ABOUT
Smart discussion of the latest science and news on toxins in your food, water, and air, and what government agencies should be doing to protect public health. Enviroblog is a project of EWG Action Fund.
FEED

An EWG podcast for environmental health news on the go.
TIPS
Did we miss something? Email Enviroblg.
BLOGROLL
STAY CONNECTED
Get our monthly eNewsletter, action alerts, & environmental tips. [Privacy policy, About EWG]
Consumers to FDA: Be there or be square
Toxic cosmetics in teenage girls
FEATURED
Elected officials MIA; Instead Wal-Mart and Burger King protecting your health
Back to school: Are we ready? Are we non-toxic?
Fire retardants: Disproportionate risk to small children
Lead: Celebrate its ban, but don't cross it off your list
7 ways to reduce your exposure to PBDEs
Ask EWG
What can I do about fluoride in my water?
What is new carpet treated with? What can I do?
Are stainless steel water bottles safe?
Is mineral-based makeup safer?
SEARCH
« White House policy: Don't like it? Delete it. | Main | Farm livin': Not the life for toads »
Are you ready for World Population Day?
I don’t believe that it’s the rising worldwide population that is leading to the environmental problems we are facing today. While I have to acknowledge that population growth plays a small role in it, I believe that most environmental degradation comes from the behavior of that population. Especially concerning is the behavior of the few developed countries that contribute much more to global degradation than the less developed ones.
Having that in mind, I can appreciate the United Nations- sponsored World Population Day coming up tomorrow, July 11. According to the UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund:
“This year’s World Population Day reaffirms the right of people to plan their families. It encourages activities, events and information that will help make this right real – especially for those who often have the hardest time getting the information and services they need to plan their families, such as marginalized populations and young people.When people can plan their families, they can plan their lives. They can plan to beat poverty. They can plan on healthier mothers and children. They can plan to gain equality for women. “
There are many reasons why family planning is important: It could save women’s lives and help them participate in the labor force, as well as give them the opportunity to choose when and how they want to establish their family.
To read some of the environmental implications of the lack of family planning, read this. If you are interested in doing something in your community, the UN web site offers some good suggestions.
Comments
Are you ready for Forced Sterilization Day? Oh wait, that's already happened multiple times.
I think this is backwards. Basically, the rights of women and the impoverished come before population control.
Posted by: Meep | July 10, 2008 11:59 AM
Dear Friends,
On World Population Day in 2008, could now be the time to acknowledge the threat to the family of humanity that could soon be posed by the current huge scale and anticipated growth of the human population on Earth?
Somehow, sooner rather than later, we have simply got to find reasonable and sensible ways to communicate openly with one another about real global challenges that are ominously looming before humanity, visible even now on the far horizon. These issues are supremely significant to human and environmental health as well as to life as we know it and the integrity of Earth, even in these early years of Century XXI. Our silence wastes precious time. Time appears to be something that we cannot afford to continue frittering away much longer while the human species unintentionally ravages the Earth.
Many too many so-called and self-proclaimed people with ‘expertise’ assure us that we simply need to do nothing except that which we are doing now; that we must “stay the course” of unbridled economic growth, increasingly conspicuous per-capita resource overconsumption and unregulated propagation of absolute global human population numbers.
Are people going to stand up, speak out loudly and clearly, to say that the “same ol’ business as usual” course of action may be nothing more or less than a “primrose path” to the future, at the end of which could be the inadvertent loss of life as we know it and an unintended ecological wreckage, the likes of which only the King of kings, Ozymandias has seen.
The idea that silence is regularly triumphant in moments like this one is anathema to me. People with clear vision, intellectual honesty, coherent minds and good scientific evidence have got speak up and, in so doing, overcome the silence.
Perhaps silence presents itself to the human community as the greatest of all dangers: a threat greater than 9.2 billion unrestained human consumers on Earth in 2050; greater still than environs being relentlessly polluted by the unrestricted expansion of large-scale industrialization activities; even greater than the reckless dissipation of Earth’s finite resources and the irreversible loss of biodiversity worldwide. Silence is not only deafening; it is also destructive of everything we are intending to do well.
If now is not the right time for open acknowledgement, then when will that time come? What possible value can be derived from more denial and delay? Who or what can we possibly be awaiting?
Human-induced global challenges loom before us here and now, I suppose. Then again, perhaps I am mistaken.
Sincerely,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
Posted by: Steven Earl Salmony | July 11, 2008 9:34 AM
http://actformidable.drinkactweb.com/
Hello,
With the economic situation that we are experiencing presently
and along with the massive losses of employment, the employment security does not exist anymore.
On top of the increase of the food and gasoline prices
we really need to prepare for a Plan B.
DrinkAct is presently the best opportunity on the market.
Drink Act gives you all the tools to build your Plan B.
Thank you very much for taking the time to consider DrinAct.
Mario Gregoire
Posted by: Mario Gregoire | July 12, 2008 2:28 PM