Today, family planning decisions tend to be all about the desires of parents, with little or no regard for the rights and living conditions of the prospective child and people who are already here. Do two adults have the right to bring a child into a world that’s a dystopian hell? Or do they at least have some responsibility NOT to? If the number of children you decide to conceive will have a direct impact on the quality of life those children experience, should that consequence be factored into your family size decision?
Listen to the Overpopulation Podcast
The Overpopulation Podcast features enlightening conversations between World Population Balance Executive Director Dave Gardner, staff, and guests. Stay tuned as we roll out more podcasts to raise overpopulation awareness and spread the great news that overpopulation is solvable!
Dropping birth rates are good news, not a “slump” we should hope is temporary. Yet news reports, headlines and commentaries about this are consistently displaying a pro-growth bias. We have your back. The Overpopulation Podcast team has mallets in hand. In this episode we continue playing whack-a-mole with instances of overpopulation disinformation.
The most recent in what’s becoming a never-ending barrage of alarming scientific reports suggests a million animal species are in danger of being pushed off the planet by the relentless expansion of the human enterprise. World Population Balance Executive Director Dave Gardner and Research Associate Alan Ware discuss this news, and ponder whether scientists, and the journalists who report on their work, are doing their part to alert us to the role of human overpopulation in biodiversity loss and climate change.
The U.S. Birth Rate is dropping. Sound the alarm? Or break out the champagne? We explore the subject on this episode.
The U.S. Center for Disease Control reported in May, 2019 that U.S. birthrates dropped 2% over last year, hitting a 32-year low. NPR and other news outlets have characterized this as a “slump” that will be bad news for our economy. We beg to differ. On an overpopulated planet, fewer births are a ticket on the expressway to sustainability. According to host (and executive director of World Population Balance) Dave Gardner:
Is political correctness being over-applied to avoid reporting on the connection between population growth/overpopulation and the numerous environmental crises they create and/or amplify? Sustainable population activist Mike Hanauer submitted this question to Grist, an online news magazine: “Why doesn’t Grist talk about population?” His question got the most votes to be answered in Grist’s Ask Umbra column, so the subject was addressed in Humans Cause Climate Change. Do We Just Need Fewer Humans? The column was pretty disappointing, so we invited Mike onto the podcast to help host Dave Gardner dissect that response.
A spate of op-eds have appeared in major news publications around the world suggesting human population is going to peak in just a few decades, and we should be concerned not about population growth, but population decline. It’s an impressive publicity campaign for a new book with the same premise. We unpack this interesting development.
Are you reluctant to bring up the subject of human overpopulation because it might make someone uncomfortable? What if you’re an environmental journalist? Don’t you have an obligation to cover the root cause of our most urgent environmental crises? The Overpopulation Podcast team picks another bone with David Roberts at Vox and provides an update on an essay at Resilience.org suggesting the sustainability problem is just overconsumption, not overpopulation.
Yes, the world is overpopulated, but the problem is NOT too big to solve. In this roundtable discussion we’ve convened the “overpopulation solution team” from World Population Balance to offer a “sustainable future” scenario. The team paints a picture of the wonderful world that results from a population sized to match our planet. They enumerate key benefits to having fewer people; including more affordable housing, a welcome mat for migrants, better care and nurturing of our children, and happier parents. People would be valued more, educational opportunities improve, and we might even enjoy a 20-hour work week.