Balanced View! Fall 2017 — Page 1

Overpopulation Meetup Thursday evening, November 9th, 6:30–8:00 p.m.Location to be announced Been informed and concerned about the overpopulation crisis for years? Anxious for a chance to talk with others about the big picture of getting traction for the issue? Come to this gathering with WPB staff and let’s think creatively! Overpopulation Meetup Saturday morning, November 11th, 10–11:30 a.m.The Wedge Table, 2412 Nicollet Ave., MinneapolisThink overpopulation is an issue but don’t know enough about it to be an activist? Come meet with WPB staff in the morning to explore overpopulation’s impact and role in current crises.

Overpopulation Film Fest November 11th. Location and time to be announced Join filmmaker Dave Gardner and others to watch and discuss a feature-length film and several short films that highlight the overpopulation crisis and what we can do about it!Overpopulation Potluck Sunday evening, November 12th, 5:30–7:30 p.m. Friends Meeting House, 4401 York Ave. S., MinneapolisYou're not alone if you're concerned about overpopulation. Come join other overpopulation activists for great food and stimulating discussion! Bring food to share. We’ll provide the beverages and table settings. RSVP for the potluck to help us plan and please let us know if you can help with any pre-event setup or post-event cleanup.

The latest flurry of media attention was the result of a study by Lund U n i v e r s i t y A s s o c i a t e P r o f e s s o r K i m b e r l y N i c h o l a s a n d U n i v e r s i t y o f British Columbia

Ph.D. student Seth Wynes. They analyzed 39 peer-reviewed sources to quantify the most high-impact personal lifestyle choices in developed countries. The news was shocking to many: conceiving one fewer child has over 8 times the impact of other “green” lifestyle choices combined; including living car-free, eating a plant-based diet, avoiding airplane travel, buying green energy, and comprehensive recycling.

As a subscriber to this newsletter, you might not be taken aback by that

fact. But you may be as surprised as I am at the positive media attention this analysis has generated. Of course, the response has been mixed. Conservative c o m m e n t a t o r R u s h L i m b a u g h wondered, “Why get married? What is the point if you’re not gonna have kids?” That’s par for the course. If we weren’t making progress, we wouldn’t be attracting the negative responses. I’m just thrilled the conversation is happening, and I hope you are, too.

If you’ve been looking for ways to bring overpopulation and its solution into more conversations, one of your options is to share with your friends, family and colleagues this study, Travis Rieder’s book and paper, and the resulting news stories and commentary. Another is to pass on this newsletter, recommend the Overpopulat ion Podcast and our Sustainable Population Pledge. We’re edging forward in our quest to raise awareness and inspire action. Thank you for being here.

Real Progress in Campaign for Sustainable Family SIzeby Dave Gardner, Executive Director

Fall 2017

“Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children,” read the headline in the U.K. Guardian . Could the m a i n s t r e a m m e d i a f i n a l l y b e connecting the dots between human overpopulation and our environmental crises? National Public Radio gave us “Want To Slow Global Warming? R e s e a r c h e r s L o o k To F a m i l y Planning.” Sweden’s The Local headlined “Want to save the planet? Have fewer children.”

These headlines came hot on the heels of bioethicist Travis Rieder’s year of living dangerously—advancing the idea we have a moral responsibility to conceive fewer children (see WPB Research Associate Alan Ware’s story in this newsletter). It was dangerous because this is new territory, long avoided. Rieder made headlines on NPR, Bill Nye Saves the World, and in Bloomberg, New Scientist, and a host of other magazines and newspapers.

Population education — promoting awareness about sustainable population to benefit everyone!

Join Us for World Overpopulation WeekendWe’re taking last year’s Overpopulation Potluck and putting it on steroids for 2017. This year we’re expanding to several events in the Twin Cities, from November 9–12. These will offer plenty of opportunities to rub shoulders with other sustainable population enthusiasts and get energized by new information, unique approaches to the topic, and news of increasing overpopulation awareness! Come meet Executive Director Dave Gardner, the WPB staff and board of directors, and fellow members. Come to one or all these events. Bring friends, family, neighbors, elected officials, even strangers off the street!

Check our Facebook page and/or email updates for final times and locations.Please RSVP to all events one of two ways:

1) e-mail office@worldpopulationbalance.org; or 2) call 612-869-1640. We look forward to seeing you there!

Balanced View! Fall 2017 — Page 2

with WPB’s mission of reducing family size in countries all over the world.

