Leave it to a wiseass mother of two to make the best case I’ve ever read for not having kids.

Caitlin Moran is currently having an American media moment as she marks U.S. publication of her book How to Be a Woman, a memoir-slash-manifesto that’s been a massive best-seller in the U.K. She’s been described as the British Tina Fey, the next Nora Ephron, and an occasional Lady Gaga bathroom companion. Everyone’s talking about her fervid defense of feminism. (“Do you have a vagina? and Do you want to be in charge of it? If you said ‘yes’ to both, then congratulations! You’re a feminist.”) But not enough people are talking about her fervid defense of the childfree life — so I’m going to.

Thing is, Moran loves being a mum (in addition to being many other things, like a columnist for The Times of London). She has a sweet and honkingly funny chapter called “Why You Should Have Children.” But she follows that with a whip-smart chapter entitled “Why You Shouldn’t Have Children.” The latter case so rarely gets vocalized, and Moran vocalizes it so damn well, that I want to block-quote the entire chapter. But that would mean a lot of typing for me. So instead I’ll just block-quote a big chunk, and then you’ll have to go buy the book to read the rest. Which you should do anyway.

[I]f a woman should say she doesn’t want to have children at all, the world is apt to go decidedly peculiar: “Ooooh, don’t speak too soon,” it will say — as if knowing whether or not you’re the kind of person who desires to make a whole other human being in your guts, out of sex and food, then base the rest of your life around its welfare, is a breezy, “Hey — whatever” decision. …

[T]his injunction for all women to have children isn’t in any way logical. If you take a moment to consider the state of the world, the thing you notice is that there are plenty of babies being born; the planet really doesn’t need all of us to produce more babies.

Particularly First World babies, with their ferocious consumption of oil and forest and water, and endless burping-out of carbon emissions and landfill. First World babies are eating this planet like termites. If we had any real perspective on fertile Western women, we’d be jumping on them in the streets, screaming, “JESUS! CORK UP YOUR NETHERS! IMMUNIZE YOURSELF AGAINST SPERM!” …

Because it’s not simply that a baby puts a whole person-ful of problems into the world. It takes a useful person out of the world as well. Minimum. Often two. When you have young children, you are useless to the forces of revolution and righteousness for years. Before I had my kids I may have mooched about a lot but I was politically informed, signing petitions, and recycling everything down to watch batteries. It was compost heap here, dinner from scratch there, public transport everywhere. … I was smugly, bustingly, low-level good.

Six weeks into being poleaxed by a newborn colicky baby, however, and I would have happily shot the world’s last panda in the face if it made the baby cry for 60 seconds less. The cloth diapers … were dumped for disposables; we lived on ready meals. Nothing got recycled … Union dues and widow’s mites were cancelled — we needed the money for the disposables and the ready meals. …

Let’s face it, most women will continue to have babies, the planet isn’t going to run out of new people, so it’s of no real use to the world for you to have a child. Quite the opposite, in fact. That shouldn’t stop you having one if you want one, of course …

But it’s also worth remembering it’s not of vital use to you as a woman, either. … I don’t think there’s a single lesson that motherhood has to offer that couldn’t be learned elsewhere. …

Every woman who chooses — joyfully, thoughtfully, calmly, of her own free will and desire — not to have a child does womankind a massive favor in the long term. We need more women who are allowed to prove their worth as people, rather than being assessed merely for their potential to create new people. …

How’s that for being in charge of your vagina? Plus she’s got a bracingly frank chapter about having an abortion and never regretting it.

How to Be a Woman also hits on masturbation, menstruation, breasts, bras, bikini waxing, and lots more woman stuff. Moran’s righteous ranting is aimed at implementing “a Zero Tolerance policy on All the Patriarchal Bullshit.” And that includes “Zero Tolerance over baby angst.”

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For more on being green and childfree, read: Say it loud — I’m childfree and I’m proud.

Never mind the climate hawks. National-security hawks ought to be seriously stressing about rapidly rising population numbers: “About 80% of the world’s civil conflicts since the 1970s have occurred in countries with young, fast-growing populations, known as youth bulges, according to an analysis by the nonprofit Population Action International.”

That’s from an L.A. Times article, “Runaway population growth often fuels youth-driven uprisings,” part of a series about population by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Kenneth Weiss. More from the article:

In many developing countries, runaway population growth has created vast ranks of restless young men …, with few prospects and little to lose. …

[Y]outh bulges have emerged in [Afghanistan,] Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia and the Palestinian territories — part of what security experts call an “arc of instability” reaching across Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

Of the 2 billion or more people who will be added to the planet by 2050, 97% are expected to be born in Africa, Asia and Latin America, led by the poorest, most volatile countries.

