US targets population growth, urges women's power
Date: Thursday, April 23, 2009
Source: Associated Press Worldstream
Author: EDITH M. LEDERER
WASHINGTON -- The new U.S. ambassador for global women's issues pledged Thursday the Obama administration's "deep commitment" to a U.N. blueprint aimed at slowing the world's population explosion and empowering women.
At the heart of the more than 100-page action plan adopted at the U.N. population conference in Cairo, Egypt, 15 years ago is a demand for women's equality through education, economic development, access to modern birth control and the right to choose if and when to become pregnant.
Underlying the conference was the record growth in global population and research, which shows that educated women choose to have fewer children. In 1994, when delegates from 180 countries met in Cairo, the population was 5.7 billion. According to the latest U.N. estimates, it will hit 7 billion early in 2012 and top 9 billion in 2050.
The U.S. ambassador, Melanne Verveer, said President Barack Obama's decision to contribute $50US million to the U.N. Population Fund for family planning, an increase of more than 100 percent over the last U.S. contribution, in 2001, "will send an unambiguous signal to the world that the U.S. supports the Cairo Platform for Action."
The Bush administration cut off money to the fund because of claims, denied by the U.N. agency, that it supported forced abortions and sterilizations in China.
Verveer, former chief of staff to Hillary Rodham Clinton when she was first lady, spoke at a luncheon honoring Dr. Nafis Sadik on her 80th birthday.
Verveer praised the Pakistani obstetrician-gynecologist for framing "the vision" of the Cairo plan that linked development, human rights, women's rights and reproductive health for the first time.
Sadik, a former head of the U.N. Population Fund, was secretary-general of the Cairo conference.
"I wanted to come here today to clearly reiterate the renewed and deep commitment of the United States government to the ... Program of Action, and the Obama administration's steadfast determination to continue to work with other governments and NGOs to meet the goals we have set," she said.
Clinton, now secretary of state, told a conference of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in Houston last month "that reproductive rights and the umbrella issue of women's rights and empowerment is going to be a key to the foreign policy of this administration." She stressed the link between women's rights and democracy.
"A society that denies and demeans women's rights and roles is a society that is more likely to engage in behavior that is negative, anti-democratic and leads to violence and extremism," she said after receiving the federation's Margaret Sanger Award named for its founder for her work on behalf of women's health and reproductive rights.
Tim Wirth, who led the U.S. delegation at the Cairo conference, called the Program of Action "a revolutionary document" because "it really is ultimately about the transfer of political power."
"That's why it's been so difficult," said Wirth, who is now president of the United Nations Foundation. "That's why it's been so controversial. There's a finite amount of political power in the world and what this document did in so many ways was to transfer a lot of political power from men to women."
Sadik, taking up the point, thanked Verveer "for capturing the spirit of the Cairo message" and expressed hope that she would convey to the Obama administration "how important it is to transfer power really to women equally no more, no less and to take away the power from men who have much more, and not what they actually deserve."
"So I hope that will be the message," she said. "Equality is the name of the game and our real message."
Sadik, who currently is a special representative of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on HIV/AIDS and global health issues, said 15 years after Cairo the first thing that needs to be done is "shed the baggage" that the Bush administration "put on us ... so unnecessarily" and move forward.
"I hope that the U.S. diplomatic policy, defense policy and development policy are all going to focus on the rights of women and make that the underpinning for anything else that they may do in a developing country," she said.
"We need urgently to increase family planning and reduce maternal mortality," Sadik said. "It is, frankly, a crime against humanity that half a million women are allowed to die every year as a direct consequence of pregnancy."
She also decried "the distortions of religion" that deny women their human rights and "bigots" who fall back on cultural values to deny rights to girls and women especially on matters of reproductive and sexual health.
In Sadik's honor, the United Nations Foundation, which sponsored the lunch, announced that it was establishing a fund to help some of the more than 600 million adolescent girls in the developing world.