The au thors p lace types o f interventions along a “coercion spectrum” in helping to judge the moral consequences of different policy choices. At the clearly coercive and morally problematic end of the spectrum are the forced abortions and sterilizations that China and India were s o m e t i m e s g u i l t y o f i n t h e implementation of their population control policies.

At the other end of this spectrum are what they call “choice enhancement” strategies such as expanding education to girls and the provision of family planning and contraceptive services. In the middle are a range of policies that, if done wrongly, can risk the danger of being coercive but, if done correctly, can still be non-coercive. They call these “preference adjustment and incentivization interventions.”

Preference adjustment is aimed at changing cultural norms through mass communication channels of T.V., radio, social media, billboards, posters, and t h e l i k e ( s u c h a s W P B ’ s Overpopulation Podcast and Facebook presence). Hickey notes that preference adjustment certainly has a history in the United States through programs like health campaigns against smoking, drugs, and sexually transmitted diseases. Hickey and Earl note that, because Americans produce such higher emissions per capita, there is added reason to argue that adjusting preferences through small family campaigns is warranted.

Incentives can be slightly more coercive as they directly alter the costs and benefits that people might calculate in their reproductive behaviors. The authors realize that poor people in d e v e l o p i n g c o u n t r i e s w i l l understandably try to become richer and, in the process, steadily increase their emissions. To ensure fairness the

Philosophers ask questions about the right and wrongs of all kinds of decisions that people make. Now, several philosophers are asking whether it’s ethical to have multiple children in an era of increasing ecological crisis.

Travis Rieder is a moral philosophy professor and bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University and author of the book, Toward a Small Family Ethic: How Overpopulation and Climate Change are Affecting the Morality of Procreation. Travis has appeared on television, radio, and WPB’s own Overpopulation Podcast making the argument that, in an era of increasingly dangerous climate change, there are morally defensible reasons for societies to encourage couples to limit the size of their families.

Rieder chose to focus on climate change because it drives so many other sustainability issues. A 2009 study by Oregon State University researchers found that, based on current rates of carbon emissions and reproduction in the U.S., each American child and his or her descendants will increase each parent’s lifetime carbon emissions by over 6 times.

Rieder understands a critical argument that World Population Balance has consistently emphasized in all its communications: overpopulation is a problem in rich and poor countries alike. He notes that, even though a high fertility country like Niger has over 7 children per family, Niger also has an average per person CO2 emissions rate that is less than 1% of the average American. Rieder also states that the poorest will bear the brunt of climate change and be least able to adapt—thus increasing the moral weight on richer, higher-emitting countries like the U.S. to have smaller families. And, as much as people stress the laudable goal of lowering consumption in the richer countries, Rieder points out that people are relatively good at having smaller families compared to greatly reducing consumption.

Rieder emphasizes that he’s focused on the creation of a small family ethic and not dictating a specific number of children. “The decision to have a child is a contribution to massive systematic

harms, it contributes to injustices, and it might expose your child to a future that’s not particularly nice to live in. That requires justification, and so

the burden is on those of us who want to have a child to come up with those justifications.” If we continue with our current business as usual trajectory, Rieder sees a future of increasing refugee crises, political instability, resource wars, rising sea levels, and freshwater and food shortages.

While acknowledging that human rights have been violated through coercive population control measures in the past, Rieder believes procreative rights are not unlimited. All rights can be limited by harm to other people.

So while having one child is part of that procreative right, Rieder thinks i t ’s much harder to justify having the second c h i l d a n d a l l subsequent children. “There’s a much bigger difference between having no child versus having one child than there is between having one child versus two children.” He notes that the condition of parenthood has been fulfilled with having a single child, and having a second child is not fundamentally changing the experience of being a parent.

Doctoral candidates in philosophy at Georgetown University, Colin Hickey and Jake Earl, joined Dave Gardner in episode 8 of the Overpopulation Podcast to discuss a policy-oriented paper they co-authored with Rieder, “Population Engineering and the Fight Against Climate Change.” The paper o u t l i n e s t h e p o s s i b l e p o l i c y prescriptions that might flow from the moral arguments. In the paper they argue that people in developed and developing countries should be addressed at the same time—an “all hands on deck” strategy—that aligns

Making the Ethical Case for Small Familiesby Alan Ware, Research Associate

Balanced View! Fall 2017 — Page 3

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authors advocate the use of an approach that emphasizes “carrots for the poor, sticks for the rich.” This would mean more positive incentives for poorer people such as family planning and contraceptive accessibil i ty, and negative incentives such as child taxes for richer people. In many developed countries the current system is tilted toward pro-natalist tax policies, and having some policies that counteract pro-natalist bias could be much needed.

