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The Overpopulation Podcast
The Overpopulation Podcast features enlightening conversations between executive director Nandita Bajaj, researcher Alan Ware, and expert guests to discuss the often misunderstood impacts of our expanding human footprint on human rights, animal protection, and ecological preservation, as well as individual and collective solutions. Ranking in the top 1.5% of all podcasts globally, we draw over 15,000 listeners from across 80 countries.
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Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?
In this episode with award-winning author and journalist Alan Weisman, we discuss his book Countdown capturing his journey to over 20 countries over five continents to ask what experts agreed were probably the most important questions on Earth, and also the hardest. How many humans can the planet hold without capsizing?
The Megamachine and Green Growth Delusions
In this interview with freelance writer Christopher Ketcham, we unpack the techno-industrial extractivism — through public lands grazing, mining, and drilling — that plagues modern societies, and the media’s and government’s complicity in failing to challenge the growth model on which it is based.
Navigating the Great Unraveling with Resilience
In this episode, we chat with Asher Miller and Rob Dietz of the Post Carbon Institute about their latest report "Welcome to the Great Unraveling", which explores ways to navigate the environmental and social breakdown resulting from multiple intersecting crises.
Confronting Overshoot: Changing the Story of Human Exceptionalism
We chat with population ecologist, originator of “ecological footprint”, and one of the world’s best big-picture ecological thinkers, Dr. Bill Rees. Bill explains how our blind faith in human exceptionalism, technological optimism, and neoliberal economics fooled us into disregarding ecological limits and brought us into a state of extreme overshoot. How can we confront this reality, in which we are degrading the biophysical basis of existence, to prepare for a post-industrial world?
Population: A Threat Multiplier for Climate Change, Biodiversity Loss, & Pandemics
In this interview with Dr. Camilo Mora, widely acclaimed professor and award-winning researcher, we discuss the impacts of human activity on climate change, biodiversity loss, resource scarcity, and pandemics, and how to move past population denial to grapple with our compounding crises.
How Free-Market Fundamentalism Fuels Population Denialism & Undermines Democracy
Naomi Oreskes, a world-renowned earth scientist, historian and public speaker explains how free-market fundamentalism has had a long history of undermining democracy and exploiting marginalized communities to benefit a small minority of elites.
Powering Down: Beyond Growth, Toward Simplicity
Richard Heinberg, one of the world’s foremost experts on energy and sustainability explains why unfettered human expansionism, even with a “green” tint, is incompatible with natural limits and how we might deliberately rein in our power and move toward a culture of sufficiency, simplicity, and resilience.
The Beauty and Complexity of Animal Cultures
Ecologist Carl Safina challenges the notion that culture is exclusive to humans beings, and reveals the rich cultures and inner lives of non-human animals, and discusses how to move beyond human supremacy, which keeps us from appreciating the incredible beauty and complexity of other creatures.
Embracing Limits With Ecospheric Grace
Author Robert Jensen discusses his latest book An Inconvenient Apocalypse that he co-authored with The Land Institute’s co-founder Wes Jackson, about the need to grapple with difficult questions and to consciously embrace limits, as a pathway to a more graceful and meaningful co-existence with Nature.
A Profound Vision For An Ecological Civilization
Dr. Eileen Crist—a deep, profound, and compassionate systems thinker—shines a light on the worldview of human supremacy that foregrounds our relationship of dominion towards non-human animals and all of nature, and offers a vision for cultivating a more indigenous-inspired identity as Earthlings.
Earth Overshoot Day: Overdrafting the World's Ecosystems
“We are using up the biophysical basis of our own existence; the only way out of overshoot is less production and less consumption, so it means a much smaller economy and far fewer people.” That’s the bottom line of this Earth Overshoot Day conversation with William Rees, the father of ecological footprint analysis.
Reflection on Six Years of Leading World Population Balance
Podcast co-host Dave Gardner reflects on the agony and the ecstasy of working to alert, educate, and inspire action to end our overpopulation crisis for the last six years as executive director of WPB.
Sex, Religion, Politics and Overpopulation
In part two of our conversation with Chris Tucker, author of A Planet of 3 Billion, we continue exploring how to make the “uncomfortable” conversation more comfortable. He explains that we must absolutely figure out how to run a prosperous global economy under continuous population decline.
How Many of Us Can Earth Support?
We’re asking the Earth to support 80 million more humans every year, yet too few us ask, “What is a sustainable human population?” We talk to Chris Tucker, who wrote a book about it: A Planet of 3 Billion: Mapping Humanity’s Long History of Ecological Destruction and Finding Our Way to a Resilient Future.
Aging Population: Nothing to Fear
Are nations with low birth rates going to collapse due to a temporary bulge in the ranks of the elderly? On an overpopulated planet, this is an important question. Depopulation alarmists in numerous countries are pushing for baby bonuses or high immigration quotas in order to avoid getting into recovery from growth addiction.
"Are There Too Many of Us on Our Planet? Yes!"
A recent report on Deutsche Welle’s Eco India environmental news magazine recently asked, “Are There Too Many of Us on Our Planet?” Bajaj helps put to rest the false dichotomy between overpopulation and overconsumption and argues that we must address both.
Dropping Birth Rates are Good News
News reports and economists exhibit collective angst about declining birth rates and the resulting aging of populations in many nations. A research team at The Overpopulation Project wondered if these challenges outweigh the ecological advantage of a population shrinking back to a sustainable level.