing” (183). But it’s complicated, and we might not agree
with all of his details. See The Collapse of Western Civilization by
Oreskes and Conway.
Donate to and or join a good
population organization—Planned Parenthood, Population Connection, NARAL,
etc. Subscribe to its magazine. Give a subscription to a library. See earlier OMNI population newsletters.
Organizers of OMNI350 Book
Forums: Repeat relevant forums at another venue and in another town (NWACC).
Purchase another copy of
Weisman’s book to give to libraries and pass around.
Publicize the new IUD and how
important and cheap are contraceptives to
population control.
Population
Today
FROM Aggressive, Ceaseless,
Relentless POPULATION GROWTH: AUTO
SALES, BUSINESS GROWTH, HIGHWAY CONSTRUCTION, TAXES, INCREASING C02
Arkansas
“17. 4 Million Car Sales Set
U.S. Record in ’15.” Compiled by AD-G Staff.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Jan. 6, 2016). “Analysts
expect sales could go even higher this year as unemployment continues to
decline and more young buyers enter the
market. . . .It was the sixth straight year of growing U.S. sales….” Just one more reason why we must stop
population growth.
NORTHWEST ARKANSAS
Christie
Swanson. “Businesses Expect Continued
Growth.” AD-G (March 18, 2016). “Northwest Arkansas employers expect to hire 3,161
workers and invest $336 million over the next three years.” The economic engine continues to respond to
the growing population.
Ron
Wood. “Change Coming for I-49
Interchange.” AD-G (March 20, 2016).
The
widening of “the interstate from Fayetteville to the north end of Bentonville”
continues. “We’ll have six lanes of
interstate, three in each direction through that interchange. . . .estimated to
cost some $55 million.” “In addition to
adding capacity, the project should eliminate kamikaze merging….” The pressure of population has been increasing
steadily as we who live here know well.
The remedy? Increasing highways
and sizes of highways while major human and species needs are under-served. Why no attempts to reduce the cause of such
ultimate destruction (9 lanes next and parking lots?)?
“Ongoing
Paving Work to Close Interstate Lanes.” AD-G (June
5, 2016). Costing $28.3 million, the
project is part of AHTD’s Connecting Arkansas Program.
Michael
Wickline. “Group Urged to Move to Next
Step on Roads.” AD-G (July
1, 2016). Hutchinson exhorts the
Arkansas Good Roads Foundation to support his highway plans. The AGRF is a collection of Arkansans
dedicated to promoting roads. Google the
name for member list. Naturally they do
not spend time comparing Arkansas needs and priorities. --Dick
The
three core neo-capitalist (neocon) values are:
private property , growth, and
consumerism. Significantly reducing
those massive behaviors in the short time available to us seems unlikely. But perhaps we can stop and even reduce
population. –Dick
Spencer
Willems. “State Prisons Projected to
Hold 22,781 by ’26.” AD-G (July
1, 2016). “The state should expect to
see its inmate population continue climbing….”
Even unwelcome growth is welcome?
That is, given the urgent need for a sustainable planet, prison growth
is not absolutely inevitable, any more than is road growth.
Seeking
Stabilization
Individuals
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
SEPTEMBER 9, 2015
http://www.thenation.com/article/the-popes-blind-spot/
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) [photo
omitted –D]
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?
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.
Books
Several books
read for OMNI350 Climate Change Forums included attention to the necessity of
stopping population growth. Here are two
of them. Richard Heinberg, The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New
Economic Reality (we must end economic and population growth quickly before
massive suffering occurs, pp. 212-215, and elsewhere). p. 282: “need to curb both
human appetites and human numbers”). We
did not discuss Firor and Jacobsen, The
Crowded Greenhouse (p. 189: two
revolutions are necessary “if human beings are to flourish safely on Earth”—social
and technical).
The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus:
Rereading the Principle of Population
Alison Bashford & Joyce E. Chaplin.
Rereading the Principle of Population
Alison Bashford & Joyce E. Chaplin.
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10747.html
The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus is a sweeping global and intellectual history that radically
recasts our understanding of Malthus's Essay on the Principle of
Population, the most famous book on population ever written or ever likely
to be. Malthus's Essay is also persistently misunderstood.
First published anonymously in 1798, the Essay systematically
argues that population growth tends to outpace its means of subsistence unless
kept in check by factors such as disease, famine, or war, or else by lowering
the birth rate through such means as sexual abstinence.
Challenging
the widely held notion that Malthus's Essay was a product of
the British and European context in which it was written, Alison Bashford and
Joyce Chaplin demonstrate that it was the new world, as well as the old, that
fundamentally shaped Malthus's ideas. They explore what the Atlantic and
Pacific new worlds—from the Americas and the Caribbean to New Zealand and
Tahiti—meant to Malthus, and how he treated them in his Essay.
