population

Jonna Higgins-Freese reviews Having Faith by Sandra Steingraber

I am an environmental activist, and for almost a year, my husband and I have struggled to understand how our environmental commitments bear on our decision about whether to have children. So when I picked up Sandra Steingraber's new book Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood,, I was immediately drawn in by the opening sentence: "Every woman who becomes pregnant brings to the experience her various identities."

On Bjorn Lomborg and population

Some years ago, well before many outside Denmark knew Bjorn Lomborg's name, a group of his fellow faculty members at the University of Aarhus took the unusual step of developing a website specifically to warn the scientific community and others about flaws in his work. Appalled by Lomborg's scientific pretensions and unfounded conclusions, these faculty members, including a former head of the Danish Academy of Sciences, actively disassociated themselves from him.

The state of the planet is grim. Should we give up hope?

Note: Donella Meadows died on 20 Feb. 2001. The following is excerpted from her story about writing The Limits to Growth in 1972. Limits was translated into 26 languages and sold more than 9 million copies.   COMPUTER PREDICTS WORLD COLLAPSE   I was one of the team of people at MIT who wrote a […]

A personal appreciation of Grist contributor Donella Meadows

I was once speaking with Donella Meadows in her Dartmouth College office a few years ago, back when I taught with her in the environmental studies program. She was responsible for my appointment in environmental literature and writing and had become a mentor I could call on for advice at any time, no matter how […]

Reading tea leaves for the environment

Every month I get a kind of Reader’s Digest for people interested in the future. It’s called Future Survey, issued by the World Future Society. Each month it contains about 50 extended summaries of recent publications about the paths — economic, environmental, social — we seem to be following. The November 2000 issue, for example, […]

The world is running low on H2O

Droughts in the United States, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan have been big news this year — and even more serious water shortages are emerging as the demand for water in many areas of the world simply outruns the supply. Water tables are now falling on every continent. Literally scores of countries are facing water shortages. All […]

I've Got Good News, and I've Got Bad News

In the spirit of celebrating every success, but only to the extent the success deserves, I would like to celebrate something that is kind of hard to describe. The rate at which things are getting worse is slowing down. We’re not going downhill as fast as we once were. The fever is high, but rising […]

There Goes the Neighborhood

To Have and Have Not

5 percent of the world’s human population resides in the U.S. 30 percent of the world’s resources are used by the U.S. 8 motor vehicles are on the roads in China for every 1,000 Chinese citizens 750 motor vehicles are on the roads in the U.S. for every 1,000 U.S. citizens 15 kilograms of paper […]