Thanks to Mark O’Connor for this article.  See http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=125060#ixzz1EXogq7F9

Freedom will not chase away the Arab world’s triple crisis
By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Commentary by
Saturday, February 19, 2011

Economic want and inequality as much as political repression incited the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions. It is, of course, to be hoped that new governments in these countries, and other Arab leaders, will better address ordinary people’s grievances. But a mere change of government will not make these countries’ economic problems go away. The converging effects of population growth, climate change, and energy depletion are setting the stage for a looming triple crisis.

The Arab world accounts for 6.3 percent of the world’s population but only 1.4 percent of its renewable fresh water. Twelve of the world’s 15 most water-scarce countries – Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Israel and Palestine – are in the region, and in eight, available fresh water amounts annually to less than 250 cubic meters per person. Three-quarters of the region’s available fresh water is in just four countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.

Water consumption in the region is linked overwhelmingly to industrial agriculture. From 1965 to 1997, population growth drove demand for agricultural development, leading to a doubling of land under irrigation. Demographic expansion in these countries is set to dramatically worsen their predicament.

Although birth rates are falling, one-third of the overall population is below 15 years old, and large numbers of young women are reaching reproductive age, or soon will be. The United Kingdom’s Defense Ministry has projected that by 2030 the population of the Middle East will increase by 132 percent, and that of sub-Saharan Africa by 81 percent, generating an unprecedented “youth bulge.”

To read the full article, please click here: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=125060#ixzz1EXogq7F9

Thanks to Joe Bish for this article from the Jakarta Globe.  See http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/home/bkkbn-expects-heavy-burden-as-population-continues-to-grow/424032

BKKBN Expects Heavy Burden As Population Continues to Grow
February 22, 2011

Indonesia is on track to surpass the United States and the 450 million mark to become the third-most populous country in the world in less than 50 years, the government said on Monday.

Sugiri Syarief, head of the National Family Planning Coordinating Board (BKKBN), said the country’s population would more than double from the current 237 million within that time.

“In less than 50 years, we could have a population of between 475 million and 500 million,” he said. “We already have the fourth-largest population in the world, but in terms of the quality of life for all citizens we are in 108th place out of 188 countries.”

Sugiri warned the population explosion was a result of high fertility rates, partly because of high poverty rates and poor families having more children. He warned the poverty rate would only increase as the population grew, hampering economic development and leading to a host of other problems.

“The population boom will burden the central and regional governments in terms of having to provide more food, health care, education, jobs, transportation and other services for a far bigger population,” he said.

To read the full article, please click here: http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/home/bkkbn-expects-heavy-burden-as-population-continues-to-grow/424032

Many thanks to Bill Geoghegan for this article.  See http://www.grass-roots-press.com/2011/02/12/commerce-news-mexicos-new-agricultural-crisis/

Commerce News: Mexico’s New Agricultural Crisis

February 12, 2011

February’s freezing fury has left a path of crumpled crops, pummeled harvests and dashed dreams in the countryside of northern Mexico. Hardest hit was the northwestern state of Sinaloa, known as the “Bread Basket of Mexico,” where about 750,000 acres of corn crops were reported destroyed after unusually cold temperatures blanketed the north of the country in January and early February.

Sinaloa is among Mexico’s major producers of white corn, the variety of maize used to make staple tortillas.

Heriberto Felix Guerra, secretary of the federal Secretariat for Social Development (SEDESOL), called the weather-related losses “the worst disaster” in the history of Sinaloa.

Altogether, more than 1.5 million acres of corn, vegetable, citrus and other crops were either damaged or destroyed in Sinaloa, with a preliminary economic loss of approximately one billion dollars.

To read the full article, please click here:  http://www.grass-roots-press.com/2011/02/12/commerce-news-mexicos-new-agricultural-crisis/

Thanks to Fred Stanback for this cartoon.

Thanks to Leta Finch for this article.  See http://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/news/2011/01/researchers-discover-way-to-reverse-immune-system-aging.aspx#

Researchers Discover Way to Reverse Immune System Aging

Copyright 2011 by Virgo Publishing

http://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/

Posted on: 01/27/2011

Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have discovered a way to reverse the aging process by removing old B lymphocytes (a type of white blood cell in the vertebrate immune system) from old mice, and forcing the production of young, potent cells to replace them. The findings were reported in the January 2011 issue of the scientific journal Blood.

