Earth Equity News

Condoms and Climate Change. By Bryan Walsh, Time Magazine, May 20, 2008. "Though simple arithmetic will tell you that the bigger the global population becomes, the harder it will be to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, you rarely see the population connection made explicit in major environmental reports... It's becoming increasingly clear that if we can't curb carbon emissions in a world of 6.8 billion, it may be impossible to do when there are 9 billion of us. And while population growth has slowed drastically in... Western Europe and in Japan... it's still rising in much of the developed world -- and for that matter, in the U.S.. 'You really can't talk about the supply and demand imbalance that is sending energy and food prices up without acknowledging that we are adding 78 million people each year, the equivalent of a new Idaho every week,' says [Robert] Engleman, [vice-president for programs at the Worldwatch Institute, and the author of the new book More: Population, Nature and What Women Want]... Engleman makes the argument that... the key to limiting population growth... is to give control over procreation to women. In society after society, even in countries where large families have always been the norm, when women take control over family size, birth rates shrink. 'They don't have to be coerced,' says Engleman. 'This will happen as long as women are in charge... It's not just feminism to support population control -- it's environmentalism.'"