Thanks to Joe Bish for this article. See: http://news.yahoo.com/catholic-church-india-says-more-children-111234252.html

Catholic church in India says have more children

October 11, 2011

Nirmala George, Associated Press

Worried about its dwindling numbers, the Roman Catholic church in southern India is exhorting its flock to have more children, with some parishes offering free schooling, medical care and even cash bonuses for large families, church officials said Tuesday.

The strategy comes as India’s population tops 1.2 billion, making it the second most populous country in the world after China, and runs counter to a national government policy of limiting family size.

But in the southern state of Kerala, where Catholics have long been a large, important minority, church authorities believe the state’s overall Christian population could drop to 17 percent this year, down from 19.5 percent in 1991. While they don’t have precise numbers for the Catholic population, they believe it is also dropping sharply.

“The Christian community in Kerala is dwindling. We realized that if the numbers decreased further, it would have a negative impact on the community,” said Babu Joseph, spokesman for the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India in New Delhi.

For the full article, please click here: http://news.yahoo.com/catholic-church-india-says-more-children-111234252.html

Thanks to David Poindexter for this article. See: http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/10/07/india-journal-overpopulation-i%E2%80%99ll-buy-that/

India Journal: Overpopulation? I’ll Buy That

October 7, 2011, 10:42 AM IST

By Ranjani Mohanty

In the 1980s, before India’s economic revolution, there used to be ubiquitous billboards showing the ideal Indian family-a father, a mother and two children-in order to encourage family planning. By the 2000s, these ads had been replaced by ones for Nokia, Coke and “India’s Got Talent.” We seem to have solved our overpopulation issue by using the philosophy “if you have lemons, make lemonade,” or, if you have a heck of a lot of people, make them consumers.

In 1952, when India’s population was less than 400 million, the government initiated a family planning program, one of the first of its kind in the world. By the 80s, India’s population had grown to 700 million. Today, India is the world’s second-most populous country at 1.2 billion. By 2025, it is expected to surpass China and become the most populous country with 1.4 billion, and some predict that figure may reach two billion by the year 2100. To put the growth into perspective, over the past 40 years, the population of the U.K. has increased by seven million while the population of India has increased by 700 million. We proudly call ourselves the world’s largest democracy, but that “largest” bit might not be something to strive for.

Economist Thomas Malthus first warned of the dangers of overpopulation back in 1798. In 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich rang the alarm bells again with his bestseller “The Population Bomb.” The 90s brought population scientist’s Joel Cohen’s book “How many people can the world support?” and ecologist Garrett James Hardin’s “Living within Limits.” But over the last few years, apart from some scientists, academics, NGO-types and concerned individuals shouting into the wind, there seems to have been little mainstream concern about the issue.

For the full article, please click here: http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/10/07/india-journal-overpopulation-i%E2%80%99ll-buy-that/

From RH Reality Check: http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/reader-diaries/2011/09/28/keeping-girls-school%E2%80%94addressing-early-marriage-breaking-barriers-reproductive-health-care

Keeping Girls in School: Addressing Early Marriage and Breaking Barriers to Reproductive Health Care

reader diary by LindaSuttenfield, Pathfinder International

September 28, 2011

Haregnesh Abetneh is 20 and lives in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. At age three, she was given away in a “promising” marriage. I met Haregnesh on a trip to Ethiopia recently and was awed by her story.

“When I turned 8,” Haregnesh said, “I was already divorced. I wanted to attend school, but my family wanted me to enter another marriage. This created a challenge, but I kept telling my parents that I did not want to get married again. I saw educated people and the difference in their lives. I also had friends who were in early marriages, who began having children very young. I watched as they had no food to eat or feed their children and they just kept getting pregnant and having babies. Some of them experienced prolonged labor and fistula. I could see that they were suffering and I wanted my future to be different.”

