Thoughts on World Population Day

People gather to get water from a well in the Indian state of Gujarat. Population growth is putting pressure on the world’s resources.  Image credit: Reuters

This year, World Population Day, July 11, fell on the same day as Major League Baseball's All-Star Game and it's not hard to figure out which one was "trending" on the Internet. Raising awareness about the All-Star Game, as far as I can tell, has no long-term consequences, while a dialogue about securing reproductive health and family planning options for the world's women affects the entire future well-being of people both in developed and in developing countries.

Last fall, Forbes columnist Erica Gies wrote a column on not having kids, arguing that the 7 billion and counting people in the world are consuming resources at a rate that can't be sustained. She's also sure that her kids' quality of life will be worse than her own so she can't bring them into the world in good conscience. It's easy to see that we live on a finite planet and that our resources are also finite. But we continue to think that population growth and economic growth can be sustained indefinitely. It just doesn't add up.

The projections are for the global population to reach 9 billion by mid-century -- that's 2 billion more people than today. If you think our natural resources are stressed and stretched now, then wait until 2050. Maybe it's better then to move population growth issues to the front burner and not reach 9 billion in the first place. Kudos to the Gates foundation for making family planning part of their strategy. According to their pamphlet, over 200 million women worldwide who want to use contraceptives don't have access to them (see the annual number of abortions below).

At the end of her essay, Gies links to "Worldometers", which gives a running population ticker as well as many other related social, energy and environment tickers. I encourage you to see the tickers spin for yourself but some numbers (rounded, as they change rapidly) are below:

Births this year: 70,000,000
Deaths this year: 30,000,000
Net population growth: 40,000,000
Abortions this year: 22,000,000
Deaths of children under five this year: 4,000,000
People with no safe drinking water source: 900,000,000

Forest loss this year (hectares): 2,800,000 (about the area of Massachusetts)
Desertification this year (hectares): 6,400,000 (about the area of West Virginia)
CO2 emissions this year (tons): 18,000,000,000

Other numbers: more bikes are being produced than cars, there are 50% more overweight people than undernourished people, cellular phones sold today outsold tv sets worldwide 6 to 1, and far too many women (182,000) died in childbirth this year. 

We can reuse and reduce as much as we want, and we should, but if we keep allowing our own numbers to increase then we're going to overwhelm the natural resources and be in a much more difficult place than we are now. And all the All-Star Games in the world won't save us.

So what can you do? Find a way to celebrate World Population Day (it doesn't matter that it was yesterday). Help put population growth and women's reproductive health on the radar of the blogosphere, the mass media, pop culture and ultimately, government and international policy. Here's a positive news item from the good people at the Huffington Post, and some suggestions from the good people at the Feministing community. Dave Gardner, who produced the documentary Growthbusters, has also put together a great resource of videos. Check them out!

15 Random Things you Can Do to Promote Positive Environmental Change

1. Write to the US Post Office and tell them that a 12-inch long receipt for a book of stamps is wasteful and ask them to improve.

2. Find an environmental blog and write comments on several of its posts. Share its cool posts on your Facebook page.

3. Combat the disinformation promoted by the Koch brothers by supporting the work of Robert Greenwald.

4. Write to the Giving Pledge and thank the billionaires for giving their wealth to philanthropic causes (seriously). Ask them to support ways to improve the lives of the global poor (who live in resource-rich countries) and ways to reduce the consumption of the global rich (who live in comparatively resource-poor countries). While you’re at it, ask them to support programs that will educate women, because educated women have fewer children and we desperately need to halt our rapid population growth. (The site seems to be mostly for media inquiries, but hey if millions of people wrote in with their suggestions, maybe some of that would get communicated to those with the big wallets.)

5. Write to your congressperson and ask him/her to introduce legislation that will add one dollar to all US income taxes. Propose that the $130 million dollars raised be used to protect watersheds, protect national parks and the land around them, and to educate citizens on the importance of biodiversity.

6. Support Planned Parenthood.

7. Volunteer to be a distributor to the Endangered Species Condom Project

8. Write op-eds for religious newspapers and magazines and tell them to promote birth control. It’s going to be a lot easier to sustain seven billion people than nine billion, which is the projection for mid-century.

9. Change all your bills to e-bills.

10. Research some plant-a-tree for a dollar sites and plant ten trees. Or twenty. Summarize your research for some environmental blogs or Facebook pages.

11. Support the in-progress documentary, Growthbusters: Hooked on Growth. Let’s face it, the planet is finite and unlimited growth is unsustainable.

12. Calculate your ecological footprint and pledge to reduce it.

13. Find an eco-hero and publicize his/her work.

14. Join the Ecolympics. Get your friends to join. Like us on Facebook, comment on our blogs posts. Share them. Come on our nature walk, come to our cooking class, and come to our film nights. Check our calendar for events.

15. Write to us with other suggestions for our next installment of random ways to promote positive environmental change.