Monthly Archive for April, 2010

From Margaret Eby, Salon.com

People have been worrying about the world’s pending overpopulation for more than two centuries. Robert Thomas Malthus sounded the alarm in 1797 with “An Essay on the Principles of the Population,” which predicted mass starvation and went on to influence the likes of Charles Darwin and Margaret Sanger. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” forecast a similar fate; if the population kept rising unchecked, Earth’s resources would buckle. Many of today’s environmental thinkers, such as broadcaster (and “Planet Earth” narrator) David Attenborough, have called for drastic measures to limit the planet’s population before it’s too late.

But according to the veteran environmental writer Fred Pearce, they’re all wrong. In his latest book, “The Coming Population Crash: And Our Planet’s Surprising Future,” Pearce argues that the world’s population is peaking. In the next century, we’re heading not for exponential growth, but a slow, steady decline. This, he claims, has the potential to massively change both our society and our planet: Children will become a rare sight, patriarchal thinking will fall by the wayside, and middle-aged culture will replace our predominant youth culture. Furthermore, Pearce explains, the population bust could be the end of our environmental woes. Fewer people making better choices about consumption could lead to a greener, healthier planet.

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From The New York Times

Thursday was a terrible day for bluefin tuna.

By a depressingly lopsided margin, countries meeting in Doha at the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species rejected a proposal by Monaco and the United States to ban international trade in Atlantic bluefin tuna, which is spiraling toward extinction. The convention had earlier rejected, also by a wide margin, a softer motion by the Europeans that would have placed the tuna high on the international list of endangered species but delayed a trading ban for one year.

The vote split partly along developed/developing nation lines. But make no mistake: It was largely the result of relentless lobbying by Japan, whose citizens consume four-fifths of the world’s bluefin tuna, thus providing a steady market for poorer countries with big fishing industries like Tunisia.

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