World Population Awareness

This week, our global population will grow by more than 1.5 million people. That's like adding a city the size of Phoenix or Philadelphia. In just one week! What's worse, around the world right now:

One in ten people lacks access to clean drinking water.

One in eight doesn't have enough food to eat.

One in five lives on less than $1 a day.

Hello Ms. Gaia,

I am currently a junior at South Pasadena High School in South Pasadena, California. I have recently been assigned a research paper and I have decided to write it on the economic, medical, and environmental effects that occur from overpopulation. I perused through your World Overpopulation Awareness website and was very pleased with what I found. However, I was wondering if you could tell me a few more things about the effects of overpopulation on the economies of overpopulated countries. Or perhaps if you could think of any advantages of overpopulation, it would be of great help to me. Thank you so much for your time and I look forward to your reply!

Sincerely,

Katie

Julie wrote:

I am confused by some of the numbers I have been reading regarding the population of earth. We supposedly hit 7billion on oct31 last year but I've read articles that explain that in extrapolating world population data that numbers are as much as 2 years old. Also there have been an abundance of news pieces and internet blogs referring to what The UN calls the "Population plateau".

The claim that we will plateau at 10 billlion (and even that not until 2050) and maintain this level. This seems counter intuitive with even longer life spans. There were references to women "waiting" to child bear until after education and or career which supposedly will put us at or below sustained population, (This only makes sense in the immediate future and does not account for the rise in fertility later in life due to medical advancements). Also how much of the world population does this anecdote actually represent? I would really appreciate if you would write something that addresses The UN World Population forecast. Maybe I am turning into a conspiracy theorist here but something just seems funky here.

Concerned world citizen

Go to this link - http://www.overpopulation.org/pdfs_documents/Overpopulation_FAQ.pdf - to download this article as a pdf for printing on 2 pages (or one 2-sided page) for student handouts.

1. What are the biggest issues that arise from overpopulation, and why are they so bad?

a. Food shortages and associated malnutrition, susceptibility to disease, stunted growth and stunted brain power, starvation b. Peak oil, which greatly impacts food supply. c. Per capita water shortage and poor water quality, which greatly impacts food supply and human health d Climate change which creates hotter, more hostile crop growing conditions and flooding, also hostile to crops. e. Shortage of nonrenewable resources, particularly fertilizer, necessary for crop production, but also other resources needed for manufacturing, without which our materialistic civilization will grind to a halt. f. Environmental damage caused by the quest for more fossil fuels and essential metals, destruction of animal habitat caused by urbanization.

2. In the future, do you foresee it getting worse or better, and to what degree?

Going by a. Food shortages alone, it will only get worse unless we quickly stabilize population and find some as-yet-discovered agricutural advancement. The Green Revolution has petered out.

Overpopulation causes rural farming people to outgrow their lands, so the grown children move to cities. Urbanization eats up farmland, reducing crop production. Also growing seasons are becoming hotter, so many crops fail due to heat and drought. Overuse of the soils caused by overpopulation leads poor nourishment for crops and eventually desertification. Overpopulation draws on available water to the point that there is not enough to water crops. Aquifers are overdrawn to the point where they are not replenished fast enough.

3. Is there anything that you believe we can do to help lessen the effects of overpopulation on the environment and other animals?

Voluntary family planning and reproductive health care - programs providing services for voluntary family planning and reproductive health care have existed since the 1960s and they do work, having brought the world's fertility rates down to 2.5. Girls education, forbidding early marriages, male involvement, and women's empowerment is also needed to stop male preference, which results in higher birth rates. But these programs need more funding and we must push for that funding.

4. Why should people be concerned about overpopulation now, as opposed to waiting until it becomes more apparent?

Slowing population growth takes time unless we resort to drastic, ugly, highly unpopular solutions. We must increase funding for family planning now, because putting babies back in the womb, or even a worse alternative, is not an acceptable solution.

5. Why do you think so many people are ignorant on the topic of overpopulation and it's effects?

a. Resistance to contraception and the belief that sex is only for procreation by certain Christian religions. b. Belief that population stabilization requires 'population control' - the One Child policy in China,for example. Not understanding that there are gentle solutions that will help people live a better life, and that people actually want, and that have been proven to work. c. Inability to connect the dots when 6 billion goes to 7 billion in 12 years and then to 8 billion in 13 years. Belief that 'God will take care of it'. Cornucopian view of the world fostered by decades of technological advances and materialistic success has caused people to think that the world's natural resources are unlimited. Forgetting that fossil fuels have allowed the West to advance technologically and live very comfortably, and therefore not really thinking to look at the dim future of fossil fuels.

6. Do you believe overpopulation, or the way we use resources is more of a problem, and why?

There is no doubt that, if the 2 billion people living very comfortably on this earth made sacrifices, then the 2 billion living on the edge could live more comfortably - IF (a very big if) it was practical to transfer the assets of the rich to the poor, and if the rich would willingly give up their comfortable life. Unfortunately many people use the excuse that consumption is a bigger part of the problem (they believe it is) to avoid dealing with population altogether.

Most frequently we hear about overconsumption in the West measured in terms of carbon emissions. However, we must remember that the critical path for humanity is the supply of food. Arable land is fast disappearing due to urbanization, soil erosion/overuse, and water shortages in both rich and poor countries. Both rich and poor countries will suffer, the poor first, but then the poor in the richer countries. Already the middle class is fast disappearing in the U.S., due to loss of jobs to overseas employees. So the U.S. is not immune to the impacts of food shortages.

Unfortunately, population is growing so fast that, whatever advances we make by providing more food to more people eventually ends up at a point where there is not enough food and starvation is nature's way to equalize supply and demand.

7. When do you think the world's population will stop growing?

At current fertility rates the world's population will only stop growing if people die at a faster rate, which is what will happen when we run out of natural resources. No one has predicted when this will happen. Malthus is reputed to believe it would happen in the 1700s (that wasn't actually what he said); Paul Ehrlich thought it would happen in the 1970s, but both did not see the technological advances that saved the world's growing population. Unfortunately, this time experts say, it will take a miracle for everyone to survive the perfect storm of resource depletion that is coming.

The good news is that fertility rates are coming down, just not fast enough. If they continue to come down at the same rate as they have been, then the worlds population growth rate will level off by 2010 at 10 billion. That is assuming too many people don't die of starvation by then, in which case the population will stop growing sooner.

If fertility rates vary by just one half a child (average), we could reach 15.8 billion by 2100 and continue to grow - on the high side, or we could reach 8.1 billion by 2050 and start a decline. Since we went from 6 billion in 1999 to 7 billion in 2011 (12 years), I find it very difficult to believe we will wait until 2050 to have 8.1 billion. Unless we change our ways and increase funding for family planning programs.

8. What motivated you to become involved with the issue of overpopulation?

In the 1980s I noticed how crowded the roads were and whereas, 20 years before my family could go camping in the woods just about anywhere, we now had to make a reservation to camp. I started to become involved after my trip to China in 1995 where I noticed that the farmland I flew over had a whole village for every 40 - 100 acres, but in the U.S. there would be just one farmhouse for the same amount of land. And there were no vacant lots in cities like Shanghai - every space was taken.

