Many thanks to Paul Ehrlich for this article by Colin Butler.

Colin Butler Population and Globalization (PDF, 135 KB)

Thanks to Phil Dodd for this article.
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Eight years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and despite repeated mandates from Congress, the United States still has no reliable system for verifying that foreign visitors have left the country.

New concern was focused on that security loophole last week, when Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a 19-year-old Jordanian who had overstayed his tourist visa, was accused in court of plotting to blow up a Dallas skyscraper.

Last year alone, 2.9 million foreign visitors on temporary visas like Mr. Smadi’s checked in to the country but never officially checked out, immigration officials said. While officials say they have no way to confirm it, they suspect that several hundred thousand of them overstayed their visas.

For full article, visit:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/us/12visa.html

Thanks to John Rohe, Vice-President for Philanthropy at the Colcom Foundation, for this article from the Social Contract, which has not lost any relevance since it was written.
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Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb was a call to arms in 1968. His prophecy of congestion and resource depletion motivated a generation in their child-bearing years to address exponential population growth. This generation responded to the call. Population became the central focus on our first Earth Day in 1970. Concerns over population growth permeated the media and seared an indelible mark on the collective conscience of a nation.

The U.S. fertility rate dropped as a result of environmental awareness of population pressures and other factors. These other factors included improved family planning, female empowerment, urbanization, increasing costs of child-rearing, and rising college expenses. Our concerns reflected an interest to leave a more dignified future.

For full article, visit:
http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc1304/article_1159.shtml

Bill Ryerson was interviewed on Prime Time Radio, October 20, 2009. Below is a summary of the interview. If you would like to listen to the interview, please visit http://www.prx.org/pieces/41170-population-media-center

Do medical dramas make you wish you’d become a doctor? Does that cheating spouse make you think you could get away with it, too? The Population Media Center, based in Vermont, has higher stakes for its shows. It creates TV and radio dramas with the hope that the behavior of the characters it creates will improve- and even save- the lives of its audience.
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Many thanks to Lindsey Grant for this paper he published through NPG. See http://www.npg.org/.

Lindsey Grant Population Policy for a Depression Forum Paper (PDF, 138 KB)

Thanks to Monique Tilford for this introduction to the latest edition of the best-selling book of which she is co-author, Your Money or Your Life. See http://yourmoneyoryourlife.info. Also see the blog site at www.yourmoneyoryourlife.info
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Introduction to the Revised Edition

Today, big national and global changes are making it very hard to get control of money in your personal and family life – and to plan for a secure future. You don’t need me to tell you that – you experience it daily. That’s one reason we decided to update this classic book. Now more than ever, we need a new way of thinking about earning, spending, saving and the good life. When this book came out in 1992, we were at the beginning of the dot com bubble and shortly thereafter, the real estate bubble. Bubbly was flowing. We bought into buying more based on our newfound apparent wealth from this boom. But times have changed and many things are going bust – and many people along with it.
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Thanks to Paul Ehrlich for the attached paper. Also see the comments on his paper at the end of the document.

Paul Ehrlich Key Issues for Attention by Ecological Economists 2008 (PDF, 401 KB)

Thanks to Lester Brown for this book byte.
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Earth Policy Institute
Plan B 4.0 Book Byte
October 7, 2009

OUR GLOBAL PONZI ECONOMY

http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/book_bytes/2009/pb4ch01_ss4

Lester R. Brown

Our mismanaged world economy today has many of the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme takes payments from a broad base of investors and uses these to pay off returns. It creates the illusion that it is providing a highly attractive rate of return on investment as a result of savvy investment decisions when in fact these irresistibly high earnings are in part the result of consuming the asset base itself. A Ponzi scheme investment fund can last only as long as the flow of new investments is sufficient to sustain the high rates of return paid out to previous investors. When this is no longer possible, the scheme collapses—just as Bernard Madoff’s $65-billion investment fund did in December 2008.
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Every dollar spent on family planning saves taxpayers $4 dollars, according to a new report by the Guttmacher Institute. “The national family planning program is smart government at its best,” said Rachel Benson Gold, lead author of the study, Next Steps for America’s Family Planning Program.

The report comes after Republicans ridiculed the inclusion of what they falsely claimed was $200 million in the stimulus package for family planning. “Democrats capitulated and contraception was gone. Now, it turns out there never was a $200 million budget request for contraception” said blogger Cristina Page on January 30 in her commentary “The 200 Million Dollar Question” posted on BirthControlWatch.org and picked up by the Huffington Post.

For full article, visit:
http://www.planetwire.org/details/8037

Over the past two weeks there has been lots of public huffing and puffing over the inclusion (and then exclusion) in the stimulus package of a provision for contraception. Much of the discussion was little more than media hot air, unanchored by anything as weighty as facts. The media discussion was notable for among other things: the absence of experts. To cite one blunder: the shock media gleefully tore into the supposed controversy of a $200 million allocation of taxpayer money for pregnancy prevention, despite the fact that there was no $200 million allocation of taxpayer money for pregnancy prevention. That fable sadly got passed off as fact. In reality, the bill proposed an administrative change that would have saved the states 200 million dollars in five years. (This “mistake” was courtesy of Rep. John Boehner, a friend of the anti-contraception movement.)

In all this, a more important point has been mangled. And that is that family planning has profound economic benefits.

For full article, visit:
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/02/07/sexonomics-101