“As with every aging process in the body, it is generally thought that aging of the immune system – including that of the B cell population – is a progressive process that cannot be stopped and/or reversed,” says lead researcher professor Doron Melamed of the Technion’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine. “But we have succeeded in showing that it is possible to turn back the aging process.”

To read the full article, please click here: http://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/news/2011/01/researchers-discover-way-to-reverse-immune-system-aging.aspx

The City Council of Boulder, Colorado recently acted to reduce the time an individual speaker could have to address the Council on an issue before the Council in a public meeting from three minutes to two minutes.  The letter below is Al Bartlett’s response to this reduction in democracy, which is a predictable consequence of local overpopulation.

February 9, 2011

Letter to the Editor

Boulder Daily Camera

THIS LETTER WAS PUBLISHED IN THE CAMERA February 13, 2011

Dear Friends,

Recent news stories have told about the Boulder City Council acting to reduce speaking times from 3 minutes to 2 minutes for citizens wishing to address the Council at public meetings.  This is a symptom of a deep illness, yet the reports indicated that the Council members addressed the symptom and not the illness.  The illness is overpopulation; the symptom is the large number of people seeking to speak at meetings of the Council.  The Council’s action is like prescribing aspirin for cancer.

In 1950 the population of Boulder was approximately 20,000 and there were 9 members of the Council.  In 2011 Boulder’s population is approximately 100,000 and there are still just 9 members of the Council.  Today there are five times as many constituents per member of the Council as there were 60 years ago.  As a consequence, we have only one fifth of the democracy that we had 60 years ago.  One can guess that today there are about 5 times as many people wanting to speak to Council on any given issue as there were 60 years ago.  Today’s crowded Council agendas and reduced speaking time per citizen are the direct consequence of actions of past Councils promoting population growth in Boulder, yet there was no hint in the news stories that any member of the Council identified continued population growth as being the driving force behind the Council’s need to reduce democracy in Boulder.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to Jack Alpert for this article.  See http://www.countercurrents.org/levine150211.htm where you can also watch a monologue by Jeremy Bentham on the global energy situation.

The Coming Misery That Big Oil Discusses Behind Closed Doors

By Steve LeVine

15 February, 2011
The Oil and the Glory

When big-thinkers at companies with the most skin in the energy game are behind closed doors and they discuss how the world really looks going forward, do they say that there are bumps in the road but that things will be fine, just fine, as they suggest publicly? Three years ago, we got a glimpse into the room when Royal Dutch/Shell issued a scenario forecasting the world in 2020. Based on current economic and energy-use patterns around the world, Shell said that energy supplies will be so tight that they will tip the world into a full-blown crisis in which governments will force their populations to reduce driving, use less electricity, and pay an extremely steep increase for what they do consume. There will be a massive, decade-long economic slowdown, and geopolitical power will shift dramatically to energy-producing nations, the company said.

Today, Shell returned with an update. The company said that the 2008 financial crisis interrupted the slide it predicted, but that the clock has begun ticking again. If the world does not change how it uses energy, its scenario will hold true.

In recent weeks, we’ve heard almost identical energy-consumption projections from ExxonMobil, BP and now Shell: The world will use about 40 percent more energy by 2030. The difference is that Exxon and BP more or less just toss out the numbers, while Shell suggests that one might consider running for the hills, oh, sometime around 2016 or 2017 before everyone else shows up. You all can plan to return home around 2030, Shell has said, when the world has come to its senses and adopted all the efficiency and price-signal mechanisms that some forward-thinkers are suggesting now.

To read the full article, click here: http://www.countercurrents.org/levine150211.htm

Thanks to Michael Tobias for this article.  See http://blogs.forbes.com/michaeltobias/2011/03/02/just-when-you-thought-you-could-bank-on-it/ It would be useful if you would create an account on Forbes (sixty seconds), click “recommend” and render relevant comments.  Let Forbes editorial staff and management begin to appreciate that people take the population issue very seriously.

Just When You Thought You Could Bank On It

Mar. 2 2011 – 2:43 am

By MICHAEL TOBIAS

I’m sitting with my friends William Shatner and his wife Liz having tea and discussing wildlife. Bill and I have been having an ongoing dialogue about the fate of the earth for over twenty years, a conversation that started in earnest beneath Mount Everest where he insisted on doing his own climbing stunts at about 19,000 feet for a television series we made together (“Voice of the Planet”.)