9. What do you think is the main factor/factors contributing to overpopulation?

Lack of education and economic opportunity for women; authoritarian households where women don't have a say about their own lives, their health care or how many children they have; child marriage; lack of maternal health care for women; cultural beliefs in rural areas that say many children are needed to take care of the land, not realizing that too many children will outgrow the land; male preference; contraceptive inaccessability; lack of educational opportunities to learn that smaller families are healthier and more economically feasible.

10. How does overpopulation effect a countries economy?

Overpopulated countries cannot build sufficient infrastructure or provide sufficient services for its population because there is too much competition for natural resources for people to earn enough to support a government. Over 2 billion people earn less than $2 a day.

When a population is growing, however - not yet overpopulated, and there is a high ratio of young people, and opportunities are available for these young people to become educated and have jobs, then an economy will boom. However, when these young people are old, and they will have likely lowered their fertility rate, then there will be more older people than young people, and the economy will suffer. On the other hand, if the country reaches a point where resources in the area are exhausted, and the country cannot buy its resources from other countries, then the country is overpopulated, and poverty will be the result.

11. Why do the most populated countries have their high populations?

High populations result when death rates are brought down while fertility rates remain high. Sanitation, pumping of aquifers, modern medicine, better ways of treating sick infants, and the Green Revolution have brought down mortality. Without a corresponding drop in fertility, population will grow.

12. Are there any solutions to end starvation?

The UN claims that farmers in Africa can be be taught better farm management. Africa is where the highest growth is. It remains to be seen if this will be enough to end starvation.

13. What types of diets have the least environmental impact?

Diets which use plants instead of animals; animals are ok if they feed on land or in water that cannot be used for crops. Some plant diets are better than others, using less resources.

14. Is overpopulation a problem that we need to be worrying about?

Yes, overpopulation is like a runaway train, and the longer we wait to do something about it, the harder it will be to deal with the impacts.

15. Do you feel like it is already a problem or something will happen in the future?

It is already a problem and getting worse. We need to do something about it now.

16. What is the biggest effect of overpopulation?

The most drastic impact so far is food shortages, with one billion people classified as 'undernourished' by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2009, and nearly a billion undernourished in each of 2007, 2008, and 2011. 3 billion people in the world today struggle to survive on US$2/day, and food prices are rising. The second and thirds impacts of overpopulation are Peak Oil and Climate Change. Some will argue that climate change is not man made, but it is indeed happening and causing crop failures. The world is producing less oil today than it did last year, and this trend will continue. Both peak oil and climate change result in less food to feed the world, peak oil because food depends on mechanized farm machinery and transport.

17. In what areas of the world is overpopulation having the biggest effects and how?

China, and India are seeing the biggest effects, mostly because of water shortages and deforestation. Africa will soon follow, particularly northern Africa where there is not enough water.

18. Have you been able to see the effects first hand? If so, what is it like?

I have seen deforestation in Nepal and Ethiopia. People have to walk further and further to find firewood. In Nepal they climb up in trees and chop out branches to feed the leaves to their buffalo and the wood fuels their fires. The trees look all mangled. In Ethiopia, people have to walk 3-4 miles for wood to fuel their stoves.

19. How does overpopulation differ here in the United State compared to other countries?

Overpopulation in the U.S. affects the world because the U.S. population exceeds its carrying capacity, getting many of its resources from other countries, often taking advantage of the poverty in the other countries by paying much less than the resource is worth.

20. Many people do not believe overpopulation is a problem. Do you think they are wrong? If so, why?

Many people do not understand the relationship between our Earth's finite resources and humans existence. They believe that, if we are well-off, everything is OK. They do not see that we have already heavily borrowed against the Earth's resources: water in ancient aquifers are being overpumped, oil that was stored in the ground for thousands of years is not being replenished. Ancient civilizations who became overpopulated did not see it either.

21. When do you feel overpopulation will grow to where it is affecting the lives of people all over the world?

It already is. The current economic crisis is due to our oil-based, debt-based economy having built up a large bubble and now it has burst. In addition, food prices are rising and some people cannot afford to buy sufficient food to feed their family.

22. What do you feel is the best solution for overpopulation?

Voluntary family planning and reproductive health care - programs providing services for voluntary family planning and reproductive health care have existed since the 1960s and they do work, having brought the world's fertility rates down to 2.5. Girls education, forbidding early marriages, and women's empowerment is also needed to stop male preference, which results in higher birth rates.

23. Are you doing things yourself to reduce overpopulation? If so, what are you doing?

I am doing the web page at overpopulation.org, promoting other organizations that work on overpopulation, doing slide shows, and supporting a couple of groups of population activists. I have also lobbied my federal representative and senators, and have put together a legislative briefing at the state level. I also do tabling on earth day, and I have been interviewed on internet radio. I donate to my favorite organizations that promote family planning and reproductive health.

24. What can people like me, an eighteen year old, do to help?

You can join an activist group, or do tabling alone if you can't find a group. You can educate yourself on the subject and all the arguments and issues on the subject (I hope my website will help you there), and participate in letter writing and leaving comments on online newspaper articles about population. You can find WOA's Facebook page (World Overpopulation Awareness), and share your activist activities with us there. You can look up Population Connection, and find suggestions of what to do there (one of them is making presentations to school teachers, who take the lesson to their students). You can hook up with the Sierra Club and join population activities there: http://www.sierraclub.org/population/

You can also help WOA - we have need of volunteers who do online help for WOA.

25. Why don't we hear much about this issue on the news and such? It seems like something that should be dealt with immediately, yet i don't see anyone in power taking action.

I come across over 20 articles a day on population, some of them in important places like the New York Times, the Economist, National Geographic, BBC, Scientific American, and so on. Today food and gas prices are rising, partly due to peak oil, partly due to climate change, partly due to seasonal fluctuation, but mostly due to a shortage of resources per person.

On the other hand, there are conservatives that do not believe in limited resources, overpopulation, "telling people what they should do in their private lives," contraception, and abortion. Some of these people are in places of high influence, like the U.S. Congress, which has recently contemplated removing Title X funding from Planned Parenthood, claiming the money is going for abortions, which it isn't. The money goes for family planning services (not abortion) and reproductive health services. These same conservatives control various media such as Fox News.

The United States and other countries HAVE been taking action on this issue for many years. Programs are in place for voluntary family planning and reproductive health, among others that reduce fertility rates. These programs have been instrumental in bringing down world fertility rates, which are now around 2.5 children per woman. But every year there is a battle over how much funding should be put into these programs by the U.S.

1. What motivated you to become involved with the issue of overpopulation?

In the 1980s I noticed how crowded the roads were and whereas, 20 years before my family could go camping in the woods just about anywhere, we now had to make a reservation to camp. I started to become involved after my trip to China in 1995 where I noticed that the farmland I flew over had a whole village for every 40 - 100 acres, but in the U.S. there would be just one farmhouse for the same amount of land. And there were no vacant lots in cities like Shanghai - every space was taken.

2. What do you believe is the worst effect of overpopulation? Why?

By far the worst effect is the inability to feed every one. Overpopulation causes rural farming people to outgrow their lands, so the grown children move to cities. Urbanization eats up farmland, reducing crop production. Also growing seasons are becoming hotter, so many crops fail due to heat and drought. Overuse of the soils caused by overpopulation leads poor nourishment for crops and eventually desertification. Overpopulation draws on available water to the point that there is not enough to water crops. Aquifers are overdrawn to the point where they are not replenished fast enough.

