Thanks to Jane Roberts for this article.
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The spring, just over 20 miles northwest of Johannesburg, flows blood red.

It is toxic, highly acidic and full of heavy metals, so nasty that newly weaned impala and other animals in the Krugersdorp Game Reserve downstream can’t drink the water – and some of them die of thirst.

The water, a poisonous legacy of the gold mining industry, is dead. Not one living organism survives in it.

Millions of gallons of the same kind of toxic water lie underneath Johannesburg, a city of nearly 4 million people, and it’s rising 50 feet a month.

For full article, visit:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-south-africa-water-20101126,0,807151.story

Thanks to Jack Alpert for this article.

To see this story with its related links on the guardian.co.uk site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/24/africa-billion-population-un-report.

See Jack’s comment, followed by the article.

The article below is a good example of good temporal logic mixed with just enough meaningless true facts to let the reader keep his illusions that his or her kids will not have a hard time in the future.

The article tells us, the living and yet to be born can muddle through our problems and not much needs to be done. Thus the article, the news media in general, is a distraction from the task of focusing each listener on the the real problem “extreme existing overpopulation.”
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Prices of wheat and other staples have risen “alarmingly” over the past year, a U.N. report said Wednesday, acknowledging fears of a repeat of the 2008 food crisis when a spike in the price of bread led to deadly riots in some countries.

Further increases were likely unless production of major food crops increases significantly in 2011, the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization said, warning that international food import bills could pass the $1 trillion dollar mark in 2010.

“With the pressure on world prices of most commodities not abating, the international community must remain vigilant against further supply shocks in 2011 and be prepared,” the agency said in its Food Outlook.

For full article, visit:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/UN-food-agency-higher-food-apf-3634235796.html?x=0&.v=1

Thanks to Earl Babbie for this article.
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Following record birth rates in the wake of the 1979 Islamic revolution, Iran implemented an internationally praised family planning program in the 1990s that dramatically reduced the growth rate. Ahmadinejad has criticized the program as an ungodly and a Western import.

“We should take the age of marriage for boys to 20 and for girls to about 16 and 17,” he said, according to the state-owned Jam-e Jam daily. “The marriage age for boys has reached 26 and for girls to 24, and there is no reason for this.”

For full article, visit:
http://www.newser.com/article/d9jkdul80/ahmadinejad-urges-young-girls-to-marry

If you are looking for the perfect holiday gift, I am happy to announce that The Post Carbon Reader is now available in bookstores. My contribution, the essay Population: The Multiplier of Everything Else, gives a broad overview of the population issue. You can pick up your copy here: http://j.mp/PCReader

How do population, water, energy, food, and climate issues impact one another? How do we respond to one problem without making the others worse? The Post Carbon Reader addresses the key issues shaping our new century, from overpopulation and renewable energy to social justice and community resilience. The Post Carbon Reader takes a hard-nosed look at these interconnected threats and, critically, presents some of the most promising responses.

Contributors include some of the world’s leading sustainability thinkers, including Bill McKibben, Richard Heinberg, Stephanie Mills, David Orr, Wes Jackson, Erika Allen, Gloria Flora, and dozens more.

Thanks to Jenny Goldie for this article.
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Suppose you had $1 million to spend on tackling climate change. How would you spend it to get the best bang for your million bucks? Would you spend it on stopping the slash-and-burn of forests? Perhaps on switching to nuclear energy? More energy-efficient buildings? Building cleaner power stations?

According to a recent paper by David Wheeler and Dan Hammer, climate change experts at the Center for Global Development, the answer is (drum roll): you would do much, much better to spend your money on a combination of family planning and girls’ education in developing countries.

For full article, visit:
http://www.owen.org/blog/4105

Population Media Center is noted as a top 50 Blog by Global Health Organizations

http://www.mastersinglobalhealth.com/top-50-blogs-by-global-health-organizations.html#41

Thanks to Joe Bish for this article. See http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2010/11/16_globalwarming_messaging.shtml

Here is a message about these findings from Joe, followed by a summary article:

From Dot Earth Blog: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/an-inconvenient-mind/
“Behavioral researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that dire descriptions of global warming, in isolation, can cause people to recoil from acceptance of the problem… Here’s a link to the paper, “Apocalypse Soon? Dire Messages Reduce Belief in Global Warming by Contradicting Just World Beliefs.”

My take is population stabilization and reduction advocates should take note. Apocalyptic warnings seem to dominate most population advocacy not infused with strong reproductive rights and family planning ethos; in other words, most who look at population as a sustainability issue per se (which I think is a good use of one’s time) tend to rely on warnings and predictions of catastrophe to ignite rapid changes to public policy. That strategy seems to be losing by a score of 6.9 billion to zero.
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Below is an excerpt from Alan Baum’s blog where he mentions PMC.

Global Population & Resource Scarcity

Are you aware that global population has doubled in the past 40 years, going from 3.3 billion to just under 7 billion today? Think about that for a minute. Forty years is an insignificant number in the global scale of time, and yet, in the past 40 years alone we have doubled the number of people living on this planet. And while much of this growth has occurred in rapidly developing countries such as China and India, it should still concern you. Why? Because, according to the Worldwatch Institute, in the very near future food demand from China and India alone will likely exceed the current global agricultural production capacity, driving global food prices higher as countries compete for ever-dwindling agricultural resources.
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Thanks to Joe Bish for this article.
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Female education and family planning are both critical for sustainable development, and they obviously merit expanded support without any appeal to global climate considerations. However, even relatively optimistic projections suggest that family planning and female education will suffer from financing deficits that will leave millions of women unserved in the coming decades. Since both activities affect fertility, population growth, and carbon emissions, they may also provide sufficient climate-related benefits to warrant additional financing from resources devoted to carbon emissions abatement. This paper considers the economic case for such support. Using recent data on emissions, program effectiveness and program costs, we estimate the cost of carbon emissions abatement via family planning and female education.

For full article, visit:
http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/1424557