This is a footnote to an earlier post.
Adam Werbach, famous for being the youngest president of the Sierra Club and then working to green Wal-Mart, is now CEO of Act Now which “helps businesses position themselves to capture the rapidly emerging green customer base; implement operational efficiencies that save natural resources and money; and use sustainability as a means of developing and motivating employees.” (source)
Some call him a sell-out, others praise him.
In the comments on this fine guest post by Gary Peters on the equally fine blog La Marguerite is a pointer to Werbach’s A Call for the End of the Population Movement (6 page PDF) where he says,
The argument I’ll propose in this article is that the population discourse undercuts progressive goals and instead helps right-wing exclusionists and those with little compassion for humans. To be effective, well-meaning population activists need to be open to leaving behind their existing framework and allow their work to be described as a women’s empowerment and sustainable development movement.
My response to that line of reasoning is summed up in the comment I left at La Marguerite.
An even shorter version: I don’t think trying to hide or de-emphasize information serves anyone well, particulary women. Seems to me that the population movement is an integral part of the whole, and hiding that is just another way of condescending to people who have had enough condescension sent their way.
While I have no beef with people like George Monbiot who, in the very short term, want to prioritize climate change mitigation over population pressure, the notion that “the population discourse undercuts progressive goals and instead helps right-wing exclusionists and those with little compassion for humans” is absurd and far beyond what Monbiot has argued.
As Dr. Feeney says, “We’re better off exposing everything to the light and working with these interrelated issues accordingly.” Let’s bring the real depth and scale of the climate crisis into the light right along side population pressure [and vice versa].
Hear, hear. Excellent point.
Thanks for continuing this most important discussion!
http://lamarguerite.wordpress.com
Chances are, we are going to wind up in that simplest of all situations in which more young people would be asking themselves the easiest of all question: “Why should we at all bring new babies into a world as funked up like this?”
http://99ppp.wordpress.com/2008/03/26/the-stork-animation-on-overpopulation/
Interesting animation. I just wanted to share this, that’s all.
THE ‘FRAMING’ OF SCIENCE AND THE REFUSAL TO EXAMINE UNWELCOME EVIDENCE OF THE HUMAN OVERPOPULATION OF EARTH
A particularly pernicious disturbance exists in the human community. ELECTIVE MUTISM is one of the great, clear and present dangers to human and environmental health. It is a worldwide “plague” in our time from which many too many in the vast community of science suffer egregiously. That elective mutism has afflicted so many in the social sciences is one thing. The family of humanity can understand, I suppose, how social scientists do not possess the most adequate expertise to speak out loudly and clearly regarding the emerging and converging global challenges derived from the human overpopulation of Earth.
On the other hand, what I find reprehensible and unbelievable is the way scientists with appropriate expertise in the physical and biological sciences, whatever their excuses, are choosing not to fullfil their professional responsibilities and not to discharge duties only they can perform. Their willful refusal to comment on good scientific evidence of the human species’ overpopulation of the planetary home God blesses us to inhabit is as unacceptable as it is perverse.
Click on the following link for a presentation of the apparently unforeseen evidence,
http://www.panearth.org
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001