3. What has been done/is being done to slow overpopulation? What would you do to slow overpopulation?

Voluntary family planning and reproductive health care - programs providing services for voluntary family planning and reproductive health care have existed since the 1960s and they do work, having brought the world's fertility rates down to 2.5. Girls education, forbidding early marriages, and women's empowerment is also needed to stop male preference, which results in higher birth rates.

4. When do you think the world's population will stop growing?

At current fertility rates the world's population will only stop growing if people die at a faster rate, which is what will happen when we run out of natural resources. No one has predicted when this will happen. Malthus thought it would happen in the 1700s; Paul Ehrlich thought it would happen in the 1970s, but both did not see the technological advances that saved the world's growing population. Unfortunately, this time experts say, it will take a miracle for everyone to survive the perfect storm of resource depletion that is coming.

The good news is that fertility rates are coming down, just not fast enough. If they continue to come down at the same rate as they have been, then the worlds population growth rate will level off by 2010 at 10 billion. That is assuming too many people don't die of starvation by then, in which case the population will stop growing sooner.

If fertility rates vary by just one half a child (average), we could reach 15.8 billion by 2100 and continue to grow - on the high side, or we could reach 8.1 billion by 2050 and start a decline. Since we went from 6 billion in 1999 to 7 billion in 2011 (12 years), I find it very difficult to believe we will wait until 2050 to have 8.1 billion. Unless we change our ways and increase funding for family planning programs.

5. What do you think is the main factor/factors contributing to overpopulation?

Lack of education and economic opportunity for women; authoritarian households where women don't have a say about their own lives, their health care or how many children they have; child marriage; lack of maternal health care for women; cultural beliefs in rural areas that say many children are needed to take care of the land, not realizing that too many children will outgrow the land; male preference; contraceptive inaccessability; lack of educational opportunities to learn that smaller families are healthier and more economically feasible.

6. How does overpopulation effect a countries economy?

Overpopulated countries cannot build sufficient infrastructure or provide sufficient services for its population because there is too much competition for natural resources for people to earn enough to support a government. Over 2 billion people earn less than $2 a day.

When a population is growing, however - not yet overpopulated, and there is a high ratio of young people, and opportunities are available for these young people to become educated and have jobs, then an economy will boom. However, when these young people are old, and they will have likely lowered their fertility rate, then there will be more older people than young people, and the economy will suffer. On the other hand, if the country reaches a point where resources in the area are exhausted, and the country cannot buy its resources from other countries, then the country is overpopulated, and poverty will be the result.

7. Why do the most populated countries have their high populations?

High populations result when death rates are brought down while fertility rates remain high. Sanitation, pumping of aquifers, modern medicine, better ways of treating sick infants, and the Green Revolution have brought down mortality. Without a corresponding drop in fertility, population will grow.

1. How does overpopulation affect the food industry?

Overpopulation causes rural farming people to outgrow their lands, so the grown children move to cities. Urbanization eats up farmland, reducing crop production. Also growing seasons are becoming hotter, so many crops fail due to heat and drought. Overuse of the soils caused by overpopulation leads poor nourishment for crops and eventually desertification. Overpopulation draws on available water to the point that there is not enough to water crops. Aquifers are overdrawn to the point where they are not replenished fast enough.

2. Are there any foods that are able to feed the world?

Grains are usually the staple used to feed the world: rice, wheat, and corn in particular. But new strains are needed to grow in hotter climates, less water, and/or poor soil. If these strains are not developed by technology, there will not be enough food to feed the world. Today there are 1 billion underfed people in the world. This number is likely to grow if population continues to grow and a solution is not found.

3. Are there any solutions to end starvation?

The UN claims that farmers in Africa can be be taught better farm management. Africa is where the highest growth is. It remains to be seen if this will be enough to end starvation.

4. What types of diets have the least environmental impact?

Diets which use plants instead of animals; animals are ok if they feed on land or in water that cannot be used for crops. Some plant diets are better than others, using less resources.

The world is headed for disaster. If we don't do something, nature will do something for us. Shouldn't we be
doing some sort of population control like what China did? Maybe a two child or one child policy for the world?

Despite over $150 billion being spent annually in development globally, virtually nobody is tracking whether the achieved progress can last, or whether it is becoming ever more fragile without the necessary access to nature's resources.

A significant step was made when the UN questioned business-as-usual models of development and sought out alternatives in its latest UN Human Development Report (2013), which prominently features countries' performance as proposed by Global Footprint Network: how much human well-being do countries generate (as measured by the UNDP's Human Development Index) at what level of resource demand (as measured by the Ecological Footprint).

"Only a few countries come close to creating such a globally reproducible high level of human development without exerting unsustainable pressure on the planet's ecological resources," the report reads.

This year UNDP used the HDI-Footprint graph to prominently show how far away the world is from meeting the sustainable development challenge. The HDI is an indicator of human development that measures a country's achievements in the areas of longevity, education, and income. The Ecological Footprint is a measure of a population's demand on nature and can be compared to the available biocapacity.

Sustainable human development depends on achieving great lives for all, within the resource budget available to the population, and with adequate access to ecological assets over the long-term.

A recent publication in Population and Development Review finds that: just when public concern about the "population bomb" has been replaced by fears of "empty cradles" and "demographic winter", signs indicate that fertility rates are rising in many low-fertility countries.

These increases are often attributed to a combination of a slowdown in the postponement of births and increasing levels of socioeconomic development , per capita income, and gender equity.

Period fertility fluctuates with transitory changes in fertility timing and changes in the total number of children women have. Cohort fertility - which estimates the average number of children women have over their lifetimes - is free of this fluctuation. If cohort fertility falls, it tells us that women really are having fewer children over their lifetimes.

The challenge of cohort fertility analysis is - for more recent cohorts, completed fertility is estimated by what has been seen so far and what is likely to happen in the future. This approach can substantially underestimate completed cohort fertility when childbearing is shifting to older ages,

It was found that cohort fertility in low-fertility countries is indeed much higher than period fertility. On average, across 37 countries, forecasted cohort fertility averages about 1.8 children for women born in the mid-1970s. This is much higher than the comparable observed period rates, which averaged only about 1.5 across these countries.

Also cohort fertility is leveling off or is even increasing in at least part of every world region that has recorded very low period fertility over the last few decades. These include countries in the English-speaking world and Scandinavia, but also France and Germany. Signs of an increase are also seen in Japan and Spain, as well as a clear end to declines in cohort fertility in eastern Europe.

A new, more accurate, method of calculating cohort fertility has been found. The common mistake in estimating the period TFR as the “average number of children women have" underestimates the actual experience of populations by some 20%.

If you are really into demographics, please follow the link in the headline to read the entire article.

A team of researchers whose paper has now been published in the science magazine "Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment" suggest that it is improbably that the world population will stop growing after reaching a level of 10 billion people at the end of this century as the UN projects.

While there could be stagnation over the short term, even small fluctuations in the energy or food supply could cause the population size to deviate from the 10-billion mark, and enter another period of strong growth. "The upper limit suggested by the United Nations hardly represents a stable equilibrium," said one of the authors: Oskar Burger of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock.

The model is based on the observation that population growth strongly depends on per capita energy use: if more energy is available, economic development will continue, which will in turn put pressure on birth rates. If birth rates are sufficiently low throughout the world, the global population will stop growing.