“We need to get more wolves into the wild,” he declares, mulling over the future for his kids and grandchildren.

Reintroduction of wolves, we both acknowledge, has been one of the most contentious of wildlife issues. But with over 2,000 Threatened and Endangered species (T&E’s) in North America wolves are iconic, just like the now extinct Passenger Pigeon was. We need to care about predators. They keep ecosystems healthy, without which, we’re all dead.

The number of T&Es is growing rapidly and this trend threatens to defuse our sense of urgency about the value of biology in general.

When Extinction Starts To Draw A Yawn

We’ve read the “Be Warned” headlines too many times. We’ve set our sights on Labradoodles, not Antarctic sea-pigs, Egyptian vultures or Borneo leopards. But as oil prices soar, and revolutions come and go, the value of threatened wildlife takes on increasingly dire dimensions. The 193 delegates to the Nagoya Summit in October 2010 for the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity journeyed to Japan in an effort to find ways to slow down the vast tragedy of extinctions occurring all around us.

Wish them luck. Polls among young people have shown they can recite hundreds of labels and brands – the latest cool gizmo – but know virtually nothing about other species.

To read the full article, click here: http://blogs.forbes.com/michaeltobias/2011/03/02/just-when-you-thought-you-could-bank-on-it/

From the National Council for Science and the Environment.

A new Multi-dimensional Research Program for Global Biodiversity is needed, according to the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE), The need for a decadal initiative is described in a new report “Creating a Ten-Year Global, Integrative, Multi-Dimensional Biodiversity Initiative” from NCSE and its partners the Encyclopedia of Life of the Smithsonian Institution, and the Committee on DIVERSITAS of US National Academy of Sciences.  The groups held an international workshop “Enabling Biodiversity Research: the Roles of Information and Support Networks” that brought together the leading biodiversity research-enabling institutions in based on a December 2009.

We conclude that the community of museums, databases and information systems, and other institutions that support biodiversity research is not sufficiently funded, organized nor large enough to meet the challenges of understanding biodiversity in time to avoid catastrophic losses of life’s richness. It is likely that much of life on Earth will vanish before it can be characterized, let alone understood. Vast storehouses of resources and the knowledge of those resources are endangered.

The world is experiencing unprecedented and accelerating losses of species, ecosystems and genetic resources (biodiversity). This situation has perilous consequences for humanity, which depends on life’s richness and variety for our very existence. Global trends of population growth, climatic disruption and unsustainable economic activity are driving major losses of irretrievable knowledge and resources.  A new generation of ‘multi-dimensional’ research is needed to understand the relationships and processes that link genes, gene expression, development, physiology, population and community ecology, speciation, ecosystem functioning, and other dimensions of biodiversity.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to Bruce Snyder for this article.  See http://rolandcclement.blogspot.com/ where you can read all of Roland Clement’s blog entries.

Reflections of a Naturalist

Roland C Clement

Friday, February 18, 2011

Human Overpopulation

Starting from different bases on different continents, and different cultural assumptions, all three major civilizations had nevertheless overpopulated their environments by the turn of the 20^th century.

Although biological evolution had given humans a high reproductive potential to compensate for the high mortality of hunter-gatherer life styles for the first 200 millennia, it was the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago that initiated our unbalanced relationship within Nature’s productive systems. Indeed, that is what  Nature is: a set of evolving, mostly living, and interdependent systems and their byproducts.

So long as our numbers and our technologies were modest, we were just one species among many, adding diversity and contributing innovations in the use of the same building blocks that the rest of the life process utilizes to maintain itself, the atoms and molecules.  At first nomadic, our demands were scattered and replenished in a few seasons of vegetative growth. In fact, native vegetation is the mainstay of all higher animal life on planet Earth, hence a principal index to Earth’s carrying capacity for animal populations.

Agriculture is a specialized form of exploitation for seasonal crops grown especially for human use. Such crops therefore contribute much less to the larger biotic community than native plants. Being seasonal, they also induce more erosion. And since we contest the tithe competing insects impose, we end up with impoverished biotic communities, a high price for the maintenance of one species, since we resorted to chemical pollution to do this.

To read the full article, click here: http://rolandcclement.blogspot.com/2011/02/human-overpopulation.html