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Population Education -- promoting stabilization to benefit everyone!*
The Population is Still Growing!
- We speak directly to over 9,000 people each year, most of them students, throughout the Upper Midwest of the United States.
- We emphasize the demographic facts of population growth and its relationship to other major issues.
- Our Mission helps us to work with diverse groups of people.
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- You can help to promote humane and ethical population stabilization.
Population News
Exciting New Ad Campaign We are seeking special funds to run ads similar to this one in several Minnesota publications this fall. These full-color ads will add to the attention gained by our messages on public radio. If you would like to help us publish these ads, please make a tax-deductible contribution. You will make an incredible difference! Thank you. |
The Population Bubbleby David BaconIn the Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons there is usually a scene where Coyote, chasing Roadrunner, runs off a cliff. He continues on a horizontal line for a couple of seconds, looking increasingly puzzled and concerned, until he realizes his predicament, tries vainly to reverse course, and falls to the desert below. This is symbolic of the situation ecologists call “overshoot.” Overshoot is when a species reproduces to a number that its environment can’t sustain. In 1944, for example, 29 reindeer were introduced onto Saint Matthew Island in the Bering Sea. With few competitors, no predators and plenty to eat, the herd increased to about 6,000 by the summer of 1963, consuming almost all available food. That winter most of them died. The surviving population in 1966 numbered 42. read the full article > (PDF) |
Featured Article
Malthus Over A 270 Year Perspective
by Andrew R. B. Ferguson
In 1798 Thomas Robert Malthus wrote: “population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio, but subsistence increases only in a arithmetical ratio.” He was well aware that Europeans were taking over the lands of Native Americans and thereby introducing more productive agricultural methods. However, taking over other people's lands is a finite process, and when he wrote that “subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio,” he was referring essentially to the potential for increasing the productivity of the land through improved farming methods.
... Little could Malthus have foreseen the improvements that would occur when full use could be made of fossil fuel energy so as to: make nitrogenous fertilizers, produce pesticides, introduce irrigation schemes, build and use tractors and other agricultural machinery, the latter greatly facilitating farming in areas that otherwise would have been unsuitable. Notwithstanding these unforeseen technological developments, which resulted in changing the arithmetical ratio by which productivity could be increased (see Figure at left), his proposition has remained substantially true; and as we will see, this should have been apparent to all about fifty years ago.
read the full article > (PDF)
Whatever your cause ... it's a lost cause without population stabilization.
*Pro-life and pro-choice members respectfully agree to disagree in order to promote fair and humane population stabilization.