"Since 1960, the population has been growing faster than the amount of usable energy worldwide," Burger said. Thus, on average, the amount of energy available per person has been decreasing, and this trend is continuing. "In the last 50 years the world population has actually moved farther away from reaching a stable equilibrium," the MPIDR researcher said. If zero population growth does in fact occur at a level of 10 billion people, but there is an insufficient supply of energy, it could only take a very small change in the resources or in the behavior of societies to trigger a deviation from this trend, which could gain momentum very quickly.

The model is not intended to replace the existing UN projections but is a starting point for including more dynamics in population models by taking into account the very fundamental dependence on energy as a first step. The UN projections assume total independence from energy resources.

Researchers need to develop a dynamic model of the global population in which projections are based at least on energy availability and possibly on other parameters such as natural resources, the economy, and cultural and political influences. Only after conducting analyses using such models can we predict more accurately whether there is in fact a stable upper limit to population growth, and determine how we can move towards it.

The population explosion of the past century is unlike anything the world has ever seen. The U.N. projects that the global population will top 9 billion by 2050 and 10 billion by 2100. This video, part of Science's 29 July 2011 special issue on Population, highlights demographic trends around the globe, which offer a window into what our future world may look like.

Global population will reach 7 billion later in 2011, just 12 years after reaching 6 billion in 1999. Today's world population is double the population in 1967. But while the overall growth rate has slowed, the population is still growing, and growth rates in some countries show little if any decline. The Population Reference Bureau's 2011 World Population Data Sheet and its summary report offer detailed information on 18 population, health, and environment indicators for more than 200 countries.

New York-World population is projected to reach 7 billion on 31 October 2011, according to the 2010 Revision of World Population Prospects, the official United Nations population projections prepared by the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs and released today.

UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, is planning a series of activities to engage partners and the general public to underline the significance of this population milestone.

"A world of 7 billion is both a challenge and an opportunity," said UNFPA Executive Director, Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin. "Globally, people are living longer, healthier lives and choosing to have smaller families. But reducing inequities and finding ways to ensure the well-being of people alive today - as well as the generations that follow - will require new ways of thinking and unprecedented global cooperation," he said.

"In particular," said Dr. Osotimehin, "the population projections underscore the urgent need to provide safe and effective family planning to the 215 million women who lack it. Small variations in fertility - when multiplied across countries and over time - make a world of difference. We must invest the resources to enable women and men to have the means to exercise their human right to determine the number and spacing of their children."

The projections also remind us that it is vital to create opportunities for young people who constitute a majority in many of the least developed countries where much of the population increases are expected, added Dr. Osotimehin. "When young people can exercise their right to health, education and decent working conditions, they can improve the capacities of their nations to escape poverty," he said.

Dr. Osotimehin noted that the greater longevity projected for all regions, coupled with low fertility in many countries, means that many countries will be confronting the challenge of ageing populations. "We should plan in advance for the health care and social safety nets of the elderly at the same time we support the largest generation ever of youth," he said.

UNFPA will kick off a series of activities related to the population milestone of 7 billion people on World Population Day, 11 July. At that time, UNFPA and several partners, including National Geographic, will launch a social media campaign to engage individuals and groups on different issues related to a world of 7 billion. These will include urbanization, women's empowerment and environmental sustainability.

UNFPA is also planning a 7-day countdown, starting on 24 October, United Nations Day, and leading up to the birth of the 7 billionth baby a week later. Events will culminate in the launch of this year's The State of World Population report, which will analyze challenges and opportunities presented by a world of 7 billion.

It is widely assumed that environmental degradation grows in proportion to population size, if per capita consumption and technology are held constant. But that assumption is hugely optimistic.

For more, the headline link will take you to Google Books Online - taken from a chapter of "A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice, and the Environmental Challenge", by Laurie Ann Mazur.

Obviously whoever is behind the overpopulationisamyth.com website has not bothered to check that world grain consumption exceeded world grain production 8 of the last 12 years, and with the production side declining due to high temperatures, soil erosion, peak oil, overpumped water aquifers, paving over of farmland by urbanization, and the decline of the Green Revolution; and with the consumption side increasing by 2 billion more people in the next 25 years, even if everyone stopped driving their cars and stopped eating meat, it wouldn't be enough to avert mass starvation.

Furthermore, the website's calculation of future population is based on old U.N. projections, which were updated in 2011 because the former projections were too low, based on the assumption that fertility rates would continue to fall as much as they did the previous 20 years. The website also falsely claims that, because population hasn't continued to double as fast as it was, that we have no need to worry.

Reading more on this website, at: http://overpopulationisamyth.com/overpopulation-the-making-of-a-myth#header-1 - the BIGGEST LIE on that page is: "The United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) " .. has "been involved in programs with governments around the world who deny their women the right to choose the number and spacing of their children. Their complicit work with the infamous "one-child policy" mandated by the government of the People's Republic of China, uncovered by an investigation of the U.S. State Department in 2001, led the United States to pull its funding."

The UNFPA has bent over backwards to ensure the principles of the 1994 Cairo Convention, where 197 nations endorsed "the right to decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing of one's children, and the right to a satisfying and safe sex life." The source of this lie is the Population Research Institute, headed by Stephen Mosher, who has called contraception 'baby poison pills'. The part about the UNFPA's work in China is also not true - the UNFPA was working with China to use voluntary contraception instead of abortion.

Just to give you an idea of the kind of misinformation we are up against ...

Dr Brian Clowes, an American researcher working with Human Life International warned yesterday against a growing campaign to promote the use of contraceptives in family planning, saying it had much to do with profits of pharmaceuticals than benefiting Tanzanian families.

He said Tanzanians needed to learn about the "deadly" health effects of contraceptives, which he calls "a new form of colonialism" and that propagation of birth control pills aims at eliminating young Africans and not nourishing their families because the use of the pills had serious health consequences to human life.

"Family planning through abortion or the use of contraceptives has caused many women and girls to suffer physically and psychologically. A traditional family planning method such as using a calendar is the only safer means," said Clowes.

Mr Emil Hagamu, the Human Life International coordinator for Anglophone Africa and head of Pro Life Tanzania, said it was a wrong to think that having many children accelerated poverty. Instead poverty should actually be linked to unequal distribution of resources as well as poor national income. He called people to reject the imposed culture that aimed at depopulation. He said family planning was the responsibility of the father and mother who should be left to use traditional family planning methods and decide on the number of children they wanted to raise.

"Rejection of children through abortion or contraceptives is not only against God, but also a big threat to women's health. There is scientific evidence that women using contraceptives can easily acquire diseases like HIV/Aids," he said.

Yours truely, Karen Gaia, was interviewed in this video. Note I was erroneously characterized as into 'population control' and was somewhat handicapped by having a slow internet connection where I was, making a web cam unworkable, thus not hearing my fellow interviewees very well over a cell phone.

By Bonnie Kavoussi

Also note: the headline of this article is misleading. The growth of the U.S. has changed very little, as was pointed out by myself and another interviewee. Thus the disclaimer printed at the bottom of the article: "CLARIFICATION: The U.S. population is still growing and only below replacement level when not accounting for immigration. "

The weak economy has led Americans to have fewer babies than the British and the French. This is not enough to maintain the size of the U.S.population, according to the Economist. The U.S. birthrate is 1.9 births per woman. 2 births are necessary to 'keep the population stable'.