Over the last five years as I’ve worked at Pathfinder, I have seen that when girls have educational opportunities, they are empowered to improve their reproductive health and their lives. Conversely, when they are denied education, they are at a higher risk of poverty, HIV and AIDS, gender-based violence, and other harmful traditional practices. Getting and keeping girls in school is one of the best ways to foster later and chosen marriage, thus reducing the risk of maternal death from early child birth. With this fundamental belief in mind, Pathfinder International provides educational support intervention to girls like Haregnesh as an integral part of women and girls’ empowerment efforts.

To read the full article, please click here: http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/reader-diaries/2011/09/28/keeping-girls-school%E2%80%94addressing-early-marriage-breaking-barriers-reproductive-health-care

From RH Reality Check.  See http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2011/09/27/survey-finds-young-people-around-globe-using-contraception

Survey: Too Many Young People Worldwide Having Unprotected Sex

by Martha Kempner, RH Reality Check

September 27, 2011

Yesterday marked the Third Annual World Contraception Day (WCD). Held each year on September 26^th, this worldwide campaign aims “to improve awareness of contraception to enable young people to make informed decisions on sexual and reproductive health.” WCD is sponsored by the pharmaceutical company Bayer HealthCare, the maker of numerous birth control pills and other methods such as the intrauterine contraceptive, Mirena. The campaign is supported by a coalition of international NGOs, including International Planned Parenthood Federation, Marie Stopes International, and USAID as well as scientific and medical societies such as the Asian Specific Council on Contraception, the European Society of Contraception and Reproductive Health, and the International Federation of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology.

In honor of the event, Bayer conducts a survey of young people around the world to assess their knowledge and use of contraceptive methods. For this year’s survey, “Clueless or Clued-Up: Your Right to Be Informed About Contraception,” researchers from GFK Healthcare interviewed a total of 6,026 young people between the ages of 15 and 24 in 29 countries. Depending on the location, interviews were conducted online, by phone, or face-to-face.

The findings are not surprising but they are alarming as the survey confirms that young people worldwide lack information about and access to contraception and as a result are having unprotected sex quite frequently.

To read the full article, please click here: http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2011/09/27/survey-finds-young-people-around-globe-using-contraception

Thanks to Ed Barry, director of the Sustainable World Initiative (SWI) of the Population Institute, for this report he wrote of a meeting he attended at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.  For more information, see http://www.epa.gov/sustainability/.  To download the report, visit http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13152.

A positive direction for the U.S. EPA – Let’s hope it gains momentum

(This is also a meeting report)

On September 15th I attended the DC public ‘roll-out’ of the report; “Sustainability and the U.S. EPA.”  This report was requested by the U.S. EPA[1], to “… develop an operational framework for integrating sustainability as one of the key drivers within the regulatory responsibilities of EPA.”

The report was prepared by an ad hoc committee organized by, and for, the National Research Council under the National Academies’ Science and Technology for Sustainability Program (STS).  This ‘COMMITTEE’ was appropriately called; “Committee on Incorporating Sustainability in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.”  Their report makes the following important recommendations (along with four others not listed here):

1.      The EPA should adopt and implement a comprehensive sustainability framework that includes specific work processes for incorporating sustainability into decisions and actions.  [The process framework that was proposed by the committee is designed as a general work process that would be applicable to any type of decision that the EPA might need to make in the future.  The latter two steps of the recommended framework are; "Sustainability Assessment and Management (SAM)," and "Periodic Evaluation and Public Reporting[2].”]

2.      EPA should set several strategic 3-5 year breakthrough objectives related to its sustainability implementation and its performance indicators and associated metrics.

3.      EPA should develop a “sustainability toolbox” that includes a suite of tools for use in the SAM approach.  Collectively this suite of tools should have the ability to analyze present and future consequences of alternative decision options in terms of the full range of social, environmental, and economic considerations of well-being.

