Here’s the 4th installment of questions from our Solving Overshoot webinar. I’m sharing the questions we did not have time to address, and including any comments I received from Madeleine Somerville and Paul Ehrlich, our panelists. If you missed the first few installments, start here with installment one. Your comments are welcome.

12. Brian Sanderson asked: “Which is easier to alter, per-capita consumption or overpopulation?
Ultimately, if nothing is done, nature will force a reduction in per-capita consumption.
On the other hand, if the question is which we as human agents will find most easy to alter, it’s population that is easier. The data are clear on this.”  But it would take something like a century to get significant shrinkage, and we likely don’t have a century. . . .

Here’s installment #3 in our series of questions unanswered during the GrowthBusters webinar, Solving Overshoot: End Overpopulation or Stop Overconsumption. I’m including responses later provided by our panelists, Paul Ehrlich and Madeleine Somerville. Find more information about the panelists, the first 3 questions and links to all these follow-ups here.

8. Terry Spahr asked (in relation to Paul Ehrlich’s remarks about the U.S. uniting on a single mission for WWII: “That was Pearl Harbor. there is no social impetus to go on a consumer war time footing. how do you galvanize a population to go to a wartime footing on reducing consumption?” . . .

I’m continuing today to share leftover questions from the GrowthBusters webinar, Solving Overshoot: End Overpopulation or Stop Overconsumption. I’m including responses later provided by our panelists, Paul Ehrlich and Madeleine Somerville. Find more information about the panelists, plus the first 3 questions and answers here.

4. Karen Pitts asked Paul Ehrlich: “Paul Ehrlich, how much money do we need each year to meet the worldwide unmet need for contraception? How much are we spending?”

Paul Ehrlich:  Haven’t time to look up, but it would be a trivial bit of the U.S. arms budget.

5. Brian Sanderson asked: “Wouldn’t you also consider poverty as an indicator of overpopulation/overshoot?    Aggressive warfare, also…   Mass migrations, also…” . . .

Guest Post by Dr. Karen I. Shragg

I write this as a devastated overpopulation activist, social justice activist, and women’s rights activist. I write it as a free-thinking atheist who is not burdened by ancient doctrine. BUT I do not write this from a perspective of shock. I am not surprised by the rise to power of our president elect.  I think it is all pretty predictable in an overpopulated world. A world, by the way, that seems clueless that it is exactly that, overpopulated, overshot, over-baked and way past well done when it comes to using up our planet’s limited and irreplaceable resources.

We may not know intellectually that the US is actually and provably at least 150 million people over its limit to provide resources like water, long term, to our citizens, but I believe we know it in our subconscious. Because so many green groups refuse to tell the carrying capacity story, we are uninformed. We know deep inside that we cannot continue to make promises of prosperity to growing millions when that very prosperity is based on dwindling natural capital. We know that prosperity isn’t just being limited just because people at the top are greedy. It is because there isn’t enough to go around forever and ever. . . .

The second in the GrowthBusters webinar series, Solving Overshoot: End Overpopulation or Stop Overconsumption, went by too quickly. At the end of the hour there were 26 questions we hadn’t had a chance to address. Our panelists, Paul Ehrlich and Madeleine Somerville, were kind enough to provide written responses to these. I will share these here on the GrowthBusters blog over the next several days.

I recommend you subscribe to the blog now to make sure you don’t miss any of these. See the subscription box to the right. Subscribing will also ensure you get notice of the next webinar in the series. While I’ll post nearly every day to get through these questions, normally the blog posts are pretty sparse (subscribing won’t clutter your inbox in 2017). If you’re a GrowthBusters member, you will get webinar invitations regardless. . . .