In 2007 birth rates started falling and fell below population-sustaining levels in 2010 and is not expected to recover to pre-recession levels anytime soon.

22% of 18- to 34-year-olds say they have delayed having a baby because of the weak economy, and another 20% have delayed getting married, according to the Pew Research Center. A quarter of these young adults have moved back in with their parents during the recession.

It will cost a middle-income family nearly $300,000 to raise a child born today from infancy to age 17, according to the Department of Agriculture.

Bits and pieces of this article are quoted below, just to show you what we are up against. Click on the link in the headline to read the entire article.

A recently released United Nations report outlines the global body's plan to foist a centrally planned "green" world order on all of humanity, making every level of government subservient to its "sustainable development" agenda. The upcoming Rio+20 sustainability conference in Brazil ... will be used to solidify the foundation of the emerging planetary control system.

Under the guise of a "green economy" — expected to cost trillions of dollars per year, according to the report — the UN intends to make use of coercive power at all levels of governance to implement the plan. From local and national governments to regional and global entities, programs affecting every area of human life will be used to advance the controversial "sustainable development" agenda.

To aid in the transition toward a so-called "green economy," the report explains, governments at all levels will have to employ "mandatory technical regulations" and other measures. International bodies, of course, will be used to ensure the whole world is signing up to and complying with the controversial agenda.

"Strategic planning" of so-called "city-regions" — also known as central planning — is also, according to the UN document, “critical" to ensuring that humanity stops consuming more resources than the planners think appropriate. A transition toward what the UN calls “sustainable diets" will be needed, too.

Even with sustainable diets, however, the supposedly wise would-be central planners hold as a central tenant of their faith that supposed "overpopulation" represents a threat to Mother Earth. So, to partially alleviate the alleged problem, the UN proposed ensuring access to legalized abortion and “family planning" all over the world.

"Demographic change together with urbanization not only heightens the need for a swift transition to a green economy, but also calls for policies to address population dynamics within a human-rights based framework," the document claims. “These policies, most notably, include universal access to reproductive health care [also known as abortion, birth control and sterilization] and family planning as well as the empowerment of women and appropriate investments in education."

While the "green" UN vision appears at first glance to be unprecedented, there seems to be an existing model: Red China. The totalitarian communist regime — with its brutal suppression of dissent and its one-child policy enforced through forced abortions — is described by the UN report as “a good example of combining investments and public policy incentives" in the development of clean technology for the march toward the “green economy."

Despite well over 50 million deaths caused by the communist dictatorship under Chairman Mao, key proponents of the UN goals continue to praise the system. "The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao's leadership is one of the most important and successful in history," billionaire UN supporter and "green" agenda driver David Rockefeller was quoted as saying by the New York Times in 1973.

The fact that there will be 1 billion extra people in the next 13 years 'frightens' the UK government's chief scientist, Sir John Beddington.

Beddington told his audience at a joint WWF and Royal Geographical Society pre- Rio+20 event last week that half of that population increase would come from Asia and most of the other half from Africa, which would grow 'frighteningly fast' from 1 billion today to 1.5 billion by 2025-2030.

The population increase will see more people living in and migrating to coastal cities, putting more at risk from flooding and rising sea levels.

The silence over population is echoed across many environmental groups and government policymakers who have been fearful of wading into a host of contentious ethical issues, including family planning, abortion and immigration.

WWF avoids the issue and instead focuses on the other primary driver of greenhouse gas emissions, overconsumption.

Others such as author Fred Pearce, have argued that population growth is under control in all but a few exceptions and heading for long-term declines. As such it is a needless distraction from the issue of overconsumption, the major driver of environmental destruction.

Professor Cafaro, from Colorado State University, cites one paper estimating that slowing population growth could provide 16-29% of emission reductions needed to avoid dangerous climate change.

'What is the greater threat to poor people in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Niger, Pakistan or India? Global climate change or national population growth?' Professor Cafaro asks.

'Perhaps we need not rank these two threats, since, as the example suggests, they magnify one another's potential harms. More people consuming water and longer, more frequent droughts = water shortages in Niger and Pakistan. More people living on marginal lands and harsher, more frequent storms = more deaths and environmental refugees from Bangladesh and Indonesia. Those worried about alleviating human suffering in the developing world cannot avoid population issues.

But Fred Pearce has argued that consumption dwarfs population as the main environmental threat.

'The carbon emissions of one American today are equivalent to those of around four Chinese, 20 Indians, 30 Pakistanis, 40 Nigerians or 250 Ethiopians. The truth is that the population bomb is being defused round the world. But the consumption bomb is still primed and ever more dangerous.'

'Cutting consumption is proving a tall order, with a global economy designed to provide ever more,' he says.

He also suggests population decline may be as necessary as a decline in consumption in rich countries. 'Who's to say that 60 or 65 million is the optimum population of the UK, or 315 million is best for the US? It seems to me we have good evidence that those numbers are ecologically unsustainable.'

'For many people telling them what kind of car to drive or how many children to have will seem an intolerable infringement of their rights. But then we should move expeditiously to put noncoercive or less coercive incentives in place that achieve the desired ends. If these prove insufficient, then we may have to accept stricter limits on our freedom to consume or to have children.'

Note: Another article that makes it look like it is all about 'population control.' Karen Gaia's comments are in italics for this article

As the world population reaches seven billion people, the BBC's Mike Gallagher asks whether efforts to control population have been, as some critics claim, a form of authoritarian control over the world's poorest citizens.

Vivek Baid runs the Mission for Population Control, a project in eastern India which aims to bring down high birth rates by encouraging local women to get sterilised after their second child. People like Vivek say efforts to bring down the world's population must continue if life on Earth is to be sustainable, and if poverty and even mass starvation are to be avoided. There is no doubting their good intention.

But critics allege that campaigners like Vivek - a successful and wealthy male businessman - have tended to live very different lives from those they seek to help, who are mainly poor women. These critics argue that rich people have imposed population control on the poor for decades. And, they say, such coercive attempts to control the world's population often backfired and were sometimes harmful.

Karen Gaia says: the article does not mention the large number of successful programs existing today that do not use coersion, but instead use only voluntary methods of family planning, usually in conjunction with reproductive health, male involvement, mother and child health programs, girls education, and programs to eliminate harmful practices like genital cutting and child marriage. It does not say that Vivek is practicing coercive methods, but insinuates without really giving a reason, that because Vivek is wealthy, that there is something wrong with him helping others. Who else but the people who have money can help the poor? The article leads you down the path from the example of Vivek to the gross exaggeration that " rich people have imposed population control on the poor for decades." While there may have been some rich people imposing population control on the poor, the article fails to give even one example.

Most historians of modern population control trace its roots back to the Reverend Thomas Malthus, an English clergyman born in the 18th Century who believed that humans would always reproduce faster than Earth's capacity to feed them. Giving succour to the resulting desperate masses would only imperil everyone else, he said. So the brutal reality was that it was better to let them starve.

I don't know if Malthus said this or not, or if he was saying if you feed them it enables them to reproduce even more, until there is a point where you can't feed them anymore - once the earth's capacity has been reached. Whether Malthus was racist or not, it is still true that human population has the huge capacity - rich and poor - to overshoot the earth's carrying capacity.

Rapid agricultural advances in the 19th Century proved his main premise wrong, because food production generally more than kept pace with the growing population.