Continue Reading »

Thanks to Fred Stanback for this article.  See http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/01/science/earth/01forest.html?_r=1&ref=justingillis

With Deaths of Forests, a Loss of Key Climate Protectors

By JUSTIN GILLIS

Published: October 1, 2011

WISE RIVER, Mont. – The trees spanning many of the mountainsides of western Montana glow an earthy red, like a broadleaf forest at the beginning of autumn.

But these trees are not supposed to turn red. They are evergreens, falling victim to beetles that used to be controlled in part by bitterly cold winters. As the climate warms, scientists say, that control is no longer happening.

Across millions of acres, the pines of the northern and central Rockies are dying, just one among many types of forests that are showing signs of distress these days.

From the mountainous Southwest deep into Texas, wildfires raced across parched landscapes this summer, burning millions more acres. In Colorado, at least 15 percent of that state’s spectacular aspen forests have gone into decline because of a lack of water.

The devastation extends worldwide. The great euphorbia trees of southern Africa are succumbing to heat and water stress. So are the Atlas cedars of northern Algeria. Fires fed by hot, dry weather are killing enormous stretches of Siberian forest. Eucalyptus trees are succumbing on a large scale to a heat blast in Australia, and the Amazon recently suffered two “once a century” droughts just five years apart, killing many large trees.

Experts are scrambling to understand the situation, and to predict how serious it may become.

Scientists say the future habitability of the Earth might well depend on the answer. For, while a majority of the world’s people now live in cities, they depend more than ever on forests, in a way that few of them understand.

To read the full article, please click here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/01/science/earth/01forest.html?_r=1&ref=justingillis

From Population Matters.

The climb to Everest base camp is a journey into a monochrome world, a landscape reduced to rock, ice and grey sky. The only spots of colour are the bright, domed tents of the few climbing teams willing to attempt the summit in the off-season. There are no birds, no trees, just the occasional chunks of glacier splashing into pools of pale green meltwater like ice cubes in some giant exotic drink. The stillness suggests nothing has changed for decades, but Tshering Tenzing Sherpa, who has been in charge of rubbish collection at base camp for the past few years, remains uneasy. “Everything is changing with the glaciers. All these crevasses have appeared in the ice. Before, base camp was flat, and it was easy to walk,” he said.

Climbers had reported that they barely needed crampons for the climb, there was so much bare rock, Tenzing said. That’s not how it was in Edmund Hillary’s day. Tenzing pointed towards the Khumbu ice fall – the start of the climb, and part of a 16km stretch of ice that forms the largest glacier in Nepal. “Before, when you looked out, it was totally blue ice, and now it is black rock on top,” he said. He’s convinced the changes have occurred in months – not years, or even decades, but during the brief interval of the summer monsoon. “This year it’s totally changed,” he said.

Continue Reading »

To Subscribers of the Poplist:

For the past several years, it has been my pleasure to send out many fascinating articles on sustainability issues, with an emphasis on population.  Initially, I intended to send only a few articles per year, but the volume of coverage of population issues by journalists has increased dramatically in recent years, especially during the food riots of 2008 and the recent milestone of reaching a global population of 7 billion.  It has, in fact, been hard to limit myself to one article per day, and, as you’ve noticed, from time to time, I have dared to send two.  All of the articles I have distributed over the years are housed at http://www.populationmedia.org/pmc-blog/ in chronological order.  The search box in the upper right corner of that page is useful for finding articles on various topics, such as climate change, biodiversity, water, food security, energy issues, sustainable economics, and women’s rights.  The participants on this list have sent most of these articles to me, and many have written excellent pieces for distribution.  Subscribers regularly tell me how valuable they find the articles to be in their work and in preparing themselves for what will likely be a very different world in years to come.

The sheer volume of articles coming my way now has led me to conclude that the time has come for someone to take over the operation of the network who can devote more time to it than I can.  Since Joe Bish, Population Outreach Manager at PMC, has been helping me for some time with identification and posting of articles, and since he scours the world’s press for population related pieces on a regular basis, I can think of no one better equipped to continue this function.  He will begin immediately reviewing articles for distribution, so starting today, please send your suggested articles and editorials to him at submissions@populationmedia.org.

