"If behavior and technology do not change, more numerous humans will trample the earth and endanger our own survival. The snake brain in each of us makes me cautious about relying heavily on changes in behavior. In contrast, centuries of extraordinary technical progress give me great confidence that diffusion of our best practices and continuing innovation can advance us much further in decarbonization, landless agriculture, and other cardinal directions for a prosperous, green environment. For engineers and others in the technical enterprise the urgency and prizes for sustaining their contributions could not be higher. Because the human brain does not change, technology must."
— Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University on a path toward fitting people on a finite, thriving planet
Amazing inflammatory @Guardian “green helmet” spin on a German proposal for the UN Security Council to produce a report on security implications of climate change. The request is fine, but only if the full suite of parallel drivers of vulnerability is considered.
Read More
From @RobertEngelman Path to early stabilization of population and substantial environmental progress: “It might be possible to end and then reverse human population growth through a strategy aimed at elevating women’s status and increasing access to contraceptive services, so that essentially all births result from intended pregnancies. Preliminary calculations based on conservative assumptions suggest that global fertility would immediately move slightly below replacement levels, putting world population on a path toward an early peak followed by gradual decline. The success of such a strategy would have many other benefits, such as reducing disability and deaths among mothers and their children and freeing more women to earn money and participate actively in social affairs.” From the SOLUTIONS journal: Why Family Planning is Key to a Sustainable Future.
“Youth bulge” + education + unemployment + repression = Arab turmoil, writes Joe Chamie in YaleGlobal Online, assessing the Middle East. Welcome to the world of the “Population Cluster Bomb, as described by Chamie on Dot Earth in 2007.
Here, from the Yale article, are the relative population increases in the Arab world and other regions since 1970.