Karen Gaia says: Many experts credit the green revolution with averting global famine during the second half of the 20th century and saving perhaps 1 billion lives.

Today we are starting to face shortages in cropland, natural gas (feedstock of nitrogen-based fertilizers, which are responsible for the "Green Revolution), per-capita water plus the Green Revolution seems to have run out of solutions. Current grain production is in part achieved by overpumping of aquifers. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says the world is getting behind in producing enough food to feed everyone. Today, the challenges of food production are even greater: crops would have to grow in hotter temperatures (currently most crops fail at 86 degrees), using less water, in various weather extremes like freezing and flooding, and in marginal soil. 1 billion were reported hungry by FAO over the last several years.

From the 1960s, the World Bank, the UN and a host of independent American philanthropic foundations, such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, began to focus on what they saw as the problem of burgeoning Third World numbers. Massive populations in the Third World were seen as presenting a threat to Western capitalism and access to resources, says Professor Betsy Hartmann of Hampshire College, Massachusetts, in the US.

No examples given of who said or thought population was a threat to Western capitalism.

President Lyndon Johnson warned that the US might be overwhelmed by desperate masses, and he made US foreign aid dependent on countries adopting family planning programmes.

Using Nepal for example: Nepal received development aid from the U.S. and other countries since the 1950s. It helped Nepal clear the Terai jungle area of malaria-bearing mosquitoes and allowed Nepal's population to expand into those areas. Everything it did in those early years of aid helped Nepal's population to explode. "Overpopulation in the agricultural hillsides continues to force the government to relocate farm workers to expand lands for cultivating. Other than migration to the world-known city of Kathmandu, Nepal (population reported over 1 million in the 2001 census), this migration to the diminishing available land for terraced farming is the highest in Nepal. Even this relocation has its limits, as the cultivatable land is only 18 percent of all the land of the mostly mountainous Nepal. In truth, nearly 21 percent of land is already used and over-terracing of forested land, bordering the mountains persists." ( http://www.ehow.com/about_5098914_effects-population-growth-nepal.html )

Only a small numbers of Nepalis come to the U.S., even though many more would like to. They pay $150 for a U.S. visa and then lose it when they are turned down. There is no U.S. fear of desperate masses motivating family planning programs. The only 'masses' that come in are from south of the U.S. border, and most of these have a far higher income than any Nepali. The U.S. chooses to look the other way when these masses come across the border because American employers can hire them for less than minimum wage

What virtually everyone agreed was that there was a massive demand for birth control among the world's poorest people, and that if they could get their hands on reliable contraceptives, runaway population growth might be stopped. But with the benefit of hindsight, some argue that this so-called unmet need theory put disproportionate emphasis on birth control and ignored other serious needs.

This may have happened in the past, but most, if not all, of today's NGOs in the field recognize the importance of reproductive health, mother and child health, male involvement, and girls education, in addition to family planning.

"Not to have a full set of health services meant women were either unable to use family planning, or unwilling to - because they could still expect half their kids to die by the age of five," says Adrienne Germain, formerly of the Ford Foundation and then the International Women's Health Coalition.

That was then. This is now.

Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay (above) presided over a mass sterilisation campaign. From the mid-1970s, Indian officials were set sterilisation quotas, and sought to ingratiate themselves with superiors by exceeding them. Stories abounded of men being accosted in the street and taken away for the operation.

That was then. This is now. Where are example of such abuses now?

Western experts and local elites in the developing world soon imposed targets for reductions in family size, and used military analogies to drive home the urgency, says Matthew Connelly, a historian of population control at Columbia University in New York.

Matthew Connelly abhors the U.N. and apparently all forms of family planning. "Wealthy foundations, foreign aid agencies, and the United Nations made "family planning" a means to plan other people's families." ( http://www.matthewconnelly.net/ ). He ignores the fact that the plan of action of the 1994 Cairo Convention states that families are free to choose the size of their families without coersion or incentives.

Steven Mosher was a Stanford University anthropologist working in rural China who witnessed some of the early, disturbing moments of Beijing's One Child Policy. "I remember very well the evening of 8 March, 1980. The local Communist Party official in charge of my village came over waving a government document. He said: 'The Party has decided to impose a cap of 1% on population growth this year.' He said: 'We're going to decide who's going to be allowed to continue their pregnancy and who's going to be forced to terminate their pregnancy.' And that's exactly what they did."

Steven Mosher is the president of Population Research Institute whose mission is: "to end coercive population control, and fight the myth of overpopulation which fuels it."

By the time of a major UN conference on population and development in Cairo in 1994, women's groups were ready to strike a blow for women's rights, and they won. The conference adopted a 20-year plan of action, known as the Cairo consensus, which called on countries to recognise that ordinary women's needs - rather than demographers' plans - should be at the heart of population strategies.

It is sad that this is said near the end of the article, after large doses of Hartmann, Connlley and Mosher.

Today's record-breaking global population hides a marked long-term trend towards lower birth rates, as urbanisation, better health care, education and access to family planning all affect women's choices.

With the exception of sub-Saharan Africa and some of the poorest parts of India, we are now having fewer children than we once did - in some cases, failing even to replace ourselves in the next generation. And although total numbers are set to rise still further, the peak is now in sight. Some believe the sense of urgency that once surrounded population control has subsided.

Nevermind the one billion hungry people or the depletion of natural resources not mentioned in this article. Nevermind that our 7 billion will become 8 billion in 12-14 years and that we could reach 15 billion by 2100. Nevermind that conservatives are in the process of trying to remove funding from family planning/RH programs internationally and domestically (which will result in a higher fertility rate).

The term population control itself has fallen out of fashion, as it was deemed to have authoritarian connotations. Post-Cairo, the talk is of women's rights and reproductive rights, meaning the right to a free choice over whether or not to have children.

"The people proposing this argue 'Don't worry, everything' s fine now we have voluntary programmes on the Cairo model'," says Betsy Hartmann.

"But what they don't understand is the profound difference in power between rich and poor. The people who provide many services in poor areas are already prejudiced against the people they serve."

This statement is a kind of reverse bigotry. There is no reason that a rich person would automatically be prejudiced against a poor person. It in effect says: if you are rich, don't bother helping the poor. You will hurt them with your (presumed) prejudice".

Mohan Rao said "Cairo had some good things," he says. "However Cairo was driven largely by First World feminist agendas. Reproductive rights are all very well, but there needs to be a whole lot of other kinds of enabling rights before women can access reproductive rights. You need rights to food, employment, water, justice and fair wages. Without all these you cannot have reproductive rights."

All very nice rights, but who are you going to find to fulfill these so-called rights? The U.N.'s Millenium Development Goals has been trying to eradicate poverty, with a program that started in 2000, and the goal is supposed to met in 2015. However, the world is still at 2 billion people who make less than $2 a day. The problem is: overpopulation causes poverty, so if you don't tackle reproductive rights first, you won't end poverty.

From book review of Population Control to Reproductive Health: Malthusian Arithmetic by Mohan Rao http://www.global-sisterhood-network.org/content/view/471/76/ "The dominant thread of the population policy had always been one of disdain for and fear of breeding by the poor. This idea was pervasive not only within the country but internationally too. Whatever little change has taken place is the result of international lobbying. However, even now, when concepts such as reproductive rights, sexuality and control by women over their bodies are talked about the issue of primary health care is sidelined. "

This paper may be viewed at http://populationmatters.org/documents/ten_myths.pdf . Here is a brief overview of the myths and the author's responses to them.

