PUBLICATIONS
Publications
Our publications feature a combination of our own writing and pieces from changemakers who are working in the area of sustainable population advocacy from a justice-oriented framework for people, animals, and the planet.
Choosing a Planet of Life
One of the commonplaces of environmental writing these days is a population forecast of 10 billion (or more) people by century’s end. Indeed, this projection is endlessly repeated, as if it were as inevitable as the calculable trajectory of an asteroid hurtling through space. Besides being a facile meme amenable to replication, this recurrent demographic report signals a widely shared fatalism: The coming growth has too much inertia behind it, and is far too politically sensitive, to question.
Overshoot and the Incredible Shrinking Planet
Let’s start with a thought experiment. Suppose you and your close family and friends, perhaps 150 people in all, were confined to an isolated island – let’s call it Esperanza – characterized by landscapes and soils that were representative of average arable land in the United States and that, henceforth, you would have to be food self-sufficient – you have no access to trade goods.
“Green Growth” and Population Denial Doom Our Climate Efforts
As the warmest year on record draws to a close, delegates from around the world just reached agreement, after 30 years of meeting on climate change, to transition away from fossil fuels. The legally nonbinding consensus to shift to renewable energy technologies came after delegates arrived via private jet in Dubai, the capital of one of the largest oil producing nations…
Wealth Never Sleeps
I am congenitally cheap. There is Scottish blood in my veins, which may explain why our family crest reads: “Fix it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”
Making Holidays Happier and More Humane
For many of us, the holidays are a chance to get together with our human and companion animal family and catch up on much-needed rest. In the global North, despite the melancholic embrace of chilly nights and short days, we know that winter has its own place and the wheel of the year its own logic - that many of the seeds fallen from their stalks in late summer must weather a frost to sprout again the following spring.
Something Wicked This Way Comes: The Menace of Deep-Sea Mining
A new chapter of Earth pillage is in the works: the commercial venture of deep-sea mining. The deep sea lies 200 meters below sea level into the abyssal depths and comprises roughly 65 percent of Earth’s surface. It is being encroached by a nexus of nation-states and industries slavering over its “mind-boggling quantities of untapped resources”.
Why I am not going to consult AI
AI can help writers save time, reduce costs, overcome creative obstacles, and produce diverse and original content for different channels and audiences.
Linked-In advice, regarding the usefulness of AI for writers
No thanks. In the words of Bartleby, The Scrivener, written by Herman Melville with neither computer nor AI, I would prefer not to.
Reproductive Autonomy Is Fundamental to Conservation
Overconsumption has brought us the climate crisis, the Sixth Great Extinction, expanding desertification, and the depletion of fresh water supplies across the globe. But it is humans, at this point eight billion of us, who are doing that consuming. It should not be controversial that our profound state of ecological overshoot is a product of both our population and our consumption.
Earthling (We/Us)
Earth keepers call out to one and all to opt out of the sociocultural identity game, to choose freedom from anthropocentric herd costumes that furnish simulacra of reality for a sleepwalking, and now moribund, existence.
Family Life in a Nature-Loving World
My wife and I are part of a large family. We have no children, no pets, but all the kin in the world. You, too, are part of this bonded group. It is true that we will never know the identity of the last common ancestor that you and I share with the old lady down my road, the birds in the back garden, the worms in the compost pile, the bacteria in my stomach, your stomach, and the deep sea, and all our other living relatives…
Boiling Frogs
In the span of a hundred years, the number of people on Earth has quadrupled, from two billion to eight billion, the latest billion added in only eleven years. This slow-motion disaster used to garner headlines in the 1970s. Concern about population explosion launched the first Earth Day and founded many environmental groups. Back then there was urgency about human overshoot. But then we gained another four billion people and somehow lost our minds.
You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught
This was yet another piercingly honest exposé of our human supremacist worldview by Dr. Crist. As Crist points out, human supremacy exists as a background assumption that gives us permission to use, abuse, torture, and kill animals for food, clothing, entertainment, experimentation, and so much more, as we deem fit.
Solidarity with Animals
The animal economy, wherein animals routinely suffer truncated and brutalized lives, weaves massively through the global economy. Billions of animals are utilized each year, with virtually no compunction, in industries of food, feed, supplements, clothing, furnishings, textiles, footwear, accessories, luxury products, entertainment, traditional medicine, and pharmaceuticals.
Don’t Lose Heart
It is said we are made of stardust. Perhaps that’s where accomplished meditators return. The rest of us may more easily return to what we’re made of by contemplating the first lifeform that emerged: the Archetype, which literally means “the first form.”
Holidays: A Chance to Dig Deeper for Kinship and Meaning
Most of my waking hours are dedicated to spreading awareness about the pervasiveness and oppressiveness of pronatalism, which is the social bias towards biological children.
The Left’s Population Denialism
There is an unfortunate trend among some of our allies on the Left of denying the relevance of our growing human population to the mounting environmental crises that pose an existential threat to our species and most others on Earth.
Dismissal of “Population Alarmism” is Rooted in Pronatalist Ideology
As the global population fast approaches 8 billion, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Executive Director Dr Natalia Kanem wants us to avoid what she calls “population alarmism.”
Broken Mirror
The real way forward, away from suffering and toward hope, lies in denouncing the root cause of our predicament, the human-supremacy story, the destructive platitude of human specialness.
The Environment & Animals Don't Care About Our Discomfort With These Topics
At a time when our collective human footprint is wreaking havoc on the planet, the fact that humanity is choosing to still feed itself with a diet that includes animal products is exacerbating and multiplying our damaging impact, with animal agriculture being a leading driver of biodiversity loss, deforestation, water use and water pollution.
Pope Francis’ Not-So-Divine Intervention
Pope Francis’ recent comments calling those who are choosing to forego procreation to be selfish fly in the face of our fight for social, reproductive, and ecological justice.