By Brian Wheeler
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Monday, October 18, 2010
http://cvilletomorrow.typepad.com/charlottesville_tomorrow_/2010/10/asap.html

Advocates for a Sustainable Albemarle Population wants the Charlottesville area to become a model for the rest of the country when it comes to planning how to live within its means.

Jack Marshall, ASAP’s president, says a fundamental change in thinking could lead to a stabilized or even reduced local population. Other local leaders think the group’s approach to limiting population growth is unrealistic.

“We must, if we care about having a sustainable community for our grandchildren, we must consume less and simultaneously we must stabilize our population size or even reduce the population size of our community,” Marshall said.
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Thanks to Joe Bish for this article.
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Some like it hot. According to environmentalist James Lovelock, we’ll get plenty of hot between now and the end of the century. “We are so far down the path toward the hottest we have been, since we were 55 million years ago,” Dr. Lovelock, who is also a leading atmospheric scientist, told StockInterview in a tape-recorded interview last week, “that as many of us look at it, it’s not going to make very much difference what anybody does.” In stronger commentary, which he wrote for England’s Independent newspaper, this past January, Lovelock warned, “The Earth is about to catch a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years.” And we were worrying about another Ice Age?

For full article, visit:
http://adeck.us/world-population-to-crash-by-80-percent-says-top-u-k-scientist-part-one-2/

In 2010-2011, PMC had projects in Brazil, Burkina Faso, Caribbean, Ethiopia, Mexico, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Senegal, Sierra Leone, the United States, Vietnam and a worldwide electronic game.

2010/2011 Annual Report (PDF, 5.5 MB)

Papua New Guinea has been warned of the adverse impact the increase in the country’s population would have on the economy, education, health and other sectors. if the government did nothing to take control.

Obstetrician and gynaecologist, Professor Glen Mola sounded the warning when he gave a presentation on population and resources to the media in Port Moresby recently.

PNG’s population is now estimated to be more than 6 million.

For full article, visit:
http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/pacbeat/stories/201009/s3023182.htm

Thanks to Kathleene Parker for this article.
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When we write about food, the accounts are generally superficial, analogous to the way we cast our politics as celebrity and glitter. We ponder sauces and seasoning, but ignore the flow of real power that lies beneath. This is especially odd, given that food is so fundamentally significant to the human endeavor, the one story each and every one of the 6.865 billion of us engages directly and daily, the luckiest among us three times a day, with sauces and seasoning.

Nonetheless, when somebody does delve deeply into this story, the telling can enlighten, entertain, and unsettle. Such is the case with Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations by Evan D. G. Fraser, an academic specializing in farming, climate change, and the environment, and Andrew Rimas, a journalist based in Boston.

For full article, visit:
http://www.onearth.org/article/the-dirty-secret-on-the-farm

Overwhelming evidence has engendered a consensus among global scientists that the human population level and trend are unsustainable. Although we are part of nature, we may have some choice in the ongoing process of which our numbers are but one variable. Individual, social, and institutional factors are examined, and policy options are considered. Evidence is given debunking the claim that the rich attempt to coerce poor nations to reduce fertility. Carrying capacity and optimum population concepts are discussed, particularly as to equilibrium potential. Prospects for pro-active success are entertained.

For full article, visit:
http://www.peakoilandhumanity.com/kurtz_folder/feedback_disequilibrium.htm

Now we’d like to turn to another matter at the intersection of health and policy. As we mentioned on this program last week, new provisions of a health care reform bill went into effect last week. And among them is the requirement that new health policies provide coverage for preventative services, including things like: standard vaccines, breast and colon cancer screenings, screenings for diabetes and so on.

But the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has sent a letter earlier this month to the Department of Health and Human Services, urging the exclusion of contraception and sterilization from that list of mandatory services of preventive care for women.

For full article, visit:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130155202

Thanks to Lester Brown for this Book Byte.
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Civilization’s Foundation Eroding
By Lester R. Brown
www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/book_bytes/2010/pb4ch02_ss2

Earth Policy Release
Book Byte
September 28, 2010

The thin layer of topsoil that covers the planet’s land surface is the foundation of civilization. This soil, typically 6 inches or so deep, was formed over long stretches of geological time as new soil formation exceeded the natural rate of erosion. But sometime within the last century, as human and livestock populations expanded, soil erosion began to exceed new soil formation over large areas.

This is not new. In 1938, Walter Lowdermilk, a senior official in the Soil Conservation Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, traveled abroad to look at lands that had been cultivated for thousands of years, seeking to learn how these older civilizations had coped with soil erosion. He found that some had managed their land well, maintaining its fertility over long stretches of history, and were thriving. Others had failed to do so and left only remnants of their illustrious pasts.
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GRAIN | 15 September 2010

Against the grain

Last week, on 7 September 2010, the World Bank finally decided to publish its much anticipated report on the global farmland grab. After years of work, several months of political negotiation and who knows how much money spent, the report was casually released on the Bank’s website – in English only.(1)

The report is both a disappointment and a failure. Everyone was expecting the Bank to provide new and solid on-the-ground data about these “large scale land acquisitions”, to use their terminology, that have created so much controversy since 2008. After all, the Bank should have access to governments and corporations in a way that journalists and non government organisation (NGO) researchers never would. The Bank itself says this was its central ambition. But there is hardly anything new in the whole 160-plus page document. The Bank said it was going to look concretely at 30 countries, but it only looked at 14. As it turns out, companies refused to share information about their farmland investments, as did governments providing the lands. So the Bank turned instead to farmlandgrab.org , a website run by GRAIN, made a database of all the deals that the media reported on there, and then sent out teams of consultants to see if they were real or not.(2) Is this the best that the World Bank could do?

For full article, visit:
http://farmlandgrab.org/15542

Thanks to Albert Kaufman for this article from the Los Angeles Times, written by Ken Weiss, who is on this mailing list. It’s a great affirmation of the importance of population in climate change, and you should let the paper know how good it is to see inclusion of population as a central theme in an article like this.
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Ever since belching smokestacks arose during the Industrial Revolution, greenhouse gases and human population have climbed in lockstep to higher and higher levels.

And while scientists warn that humanity must dramatically slash future carbon-dioxide emissions to avert extended droughts, floods and other climate catastrophes, they have generally avoided a rigorous examination of how slowing population growth would help. Now, an international team of scientists has done the math.

For full article, visit:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2010/10/global-warming-overpopulation

You can post your comments at http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2010/10/global-warming-overpopulation-climate-change.html#comments