1. The Population Explosion is Over It's far from over! The world population grows by almost 230,000 people every day. Yet population growth is still ignored.

2. Foreign Aid for Family Planning is a Waste of Money and Population Growth is Inevitable. Family planning is one of the most cost-effective health interventions in the developing world.

3. Technology and Human Ingenuity will solve all our Problems If our patterns of consumption are imitated, as others are striving to do, the world probably is not viable.

4. Development is the Best Contraceptive No country has got itself out of poverty without first addressing population growth.

5. Educate Women and they will have Fewer Children Education in itself does not mean women will have fewer children.

6. Poor People Choose to have Large Families in Order to Care for Them in Old Age Family size is the product of a complex combination of individual, socioeconomic and cultural factors, and is often not the result of choice.

7. Family Planning Programmes are Coercive Family planning is not telling women what to do - it's listening to what they want!

8. Family Planning is Against Religious Teaching Family planning is not against religious teaching.

9. HIV and Other Diseases Will Solve the Population Problem Not saving people is not an option.

10. It's Too Late to do Anything Anyhow It's not too late!

http://populationmatters.org/documents/ten_myths.pdf

Jonathan V. Last's new book "What to Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster" is getting a lot of attention, but is not painting the whole picture.

A total fertility rate of 1.9 births per woman - slightly below replacement - Is no reason to panic and start having procreative sex. The total fertility rate has always gone down during recessions. There's no reason to assume it won't bounce back to replacement level of around 2.1 - especially when American women on average still say they want two kids. Even if it doesn't, we've survived much worse things than a gray hair epidemic. "Children of Men" was NOT a documentary.

Jonathan V. Last is not a demographer. He's a conservative with a decidedly conservative agenda. The books was partly funded by the Phillips Foundation which is staffed with people from right-wing organizations, including Eagle Publishing, Regnery Publishing, The Heritage Foundation, The Claremont Institute, The American Spectator, Young America's Foundation and Focus on the Family, according to The Center for Media and Democracy.

Last admits: "Yes, I'm one of those anti-abortion nut jobs who thinks that every embryo is sacred life and abortion in killing an innocent and blah-blah-blah," and "there are, to my mind, compelling and overwhelming moral arguments in favor of banning abortion."

Last's hyperbole includes gems like: "The widespread practice of abortion culled an entire generation's worth of babies that otherwise might have been born." Which leaves you wondering which generation is missing.

Last blames expanded gay rights for reducing the birthrate, and refers to cohabitation as "shacking up," adding that "cohabitation looks less like an enlightening social change and more like a spreading social pathology working its way up the culture from society's have-nots." He adds: "Why did the lower-middle class decide, en masse, to stop emulating the elites and start patterning their sexual and marital behaviors on the lower classes?"

Those who choose not to have children do not escape his vile: "The child-free life is championed with the vigor and conviction of the early Marxists."

As for for Muslims, Last said that Europe "is almost certain to fade away in the next 50 years, replaced by a semi-hostile Islamic ummah ... the result of a policy choice made by adherents of a truly radical faith: multiculturalism."

Last wants FICA taxes cut by a third with a couple's first child, two-thirds with a second kid, and eliminated entirely with the birth of a third baby. Strangely, this prescription comes after he explained why monetary incentives such as subsidized day care and cash payments don't work.

Steven Mosher spoke in January this year at "the nation's largest student-run pro-life Conference." His talk was entitled, "The Myth that Kills: Overpopulation as an Excuse for Genocide." The mass killing of innocent unborn children is horrible enough. When it is promoted on the basis of a myth, that is even worse.

If people see their children as a burden on society and the environment, what motivation is there to keep them? This myth has infiltrated all aspects of our lives and must be exposed and debunked in order for children to be seen as not only good, but beneficial to society.

Ross Douthat is a Catholic-conservative columnist with The New York Times who should get pregnant himself so he could understand what women are up against in this world instead of urging women to have large families for the greater glory of God and country.

A recent Pew Research Center report that finds that the birthrate fell rapidly between 2007 and 2011 and now stands at the lowest point since 1920, when accurate record-keeping began. {Note: this is not the same as the total fertility rate, a more accurate measure, which was lowest in the 1970s}. In the report, the US-born birthrate declined by 6%, while for foreign-born women it was 14% and for Mexican-born women 23%. The reasons include: the recession makes people cautious; more women are using better birth control; the more seriously women take their education and their jobs, the less likely they are to have kids before they are good and ready. For college-educated women, raising a child not only costs a fortune while lowering a mother's income for life; standards of good mothering have been raised too high.

In his article "More Babies, Douthat believes that our low birthrate means we risk losing our "economic dynamism." Obviously he hasn't looked at the high birthrate places like sub-Saharan Africa, Gaza and the Philippines where people are barely getting by; and low-fertility nations like Germany and Japan, which are prospering. For Douthat, fewer kids mean fewer workers down the road to support Social Security, but also he says women having fewer babies -- or no babies -- is "a symptom of late-modern exhaustion" and "decadence."

Douthat suggests "a more family-friendly tax code, a push for more flexible work hours, or an effort to reduce the cost of college." Would you have an extra baby if you got a bigger tax deduction for it? If your boss let you work ten hours a day four days a week or one afternoon at home?

Funny that the birthrate is lowest in patriarchal countries where having a baby means you stay home forever: Italy, Spain, Greece, Japan, Singapore and Poland. How would you like to be a Japanese or Polish or Italian housewife, Ross Douthat? I thought not.

I'm not so sure why we want more people on our crowded, overheated planet, where world population is projected to increase by 2 billion before finally beginning to fall. But if Douthat really thought through what it means to have and raise a child these days, I'm sure he could come up with a lot of great ways to help women and families. The trouble is, he couldn't be a Republican anymore. He'd be a socialist.

The Crisis Project is a new movement started by young people to investigate the fraud behind Crisis Pregnancy Centers, or as I like to call them Crisis Propaganda Centers. We've written a lot about CPCs on this site, so most of you already know that they are in some cases tax payer funded right wing anti-choice disasters.

Many women walk into a CPC unaware that they are being given advice from people who are not required to be medical personnel and that have an anti-choice agenda when dispensing "advice" on their reproductive health and family planning options.

The Crisis Project went into CPCs undercover with cameras to film some of the interactions and what they found is disturbing. In the encounter below the undercover young college aged woman enters the CPC asking for a pregnancy test and when the test comes back negative, she inquires about starting on the birth control pill.

Via The Crisis Project:

The counselor responds, "we don't sell baby-killing things." The Birthright counselor later refers to birth control as "death and destruction drugs." While advising our investigator against seeking out birth control, the Birthright counselor explicitly says that birth control "kills a baby." The Birthright counselor continues to tell our investigator that some doctors will "probably laugh at " if she were to ask them about the risks associated with hormonal contraceptives.

Another very skewed view. What is the best way to correct such misconceptions? First we must find out where they are coming from. Words highlighted in yellow are some of the inaccurate hot-button words that should be corrected

Governments and @dictators assembling in Rio de Janeiro for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development must adopt even more @stringent policies to reduce the number of people in the world and make sure that those @who @remain stop consuming so much, a taxpayer-funded network of more than 100 science institutions demanded in a newly released statement.