American national-security planners ignored the issue for decades.

That changed on Sept. 11, 2001.

The bipartisan commission that investigated the suicide hijackings, carried out by 19 young Arab men, said one factor in the rise of extremism in the Muslim world was “a large, steadily increasing population of young men without any reasonable expectation of suitable or steady employment — a sure prescription for social turbulence.” …

In planning documents, the Pentagon and the National Intelligence Council warn of a looming “demographic crisis” in parts of Africa and Asia, where rapid population growth and climate-related disasters could help trigger famines, wars and revolutions.

Weiss reports on particularly disturbing trends in Afghanistan, which “has a birthrate of nearly seven children per woman, one of the highest in the world.”

Since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, the population [of Afghanistan] has swelled from 23 million to 33 million. Nearly three-fourths of Afghans are under 30. The median age is 16.6, compared with 37 in the United States. …

The nonprofit International Council on Security and Development interviewed more than 420 men in Helmand and neighboring Kandahar provinces in 2010. Participants in the survey were asked, “Why do you think other Afghan men join the Taliban?” The leading reason, cited by 57%, was “jobs or money.”

Lots of idle young guys add up to lots of trouble. And with the Taliban and many other men opposing education for girls and basic rights for women, the prospects for female empowerment and widespread family-planning programs in Afghanistan are looking grim. After all, women’s rights are key to slowing population growth.

But it’s not all terrible news. Weiss reports on Iran’s family-planning successes, which have brought its fertility rate down from about seven births per woman in the 1980s to fewer than two today.

Weiss hits many more population angles in the “Beyond 7 Billion” series. (Check out Grist’s own 7 billion series for more still.)

One of the women, Chris Faulkner, “did standard things in standard order: high school, college, job, marriage and children,” and she is now leading a comfortable middle-class existence.

The other woman, Jessica Schairer, is a single mother of three, trying to get by making just under $25,000 a year, supplemented by food stamps. She did not do things in standard order: “She got pregnant during her first year of college, left school and stayed in a troubled relationship that left her with three children when it finally collapsed six years ago.”

DeParle tells these women’s stories and puts them in context with data about larger social trends, but what jumped out at me is something that he didn’t mention at all: contraception, or a lack thereof.

Schairer didn’t intend to get pregnant in college, and if that pregnancy had been avoided, her life might have turned out very differently and she might not now be teetering on the edge of poverty. Unlike women in, say, rural Uganda, she could have gotten her hands on birth control, as could have her partner. She bears responsibility for her situation, and she acknowledges that. “I’m in this position because of decisions I made,” she said.

But society also failed her. If so many young women like Schairer are getting pregnant accidentally, then we as a country are doing something really wrong — doing lots of things wrong, actually. Sex ed in our schools is too often crappy or nonexistent. Reliable birth control can be hard to get ahold of and afford. Our whole culture is at once saturated with sex and at the same time afraid of having of having honest conversations about it. Add all that up and the result is that almost half of the nation’s 6 million-plus pregnancies each year are unintended.

Imagine if it became normal for young women in America, when they become sexually active, to start using a long-acting form a contraception — an IUD (they’re making a comeback!) or a patch or a ring or a shot, something you don’t have to think about every day — until/unless they decide they want to have kids. (Yes, they should still use condoms too.) Obama’s healthcare act will help make this more achievable; starting this August, most insurance plans will be required to cover the full cost of birth control. But it’ll take more than changing the rules; we need to change the culture too.

Melinda Gates is getting lots of press for her high-profile campaign to make contraception widely available throughout the developing world. It’s well established that family planning can help fight poverty in poorer countries.

But we could use some big-name spokespeople for the contraceptive cause right here at home — and more journalists willing to connect the dots between reproductive health and financial health.

Melinda Gates will celebrate World Population Day by avoiding saying the word “population,” and at the same time doing more to address population-related challenges than anyone else on the planet.

She has adopted family planning as her signature issue and is leading an effort by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to make contraceptives widely available to women in developing countries. On July 11, World Population Day, she’ll be headlining the London Summit on Family Planning, cosponsored by her foundation and the U.K. government. The aim of the summit is to raise $4 billion to provide family-planning services over the next eight years to 120 million women. About twice that many women now lack access, which Gates says is “a crime.”

