From National Geographic magazine January 2011 issue. See http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/01/seven-billion/kunzig-text Your letters can go to ngm@nationalgeographic.com.

On December 29, in the first report of a year-long partnership between the PBS NewsHour (the Lehrer Report) with National Geographic magazine examining population issues (with help from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting), special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reported from New Delhi, where rapid and unplanned population growth is exacerbating a shortage of water. See the report at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/health/july-dec10/india_12-29.html and watch for further updates at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/.
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Pop Audio from the Woodrow Wilson Center

• “Can the planet handle 9 billion? The answer is probably yes. Is it a desirable trajectory? The answer is no,” says John Bongaarts of the Population Council. [more]

• Robert Walker of the Population Institute calls expanding reproductive health services a “win for women, for their health, for their welfare, the welfare of their families, for their communities, for the environment, and for the planet at large.” [more]

Thanks to Marilyn Hempel for this announcement.
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African Women Speak Out
A documentary film project created by Blue Planet United/Population
Press http://www.populationpress.org
from Marilyn Hempel, Executive Director of Blue Planet United

The Population Press, and its parent organization Blue Planet United, are pleased to announce the completion of a video project – African Women Speak Out. We hired a young student from Kenya, Michelle Odhiambo, to interview five young women from five different African countries, and to produce short video films of these interviews. The entire series is now showing on our website – http://www.populationpress.org.
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You may want to thank The Economist for mentioning population near the end of this article. To comment, visit, http://www.economist.com/node/17628093/comments#commentForm
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In some ways Alhaji Bunu Fodio is lucky: at least his house is still standing. Most of Kagara, his dusty village in Nigeria’s far north, was smashed to smithereens during this year’s rainy season when an unexpected deluge burst a nearby dam. Floods destroyed homes and farms in at least a dozen nearby villages. Mr Fodio lost his entire harvest of maize and sorghum.

Kagara lies on the edge of the Sahel, an arid belt of land on the Sahara desert’s southern fringe that spans Africa from Senegal in the west to parts of Ethiopia in the east, and is constantly battling the elements. During the Sahel’s nine-month dry season, roughly from October to June, the subsistence farmers who make up most of its inhabitants eagerly await the rain.

For full article, visit:
http://www.economist.com/node/17628093?story_id=17628093

At http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/worldbiz/ all you can listen to a November 29 BBC broadcast on the issue of economic growth and the question of whether it should continue.
Look for the link: GlobalBiz: Growing Pains: 29 Nov 10

Thanks to Hugh Harwell for this OpEd. It does not mention population, but the problem of societal illusions applies to many population and sustainability issues.
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The United States, locked in the kind of twilight disconnect that grips dying empires, is a country entranced by illusions. It spends its emotional and intellectual energy on the trivial and the absurd. It is captivated by the hollow stagecraft of celebrity culture as the walls crumble. This celebrity culture giddily licenses a dark voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness and betrayal. Day after day, one lurid saga after another, whether it is Michael Jackson, Britney Spears or John Edwards, enthralls the country … despite bank collapses, wars, mounting poverty or the criminality of its financial class.

For full article, visit:
http://projectworldawareness.com/2010/09/american-psychosis-what-happens-to-a-society-that-cannot-distinguish-between-reality-and-illusion/

Thanks to Joe Bish for this article about a possible human rights violation in Palau.
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Palau is currently wrangling with a controversial bill that would ban the sale and distribution of contraceptives. The Population Growth Act is intended to stimulate population growth in the country, and has already been passed by the Senate on first reading.

According to the Asian Development Bank, Palau’s population growth is just under 1.5%-the smallest in the region. This has raised concerns among officials, especially because young Palauans are increasingly moving overseas to pursue education and work opportunities. Senator Alfonso Diaz explained: “We’re hoping when we outlaw [contraceptives] that people will be freely having sex and then reproduce.”

For full article, visit:
http://topnews.us/content/229374-palau-debates-banning-contraceptives-stimulate-population-growth

At http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00c8nxh (December 10, 2010), you can listen to an interesting BBC World Service program on the threat to biodiversity by loss of single trees in Brazil’s Atlantic forest. Here is BBC’s description of the program:

Analysing tree-specific microbes in the Brazilian rainforest
Scientists in Brazil are using ‘meta-genomics’ – the use of DNA decoding to work out what is in the mass of micro-organisms in the environment. They basically make a ‘soup’ of the DNA found in a certain area and then work out what they have. So far they have found thousands of bacteria, fungi and other micro-organisms that live on or in tropical trees in Brazil’s threatened Atlantic Forest. These microbes are specific to each tree species. So if one species of tree goes extinct, could it take thousands of previously unknown, and possibly useful micro-organisms with it?
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FM100 to air radio drama on MDGs
By ELIZABETH MIAE

The Population Media Centre-PNG (PMC) has partnered with Kalang Advertising Ltd (KAL)-FM100 for the broadcast of the millennium development goals (MDG) radio drama series for a two-year period commencing next February.

A broadcast agreement contract was signed last Friday between the two parties.

PMC is an implementing agency to the United Nations and is responsible for the production of the MDG radio campaign involving two long running radio drama series.
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Thanks to Eric Rimmer for this article from the Journal of Cosmology.
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Humans and their predecessors have accelerated the loss of Earth’s biodiversity into a sixth global mass extinction. Paleontologically, it is a new phenomenon for a mass extinction to be attributed to a single species, but the evolution and expansion of humans has created unique circumstances. Whereas behaviors associated with the human enterprise can be tied to specific extinctions, the global pattern of biodiversity loss is clearly linked to the extraordinary growth of our population’s size and density. The prospects for continued losses of plant and animal species remain likely if the growth of the human population goes unabated.

For full article, visit:
http://journalofcosmology.com/Extinction104.html