Meanwhile, new economic models are also needed, claimed scientists associated with the IAP Global Network of Science Academies. Politics and @ethics — in other words, the @will and @morality of the people — cannot be allowed to stand in the way of the UN "sustainability" @regime any longer; at least not if the world is to be saved from its primary @enemy: humanity.

"For too long, population and consumption have been left off the table due to political and ethical sensitivities," complained U.K. Royal Society fellow Charles Godfray. "These are issues that affect developed and developing nations alike, and we must take responsibility for them together."

The draft UN agreement being developed by national governments and environmental activist groups already deals with @population @control and reducing consumption. But to the @anti-population scientist coalition, whose controversial joint statement is being widely touted in the global media, more must be done.

The IAP statement claimed "The combination of unsustainable consumption patterns, especially in high-income countries, and of the number of people on the planet, directly affects the capacity of the earth to support its natural biodiversity."

The network demanded "urgent action" from national and global policy makers, offering a list of highly controversial recommendations to achieve the ever-elusive goal of what the UN calls "sustainability."

Among other points, the statement urged rulers to consider ways to restrict both population and consumption through @coercive policies at all levels of government. Virtually every field of policy making should be put at the service of the agenda: poverty, "gender equality," education, health, "global governance," economic development, the environment, and more.

"If the right conditions are in place, measures that reduce fertility rates while respecting human rights can stimulate and facilitate economic development, improve health and living standards, and increase political and social stability and security," the network claimed. People living in richer nations, meanwhile, @need to become much poorer.

The collection of scientists also demanded that "everyone" have taxpayer-funded access to "reproductive health" and "family planning" - terms which @generally @refer @to contraception, sterilization, and abortion.

According to estimates cited in the statement, by 2050, there might be between 8 billion and 11 billion people on earth, up from around 7 billion today. That is simply too many humans for the planet to handle, claim

"Give up use of our abundant fossil fuels, the developed nations will revert back to 19th century lifestyles and developing nations have no hope of uplifting themselves from the poverty they have endured for centuries," concluded Rust, who has over 50 years of experience dealing with energy-related subjects.

But the UN and its member governments - mostly @despotic regimes of different varieties - are not giving up yet. Official documents released in recent months show that the global body hopes to use the Rio+20 gathering to amass a vast array of new @powers. The purpose: literally re-shaping human civilization. Even people's @thoughts and lifestyles are in the crosshairs.

Also on the agenda, according to UN documents, is the erection of a worldwide @regime of central planning under the guise of moving toward what the organization touts as a "green economy."

Local and state officials across America, for example, under increasing pressure from their constituents, are scrambling to protect citizens and property rights from Agenda 21, the global "sustainability" regime adopted at the first "Earth Summit" two decades ago. Alabama just banned it. And the anti-UN outcry is only getting louder.

Please read the entire article at http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/11724-science-group-un-rio%2020-summit-must-reduce if you want to make your blood boil.

For 26 years, PopDev (and Betsy Hartmann) has worked at an intersection of environment, development, anti-militarism, and reproductive freedom. The center of our work is the commitment to challenge the conventional belief that population growth is a main force behind social problems, from famine and violent conflict, to ecosystem degradation and even climate change. We strive to bring those conversations back to the structures of global inequality, colonization, and over-consumption that actually drive them.

For some, it challenges a fundamental understanding of the world to suggest that there are not actually too many people on the planet — but instead an unsustainable, industrially demanding level of consumption by a minority of those people.

Researchers like David Satterthwaite point out that the consumption levels of two actual humans plucked at random from that seven billion may vary from each other by a factor of up to one thousand.

Do I believe that the planet can sustain unchecked exponential population growth? No. I also don't think that's what the earth is faced with, if people have access to affordable, culturally competent, unstigmatized, full-spectrum reproductive health care.

In the anti-sex, imperialist, misogynist worldview of folks like Thomas Malthus, the 18th century white English clergyman who gave us the idea of unchecked population growth, people were powerless against the forces of reproduction. In that worldview, the fear certainly makes sense.

So to folks who are tying access to contraceptives and abortion, or women's education and economic empowerment campaigns, to the need to slow population growth, I say: PLEASE STOP.

Please consider that these goals are good, and powerful, and necessary in their own right. Please recognize that when we tie people's needs and interests to a goal held for them by other, perhaps more powerful and wealthy, people it ties the campaign to meet their needs to upholding that goal.

Specifically, it ties the value of girls and women's lives, education and well-being to the beliefs other people have about how many children they should be having, and when.

And when we invoke the language of "overpopulation," of "too many people," of "can't feed em don't breed em," these are the stories we are actually invoking. Whether we know it or not. Whether we are honest about it or not. Whether we care or not.

Black, Puerto Rican, and Indigenous women in the United States sterilized without their consent, or sometimes even their knowledge, for generations. Immigrant women targeted in many states by punitive legislation meant to vilify their reproduction. Romani women in Eastern Europe targeted by social workers for sterilization. HIV+ women in Kenya offered cash bribes by US-based non-profits to go on long-term birth control. More than 300,000 Quechua women and men sterilized in Peru at the turn of this century, in a campaign with political support from USAID.

So I ask you, whether or not we agree about the math or even the ethics, please find a new strategy. Because I want to fight at your side for our shared goals. But I'm just not willing to turn my back on so many people's lived experiences in order to do it.

Follow the link to read the excellent, revealing and energized debate that has taken place in the comment section of the PopDev blog.

President Barack Obama's new mandate that insurance companies provide free contraception and sterilization services may actually be a brilliant budget move that will be particularly helpful to states like California. After all, if you don't have children, insurers and government won't be forced to pay for your maternity and child health services.

Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told a House panel: "The reduction in the number of pregnancies compensates for the cost of contraception." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in 2009 that contraception "will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government" and will help "stimulate the economy."

Thus the newest health care cost containment strategy appears to be subsidizing women to avoid having children, balance budgets on the backs of not-to-be-born children.

California already has a rapidly graying population, with one in five Californians now 60 years of age or older. In 2010 the state's birth rate fell to its lowest level since 1935, and its fertility rate, the rate at which a society replaces itself through births, has fallen to 1.94, below the 2.1 replacement level, according the California Dept. of Finance. Californians are not having enough babies to replace themselves.

The U.S. total fertility rate, which was 3.17 in 1964, has fallen to 2.06.

By subsidizing free birth control, federal policy appears to be designed to drive these birth rates down even further. We can soon cut budgets for schools, teachers, child health, welfare and other services.

But fewer children mean fewer job creators, fewer employees, fewer taxpayers a shrinking economy, and an even tougher burden on Social Security, which is already facing a financial crisis, with only three workers supporting each retiree compared to 16 workers in 1950, as well as on Medicare and other programs.

Fewer children means less demand for homes, frustrating the ability of the housing market to rebound.

Our poor economy, with an unemployment rate among the highest in the nation, is propelling people to leave the state instead. California's population grew only 0.7% in 2011.

By looking at Europe, we can see where this trend will lead. In Germany, the fertility rate has plummeted to 1.38 children per mother. Germany, France, Italy and other nations, worried about the serious weakening of their economies from sliding birth rates, have now inaugurated tax and cash incentives for having children.

Decisions on birth and birth control should be made by individuals based on their own family and faith considerations, not mandated and manipulated by government.