A One-Child Policy for the United States of America?

It is often said that environmentalists fear a big bogeyman beneath the bed — a taboo topic they are just too scared to mention.

Population. There, I’ve said it.

What is often implied is that either a) green thinkers don’t want to be seen to be putting planet above people (and so stay quiet); or b) that they don’t believe that population is a problem.

So they stand accused of blocking a key means of tackling the Earth’s environmental woes.

Yet there is something this debate rarely considers, and that is the question of where population growth is a problem for the environment.

It is easy for people in the West to look to the high birth rates of the developing world and demand a cut to save the planet.

But this finger-pointing is often based on xenophobia or denial of personal responsibility rather than on any sound science.

After all, doesn’t the biggest threat to our environment come from the way a rich minority – for whom birth control is usually available – tend to consume so relentlessly?

Think about it. A baby born in the USA is going to consume a lot more of the Earth’s natural resources and cause far greater emissions of greenhouse gases per year than probably a hundred babies born in Burundi.

And that’s even before you consider the difference in life expectancy and overall lifetime impacts.

One initiative that aims to put population back on the agenda is Global Population Speak Out.

Writing for BBC Online, its organiser John Feeney says the aim is to break the taboo on talking.

Most of the campaign’s backers are based in the West, so I hope this isn’t a signal of more of the same — the rich world telling the poor to cut back while it carries on consuming.

A renewed debate on population is probably necessary but it must be truly global, with space for voices from across the wealth divide. And it needs to look harder how people’s environmental impacts differ according to what they consume.

After all, a one-child policy for the United States of America alone might do more for the environment than a billion condoms donated to the developing world.

Alien Plant Life Abounds on Yemeni Archipelago

Check out these stunning plants from the Socotra Islands of Yemen. They look so strange and beautiful. There are more to see here.

The plants there have been isolated from their continental cousins for such a long time that they have evolved to look so very alien.

Is this the strangest plant life on the planet?

Liberians Forced to Fight an Army of Worms

What do you do when your country gets invaded by an army intent on eating your food and leaving people hungry?

That’s the problem facing Liberia, which has declared a State of Emergency after an outbreak of Army Worms, which are devastating crops across the country.

The worms are actually 5-centimetre long moth caterpillars and are some of the worst agricultural pests known.

They can rapidly chew their way through crops, leaving entire fields ruined. Tens of millions of them are marching across the country and also threatening neighbouring Guinea and Sierra Leone.

One factor that explains how the outbreak got out of control is that, as one of the world’s poorest nations, Liberia has a lack of early warning systems.

Rich countries could and should be doing more to help countries like Liberia to set up systems to detect problems like this and warn people about how to address them.

The same applies to natural disasters and disease outbreaks — better information, shared more effectively, always leads to better outcomes.

And paying to prevent a disaster is always more cost-effective than paying to deal with one after it has happened.

Oxford Dictionary Spells Death of Nature

It is almost official…  Children in Britain no longer need to know such things as acorns and blackberries, beetroots and ravens.

Instead, they need to know celebrity and citizenship, vandalism and voicemail.

These are among the lists of words that have disappeared from, or have newly arrived in, the latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary.

“We have moved from a roaming childhood to one that is lived indoors,” says Henry Porter, writing for the Observer and blogging at Comment is Free.

In line with this trend, the dictionary’s editors have been quietly rejecting words that describe to natural world.

Gone is the stoat, the starling and newt. Likewise the conker, carnation and wren.

Of the newly excluded word “sycamore”, Porter says: “if you don’t know the word for the tree, you mind is unlikely to be lit up by its associations.”

If children are no longer to learn the names of their native biodiversity, I fear it will disappear faster than ever.

How fitting it is, that among the new arrivals to the dictionary’s pages, the youngster will find the word “endangered”.

Two Degrees of Climate Change Stupidity

The word “stupid” keeps popping up in connection to climate change.

First, members of the Plane Stupid pressure group took over Stansted Airport in a protest against greenhouse gas emissions from aviation.

Then, at the UN Climate Change Conference in Poland, there was a screening of the film The Age of Stupid that apparently attracted ‘zillions‘ of people from NGOs and even some country negotiators.

The film stars Pete Postlethwaite as a man living alone in 2055, in a world gone badly wrong.

He spends his days watching news reports and other video clips from 2008 — and wondering, why didn’t we act to stop climate change? OneClimate.Net has a short film about the screening.

These are two very different approaches to the same problem.

The Age of Stupid’s team is using entertainment and comedy to show the seriousness of climate change. Plane Stupid’s protesters are taking more direct action, and George Monbiot, writing for the Guardian, argues that they are right.

But as Richard Black of the BBC knows only too well, the protest led to the cancellation of flights to Poznan, host city of the UN climate summit.

This made it harder for NGOs to put pressure on governments and for journalists to report what was going on there.

And as Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated this week, the UN negotiations are the “only show in town”.

At the summit and elsewhere, many people are fixating on limiting global warming to no more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

But Pachauri pointed out that this is a totally arbitrary target, devised not by scientists but by the European Union.

He warned that even a two-degree rise would cause serious impacts — especially for the world’s poor.

