Reaching the Masses: Radio Shows Abroad Are Connecting People with Health, Environment and Population Issues; Now, They’re Coming to Hollywood

By Melissa Knopper

Darkness falls over Rwanda. All across the country, thousands of people switch on their radios and tune in to Umurage Urukwiye (“Rwanda’s Brighter Future”), a popular broadcast soap opera. They listen as the main character, Leodia, leads an ecology club in her village, Tarama. They respect the way she protects the habitat of endangered mountain gorillas, which is being destroyed by tourists. Through her work, Leodia encourages her neighbors to buy tree seedlings to prevent erosion and help the gorillas.

At the end of the show, researchers from Population Media Center (PMC) do a survey. They discover sales of tree seedlings spiked by 11% at local nurseries. Each time researchers from this Shelburne, Vermont-based nonprofit air a radio or television soap opera, they find similar results—an increase in family planning visits to a clinic, better HIV and AIDS prevention or a decline in violence against women.
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UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, today welcomed the United Nations Secretary-General’s announcement naming Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin as Executive Director of UNFPA, to succeed Thoraya Ahmed Obaid once her tenure ends on 31 December.

Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, a Nigerian, is currently Professor of Medicine at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and the African Spokesperson for the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health. Prior to this, he served as Minister of Health of Nigeria and was also Director-General of the country’s National Agency for the Control of HIV and AIDS. In addition, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Centre for Population and Development Studies.

For full article, visit:
http://www.unfpa.org/public/home/news/pid/6942

Thanks to Fred Stanback for this article.
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Worldwide overpumping of groundwater, particularly in northern India, Iran, Mexico, northeastern China and the American West, more than doubled from 1960 to 2000 and is responsible for about 25 percent of the rise in sea level, according to estimates in a new study by a team of Dutch researchers published in Geophysical Review Letters.

The general idea that groundwater used for irrigation is running off into ocean-bound rivers or evaporating into the clouds, only to end up raining into the ocean, has been around for two decades or so; it was a focus of a 2005 paper in The Journal of Hydrogeology. But Peter H. Gleick, a leading expert on water issues, said the new paper offers a fresh way of quantifying the phenomenon.

For full article, visit:
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/rising-seas-and-the-groundwater-equation/

Thanks to Joe Bish for this article from the Washington Post.
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Catholic churches in the central Swiss city of Lucerne have sparked controversy among believers with an AIDS awareness campaign that involves giving teenagers condoms bearing the slogan “protect thy neighbor as thyself.”

The churches started handing out some of the 3,000 condoms Monday as part of an effort to engage young people, many of whom may be turned off by the Vatican’s long-standing opposition to the use of condoms, said a spokesman.

“We needed something to appeal to people who wouldn’t dream of talking to the church about that kind of issue,” Florian Flohr told The Associated Press.

For full article, visit:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/25/AR2010102502049.html

Thanks to Bob Walker for this blog posting.
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Population Matters
Not Written in Stone: Projections and Pledges
October 5th, 2010

Many bright and otherwise well-informed people believe that population growth is a fait accompli. They accept without much thought or reservation the U.N. projection indicating that world population will grow to 9.1 billion by 2050. Few understand that the U.N.’s projection is just a medium variant, and that U.N. demographers also issued ‘low’ and ‘high’ variants showing population growing somewhere between 8 billion and 11 billion by mid-century.

August Comte, the French sociologist, once famously declared that “demography is destiny,” but he never said it was predestined. Fertility and mortality rates can easily defy projections. That’s why projections are not written in stone; they are frequently updated to take into account new data. Demographic projections, as demographers are found of saying, are not predictions.
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Terming population stabilisation as “most important”, Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad today said the government will strive for achieving it through people’s cooperation rather than taking the legislation route.

“We are building new infrastructure, increasing food production but everything is proving to be less than required due to lack of population control. How to tackle it is the biggest question before India now,” he said.

Azad was talking to the media after inaugurating the pavilion of the Health and Family Welfare Ministry — with the theme of “population stabilisation” — at the India International Trade Fair here.

For full article, visit:
http://www.zeenews.com/news668107.html

Thanks to Joe Bish for this article from Times of the Internet.
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Recent financial and demographic studies have revealed that by the time the year 2030 comes around a majority of the middle class population of the world will be from China and India.

It has been estimated that the people of India and China will account for as much as 45 per cent of the middle class population of the world by the year 2030.

These stunning statistics have been recently brought to light by the financial book Southern Engines of Global Growth.

For full article, visit:
http://www.timesoftheinternet.com/briefs/india-china-to-contribute-majority-of-world-middle-class-population-by-2030/

Many thanks to Tim Murray for this article by him.
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Language as a tool of deception and self-destruction

As William Catton has observed, language is a double-edged sword. It can be employed to convey clear and accurate information or be an agent of obfuscation and manipulation. Since the tactics of deceit and camouflage are common to a cross section of species, Catton maintains that they must not be necessarily seen as a character flaw but instead be viewed objectively as a sometimes necessary adaptation to confuse predators and prey. As Churchill said, sometimes the truth must be protected by a bodyguard of lies. It is doubtful that the Normandy invasion would have succeeded without the fiendishly deceptive ploy of creating Patton’s phantom army. Perhaps the imperatives of group living in an hierarchical arrangement primed the primate brain for deceitful tactics, but in language we have developed a means to deceive even ourselves. Language has become a weapon of mass distraction and destruction. What was a competitive advantage of decisive importance in our ascendance may prove, ironically, to be the agent of our ultimate demise. When we are not using language to practice deceit, we amusing ourselves to extinction by “conjuring fictions with words”, as Catton put it, stupefied and inebriated by the opiate of escapist storytelling.
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Thanks to Jennie Goldie of Sustainable Population Australia for her article, “The Coming Liquid Fuel Crisis.” She based this paper on information from the Peak Oil Conference last month.
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We face a liquid fuel crisis in two to five years. That was the stark message from an international conference on peak oil in Washington DC that I attended last month.

It will be far worse than the 1973 and 1979 oil shocks that induced panic, disorientation and insecurity. Back then stock market declines followed big hikes in fuel prices. This time we can expect ever-rising fuel prices accompanied by annually deepening recession, increasing inflation and unemployment, and a decline in world trade.

Last time, the crises resolved themselves as oil production and trade were resumed. This time, there will not be enough oil to resume business as usual. Despite a decrease in demand from OECD countries, overall demand continues to rise as global population climbs inexorably from 6.8 towards 9.2 billion and newly emerging economies expect their share of the global resource pie.

For full article, visit:
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=11171

Thanks to Chris Clugston for this interesting paper.

To download a copy, visit: https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B5F-idWfw7TeZWE5NWUzOTgtMGI0Ny00MGM2LWIyN2ItMDFkMDgwZjk5MmVm&hl=en&authkey=CMOlkNcD