Gates stresses the health benefits of the campaign and tries to defuse controversy by sidestepping the issue of abortion and rejecting the old-school notion of “population control,” which evokes images of rich white men telling poor women of color how many kids to have. Gates addressed this in an interview on CNN:

Sanjay Gupta: Is this population control?

Melinda Gates: No. And I think that’s where we’ve gotten ourselves … in trouble on this issue. Deciding about a family is a decision that needs to be made inside of a family. The population is coming down in countries where there’s widespread access to contraceptives, but you’ve got to start at the bottom up. To hear a poor woman say to me, “I can’t find the means to feed this child, and if I have seven children, there’s no way I can feed and keep alive seven children,” I think somebody needs to give voice to that and I think it’s important that I do that.

A study published Tuesday in The Lancet, financed by the Gates Foundation, found that fulfilling unmet demand for contraception from women in poor countries could cut global maternal mortality by almost a third.

The Guardian has more on the health benefits:

“if we are successful, it would mean 100 million fewer unintended pregnancies, 200,000 lives saved, 50 million abortions averted,” [said Andrew Mitchell, the U.K. minister for international development]. …

There is a strong consensus to suggest that with access to voluntary family planning, poverty declines, education rates rise, the health of women and children improves and the numbers of women who die in childbirth and children who die under the age of five falls.

Last week, Gates took this message to The Colbert Report:

Stephen Colbert: You know from the culture wars in the United States, if you’re in favor of contraception, you are automatically a slut. Aren’t you afraid that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will be thought of as a slut factory? It is controversial.

Melinda Gates: You know, we’ve made it controversial in the United States and it doesn’t need to be. In fact, 90 percent of Americans say they find contraceptives morally acceptable. But because we’ve made it controversial, it’s come off the global health agenda. And so it means 200 million women that say they want access to contraceptives — things that we use here in the United States — they don’t have them. And then guess what: women die if they can’t space their births, if they have children too close together, or they’re too young when they have a child. That shouldn’t happen in this day and age.

There you have it. Contraception: not slutty. Has anyone told Rush Limbaugh and Foster Friess?

UPDATE: Here’s Gates making the case for family planning in a cute animated video:

You know what doesn’t do a lot to help reduce unwanted births? Putting women in sole charge of contraception, then making it nigh-impossible for them to exercise any reproductive freedom. We could improve sex ed, affordability of birth control pills, and access to abortion — but as long as there are Republicans around, we might be better off researching easy contraception for men. Which is why this new topical contraceptive gel, developed by researchers at the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, could be a big deal.

Unlike current options for male contraception, this one doesn’t involve surgery or even the unfairly-maligned condom. You just put it on your skin, maybe in the form of a patch like the one already available to women. The mix of testosterone and synthetic progesterone lowers sperm counts in 89 percent of men, making it way less likely that you’ll put a bun in your partner’s oven. No need for injections, implants, pills, diaper budgets, child support, or college funds.

For women, this may still feel a little unfair — we’ve been dealing with copper wires, rubber hubcaps, sponges, hormones, and minor surgery in pursuit of self-determined fertility since like the Middle Ages, so how come THEY got to wait until there was a zero-effort, topically-applied solution? But really, if this works out, everybody wins. Dudes just win a little easier, that’s all.

Paul Ehrlich, author of the iconic 1968 book The Population Bomb, now refers to himself as a “mobster.” Okay, so the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere — the MAHB — is not exactly an organized crime group, but Ehrlich is still raising some ethical eyebrows. After warning of impending global catastrophe for over 40 years, he and his MAHB are bringing together humanists, social scientists, ecologists, and economists to figure out how we might convince people to quickly change course.

The trouble, Ehrlich says, is in our genes. One hundred thousand years ago, when our greatest obstacles were wild animals, food foraging, and “ducking rocks thrown at our heads,” it wasn’t necessary to grapple with huge, hard-to-discern disasters like biodiversity loss or climate change. Alas, our brains aren’t yet up to speed with these fast times. As Ehrlich says, we’ve got “stone age brains with space age technology.”

What’s to be done? Having written over 40 books, Ehrlich posits that “people don’t want to hear about solutions — those books don’t sell.” And he’s long since given up on any attempt to counter “genuine idiots” or “the mathematically challenged.” Ultimately, though, he’s a people person — he thinks that, with the right incentives, we can be retrained.

