Maka Si Tomni (Surround The Universe)

The following is an excerpt from an interview with Dr. Malcolm Potts and Leon Kolankiewicz, featured on the radio station KGNU Colorado on September 4, 2009 as part of Population Media Center’s Population News Strategy.

Interviewer: Your book is about how biology explains war and terrorism. What does population have to do with your work and interests?

Dr. Malcolm Potts, Bixby Professor of Population and Family Planning, University of California, Berkeley: Okay, we are looking outside the United States and the fighting in Afghanistan and that is where some of our troops sadly are dying. But those wars tend to occur in countries with rapid population growth, where those people are competing for resources, and particularly when you have lots of young men, [aged] 15-30, who often have no job opportunities and in Afghanistan they are not educated, and they are very angry and they do violent things.

I have worked in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Gaza Strip and places like that, and I think one of the solutions to make the world a more peaceful place is to ensure that the women in these countries can choose whether and when to have a child. Because unless we can give them that freedom, then there is no point in pretending that we are going to give them freedom to become a democracy or stable nation or anything else. We have to focus on women first and their freedom and other things will fall into place.

Interviewer: Malcolm, you have traveled to over 80 countries looking at issues of maternal mortality and population growth. Can you give us a picture of what is going on? I am not sure that our listeners have kept up with this issue and perhaps think that population growth is an issue that we talked about during the 70s and that it is under control now. What is the global situation?

Dr. Potts: It is very serious. When there was a lot of attention, which the older listeners will remember, as you mentioned, the population explosion of the 60s and 70s, then there were about 3 billion people in the world and the rate of growth was over 2%. Now there are a lot more people in the world, the rates of growth have fallen, but the absolute number of people we add to the planet each year is about the same. So this year we will have about 85 million more births than deaths on this planet. That is about as many people that live in Germany. And when I look at a globe of the earth, I can’t find a place to fit a new Germany in and that is happening every year.

….

Interviewer: Leon, your work really focuses on wilderness and U.S. natural resources, and I am not really sure how this ties into population growth. Can you tell us a little bit about your concerns concerning the environment and the growing U.S. population?

Leon Kolankiewicz, author and wildlife biologist: … The focus of my work in the past has been on U.S. population growth, both domestically, as in the United States, and the impact of a growing number of Americans on the global environment, such as our rising green house gas emissions. Just to set the stage, in this country, we are growing now by more than 3 million people a year. In the 1990s, we grew by something like 32 to 33 million people – the largest decade of growth in U.S. history, since they started keeping tabs in the 1790s or thereabouts. And this added 30 million people all have an impact on the environment. We are all consumers. We are all using land to give us places to work, to play in, to recreate, to go to school in. We are consuming resources and producing waste. Even those of us, such as yours truly, that try to live more efficiently and lighter on the earth, reducing our so-called ecological footprint, have an impact.

To hear the complete interview, visit our website where you will find more than 45 population focused interviews. You can subscribe to our podcasts via iTunes or whatever your favorite MP3 player might be for free directly from our site. We are adding new interviews every week. Stay current on one of the most important issues of our time by subscribing today!

The interview excerpt above is just one example of the more than 88 hours of media interviews focused on population that has come out of PMC’s Population News Strategy Project. This project began about one year ago with the purpose of bringing the issue of population back into the media and in the forefront of the American public by placing population and sustainability experts on radio talk show programs across the United States. Our purpose has been to educate the public, encourage their activism and change the terms of the sustainability debate to include the idea that stabilized global and U.S. populations are necessary prerequisites of bona fide sustainability.

To date we have placed 26 experts on more than 180 separate radio talk show programs, which has led to more than 1000 syndicated broadcasts in a variety of media markets all over the United States. These markets have ranged from small town, rural America to major metropolitan markets such as New York City, Sacramento, Boston, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Dallas. In addition to broadcasting on traditional radio outlets, the majority of these programs are also being streamed or archived online, further extending the reach and impact of such programs. Our stories have also been picked up by major environmental internet portals such as Treehugger.com and GreenerOz.net. In order to further impact the debate around sustainability, we have begun efforts to work with some of most popular environmental blogs to promote ideas of population stabilization. PMC has also created a “Best Of” library on our website for continued listening and further dissemination.

To ensure our success, we arm our expert guests with up to date talking points about population’s impact on environment and society, suggestions for performing well during live interviews, and themes we would like them to stress during their particular show. Then we let them go to work, giving color to the issues at hand, expressing their own unique viewpoints and, often, engaging with live call-ins and spontaneous debates and discussions.

Most important, we’ve been flexible and innovative in our approach. We’ve responded in real-time to important news events like the Global Population Speak Out last February, Nadya Suleman’s octuplets, Earth Day, World Population Day, and even Florida’s recent population decline. By reacting quickly to the news cycle and offering talk show hosts expert guests appropriate to the topic at hand, we can, in turn, influence the news cycle itself.

We would like to thank all of our expert guests, and all of the great radio talk show hosts and producers who have been willing to explore the critical sustainability issue of human population with us.