make big car owners pay

Writing in a NYT op-ed, Owen D. Gutfreund, a professor of history and urban studies at Barnard College and author of 20th-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape, says,
It’s imperative that we rethink the way we approach transportation. Our highway policy has remained largely the same since the 1950s even as driving [...]

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water footprint

By Arthur Max, Associated Press Writer:
The threat of climate change has drawn attention to carbon footprints…. Now scientists have begun calculating a water footprint, the amount of water needed to produce goods or services.
“What we are doing now can’t keep up with the issues we already have,” says Carol A. Howe, an expert working [...]

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We Feed the World

The 2005 Austrian documentary film We Feed the World has been showing on the Sundance channel in the US recently. (IMDB entry.) It’s incredibly well done.
WE FEED THE WORLD is a film about food and globalisation, fishermen and farmers, long-distance lorry drivers and high-powered corporate executives, the flow of goods and cash flow [...]

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population & environment

Gary Peters taught geography in the California State University system. Among the ten books he has authored or co-authored is a textbook on population geography. Read his excellent overview of population and environment issues.
It may be time to see that our numbers, combined with our expanding affluence and constant need to consume more [...]

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a climate for conflict

Global climate change, war, and population decline in recent human history, D.D. Zhang et al., December 4, 2007, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (open access). [See Emmett Duffy's review: A climate for conflict.]
Abstract:
Although scientists have warned of possible social perils resulting from climate change, the impacts [...]

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Five Short Blasts

In appreciation of Pete Murphy’s initiative I’ve promoted the following from the comments. While I don’t know Pete and have only read the preface of his book, I can say he appears to be knowledgeable and sincere. He offers a useful page of resource links here.
I stumbled across your blog this morning. I love [...]

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population and climate change, a discussion

A useful roundtable discussion of population and climate change. From the introduction:
A larger global population means a larger demand for everything–most urgently, energy. And although Earth’s resources have apparently stretched further than Paul Ehrlich infamously predicted four decades ago in his book The Population Bomb, the mounting climate problem suggests that the consequences of [...]

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Sustainability & Moral Disengagement

Here is one of the most thoughtful articles you’ll find on sustainability and the reasons we don’t address it: Impeding ecological sustainability through selective moral disengagement by Albert Bandura, David Starr Jordan Professor of Social Science in Psychology, Stanford University.
Environmental degradation of human origin stems [...]

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catastrophe in Africa?

Paul Chefurka in Africa in 2040: The Darkened Continent:
All in all, the future of Africa is beyond grim when one looks out just a decade or two. Declining food production, rising food prices, shrinking economic activity and a continuation of the HIV/AIDS pandemic paint a picture of human distress that is beyond endurance.
The scale [...]

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Kenya: Violence and Population Pressure

See the op-ed in the IHT by Gunnar Heinsohn, a sociologist with the Raphael Lemkin Institute for Comparative Genocide Research at the University of Bremen.
Between 1950 and 1985, Kenya’s total fertility rate (children per woman’s lifetime) hovered around eight. In 2007, each Kenyan woman still gave birth to an average of 5 children (compared to [...]

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