Update Aug 25th: Brilliant talk by Hans Rosling, in which he explains “Child survival is the new Green”. Book review PeopleQuake by Fred Pearce Eden Project Books 2010 Pbck; 342pp There is a scary book I have a half-share in with a neo-Malthusian friend which contains graphs of the exponential growth curves in population for [...]
Book Review: Whole Earth Discipline An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand Atlantic Books 2009 316pp “Civilization is at risk, but civilization is the problem”. Stewart Brand is one of the iconic founders of the environmental movement, an original old hippy whose influence on the boomer generation should not be understated. With his latest book Whole [...]
Friday, December 18, 2009
Peak Water Civilisation and the World’s Water Crisis Alexander Bell Luath Press 2009 Hardback 208 pp If oil supply peaks and begins to decline times will be hard. Standard of living will decline and people may go hungry but they will be able to adapt by powering down and making do with less. If water [...]
The view expressed in recently reviewed books like Holmgren’s Energy Scenarios and Chamberlin’s The Transition Timeline is that peak oil will be followed by a long, slow decline- Energy Descent- rather than an abrupt collapse. For an alternative view, Dmitri Orlov, author of the acclaimed Reinventing Collapse puts the case for sudden collapse very well [...]
Book Review: The Transition Timeline for a local, resilient future Shaun Chamberlin Forward by Rob Hopkins 190 pp pbk Chelsea Green 2009 The follow-up to Rob Hopkins’ seminal The Transition Handbook uses the method of “backcasting” from an envisioned future from which we create a timeline of how the transition to a more local, resilient [...]
The Real Perils of Human Population Growth by David and Marcia Pimentel The present world population of 6.7 billion is projected by the United Nations to increase to 9 billion and may rise to as many as 11 billion by 2050. Even if a worldwide policy of two children per couple (instead of the current [...]
Book Review Reinventing Collapse- The Soviet Example and American Prospects Dmitry Orlov New Society 2008 When I met Bill Mollison at the International Permaculture Convergence in Croatia three years ago, all he wanted to talk about it seemed was cannibalism. He had traveled in Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union and told me [...]
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Bantry beekeeper Tim Rowe delivered his first public talk last Monday night in Bantry on a topic that has been preoccupying him for some time- the consequences of overpopulation. This fascinating and enlightening talk took us through the issue facing the world as the human species runs riot and reaches more than 6.7 billion in [...]
[Update: See John Feeney's excellent response to Monbiot here.] A few people have pointed me to George Monbiot’s recent article on population in the Guardian. While it is welcome that Monbiot addresses the issue I wanted to reply because I found it really disappointing, failing to join the dots and in some ways misleading. The [...]
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Bursting point: the world’s unsustainable population from the latest edition of Sustainability Magazine by Graham Strouts www.zone5.org “It is a simple logical truth that, short of mass emigration into space, with rockets taking off at the rate of several million per second, uncontrolled birth-rates are bound to lead to horribly increased death-rates. It is hard [...]