This stalwart of the environmental movement has received a great deal of criticism for his doomsday rhetoric, and, by his own admission, the environmental movement has “utterly failed.” But, in spite of all the perceived failures, he’s still searching for a way to convince our planet of short-term thinkers that large-scale environmental change is worth addressing quickly and globally.

Maybe adding the title “MAHB-ster” will help him convey a sense of urgency without scaring people away from the problems that lie ahead.

I caught up with Ehrlich recently to talk about his work, as well as the nature of environmental rhetoric, the pitfalls of the Republican Party, and the elusive aura of the 1960s.

Free MP3. (Right click, select “Save Link As.”)

This interview is part of the Generation Anthropocene project, in which Stanford students partake in an inter-generational dialogue with scholars about living in an age when humans have become a major force shaping our world.

The outcome document for this week’s Rio+20 summit is 49 pages long. Some 23,917 words.

Women were mentioned in less than 0.01 percent of the text. And only two of the 283 sections addressed women’s needs for family planning.

At first, this might not seem like a big deal. It’s easy to think of Rio as a purely environmental conference, dealing with issues related to sustainable development and a green economy. It’s easy to say that Rio is not about “women’s issues.”

Well, we have some news for you: You can’t have sustainable development without women. Despite the best efforts of women leaders in government and civil society, strong statements on access to contraception and reproductive health services are still in doubt. Of the seven priority areas of discussion at the summit, none included a focus on women’s health and empowerment.

The stakes at Rio are huge. Time is running out to develop plans for economic growth that reduce poverty without harming our environment. But there is no path to a sustainable future that doesn’t include women. Leave them out, neglect their needs, and risk failure.

Right now, more than 200 million women in developing countries want the right to plan their families, but lack contraception. Meeting their needs would not only improve their lives, but would help them respond to the effects of climate change, practice sustainability, and participate more fully in the economy and their communities.

Consequences of environmental change — floods, droughts, crop failure — affect everyone, but are especially hard on women and families. As the primary people responsible for gathering water, firewood, and other household resources, women are on the front lines of the climate crisis. When they are able plan the timing of their own childbearing, they can better adapt to the unpredictable impacts of climate change, and ensure the survival of their families.

Powering these households and ensuring access to electricity is essential. Investing in small-scale, distributed clean energy sources like solar is the fastest, cheapest, and most reliable method to provide electricity to women and families. This will create more resilient and robust rural communities while reducing the burden on families who are heavily reliant on dangerous kerosene for electricity.

Empowering women to make these critical decisions in their own lives can also contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Studies show that slowing population growth by giving women access to the contraception they already want could reduce emissions by between 8 and 15 percent [PDF] — roughly equivalent to ending all tropical deforestation.

Family planning and reproductive health are also fundamental to promoting environmental sustainability. A woman who cannot access contraception may have more children than she can afford to feed and educate. She will need more resources to take care of her growing family. In contrast, couples who can plan their own childbearing are better able to manage other aspects of their lives, including their use of natural resources. Access to family planning helps women raise healthy and stable families, which protects valuable natural resources for future generations.

As the world population grows, the demand for water, forests, and land mounts, and pressure on resources intensifies. The most resource-stressed areas typically have few resources, high population densities, and high population growth rates. Meeting the needs of a rapidly growing population not only taxes resources, but is a significant economic challenge for many of the world’s poorest countries.

Investing in women is a powerful antidote to poverty. Women who are able to delay childbearing are more likely to meet their educational goals, obtain productive employment, and increase household income. Smaller family sizes also allow more children to be educated, and promote girls’ education. In turn, educated women tend to have smaller families, and more resources to invest in their children.

Employment for women is also important to achieving full potential in the labor market, and growing a green economy. Currently, the proportion of working-age women who are employed lags behind men in all regions. Yet women are indispensable in agriculture, producing up to 80 percent of the world’s food, and their unpaid labor is estimated to contribute up to 50 percent of GDP in some countries. By preventing unintended pregnancies, family planning can enhance women’s employment opportunities, and increase their financial contribution to communities and nations.

In short, ensuring that women have access to contraception promotes sustainable economic growth. And it’s a cost-effective investment. Every dollar spent on family planning can save $2 to $6 in other development areas.

To those who say women’s issues are a distraction from the Rio+20 negotiations, we say nothing could be further from the truth. They are at the heart of this great challenge, and provide the foundation for creating a more sustainable world.

For all of Grist’s Earth Summit coverage, click here.

