Understanding Population Growth: How Slowing Growth Leads to Prosperity

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Date:

Thursday, February 09, 2012

Time:

6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Event Type:

Speaker

Organizer/Author:

HowMany.org

Location Details:

Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists - Fellowship Hall, 1924 Cedar St., Berkeley, CA

HowMany.org welcomes Dr. Malcolm Potts and Dr. Martha Campbell of UC Berkeley's Bixby Center for Population, Health and Sustainability to its Speaker Series stage. Drs. Potts and Campbell will engage the audience on the topic of "How to help people understand how to slow population growth." This is central to ameliorating global issues of economic hardship, threats to basic reproductive health care and fragile ecosystems disappearing at record rates - as well as local issues of carbon emissions and possible resource shortages. Apart from teaching at U.C., both spend time each year conducting research in the developing world.

For more information: http://www.howmany.org/

Added to the calendar on Wed, Jan 11, 2012 12:28PM

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§You've got this backwards

by Lloyd

Sun, Feb 5, 2012 6:40PM

People who are unwilling, or unable, to directly and critically confront capitalism seem always to be looking for flaws in "human nature" as the primary (if not the only) cause of the on-going social ecological crises -- "obviously," they tell us, "we are all making too much love." Also, it is often asserted, and always implied, that all individual human beings have the same ecological impacts. (But then, of course, corporations are people, too, right?) I've browsed the "HowMany" website and see no analysis of capitalism at all in this regard. The error is ubiquitous in writings on population. Instabilities created by the global capitalist system are the causes of community disintegration, the theft of traditional land, and the tendency toward "resource wars." This group's analysis of population issues has it backwards: global "prosperity" (a term in need of clarification in its own right) may allow human populations in parts of the world currently under assault by capitalism to stabilize; but the inverse is NOT necessarily true. A drop in _consuming_ populations will only force grow-or-die capitalism to make us believe we each need to BUY MORE THINGS to make up for the "scarcity" of paying customers.

Population growth is a _symptom_ of social-ecological imbalances, NOT the "cause." For more extensive analysis, see:

http://www.anarchija.lt/images/pdf/Murray%20Bookchin%20-%201993%20-%20What%20Is%20Social%20Ecology.pdf

"The idea of dominating nature stems from the concrete reality of systematic, institutionalized domination within human societies."

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