Showing posts with label sanity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sanity. Show all posts
Friday, May 22, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Paradise Lost: Case Study of Limited Resources and Population Expansion
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/05/09/off_road_warriors/
ATVs having nowhere to ride on
There are irrevocable costs that come with our society’s relentless promotion of growth. The story behind the ATV article is that in many ways parents today cannot provide to their own children the lifestyle they once enjoyed. Unless we learn to live sustainably, with smaller families and a stable population, our children and future generations will miss out on an ever-increasing list of life-enhancing experiences.
Americans also should question the paradigm that communities must always be growing in order to enjoy a better quality of life. Indeed, the opposite is oftentimes true with the attendant higher taxes, housing costs, traffic congestion, and the incessant loss of open spaces.
Henry Barbaro
NECSP Board Member
Sunday, May 10, 2009
America On The Brink -- A New Book
AMERICA ON THE BRINK: THE NEXT ADDED 100 MILLION AMERICANS
By Frosty Wooldridge
Published April 27, 2009; Available 1-888 280 7715; Barnes and Noble; Borders; www.barnesandnoble.com ; www.borders.com ; www.Amazon.com In London, England contact: www.authorhouse.co.uk
"Eye-opening, incisive, brilliant! The US has the fastest growing population of any industrial nation, and one of the world's highest consumption rates. Water, topsoil, forests, fish, petroleum...the more of us, the more pressure we exert on our environment. Many discuss our personal consumption patterns, but few dare talk about the underlying crisis of population growth. Wooldridge is one of the few courageous voices warning us about the implications of our current direction, and informing us what we can do to change course." Richard Heinberg, Peak Everything
"Electrifying reading! This is a veritable cannonade of a book. Wooldridge targets the people and institutions, from the President on down, who refuse to look at the consequences of population growth in the modern era. His focus is on the United States, but his range is the world. He fearlessly addresses issues that politicians fear to mention, such as the effects of mass immigration on our population future and our social systems. He engages to force population issues into our local and national political decisions." Lindsey Grant, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Environment and Population.
"The environmental community may be outrageously AWOL on the important subject of population, but not Frosty Wooldridge. Read this book!" Richard D. Lamm, Governor of Colorado 1975- 1987
"Wooldridge's powerful indictment of our political leaders for failing to address U.S. overpopulation should be required reading in classrooms and boardrooms. To mindlessly add 100 million more people to our nation's population in the next 30 years will put the United States economy and social order at further risk. His challenge needs to be addressed on individual, national and international levels before it's too late." William B. Dickinson, The Biocentric Institute
America on the Brink: The Next Added 100 Million Americans--injects a whole new dynamic facing the United States in the 21st century. While national leaders at every level ignore accelerating consequences, immigration-
America on the Brink: The Next Added 100 Million Americans
By Frosty Wooldridge
Publisher: Author House www.authorhouse.com, Price: $17.99
ISBN # 978-1-4389-6074-6
219 pages, 41chapters
Order Phone number: 1-888-280-7715 credit card or check
It will also be available on www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com
within a few weeks.
Radio, TV, newsprint: for complimentary media copy, call Yvona Doane: 1 888 519 5121 Ext. 5299
Author Contact: www.frostywooldridge.com
Monday, May 4, 2009
The Great American Garbage Patch
The Great American Garbage Patch
http://www.newswithviews.com/Wooldridge/frosty463.htm
By Frosty Wooldridge
In my 40 years traveling around this planet, I discovered human beings respect nothing anywhere in the world. No matter how beautiful, no matter how pristine the location and no matter what country—human beings toss their trash everywhere. They inject their chemicals into the land, air and water. They throw their rubbish into rivers, lakes and streams.
In my forty years of Scuba diving around the world, I’ve seen our pristine lakes and oceans turn into trash cans for humans. Millions of tires, nets, plastic, glass and metal containers roll around the ocean floor like ‘creatures’ out of place.
As recently exposed on Oprah, “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch” twice the size of Texas, features three million tons of plastic debris floating around the Pacific. In some places, it reaches 60 feet thick. It kills millions of marine creatures annually. It’s not just the Pacific, 46,000 pieces of plastic float on every square mile of all our oceans and seas! That figure is correct!