Four and a half billion years is a hard number to digest. That’s the age of the Earth, and a lot has happened in that time. The geologic record contains dramatic climate swings, the formation of entire continents, the proliferation of new species — as well as mass extinctions. But no matter what has happened in the past, life goes on. Well, in the case of mass extinctions, at least some life does …

To help people get their heads around our role in all this, geologists use the analogy of a clock: If you compress all of the Earth’s history into a single day, humans do not show up on the scene until a minute before midnight.

“When you have that viewpoint of looking at these events long afterward and seeing what happens in the aftermath, it tends to lead to interesting new evolutionary pathways in many cases,” says Stanford geology and environmental sciences professor Jonathan Payne. He quips that we “can’t be entirely sorry” about past mass extinctions because they “changed ecosystems in ways that ultimately led to the evolution of human beings.”

Thinking on this kind of deep earth time scale can offer some comfort in times like these. But perhaps it shouldn’t.

“Although the Earth will undoubtedly recover from whatever humans do to it, it won’t recover on a time scale that is relevant to us, our children, or our grandchildren,” he says. “One way of thinking about it is that anything we decide to do to the planet is permanent, for all practical purposes.”

I recently caught up with Payne to discuss geologic time, mass extinctions, and humans as a geologic force.

This interview is part of the Generation Anthropocene project, in which Stanford students partake in an inter-generational dialogue with scholars about living in an age when humans have become a major force shaping our world.

Children in Leyte, the Philippines, where large families are still the norm. (Photo by Glen McBethlaw.)

Days from now, some 130 heads of state and tens of thousands of activists from around the world will gather in Rio de Janeiro for the “Rio + 20” Earth Summit. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recently laid out his vision for the conference in a New York Times article entitled “The Future We Want.”

Ki-moon expressed hope that the meeting will inspire new thinking, focus on people, and issue a “clarion call” for smarter resource use. He gave a nod to the importance of women, who “hold up half the sky,” and of young people, “the very face of our future.”

Still, one crucial ingredient went without mention: sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). The inclusion of SRHR and access to family planning completes the jigsaw puzzle of a just and sustainable world.

To understand why, consider the lives of the women who sell dried fish in my province — Leyte, in the Philippines. The women of Leyte are on the front lines of an unfolding environmental crisis. The gulf they depend on for their livelihood has been ravaged by overfishing and the destruction of coral reefs, forests, and mangroves. Where fishers once reeled in up to 50 kilograms a day, the average has now dropped to just 0-5 kilograms, barely enough to feed a family.

And climate change has disrupted the weather, making it too unpredictable to dry fish under the heat of the sun. The result, for the women of Leyte, is a substantial loss of income.

Large families are still the norm in Leyte, where most women have more than four children [PDF]. Many would like to prevent or delay having another child; one in three births is unwanted or mistimed [PDF]. But too many lack access to family planning and reproductive health services and information.

High fertility and declining income forces families to make painful choices. In many cases, one or two or even more of the children will be the “sacrificial lamb” who goes to work so at least some of their siblings can go to school. Most parents — especially mothers — want their children to finish school, since access to quality education can end the cycle of poverty. My own grandmother, who was widowed at the age of 33, struggled to make ends meet so that all of her four children could finish college and provide a promising future for their children.

Climate change and resource depletion will eventually affect all of the world’s people. But it is already gravely affecting the dried fish sellers in Leyte. There are efforts under way to help. The Green Climate Fund will finance climate adaptation in developing countries, and much can be done to promote better land use, reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and secure rights for indigenous people.

These measures are necessary, but they are not sufficient. To make a powerful difference in the lives of the women of Leyte, we must ensure that SRHR and family planning are included in efforts to address climate change and promote sustainable development.

Family planning and SRHR is a potential game changer. Women who are empowered to make choices about childbearing are healthier and more resilient. They are more likely to invest in their children’s education; they and their children are less likely to be poor.

Imagine if the estimated 215 million women who now lack access to contraception [PDF] were able to plan their families. Imagine unleashing the potential of 600 million adolescent girls by ensuring their access to education, opportunities, and rights. In fact, imagine if every one of the planet’s 3 billion young people were empowered with rights and opportunity. Imagine that those young men and women are able to make informed choices to stay healthy and free of HIV; to marry if they choose and raise healthy, happy families. Imagine breaking the cycle of poverty and gender-based violence that has haunted humanity for generations and generations.

That is the future I want.

