Darrell G. Moen, Ph.D.

  The Population Myth

People who claim that population growth is the big environmental issue are shifting the blame from the rich to the poor

By George Monbiot.

October 03, 2009 The Guardian” — 29th September 2009 — It’s no coincidence that most of those who are obsessed with population growth are post-reproductive wealthy white men: it’s about the only environmental issue for which they can’t be blamed. The brilliant earth systems scientist James Lovelock, for example, claimed last month that “those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational.”(1) But it’s Lovelock who is being ignorant and irrational.

A paper published yesterday in the journal Environment and Urbanization shows that the places where population has been growing fastest are those in which carbon dioxide has been growing most slowly, and vice versa. Between 1980 and 2005, for example, Sub-Saharan Africa produced 18.5% of the world’s population growth and just 2.4% of the growth in CO2. North America turned out 4% of the extra people, but 14% of the extra emissions. Sixty-three per cent of the world’s population growth happened in places with very low emissions(2). (more…)

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 1st July 2003

It is old news, I admit. Two hundred and fifty-one million years old, to be precise. But the story of what happened then, which has now been told for the first time, demands our urgent attention. Its implications are more profound than anything taking place in Iraq, or Washington, or even (and I am sorry to burst your bubble) Wimbledon. Unless we understand what happened, and act upon that intelligence, pre-history may very soon repeat itself, not as tragedy, but as catastrophe.

The events which brought the Permian period (between 286 and 251 million years ago) to an end could not be clearly determined until the mapping of the key geological sequences had been completed. Until recently, palaeontologists had assumed that the changes which took place then were gradual and piecemeal. But three years ago a precise date for the end of the period was established, which enabled geologists to draw direct comparisons between the rocks laid down at that time in different parts of the world.

Having done so, they made a shattering discovery. In China, South Africa, Australia, Greenland, Russia and Spitsbergen, the rocks record an almost identical sequence of events, taking place not gradually, but almost instantaneously. They show that a cataclysm caused by natural processes almost brought life on earth to an end. They also suggest that a set of human activities which threatens to replicate those processes could exert the same effect, within the lifetimes of some of those who are on earth today. (more…)

Why so much hunger? What can we do about it?

To answer these questions we must unlearn much of what we have been taught.

Only by freeing ourselves from the grip of widely held myths can we grasp the roots of hunger and see what we can do to end it.
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