While riding my bicycle around the world or climbing mountains, I have seen humans toss soiled baby diapers into pristine pools, fjords and rivers. On Mt. Everest, known as the “Earth Mother”, climbers have left tons of trash and garbage on her flanks in their efforts to reach the top. At the base, climbers have turned the area into a sewage pit.
Most large rivers running out of industrial nations feature raw sewage that creates ‘dead zones’ like the 10,000 square mile one at the mouth of the Mississippi River to 27,000 square mile dead zones in the North Sea. How big is that? That’s the size of North Carolina.
Instead of changing their ways, humans continue adding more trash upon the trash with no end in sight.
In a sobering expose’ Mother Jones featured a brilliant piece by world famous author Bill McKibben. He also wrote a ground-breaking book: The End of Nature. I highly recommend reading his books.
“Waste not, want not” by Bill McKibben, Mother Jones/May-June 2009 http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/05/waste-not-want-not
“Once a year or so, it's my turn to run recycling day for our tiny town,” McKibben said. “But it's also kind of disturbing, this waste stream. For one, a town of 550 sure generates a lot—a trailer load every couple of weeks.
“More than that, though, so much of it seems utterly unnecessary. Not just waste, but wasteful. Plastic water bottles, one after another—80 million of them get tossed every day. The ones I'm stomping down are being "recycled," but so what? In a country where almost everyone has access to clean drinking water, they define waste to begin with. In fact, once you start thinking about it, the category of "waste" begins to expand, until it includes an alarming percentage of our economy. Let's do some intellectual sorting:
“There's old-fashioned waste, the dangerous, sooty kind. You're making something useful, but you're not using the latest technology, and so you're spewing: particulates into the air, or maybe sewage into the water. You wish to keep doing it, because it's cheap, and you block any regulation that might interfere with your right to spew. This is the kind of waste that's easy to attack; it's obvious and obnoxious and a lot of it falls under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act and so on. There's actually less of this kind of waste than there used to be—that's why we can swim in most of our rivers again.” Or to correct McKibben, at least 53 percent of them!
“There's waste that comes from doing something that manifestly doesn't need doing,” said McKibben. “A hundred million trees are cut every year just to satisfy the junk-mail industry. Or think about what we've done with cars. From 1975 to 1985, fuel efficiency for the average new car improved from 14 to 28 miles per gallon. Then we stopped worrying about oil and put all that engineering talent to work on torque.”
While we Americans run through our busy days, mountains of trash accumulate worldwide by our singular activities.
McKibben said, “Chris Jordan is the photographer laureate of waste—his most recent project, "Running the Numbers," uses exquisite images to show the 106,000 aluminum cans Americans toss every 30 seconds, or the 1 million plastic cups distributed on US airline flights every 6 hours, or the 2 million plastic beverage bottles we run through every 5 minutes, or the 426,000 cell phones we discard every day, or the 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags we use each hour, or the 60,000 plastic bags we use every 5 seconds, or the 15 million sheets of office paper we use every 5 minutes, or the 170,000 Energizer batteries produced every 15 minutes. The simple amount of stuff it takes—energy especially—to manage this kind of throughput makes it daunting to even think about our waste problem. (Meanwhile, the next time someone tells you that population is at the root of our troubles, remind them that the average American uses more energy between the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve and dinner on January 2 than the average, say, Tanzanian consumes in a year. Population matters, but it really matters when you multiply it by proximity to Costco.”
I have read where Americans use 90 billion plastic and paper bags annually. (Source: Sierra Club) But I’ve also read that the total number of plastic bags for humanity exceeds 386 billion annually. All go to the landfill, or, as you can verify daily—all over the landscape.
“Americans discard enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet every three months—and aluminum represents less than 1 percent of our solid waste stream,” We toss 14 percent of the food we buy at the store. More than 46,000 pieces of plastic debris float on each square mile of ocean. And—oh, forget it.”
McKibben covers waste from many corners, but then, he covers the waste of our two wars and military waste.