In his opening speech to this year’s conference, Pachauri said a two-degree rise would committed us to sea level rise of 0.4 to 1.4 metres due to the thermal expansion of water alone.

That’s before any melting icecaps and glaciers add to the volume of sea water.

His concerns were echoed in Poland by negotiators from some of the countries most vulnerable to climate change — the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) — which are urging faster emissions cuts to prevent a rise of more than 1.5 degrees.

“At the rate at which we are going, Barbuda will be fully submerged in the next 50 to 60 years,” warned Ambassador Diann Black-Layne of Antigua and Barbuda, last week in Poland.

If these messages don’t gain traction, we might find ourselves sleepwalking into a two-degree limit that feels like good news for EU policymakers, but is a disaster story but for the people of low-lying island nations.

Protesters and film-makers and vulnerable countries  and communities are still all chasing the elusive message that sticks and leads to an end to the stupidity and the wilful ignorance of the best available scientific advice.

Calm Before the Climate Change Storm

Billions of words have been written about climate change but just a single photo can do so much more to explain the threat and the injustice.

Yale Environment 360 has a selection of images by Munem Wasif from Bangladesh that do just that.

Millions of people in Bangladesh are already feeling the impacts of rising sea level despite having some of the lowest per capita greenhouse-gas emissions in the world.

They aren’t the only communities paying the price for other people’s pollution. I just wonder when people are going to get angry about this.

Incredible Melting Man Warns of Climate Change

Climate change has got so bad in Argentina that a man there has actually melted into a gloopy puddle on the pavement.

That’s what the Cruz Roja Argentina (the local wing of the Red Cross) wants passers-by to belief for a moment.

And while the pedestrians pause to gawp, the man hands out information about climate change. Brilliant tactics!

No-one is likely to forget meeting the melting man. But will remember they melting ice-caps and glaciers?

Strange Green Lights on Our Pale Blue Dot

A short show of intense beauty that only a few astronauts have had the pleasure to view is ours to marvel at, thanks to Andy Revkin over at DotEarth.

He has a fine video clip of the aurora borealis, which Don Pettit stitched together from photographs he took from space. I think this counts as geojournalism.

It must feel so good to get up there in space, far above the pollution and the sounds of the city, and way too high to remember where borders lie.

To see the planet turning silently in the endless space, onwards ever onwards, must be a reminder that we who claim to rule it are truly just momentary upstarts who take ourselves far too seriously.

Why is it that we hear so little about what astronauts feel when they make it into space and when they return home again?

They fall to Earth as citizens of competing nation states once more, just days after having surveyed the entire spinning planet like gods from above.

That has to be strange, beautiful, heartbreaking and mindbending, but it is a story I don’t hear being told.

With our planet in the state it is in, maybe it is time for the astronauts from all nations to get better at sharing the wonder the rest of us are unlikely ever to experience first-hand.

The Donkey Librarian in the Land of 1,000 Despairs

I’m sitting here at the computer, with millions upon millions of words available to my hungry eyes.

And while I am hopelessly hooked on emails, blogs, web-based newspapers, and all of the online rest,  I’ll never give up my first literary love: books.

James Meadow at the Rocky Mountain News relates how one man has turned a similar passion into action that has enriched the lives of tens of thousands of poor children in his native Ethiopia.

That man is Yohannes Gebregeorgis — also known as the Donkey Librarian, Book Man of Africa and Slayer of the Dragon of Illiteracy — and the smiling faces on his website speak volumes about his impact.

Gebregeorgis calls Ethiopia “The Land of 1,000 Despairs”, a nation wracked by poverty, illiteracy, and the fallout from decades of conflict, famine and misrule.

He fled the country years ago and made his way to the United States where he later set up Ethiopia Reads, an organisation whose mission is to create a reading culture in Ethiopia by bringing books to children.

Since 2002 he has taken thousands of books to Ethiopia, distributing them in purpose built libraries — including Ethiopia’s first free public library — or on donkey driven cart for the more remote rural areas.

Overall, more than 100,000 children have benefited. For this, Gebregeorgis is in the running for the CNN Heroes 2008 awards.

“When people are literate they can understand humanity,” he says. He gets my vote.

Geojournalism: great word, great concept

I just learnt a new word and I like it so much I am going to use it to tag content on this blog. “Geojournalism” is the word, and it is also the title of a new blog by Brazilian journalist Gustavo Faleiros

Gustavo points out that satellite images, maps and digital globes create opportunities for doing “better news, better stories” about the Earth, its beauty and the urgent problems it faces.

This then is geojournalism.

Gustavo writes on this and other topics for O Eco, where he is running a new project that combines mapping technologies with journalism — using Google Earth to show where forest fires are burning in the Amazon.

I have been impressed before by the way Google Earth layers can be used to convey important messages, such as by mapping atrocities in Darfur and publishing the testimonies of people affected, or by charting the spread of the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus.

There are plenty of examples of ways to use Google Earth to communicate about environmental issues too.

The good news is that Google’s philanthropic wing Google.org is offering grants for people who want to follow suit. The deadline for applying for this round of Geo Challenge grants is 22 December.