FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 22, 2010

Contact: Katie Elmore
Director of Communications
Tel: 802-985-8156 ext. 205
elmore@populationmedia.org

BeMobile Sponsors UN MDGs Radio Drama Campaign in Papua New Guinea

Port Moresby, PAPUA NEW GUINEA – The United Nations in Papua New Guinea in cooperation with the Population Media Center (PMC) is pleased to announce a groundbreaking partnership with local mobile phone company, BeMobile. BeMobile has signed on as the major private sector sponsor of two social change radio serial dramas to be developed for public broadcast in Papua New Guinea in Pidgin and English.

“The United Nations is delighted that BeMobile has taken on a role as a corporate partner for development in PNG. Through this support, BeMobile is developing a legacy of civic participation and helping PNG move towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals,” said United Nation’s Resident Coordinator David McLachlan-Karr.
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This month, America celebrates the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, founded in 1970 by the late U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.), one of our greatest environmental heroes of the 20th century. Yet few of the multitudinous articles, exhibits, parades and speeches will dare — or bother — to broach the one issue that worried Nelson perhaps more than any other: human overpopulation.

I know this because I collaborated closely with Nelson on several projects during the last decade of his life.

By the time he died in 2005 at the age of 89, Nelson had become deeply disappointed with the wholesale retreat of the environmental establishment from advocating limits to population growth. Rather, a new generation of more pragmatic (expedient?) campaigners preferred to prattle on about safer and sexier topics like tropical deforestation, overfishing, oil and water shortages, urban sprawl, traffic congestion, power plant pollution, toxic waste, marine “dead zones,” proliferating dams, roads and power lines, destruction of wildlife habitat, endangered species, and of course, climate change.

For full article, visit:
http://www.mnn.com/home-blog

The following article appeared in the March/April 2010 publication of Santé Tropic’.
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Ngelawu Nawet and Conal Keele : First radio serial dramas in Wolf and Pulaar for health
By: Mohamed Kébir Tijani KANE

A few months ago, RTS and selected community radio stations in Senegal began broadcasting two radio serial dramas in Wolof and Pulaar. The Wolof program, titled Ngelawu Nawet (“Winds of Hope”) and the Pulaar program, titled Conal Keele (“Harvesting the Seeds of Life”), both have a unique characteristic: they are written, produced and acted by Senegalese, using a methodology for behavior change communication developed by Miguel Sabido of Mexico.

These programs are the work of the American non-governmental organization Population Media Center (PMC). PMC formed a partnership in 2006 with a local Senegalese organization (Réseau pour l’Appui de l’Education Sanitaire – RAES) and the University of California at Los Angeles to promote the use of this behavior change communication methodology in Senegal. The US Agency for International Development (USAID), through an agreement with its local social marketing firm, the Agence pour le Développement du Marketing Social (ADEMAS) and the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) funded the project through the aegis of the Senegalese Ministry for Health and Prevention. This is the first experience in Senegal of the use of entertainment-education, which has already proven extremely successful in other countries throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the United States.
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Through his Foundation’s initiatives, President Clinton addresses global challenges, including climate change, childhood obesity, and sustainable development. Now, he wants you to Take Initiative on Earth Day.

The Clinton Foundation has launched a website, www.clintonfoundation.org/earthday, that has four actions you can take to learn more about climate issues and help make a difference. First, they have launched a climate quiz that lets you test your knowledge about the environment—and it has a twist. For every person who takes the quiz, $2 will be donated toward buying solar flashlights for people without access to electricity living in camps in Haiti. Their goal is for 100,000 people to take the quiz so that they can donate 20,000 flashlights to internally displaced people in Haiti. All you have to do to “Take Initiative” to help Haiti and the environment is take the 10-question quiz. Also, you can get informed about the Foundation’s climate initiatives and sign up to participate in a local event in Chicago, Little Rock, Houston or New York. And the capstone to their Earth Day campaign is a special Digg Dialogg on April 22 in which President Clinton will answer climate questions submitted through Digg. Get the details about the online event and the other activities on http://www.clintonfoundation.org/earthday.

Thanks to Carter Dillard for alerting me to this special issue of Nature.
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Nature 461, 447-448 (24 September 2009) | doi:10.1038/461447b; Published online 23 September 2009

Earth’s boundaries?

Abstract
An attempt to quantify the limits of humanity’s load on our planet opens an important debate.
In this issue of Nature, a group of renowned Earth-system and environmental scientists led by Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre sets out to define boundaries for the biophysical processes that determine the Earth’s capacity for self-regulation (see page 472). The framework presented is an attempt to look holistically at how humanity is stressing the entire Earth system. Provocatively, they go beyond the conceptual to suggest numerical boundaries for seven parameters: climate change, ozone depletion, ocean acidification, biodiversity, freshwater use, the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, and change in land use. The authors argue that we must stay within all of these boundaries in order to avoid catastrophic environmental change.

For full article, visit:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal

or

http://www.nature.com/news/specials

When fossil fuels begin to vanish, the first sign of the times will not be made of cardboard and propped up in front of an empty gas pump. The sign will be the flickering bulb in the ceiling, because electricity is always the weakest link in the synergistic triad that includes fossil fuels and metals.

When the lights go out, so does everything else. The house or apartment will be largely non-functioning. Not only will there be darkness throughout the dwelling between sunset and sunrise, but all the sockets in the wall will be useless. The “four major appliances,” stove, refrigerator, washer, and drier, will be nothing more than large white objects taking up space, so there will be no means of cooking food or preserving it, and no means of doing laundry. There will be no heating or air-conditioning, because these are either controlled by electricity or entirely powered by it. For the same reason, there will be no plumbing, so clean water will not be coming into the house, and waste water will not be leaving it.

For full article, visit:
http://www.culturechange.org

Thanks to Frank Arundel for this article. This article is well worth reading!
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Modern industrial society is based on a triad of hydrocarbons, metals, and electricity. The three are intricately connected; each is accessible only if the other two are present. Electricity, for example, can be generated on a global scale only with hydrocarbons. The same dependence on hydrocarbons is true of metals; in fact the better types of ore are now becoming depleted, while those that remain can be processed only with modern machinery and require more hydrocarbons for smelting. In turn, without metals and electricity there would be no means of extracting and processing hydrocarbons. Of the three members of the triad, electricity is the most fragile, and its failure serves as an early warning of trouble with the other two [6, 7].

For full article, visit:
http://www.culturechange.org

PMC has been working in partnership with Emergent Media Center on an electronic game for adolescent boys aimed at preventing violence against women. The game is called Breakaway and will launch at the 2010 FIFA Cup in South Africa. For more information on the game, visit: http://www.populationmedia.org/where/worldwide/

Here is a short trailer of the game.

On October 4, 2009, the Population Institute hosted a fascinating seminar by Jack Alpert, former director of the Stanford Knowledge Lab. More recently, he summarized why he has concluded that the sustainable world population that allows ever increasing well being is below 100 million. To see it, click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTWduFB_RX0

If you would like to see the seminar he presented at Population Institute, or if you would like to show it to others, Jack has posted two 25-minute videos of the “Nonlinearity of the Elephant Problem.” You can view them at this URL http://skil.org/Qxtras_folder-2/nonlinearityofelephant.html.

Thanks to Linda Schuck for this announcement.

Behavior, Energy and Climate Change Conference
November 14-17
Abstracts Due May 15

For more information, visit:
www.BECCconference.org