“Want to talk about government waste?” said McKibben. “We're going to end up spending north of a trillion dollars on the war in Iraq, which will go down as one of the larger wastes of money—and lives—in our history. But we spend more than half a trillion a year on the military anyway, more than the next 10 nations combined. That almost defines profligacy.
“We landed on a continent with topsoil more than a foot thick across its vast interior, so the fact that we immediately started to waste it with inefficient plowing hardly mattered. We inherited an atmosphere that could buffer our emissions for the first 150 years of the Industrial Revolution.
“But our margin is gone. We're out of cash, we're out of atmosphere, we're out of luck. The current economic carnage is what happens when you waste—when the CEO of Merrill Lynch thinks he needs a $35,000 commode, when the CEO of Tyco thinks it would be fun to spend a million dollars on his wife's birthday party, complete with an ice sculpture of Michelangelo's David peeing vodka. The melted Arctic ice cap is what you get when everyone in America thinks he requires the kind of vehicle that might make sense for a forest ranger.”
McKibben makes sense! He’s brilliant! So why am I pulling my hair out by the roots? Why do I ride my bicycle along highways with an endless stream of trash? Why do I see fast food, beer and pop bottles littering America’s rivers and lakes? Why do humans create and inject ever more deadly chemicals into the environment annually? How can Americans remain mind-numbingly apathetic to mountains of debris covering North America?
How about the ones of us that care? Let’s create incentive laws to encourage the ones that don’t care—to pick up after themselves. How about a 10 cent national deposit/return law like Michigan’s. I have bicycled the entire ‘mitt’ of Michigan and never picked up one plastic, can or bottle container. Why? Because no matter who tosses their container litter, an armada of kids picks up everything for the financial reward. It’s time for America to take responsibility for cleaning up America. Let’s stop the waste stream by engaging a “National Recycling Policy”.
The original people of this continent, living here thousands of years, maintained a pristine environment. New arrivals from Europe trashed North America inside of 150 years. That’s unreasonable and immoral. It’s unconscionable! Let’s change ourselves toward a more responsible society.
http://www.newswithviews.com/Wooldridge/frosty463.htm
By Frosty Wooldridge
In my 40 years traveling around this planet, I discovered human beings respect nothing anywhere in the world. No matter how beautiful, no matter how pristine the location and no matter what country—human beings toss their trash everywhere. They inject their chemicals into the land, air and water. They throw their rubbish into rivers, lakes and streams.
In my forty years of Scuba diving around the world, I’ve seen our pristine lakes and oceans turn into trash cans for humans. Millions of tires, nets, plastic, glass and metal containers roll around the ocean floor like ‘creatures’ out of place.
As recently exposed on Oprah, “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch” twice the size of Texas, features three million tons of plastic debris floating around the Pacific. In some places, it reaches 60 feet thick. It kills millions of marine creatures annually. It’s not just the Pacific, 46,000 pieces of plastic float on every square mile of all our oceans and seas! That figure is correct!
While riding my bicycle around the world or climbing mountains, I have seen humans toss soiled baby diapers into pristine pools, fjords and rivers. On Mt. Everest, known as the “Earth Mother”, climbers have left tons of trash and garbage on her flanks in their efforts to reach the top. At the base, climbers have turned the area into a sewage pit.
Most large rivers running out of industrial nations feature raw sewage that creates ‘dead zones’ like the 10,000 square mile one at the mouth of the Mississippi River to 27,000 square mile dead zones in the North Sea. How big is that? That’s the size of North Carolina.
Instead of changing their ways, humans continue adding more trash upon the trash with no end in sight.
In a sobering expose’ Mother Jones featured a brilliant piece by world famous author Bill McKibben. He also wrote a ground-breaking book: The End of Nature. I highly recommend reading his books.
“Waste not, want not” by Bill McKibben, Mother Jones/May-June 2009 http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/05/waste-not-want-not
“Once a year or so, it's my turn to run recycling day for our tiny town,” McKibben said. “But it's also kind of disturbing, this waste stream. For one, a town of 550 sure generates a lot—a trailer load every couple of weeks.
