Finally! An environmental film that breaks the 40-year old population taboo by connecting the dots to the world’s most pressing environmental, social and humanitarian crises. Click here: Mother: Caring Our Way Out of the Population Dilemma to find out more about this groundbreaking film, due to be released in February 2011.

Thanks to Joe Bish for this article.
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Nationwide moving service, ABF U-Pack Moving, recently conducted a research study focused on compiling data into a World Population Growth infographic entitled How Humans Run the Earth. This descriptive infographic serves as a visual representation of how the world’s vast population explosion over the past 60 years has dramatically affected the world we live in. The charts and graphs included in the World Population Growth infographic provide an intriguing look at where the world’s population lives, how they consume resources and how the world is likely to change over the next 40 years as the population continues to rapidly grow.

For full article, visit:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/11/11/prweb4772124.DTL

Thanks to Mark O’Connor for this article, preceded by his comment.

That’s not quite what the Melbourne Age’s economics editor Tim Colebatch is saying, but he comes close to it when he writes today:

…since Labor took power, Victoria’s population has grown by almost a million, close to 20 per cent. For those living in Victoria, hospital wards became overloaded, trains overcrowded, roads clogged. Assault rates rose, for several reasons, and people felt less secure. The cost of electricity, gas and water soared, mostly for reasons unrelated to state government. Labor made some mistaken choices that proved expensive. And it developed a habit of being less than honest with Victorians
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Thanks to Bob Engelman for this article. This article refers to a new Worldwatch Report on the population-women-climate linkage, which can be found at http://www.worldwatch.org/PopulationClimateWomen. For a Time magazine blog by Krista Mahr about the report, see http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2010/11/19/can-condoms-curb-climate-change/
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The Number Left Out: Bringing Population into the Climate Conversation

Robert Engelman

Numbers swirl around climate change.

So many parts per million of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So many gigatons of carbon dioxide emitted. So many degrees Celsius of temperature rise that we hope won’t happen. Yet one number rarely comes into play when experts or negotiators talk about the changing atmosphere and the warming of the planet: the number of humans putting heat-trapping gases into the air.
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PMC’s Fall 2010 newsletter features our programs in Senegal, Papua New Guinea and one-on-one interviews with Program Advisory Board members, Gloria Steinem and Anne Ehrlich.

PMC Fall 2010 Newsletter (PDF, 3MB)

Katie Elmore, PMC’s Director of Communications was interviewed by Jim Swanson on Progressive News Radio.

To listen to the podcast, visit:
http://www.progressivenewsradio.com/?p=120

From the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Asia Program. Asia Program Associate Michael Kugelman has published a new policy brief on how the international community can help Pakistan respond to its water crisis.

The brief has been published by the Oslo-based Norwegian Peacebuilding Center (NOREF), and can be accessed from the Asia Program’s webpage:

http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1462&fuseaction=topics.item&news_id=643800
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Below is an article from Reuters featuring Population Media Center’s President, Bill Ryerson, and his chapter in The Post-Carbon Reader.

A Primer for the Post-Carbon World
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS233836031520101210

“When it comes to controversial issues, population is in a class by itself. Activist working to reduce global population growth are attacked by the Left for supposedly ignoring human-rights issues or glossing over Western over-consumption. They are attacked by the Right for supposedly favoring widespread abortion and promiscuity. Others think the problem will be solved by technology.

One thing is certain: The planet and its resources are finite and it can not support an infinite population of humans or any other species. A second thing is also certain: The issue of population is too important to avoid just because it is controversial.”

Thus begins a fantastic, and chilling, chapter entitled “Population: The Multiplier of Everything Else” by WIlliam Ryerson of the Population Media Center in a must-read book entitled The Post-Carbon Reader. edited by Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch. Heinberg is well-known for popularizing the Peak Oil concept and is Senior Fellow-in-Residence at the Post Carbon Institute.
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Below is an article about PMC’s work that appeared in the Digital Report on December 9, 2010.

Population Media Center takes creative approach to overpopulation
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/301279#ixzz187icoTKl

The issues surrounding humanity’s overpopulation challenge are vast and discouraging, but one organization is taking a creative approach – and it just may be working.

The United Nation’s estimates for changes in world populations over 50-year periods are grim. At the high end, there is a staggering growth in world population of 8 billion people – and at the low end, there is a loss of nearly 2 billion people. These estimates are measured in 50-year increments from 1950 to 2300.
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Thanks to Joyce Tarnow for this article.
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Excessive withdrawals are forcing communities from South Carolina to Florida to look elsewhere for water.

The Hilton Head Public Service District, which provides water and sewer service to a South Carolina island resort community, announced last week that it was shutting down one of its wells because saltwater had soured the supply. It became the sixth of the district’s dozen wells to be sealed in the last decade due to saltwater displacing fresh groundwater, signaling a potentially dangerous new trend for the water supply of millions of people in the Southeast.

“This is just the start of it,” the district’s general manager Richard Cyr told Circle of Blue. Cyr expects another two wells to be spoiled in the next year and all the wells to close by 2020, as salt water plumes move inland. “We are the canary in the coal mine for the coastal area. This is a regional issue. Anyone using the Floridan Aquifer is subject to these threats.”

For full article, visit:
http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2010/world/north-america/overdraft-saltwater-intrusion-strain-the-floridan-aquifer/