Bashford and Chaplin reveal how Malthus, long vilified as the scourge of the
English poor, drew from his principle of population to conclude that the
extermination of native populations by European settlers was unjust.
Elegantly
written and forcefully argued, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus relocates
Malthus's Essay from the British economic and social context
that has dominated its reputation to the colonial and global history that
inspired its genesis.
Alison Bashford is the Vere
Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of
Cambridge and a fellow of Jesus College. Her books include Global
Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth. Joyce E.
Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American
History at Harvard University. Her books include The First Scientific
American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius.
Two
Books by Alan Weisman
THE
WORLD WITHOUT US by ALAN WEISMAN
S T. MARTIN'S, 2007.
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ALAN WEISMAN, COUNTDOWN: OUR LAST, BEST HOPE FOR A FUTURE ON EARTH? Little, Brown, 2013.
Countdown is a gripping narrative by a fair-minded investigative journalist who
interviewed dozens of scientists and experts in various fields in 21 countries.
“ –The Wall Street Journal
A new
book by the author of THE WORLD WITHOUT US. “A riveting read….a major
work…rigorous and provoking.” —Booklist (starred review)
With a million more of us
every 4½ days on a planet that's not getting any bigger, prospects for a
sustainable human future seem ever more in doubt. For this long awaited
follow-up book, Alan Weisman traveled to more than 20 countries to ask what
experts agreed were the probably the most important questions on Earth-and also
the hardest: How many humans can the planet hold without capsizing? How robust
must the Earth's ecosystem be to assure our continued existence? Can we know
which other species are essential to our survival? And, how might we actually
arrive at a stable, optimum population, and design an economy to allow genuine
prosperity without endless growth?
The result is a landmark work of reporting: devastating, urgent, and, ultimately, deeply hopeful. By vividly detailing the burgeoning effects of our cumulative presence, Countdown by Alan Weisman reveals what may be the fastest, most acceptable, practical, and affordable way of returning our planet and our presence on it to balance.
The result is a landmark work of reporting: devastating, urgent, and, ultimately, deeply hopeful. By vividly detailing the burgeoning effects of our cumulative presence, Countdown by Alan Weisman reveals what may be the fastest, most acceptable, practical, and affordable way of returning our planet and our presence on it to balance.
Don’t
Overlook Consumption and Fertility Rates
Too Many People? Population, Immigration, and the
Environmental Crisis by Ian Angus and Simon Butler. Haymarket, 2012. Too
BY I TTMany People? provides a clear, well-documented, and popularly written
refutation of the idea that “overpopulation” is a major cause of environmental
destruction, arguing that a focus on human numbers not only misunderstands the
causes of the crisis, it dangerously weakens the movement for real solutions. Click to Listen to Ian Angus Speak About the Book
Ian Angus is editor of Climate and Capitalism, an
online journal focusing on capitalism, climate change, and the ecosocialist
alternative. His previous books include Canadian Bolsheviks and The Global Fight for Climate Justice.
Simon Butler, a climate justice
activist based in Sydney , Australia
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Socialism
Today
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Organizations
(see earlier newsletters)
Population
Action International
UN Population Fund
Sierra Club’s Global
Population and Environmental Program
World Watch Institute: Population
Population Connection Magazine
June
2016
Focus
on Latin America, the Zika virus, and reproductive rights in Latin America
President’s
Note
I.
Causes of Crisis of great number of poor people ignorant of reproductive rights
and methods, not allowed either, or
cannot afford contraception
Catholic
Church, Helms Amendment, Soaring Population, Poverty/slums
II. Good news
Martin
Luther King, Jr., “the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we
have discovered and with resources we possess” (1966).
Both
Secretary Clinton and Senator Sanders are firmly committed to fix Helms after
becoming president.
Significant
article on overall progress in falling birth rates
in Latin America except for the poor, who are far behind wealthy families in
controlling family size, perpetuating inequality, reprinted from The Christian Science Monitor, pp. 16ff. Several other items on the virus.
Full-page
ad for the new anthology, The
Good Crisis: How Population Stabilization Can Foster a Healthy U.S.
Economy. Available
free by PDF or purchase a hard copy, www.thegoodcrisis.org
Editorials
reprinted from the The New York Times (employers’
religious objections to providing contraception) and the Los Angeles Times (many women in Latin Am. are not allowed to
control their bodies and the virus is making the situation for them worse).
And
more. PC and its magazine are important
for a better future for the women and men of the world and deserve our support.
Is the U.S. imposing its own
values about reproductive health and family planning on other
countries?
Not
at all. The U.S. generally provides assistance to other countries through two
avenues: the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the United States
Agency for International Development (USAID).