“More than that, though, so much of it seems utterly unnecessary. Not just waste, but wasteful. Plastic water bottles, one after another—80 million of them get tossed every day. The ones I'm stomping down are being "recycled," but so what? In a country where almost everyone has access to clean drinking water, they define waste to begin with. In fact, once you start thinking about it, the category of "waste" begins to expand, until it includes an alarming percentage of our economy. Let's do some intellectual sorting:
“There's old-fashioned waste, the dangerous, sooty kind. You're making something useful, but you're not using the latest technology, and so you're spewing: particulates into the air, or maybe sewage into the water. You wish to keep doing it, because it's cheap, and you block any regulation that might interfere with your right to spew. This is the kind of waste that's easy to attack; it's obvious and obnoxious and a lot of it falls under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act and so on. There's actually less of this kind of waste than there used to be—that's why we can swim in most of our rivers again.” Or to correct McKibben, at least 53 percent of them!
“There's waste that comes from doing something that manifestly doesn't need doing,” said McKibben. “A hundred million trees are cut every year just to satisfy the junk-mail industry. Or think about what we've done with cars. From 1975 to 1985, fuel efficiency for the average new car improved from 14 to 28 miles per gallon. Then we stopped worrying about oil and put all that engineering talent to work on torque.”
While we Americans run through our busy days, mountains of trash accumulate worldwide by our singular activities.
McKibben said, “Chris Jordan is the photographer laureate of waste—his most recent project, "Running the Numbers," uses exquisite images to show the 106,000 aluminum cans Americans toss every 30 seconds, or the 1 million plastic cups distributed on US airline flights every 6 hours, or the 2 million plastic beverage bottles we run through every 5 minutes, or the 426,000 cell phones we discard every day, or the 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags we use each hour, or the 60,000 plastic bags we use every 5 seconds, or the 15 million sheets of office paper we use every 5 minutes, or the 170,000 Energizer batteries produced every 15 minutes. The simple amount of stuff it takes—energy especially—to manage this kind of throughput makes it daunting to even think about our waste problem. (Meanwhile, the next time someone tells you that population is at the root of our troubles, remind them that the average American uses more energy between the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve and dinner on January 2 than the average, say, Tanzanian consumes in a year. Population matters, but it really matters when you multiply it by proximity to Costco.”
I have read where Americans use 90 billion plastic and paper bags annually. (Source: Sierra Club) But I’ve also read that the total number of plastic bags for humanity exceeds 386 billion annually. All go to the landfill, or, as you can verify daily—all over the landscape.
“Americans discard enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet every three months—and aluminum represents less than 1 percent of our solid waste stream,” We toss 14 percent of the food we buy at the store. More than 46,000 pieces of plastic debris float on each square mile of ocean. And—oh, forget it.”
McKibben covers waste from many corners, but then, he covers the waste of our two wars and military waste.
“Want to talk about government waste?” said McKibben. “We're going to end up spending north of a trillion dollars on the war in Iraq, which will go down as one of the larger wastes of money—and lives—in our history. But we spend more than half a trillion a year on the military anyway, more than the next 10 nations combined. That almost defines profligacy.
“We landed on a continent with topsoil more than a foot thick across its vast interior, so the fact that we immediately started to waste it with inefficient plowing hardly mattered. We inherited an atmosphere that could buffer our emissions for the first 150 years of the Industrial Revolution.
“But our margin is gone. We're out of cash, we're out of atmosphere, we're out of luck. The current economic carnage is what happens when you waste—when the CEO of Merrill Lynch thinks he needs a $35,000 commode, when the CEO of Tyco thinks it would be fun to spend a million dollars on his wife's birthday party, complete with an ice sculpture of Michelangelo's David peeing vodka. The melted Arctic ice cap is what you get when everyone in America thinks he requires the kind of vehicle that might make sense for a forest ranger.”
McKibben makes sense! He’s brilliant! So why am I pulling my hair out by the roots? Why do I ride my bicycle along highways with an endless stream of trash? Why do I see fast food, beer and pop bottles littering America’s rivers and lakes? Why do humans create and inject ever more deadly chemicals into the environment annually? How can Americans remain mind-numbingly apathetic to mountains of debris covering North America?