From now until December 31, you will continue to see articles that I have chosen to distribute. After that date, I may occasionally send articles I come across to Joe with the suggestion he send them out. However, my role as official liaison to this list will be over so send your suggestions to Joe.  Thanks to you, this list, which started by my sending an electronic version of Garrett Hardin’s classic “The Tragedy of the Commons” to a few people, will continue to be a forum for sharing important information and ideas with population and sustainability activists, journalists, and scholars worldwide.

Best wishes,

Bill Ryerson

From CNN.  See http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/08/showbiz/celebrity-news-gossip/duggars-expecting-20th-child-ppl/index.html?hpt=hp_bn7 If all of their offspring had 20 children each, after just ten generations (about 250 years), they would have … 10 trillion, 240 billion offspring.  That’s 10,240,000,000,000.

Duggar No. 20 on the way

Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, stars of the TLC’s reality show “19 Kids and Counting,” said Wednesday that they are excited to be expecting their 20th child this spring (their oldest is 23 and their youngest is 2).

But CNN.com readers weren’t ready to celebrate with the Duggars. Instead they took issue with the older children having too much responsibility, bringing more children into an overpopulated world and TLC continuing to support the burgeoning family.

jpv said, “These people are insane. He is doing this to prove his manhood or something. If they wanted these many kids why not adopt? Many [kids] out there need homes. If this guy ever loses whatever job he has we will all be paying for those kids via welfare (if we aren’t already). Enough already.”

heresme responded, “They are not hurting anyone. They are not living off your tax dollars. The kids are well behaved and educated. They are living in a loving, intact family. To me, this is far more sane than those women who just can’t keep themselves in control and keep having babies from different fathers while living in the projects, not working.”

enevoldsen responded, “Did you ever think that maybe they just really like having kids and being parents? Or is that somehow impossible? Why is it that every person who wants to have more kids than ‘the norm’ in North America is instantly labeled insane.’”

cyclingpete said, “OK! We get it. You can procreate. So do mosquitoes! I think this is an addiction. I’m disgusted! If you are that hip on raising that many children why not adopt or foster and help kids who need a loving home? But, nooooooo. Just keep popping them out.”

To read the full article, please click here: http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/08/showbiz/celebrity-news-gossip/duggars-expecting-20th-child-ppl/index.html?hpt=hp_bn7

Thanks to Todd Daniel for this article from The Telegraph.  Prince Charles and his father have spoken out often about concern over human population growth and our destruction of the environment.  See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/8749863/Prince-Charles-warns-of-sixth-extinction-event.html

Prince Charles warns of ‘sixth extinction event’

Mankind faces extinction, the Prince of Wales has warned, unless humans transform our lifestyles to stop mass consumption, run away climate change and destruction of wildlife.

By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent

2:34PM BST 08 Sep 2011

In his first speech as the new President of the Worldwide Wildlife Fund (WWF) UK, Prince Charles suggested ‘surviving ourselves’ should be a priority.

Referring to himself as “an endangered species”, he warned that the world is already in the “sixth extinction event”, with species dying out at a much faster rate than at any time since the death of most of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Despite campaigning for years on global warming, he said climate change was not the only problem but merely speeding up the “rapacious” destruction of natural resources like water, land and food that humans need to survive.

The Prince said if the world carries on “business as usual” then the human race itself could be in danger.

“We are, of course, witnessing what some people call the sixth great extinction event – the continued erosion of much of the Earth’s vital biodiversity caused by a whole host of pressures, from the rising demand for land to the corrosive effects of all kinds of pollution,” he said.

“This is an important point that needs to be stressed more than it is, because its ultimate impact is plainly not at all clear to most people – without the biodiversity that is so threatened, we won’t be able to survive ourselves.”

To read the full article, please click here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/8749863/Prince-Charles-warns-of-sixth-extinction-event.html