UNFPA
assists governments and organizations at the receiving countries’ request. The
agency maintains a democratically organized and implemented agenda, agreed upon
by the 179 countries that took part in the Cairo International Conference on
Population and Development (ICPD) in 1994. UNFPA extends assistance to
countries at their request and works in partnership with
governments, all parts of the United Nations system, development banks,
bilateral aid agencies, non-governmental organizations, and civil society.
Under internationally agreed upon population and development goals, each
country decides for itself what approach to take in order to meet the specific
needs of its residents. At the Cairo conference, developing countries agreed to
provide 75% of the funding needed to provide family planning to
everyone who wants to use it in their countries, and the industrialized nations
agreed to provide the remaining 25% of the funding.
USAID
grants assistance to foreign organizations that apply for funding and technical
assistance. There is no U.S. funding for family planning in any
country where it is not specifically requested by either the government or a local
organization.
Basically, we’re advocating that the
U.S. government increase the foreign aid it contributes to international family planning programs through USAID and UNFPA, so
that the 225 million women worldwide with “unmet need” for family planning can gain access. Unmet need means that
they are of childbearing age and want to use contraceptives, but cannot obtain
them. We simply want to empower women to make the best decisions for
themselves—that’s true around the world, and it’s true right here in the U.S.!
Shauna Scherer Population
Connection
A
Reply to George Monbiot’s,
essay on Overconsumption and Overpopulation
"Give women power over their
own lives and the population problem should go away!” We wholeheartedly
agree on this point, except for one very important caveat: Without access to affordable
contraception and the education to use it properly, women cannot reliably gain
power over their own lives in the first place. This is
the very premise of the concept of unmet need for family planning—the 225
million women in the developing world who are estimated to have unmet need
want to prevent or delay pregnancy but aren’t using contraception. Why? Because
they afraid of what their families and communities will think, they are
wary of side effects, they don’t believe it’s in their control to plan their
pregnancies (because it is something controlled by god), and they
don’t have reliable and affordable access to contraceptives and family
planning education and services.
Without increasing access to
contraception, women simply cannot escape the patriarchy because they will spend their entire reproductive lives
pregnant, breastfeeding, and taking care of young children. On the flip
side, there are several countries that come to mind where women are still
not fully equal to men (including our own), but where the total fertility
rate has dropped precipitously because of access to birth control:
Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Tunisia, Iran, and the list
goes on.
In the United States,
and the rest of the developed world, conspicuous consumption is absolutely
imperative to reduce and, if possible, end. We are in total agreement on
that.
The one
area where I’m not sure you’re right is on women’s perception of population issues in the global south. Women
play a huge role in the family planning programs in aid-recipient countries, as
educators, nurses, doctors, advocates, and patients/consumers of contraception.
It’s true that a hundred years ago eugenics
was a driving inspiration for population programs, but that has changed
along with most other socially outdated causes. (We used to have separate
water fountains in this country for blacks and whites, but that doesn’t mean we
shouldn’t have water fountains.) The money that the U.S. gives to international family planning programs
is granted at the request of recipient governments and NGOs.
It’s not something we’re pushing—rather, there is not enough funding to go
around to all the organizations who wish to receive it. By Starkey at Population Connection
My blog:
War Department/Peace Department
Newsletters
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)
JUNE 2013, CO2 SPIKED AT 400PPM AFTER 10,000
YEARS NEARLY CONSTANT AT 280PPM.
Contents: Over-Population Newsletter #4, June 28, 2014
FORUM ON WEISMAN’S COUNTDOWN, Sunday July 6, 1:30
July 11, United Nations
World Population DAY
CONDITION OF THE WORLD
Alan Weisman, Countdown, a Review by Nathaniel Rich in
NYTBR
Datz, C02 vs. Food
RESISTING ORGANIZATIONS
United Nations Population
Fund
Population Connection
Population Connection Magazine of Population Connection (formerly ZPG)
NARAL
CHALLENGE
Angus and Butler
Contact President Obama
Contents 1-3
Population and Climate
Change
Paul and Anne Ehrlich in The Population Bomb (1968) concluded
that population growth was a significant danger to the planet. They were falsely reported in the mass media
and maligned by various organizations. The
Republican Ford Administration in NSS Memorandum 200 connected population and warming/climate
change in 1975. The report was quickly
suppressed. Little attention has been
given to these connections by the mass media, and strong business and religious
denial has also silenced official and public discussion and action. Now at last, strengthened by books and
articles like that of Alan Weisman’s Countdown
which give comprehensive analysis (population numbers and consumption,
women’s desires and needs), significant progress can be made against the harms
of population growth. --Dick
END OVER-POPULATION
NEWSLETTER #10
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