How about the ones of us that care? Let’s create incentive laws to encourage the ones that don’t care—to pick up after themselves. How about a 10 cent national deposit/return law like Michigan’s. I have bicycled the entire ‘mitt’ of Michigan and never picked up one plastic, can or bottle container. Why? Because no matter who tosses their container litter, an armada of kids picks up everything for the financial reward. It’s time for America to take responsibility for cleaning up America. Let’s stop the waste stream by engaging a “National Recycling Policy”.
The original people of this continent, living here thousands of years, maintained a pristine environment. New arrivals from Europe trashed North America inside of 150 years. That’s unreasonable and immoral. It’s unconscionable! Let’s change ourselves toward a more responsible society.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Quality Not Quantity
The upside to the recession
by Samantha Macina
Published: Tuesday, April 28, 2009
http://www.fairfieldmirror.com/news/the-upside-to-the-recession-1.1737634
The solution to two of the world’s biggest problems could potentially be linked, according to Robert Costanza, who spoke about “The Global Recession as an Opportunity to Create a Sustainable and Desirable Future,” to members of the University on Thursday as a part of Earth Week.
Costanza stated that there is actually a plus side to the current worldwide economic recession. It provides us with an opportunity to rethink our goals as a society, and create a sustainable future by changing the way we view the economy.
According to Costanza, the 1950s brought about an increase in society’s use of ecological resources, such as fossil fuels and raw materials. This constantly increasing use has caused unprecedented changes in the world’s ecosystems, causing loss of land area, increased storms and more flooding worldwide.
Unless we work to stop it, our environment will continue to decline.
Costanza said Americans typically view the economy as a market whose purpose is for growth. But this is the wrong way to look at things. “The economy should be for creating a high quality of life, and sustaining it in the future. It’s about human well-being,” he said.
He recommended a “full world model of economy,” in which material growth would slow. Instead, there would be an increase in quality of consumption, not quantity.
Costanza expressed his hope that the recession has us on the right path, and will “break our addiction” to the material.
Costanza has spent years conducting research on the relationship between ecological and economic systems.
Since receiving his PhD systems ecology from the University of Florida, Costanza has become a professor of ecological economics, the director of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont, and the co-founder of the International Society for Ecological Economics.
He concluded that best way to improve the environment and increase quality of life is by rethinking the way we view the economy.
For Costanza, maintaining ecosystems is the solution to economic success. They will create well being by providing us with services, such as climate control, food, water, security, and health.
According to Costanza, the value of the resources ecosystems could provide would be about $33 trillion per year, plus an increased quality of life.
Students in the audience were willing to heed Costanza’s advice. “I think it is very important for students, not only at Fairfield, but all over the world, to learn about these issues. They need to be dealt with to ensure our survival, and the change can start with us,” said Taylor Bicho ’11.
Michael Chiaramonte ’11 said “It’s important for our generation to learn about environmental problems, and how to fix them, because it is something that will continue to affect us.”
Costanza urged the audience not to retreat back into old ways after the recession is over.
He said, “Global recession has us on the right path.”
by Samantha Macina
Published: Tuesday, April 28, 2009
http://www.fairfieldmirror.com/news/the-upside-to-the-recession-1.1737634
The solution to two of the world’s biggest problems could potentially be linked, according to Robert Costanza, who spoke about “The Global Recession as an Opportunity to Create a Sustainable and Desirable Future,” to members of the University on Thursday as a part of Earth Week.
Costanza stated that there is actually a plus side to the current worldwide economic recession. It provides us with an opportunity to rethink our goals as a society, and create a sustainable future by changing the way we view the economy.
According to Costanza, the 1950s brought about an increase in society’s use of ecological resources, such as fossil fuels and raw materials. This constantly increasing use has caused unprecedented changes in the world’s ecosystems, causing loss of land area, increased storms and more flooding worldwide.
Unless we work to stop it, our environment will continue to decline.
Costanza said Americans typically view the economy as a market whose purpose is for growth. But this is the wrong way to look at things. “The economy should be for creating a high quality of life, and sustaining it in the future. It’s about human well-being,” he said.
