Thanks to John Tanton for reminding me of this 1971 paper by Garrett Hardin, which seems fitting in response to some of the recent disasters to strike Asia.

Nobody Ever Dies of Overpopulation (PDF, 14KB)

Thanks to Steve Kurtz for this article.
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Take relentless population growth. Add decades of expanding per-capita resource consumption. Simmer slowly over rising global temperatures.

What do you get?

Traumatic information: that is, information that wounds us through the very act of obtaining it

Everyone knows things are going wrong. But if you understand ecology, you know this in a way that others don’t. It’s not just that the current crop of world leaders is idiotic. It’s not just a matter of a few policies having gone awry. We’ve been on a perilous track since the dawn of agriculture, capturing more and more biosphere services for the benefit of just one species.

For full article, visit:
http://globalpublicmedia.com/how_do_you_like_the_collapse_so_far

Some time in the 1980s, the combined environmental effects of our species began to exceed the ability of the planet to sustain us all. So to carry forward an ever-advancing civilization, which we might say is the prime directive of the human race, we either have to learn to reduce our environmental impacts or our population, and probably both.

Whatever one’s view of population control, it seems inevitable that we must stop increasing our population at some point. Predictions are population may level off at nine billion by mid-century. Perhaps nine billion of us could get a handle on our consumption of everything and limit our environmental footprint, but no matter how carefully we live, could the world handle 12 or 15 billion of us, or more?

For full article, visit:
http://www.canada.com/saskatoonstarphoenix

This interview was carried by Australian Broadcasting Corporation on May 13, 2008.
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Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Broadcast: 13/05/2008
Reporter: Tony Jones

Oil expert and author Richard Heinberg joins Lateline to discuss the phenomenon of peak oil.

Transcript
TONY JONES: Now to tonight’s interview with Richard Heinberg. He’s one of the world’s leading experts on the phenomenon of peak oil. That’s the point at which the world’s oil reserves go into decline. The idea is that having reached its peak it’s all downhill from there and there’s evidence that global rates of oil discovery have been declining since the 1960s, and that new oilfields are becoming more and more inaccessible.

For full article, visit:
http://www.abc.net.au

Thanks to Phil Dodd for this article from the Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch.
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Suddenly Lucy yells, “What kind of a novel do you call this?” She jumps to her feet, waving the pages in his face, “It doesn’t have any people! All it has is six dogs!” Cut to a close-up of Snoopy at his typewriter, intently rereading his manuscript, the pages a few inches from his nose. The solution is obvious. He says to himself, “I’ll add another dog!”

Yes, Snoopy is indeed “everyman.” Each of us sees the world through our own filters, our beliefs, our experiences, our ideologies. We’re a bundle of contradictions: We’re selfish, self-interested, often a tad greedy. We say we’re our brother’s keeper, that we’ll do unto others as we want them to do unto us.

For full article, visit:
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story

Thanks to Alan Kuper for the link to this half-hour, May 5th Canadian television program, Population and the Planet. The program is 30 minutes long. After linking to the website, click on the Population and the Planet tab.
http://www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/theagenda

Thanks to John Feeney for this article.
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Only since 1800, in the last 0.01% of the history of Homo sapiens, has the human population shot into the billions. Now at nearly 6.7 billion, with 9 billion looming 40 years away, few environmentalists seem to care.

Yet the population-environment link is clear. Our environmental impact, as gauged by total resource consumption for a country or the world, is the product of population size and the average person’s consumption.

Today’s crumbling environment, racked by climate change, mass extinction, deforestation, collapsing fisheries and more is evidence our total consumption has gone too far. We are destroying our life-support system. In ecological terms we are in “overshoot” of Earth’s “carrying capacity” for humans, our demand exceeding the planet’s absorptive and regenerative capacities.

For full article, visit:
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk

Thanks to Peter Salonius for sending me the article below.

Population Growth in the United States & Canada: a Role for Scientists (PDF, 139KB)

Thanks to Bill Willers for this article by Peter Salonius.
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News of food price escalation is bringing global carrying capacity for human beings ‘front and center’- with food riots all over the world.

This is being precipitated now by food-to-ethanol programs, although with constantly rising populations fed by the increased food produced by various agricultural revolutions (the Green Revolution being the latest), these riots would have eventually happened. However the speed of these developments is awe inspiring.

On April 14 2008 we heard Robert Zoellick, head of the World Bank, calling for a crash program of food production increases to stave off the approach of famine. How many times does he think we can pull new ‘productivity rabbits’ out of the hat when soil resources of the planet continue to be degraded to produce more food for the irresponsibly breeding horde?

For full article, visit:
http://www.abc.net.au/news

In 2007, PMC had projects in Brazil, Eastern Caribbean, Ethiopia, Jamaica, Mali, Mexico, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, the United States and Vietnam.

2007 Annual Report (PDF, 3MB)