To make that future real, we must first guarantee basic human rights for women and young people. We must build a sustainable economy that is inclusive, not divisive; sustaining, not depleting. But most of all, we must ensure provision of basic social services such as education, health, and family planning for all.

We are a long way from these goals. Of the countries that have submitted plans for adapting to climate change, only the small island state of Sao Tome and Principe has included SRHR and family planning in their sustainable development plans. This is disheartening.

Yet, I do not lose hope. As Philippine Senator Gregorio Honasan said recently, “Doubt is the opposite of faith. And faith is the source of hope.” He is right; we should not lose faith. We need to work hard to bring family planning and SRHR to the Earth Summit negotiating tables. Let’s start with our own government leaders as they head to Rio this week.

The exclusive resort town of Aspen, Colo., has an international reputation for high-end service and a stunning landscape of pristine mountains, all configured to welcome wealthy tourists. Like many communities in the U.S., Aspen depends on low-wage immigrant labor to fuel its service economy. Also like many communities in the U.S., Aspen passed a resolution calling on the federal government to restrict both documented and undocumented immigration in order to preserve the economic and cultural integrity of the nation.

But Aspen’s resolution, passed unanimously by the city council in 1999, was different from many others around the country in that it played up environmental concerns as well, providing green cover for the demonization of low-income immigrants from Latin America.

Shortly after its passage, city council member Terry Paulson — a longtime immigration critic and self-avowed environmentalist — announced that he would be working on a statewide campaign to “promote overpopulation awareness” and declared, “If we address population and do something about it, everything else will fall in line.”

When we traveled to the area, we found two very different Aspens. The dominant, commercial Aspen was an idyllic, post-industrial refuge with stretch Range Rover limousines, toy poodles with diamond-encrusted collars, world-class ski slopes, and Hollywood celebrities who spend just a few weeks a year in multimillion-dollar single-family homes.

How immigrants live outside of Aspen. (Photo by Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism)

The other Aspen is a place where foreign-born laborers from Latin America work in low-status, often dangerous, jobs for low wages with few benefits. In some cases, they drive 60 to 140 miles round-trip daily to get to those jobs because they can’t afford to live near Aspen’s core. Many of these workers live in deplorable housing conditions, including campers and cars “down valley” in trailer parks along the highway in dangerous flood zones.

Aspen’s goal is to be a “city beautiful,” a beacon of sustainability. Unfortunately, its path toward that goal has been paved with nativism and exclusion. The town’s resolution reflects the longstanding link between nativism and environmentalism in the U.S. As Aspen council member Tom McCabe cautioned, “The planet’s a finite resource … We can’t indefinitely welcome people and expect to maintain our quality of life.”

And this is precisely the point: Many Aspenites and others in similarly privileged communities across the U.S. want to protect their quality of life, which requires resources and wealth derived from ecosystems and labor from around the world.

While the city council put the blame on immigrants, Aspen has continued to allow construction of rarely inhabited vacation homes made of materials from across the globe, requiring year-round maintenance and energy usage. One local who looked after homes while absentee owners were out of town told a journalist that most of the properties he managed were empty 45 weeks of the year. “Yet they had to stay heated so the pipes wouldn’t freeze and their swimming pools, as a rule, were heated continuously — not drained — so they’d be ready for use when the owners arrived.” One Aspen resident and multimillionaire financier dug up and hauled away an entire hillside so that he could more easily “keep an eye on his horses.” He thought this was perfectly reasonable for his new “cabin” — a 7,500-square-foot luxury home that sits on a 157-acre lot.

So who is actually causing the most environmental harm?

Read the authors’ book, The Slums of Aspen.

For more than three decades, scholars have presented evidence that low-income, immigrant, and minority communities face greater threats from environmental problems than other groups. While these studies reveal the hardships associated with environmental inequality, fewer studies consider the flip side of that reality: environmental privilege. Environmental privilege results from the exercise of economic, political, and cultural power, enabling some groups to enjoy near-exclusive access to coveted environmental amenities such as parks, mountains, and open lands. Environmental privileges accrue to the few while environmental burdens confront the many.

We have a more optimistic vision for the future, arrived at after talking with immigrant workers about their hopes and dreams for the community, and after learning about the work being done by local citizen-activists. We came away from that beautiful place with a belief that we can equitably care for both ecosystems and humankind, creating a society where social and environmental justice, inclusivity, and democracy can all thrive.

Also check out:

• Stephen Colbert mocks group that blames immigrants for climate change
• Is the environmental crisis caused by the 7 billion or the 1%?