He recommended a “full world model of economy,” in which material growth would slow. Instead, there would be an increase in quality of consumption, not quantity.
Costanza expressed his hope that the recession has us on the right path, and will “break our addiction” to the material.
Costanza has spent years conducting research on the relationship between ecological and economic systems.
Since receiving his PhD systems ecology from the University of Florida, Costanza has become a professor of ecological economics, the director of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont, and the co-founder of the International Society for Ecological Economics.
He concluded that best way to improve the environment and increase quality of life is by rethinking the way we view the economy.
For Costanza, maintaining ecosystems is the solution to economic success. They will create well being by providing us with services, such as climate control, food, water, security, and health.
According to Costanza, the value of the resources ecosystems could provide would be about $33 trillion per year, plus an increased quality of life.
Students in the audience were willing to heed Costanza’s advice. “I think it is very important for students, not only at Fairfield, but all over the world, to learn about these issues. They need to be dealt with to ensure our survival, and the change can start with us,” said Taylor Bicho ’11.
Michael Chiaramonte ’11 said “It’s important for our generation to learn about environmental problems, and how to fix them, because it is something that will continue to affect us.”
Costanza urged the audience not to retreat back into old ways after the recession is over.
He said, “Global recession has us on the right path.”
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Sir David Attenborough Joins OPT
The broadcaster Sir David Attenborough has become a patron of a group seeking to cut the growth in human population.
On joining the Optimum Population Trust, Sir David said growth in human numbers was "frightening".
Sir David has been increasingly vocal about the need to reduce the number of people on Earth to protect wildlife. The Trust, which accuses governments and green groups of observing a taboo on the topic, say they are delighted to have Sir David as a patron.
Sir David, one of the BBC's longest-standing presenters, has been making documentaries on the natural world and conservation for more than half a century. In a statement issued by the Optimum Population Trust he is quoted as saying: "I've never seen a problem that wouldn't be easier to solve with fewer people, or harder, and ultimately impossible, with more."
The Trust, which was founded in 1991, campaigns for the UK population to decrease voluntarily by not less than 0.25% a year. It has launched a "Stop at Two" online pledge to encourage couples to limit their family's size. Other patrons include Jonathan Porritt, chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, and Dame Jane Goodall, founder of the Jane Goodall institute.
BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin said population was a fraught area of debate, with libertarians and some religious groups vehemently opposing measures by governments to influence individual fertility.
In turn, the Trust accuses policy makers and environmentalists of conspiring in a "silent lie" that human numbers can grow forever with no ill-effects. In January 2009, Sir David revealed that he had received hate mail from viewers for not crediting God in his nature programmes. His most recent documentary focused on how Charles Darwin came up with the theory of evolution and why it remained important.
Visit NECSP.ORG to learn more about population issues and take action!
Friday, April 10, 2009
Moderate and Determined
After reading the two responses to Henry Barbaro's letter in the Jamaica Plain Gazette, perhaps readers can now appreciate both the difficulty and absolute necessity of the mission New England Coalition for Sustainable Population has set for itself: to raise awareness of and promote action on the ways to achieve sustainable population for the region, the nation and the international community. With 225,000 net people added each day to a planet in ecological crisis, this issue is not going away anytime soon.
Both writers agreed that lowered birth rates and stabilized population were worthy and admirable “ends” that must be achieved if our human communities have any real chance at attaining sustainable living scenarios. In this, they are surely correct. Talking “sustainable development” is just a pie-in-the-sky pipe dream -- unless it involves a stabilized population.
But the “means” each author suggested couldn’t have been more divergent. One warned against state-mandated, involuntary human population management and advocated for robust access to voluntary means of birth control and increased education to lower birth rates. The other called for enforcement of strict policies on procreation to alleviate the occurrence of poverty.
The good news is that both have realized that stabilizing human population is a core-component of the urgent need to implement sustainable development regionally, nationally and internationally. On this point, NECSP strongly agrees with them – and its our job to encourage this dialog and provide New Englanders the tools necessary to be activists on sustainable population issues.