Rieder, Hickey, and Earl have been encouraged by the response from readers, viewers, and listeners. Older p e o p l e w h o ’ v e k n o w n a b o u t overpopulation for decades are heartened by the renewed attention to the issue, and students in the authors’ classes—who will live most of their lives with the negative effects of overpopulation such as climate change—have been receptive to these potentially controversial ideas.

WPB is engaged in education about the dangers of overpopulation so that more and more people are persuaded to choose a small family size. When the time comes that people are ready to consider public policies to influence reproduction, philosophers such as Rieder, Hickey, and Earl will be in the forefront of providing the means of thinking morally about reproductive r i g h t s i n t h e c o n t e x t o f a n overpopulated and increasingly unsustainable civilization.

To learn more, go to the WPB website and listen to Dave Gardner interview Travis Rieder in Episode 7 of the Overpopulation Podcast and Hickey and Earl in Episode 8.

Cartoon Contest Grand Prize Winner Commissioned to Create Overpopulation Cartoons

Cartoons have the ability to distill the essence of an idea into an easily understandable, high impact message. The World Population Balance Earth Day Cartoon Contest fielded excellent entries which you can see on the WPB Facebook page in the photos tab. World Population Balance is working with grand-prize winning cartoonist Nadia M e l o n i t o c r e a t e p rofess iona l , on- ta rge t messaging that conveys the centrality of population in creat ing a sus ta inable , habitable future. Here’s one of the commissioned works from Nadia. In this cartoon Nadia beautifully illustrates the strain placed on the p l a n e t b y t h e “overpopulation gorilla.”

Our MissionWe alert and educate that overpopulation

is the root cause of resource depletion, species extinction, and poverty. Our mission is to chart a path for human civilization that—rather than causing

greater misery—enables good lives on a healthy planet. We advocate and support

a smaller, truly sustainable human population—through dramatic and voluntary reduction in birth rates.

Balanced View! Fall 2017 — Page 4

Join or Create Your Own Overpopulation Meetup

In this world of increasingly electronic communication it is encouraging and motivating to meet face to face. The Minneapolis Overpopulation Meetup continues to meet in the Twin Cities area. The meetups generally take place on the 3rd Saturday morning of every month at different locations in the Minneapolis area. A new meetup group is forming and will generally meet early afternoon on the 3rd Saturday of the month. The topics of the meetups are open to attendee input and can change according to participants' interests. If you’re outside the Twin Cities we can help you get an additional group up and going.

E-mail us at meetups@worldpopulationbalance.org with any questions. Or be part of the conversation by joining at: meetup.com/Minneapolis-Overpopulation-Meetup/. You’ll get notifications of upcoming meeting date, place and topic. World Population Balance’s Facebook events page has information as well.

Show Your Support and Sign the Sustainable Population Pledge

If you agree with the message that smaller families are essential for creating a more sustainable planet, go to the World Population Balance website and sign the Sustainable Population Pledge! The Pledge has been signed by hundreds of people in 29 countries and growing. It is a unique statement in the world of population organizations as it explicitly promotes voluntary, one-child families. Filling out the pledge form is simple and fast and you’ll be doing your part to let the world know that sustainable population is possible!

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WPB Sponsors Karen Shragg in China Trip to Promote Move Upstream:

A Call to Solve OverpopulationWPB Advisory Board Member Karen Shragg has worked closely with WPB for years, and she’s developed into a leading advocate for sustainable population on the local, national, and now the global stage. Karen is author of the most boldly truthful book on overpopulation available: Move Upstream: A Call to Solve Overpopulation.

Karen was a speaker at the 10th annual conference of the World Academy for the Future of Women in China and spoke to over 5,000 students and community members. Karen was struck by the signs of overpopulation throughout China – from the lack of wildlife to the pollution obscuring the night skies. She returned with a critical take-home message: "The main thing I learned is, I'm working on the right issue.” All of us who care about sustainable population are truly fortunate to have Karen as an impassioned and inspiring advocate for our cause.

We would hate to lose touch, but this could be your last printed Balanced View newsletter! If we haven’t heard from you in a few years, make sure to let us know you want to continue receiving the newsletter. Please e-mail

office@ worldpopulationbalance.org or leave a message at 612-869-1640. If you would like to receive Balanced View via e-mail, make sure we have your current e-mail address. Thanks for your commitment to confronting the overpopulation crisis!

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