As to the “means” each author was suggesting, Glenn Ingrham is right to note the power a government of, by and for the people can wield – when so motivated, our democratically elected officials can marshall profound influence on the choices citizens make (think seatbelts and smoking). On the other hand, Rene Ruiz is right to warn against the very real potential of grevious human rights abuses when government acts mindlessly or with excessive, myopic urgency.
The middle ground is “we the people” identifying stabilized population as fundamental to the path towards a peaceful, ecologically sustainable future and then turning the positive power of our self-government towards that goal. Afterall, it’s the power of our government that is best positioned to ensure the education, literacy and access to family planning that will allow people to make voluntary decisions about reducing their fertility.
In closing, here are two examples of the type of democratic self-government that would do wonders for attaining sustainable population. One: Taking birth control pills off prescription and providing easy access to modern contraceptive methods with subsidies and sliding scale charges. Two: Requiring pre-marital counseling regarding family planning, the economic benefits of small family size and the environmental consequences of population growth –before any marriage licenses are issued.
Please visit the NECSP website, www.necsp.org, to become a member and get involved in this most interesting and crucial of issues.
Both writers agreed that lowered birth rates and stabilized population were worthy and admirable “ends” that must be achieved if our human communities have any real chance at attaining sustainable living scenarios. In this, they are surely correct. Talking “sustainable development” is just a pie-in-the-sky pipe dream -- unless it involves a stabilized population.
But the “means” each author suggested couldn’t have been more divergent. One warned against state-mandated, involuntary human population management and advocated for robust access to voluntary means of birth control and increased education to lower birth rates. The other called for enforcement of strict policies on procreation to alleviate the occurrence of poverty.
The good news is that both have realized that stabilizing human population is a core-component of the urgent need to implement sustainable development regionally, nationally and internationally. On this point, NECSP strongly agrees with them – and its our job to encourage this dialog and provide New Englanders the tools necessary to be activists on sustainable population issues.
As to the “means” each author was suggesting, Glenn Ingrham is right to note the power a government of, by and for the people can wield – when so motivated, our democratically elected officials can marshall profound influence on the choices citizens make (think seatbelts and smoking). On the other hand, Rene Ruiz is right to warn against the very real potential of grevious human rights abuses when government acts mindlessly or with excessive, myopic urgency.
The middle ground is “we the people” identifying stabilized population as fundamental to the path towards a peaceful, ecologically sustainable future and then turning the positive power of our self-government towards that goal. Afterall, it’s the power of our government that is best positioned to ensure the education, literacy and access to family planning that will allow people to make voluntary decisions about reducing their fertility.
In closing, here are two examples of the type of democratic self-government that would do wonders for attaining sustainable population. One: Taking birth control pills off prescription and providing easy access to modern contraceptive methods with subsidies and sliding scale charges. Two: Requiring pre-marital counseling regarding family planning, the economic benefits of small family size and the environmental consequences of population growth –before any marriage licenses are issued.
Please visit the NECSP website, www.necsp.org, to become a member and get involved in this most interesting and crucial of issues.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
The Hour is Late, The Time is Now and The Future is at Hand
New England Coalition for Sustainable Population is proud to introduce our new website and refurbished blog. We are eager to organize and train population activists from New England, the United States and across the world -- we want to know you, hear your stories, listen to your ideas and work together to bring sustainable population into the everyday lexicon of environmentalists, capitalists, unions, families, students, children, adults, business people, neighbors and governments across the international community.
Out of the ashes of the old ways, let's help build a new region, a new nation and a new world. Please visit our website by clicking on the "Action" picture above. And don't forget to follow -- and contribute to -- our blog!
It will take a lot of work, but working together as a tight knit group of dedicated activists, thinkers and supporters -- the future is bright, green and sustainable.
Out of the ashes of the old ways, let's help build a new region, a new nation and a new world. Please visit our website by clicking on the "Action" picture above. And don't forget to follow -- and contribute to -- our blog!It will take a lot of work, but working together as a tight knit group of dedicated activists, thinkers and supporters -- the future is bright, green and sustainable.
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