EarthSky listeners on radio and Internet stayed up-to-date on one of the planet’s most pressing issues – its human population – in 2009. For its superb population reporting, EarthSky has now won a first place award in the Population Institute’s 30th Annual Global Media Awards for Excellence in Population Reporting, joining 12 winners including the Associated Press and PBS.
“I check in to the U.S. and world population clocks regularly and watch the numbers climb,” said EarthSky president and founder Deborah Byrd. “Here at EarthSky, we understand that our still-growing human population is the foundation of many other sustainability issues of the 21st century. EarthSky remains committed to speaking with population experts and bringing their insights to our audience in the years ahead.”
In recent years, EarthSky – a clear voice for science on 1,800+ broadcast outlets globally – has featured population experts speaking about the economic challenges of the world’s aging population, growing urbanization, and climate-related human migration, and a series of interviews on how to feed a population of 9 billion by 2050. Each EarthSky podcast is heard around the world – in English and Spanish – 15 million times.
EarthSky will join other Global Media Award winners at a ceremony in Washington, D.C., on December 4, 2009. Producer Lindsay Patterson and Managing Partner Ryan Britton will be accepting the award on behalf of EarthSky.
The EarthSky Promise: To bring the ideas, strategies and research results of scientists to people around the world, with the goal of illuminating pathways to a sustainable future.
Congratulations EarthSky ! , Deborah, Everybody.
Thanks Rob!
Congratulations on not being afraid to handle an essential and controversial topic. I hope the award will encourage more such reporting and discussion. The fact that the Population Institute has been making these awards for 30 years is a mixed blessing. It’s a little like Black History Month. Both instances reflect a significant deficit that is now being addressed. In these cases, true success comes when specific acknowledgement is no longer needed because the issue at hand is an integral part of our society.
Congratulations. Three cheers for Deborah, Beverly and the entire ES staff.
Thanks for every word uttered by Earth & Sky about the human overpopulation of Earth. Despite everyone’s best intentions, I believe a significant deficit remains in the reporting of this proverbial “mother” of all global challenges. There is so much more to say and to do before, as David Bross put it so neatly above, “specific acknowledgement {of the issue of the human overpopulation of Earth} is no longer needed……”
We have move forward fast to achieve this goal. If we are to succeed, perhaps we benefit from understanding how some leaders of the human population on Earth could be directing the children down a “primrose path.”
Just for a moment, please consider that ‘cancerous’ greed and a plethora of material addictions are widespread diseases of many too many leaders and their minions in my not-so-great elder generation, a dangerously disordered minority who harbor the potential for utterly ruining the future of children everywhere and the Earth as a fit place for life as we know it.
In such circumstances, do knowledgeable people who choose to remain electively mute end up complicitly appointing themselves mortal enemies of the future of life? Or not? If not, how is this behavior to be reasonably and sensibly characterized?
Good people, is it not yet self-evident that the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us live in patently unsustainable ways as dangerously disordered greedmongers, plunderers, hyperconsumers and hoarders and that the human beings among us with feet of clay are unexpectedly the very people to guide the human community toward sustainability because they retain the capability for doing so?
Sincerely,
Steve
population questions are a thorny issue as they immediately involve politics and other red flags. perhaps in a website devoted to earth and sky one should look at this from a solar system economy point of view to give us the necessary perspective. sometime in the next fifty to a hundred years (unless the constellation program stays cancelled) we are going to have an incipient solar system economy involving initially a terra-formed moon and mars and later terraformed venus and the moons of the gas planets all connected by thermonuclear fusion rocket engines and maybe as yet unimaginable matter-anti-matter engines.
for us to have such a socialist solar system economy we will need about 15 billion people initially in the solar system, about 14 billion on a radically tranformed earth itself (a garden paradise with a very high standard of living for each human being as well as its animals and plants) and several hundred million on the aforementioned planets and moons. i point out that doing this is not an option as the human species is on the threshold of near-infinite exponential population growth and energy and material utilization rates. the obverse of this insight is that at this near-infinite point we face infinitely immediate energy and material crises as we use up both at near-infinite speeds bringing about an energy and material crisis every few years, months weeks, days or even hours.
the sad thing is that there seems to be near zero understanding of this exponential situation among policy makers and lay people and this leaves room for the charlatans to come in. last year there was a meeting of billionaires at rockefeller university in new york to discuss “the dangers of overpopulation.” prince phillip of britain, the arch aristocrat, was quoted in 1977 as saying that when he dies he wishes to be reincarnated as an aids virus to help cull the population much as cattle are culled. most of us are not billionaires or acerbic aristocrats, so why is it that we have allowed the “danger of overpopulation” to be internalized within us and we speak of “sustainability?”
understanding the scientific basis of population growth puts into perspective the issue of global warming. global warming emerges as a subset of population control as it legitimizes culling the population which is seen as a danger to the biosphere instead of as vernadski (the great soviet biogeochemist, 1861-1945)understood it, as the key ingredient in the further development of a non-static, not in balance environment which is dependent for its future development on human industrial and agricultural activity. i ask everyone concerned to conduct a thought experiment to make my point clear: supposewe we were to snap our fingers and every human being was magically gone from the face of the earth without doing any damage to it? what would happen to the environemnt, the biosphere and the geosphere? would it remain the same? would things improve without human caused pollution? or would a proces of self-destruction begin that may come to threaten vertebrate life itself?
Julian, yes, more people would be needed for a solar system economy. But in my adult lifetime – over the past 50 years – I’ve seen the space program go from the first tentative steps on the moon to no human presence on the moon at all, much less on Mars or Venus. As for terraforming … what evidence is there that we humans can possibly learn enough about the subtleties of nature to make it work? The only planet whose climate and terrain we’re altering at present is Earth, and scientists are not altogether sure of any of the details – for example, how much warmer it might get, or what effects that warming might have. Will we really have the knowledge to begin terraforming in, as you suggest, the next 50 to 100 years? There’s just no sign that it will happen, much as I (like you) would like to see that sign.
Deborah
– not hippy –
to quote douglas adams, i am not “hippy” or happy with your answer, deborah. at this moment humanity is on the threshold of infinite population growth and energy and material utilization rates. as i stressed in my response, this kind of exponential growth is not an option. if we do not at least begin the industrialization of the moon and mars in a few generations, our survival will come into question and our civilization will begin to self-destruct in an equally exponential way in ways we can not imagine. at this point in time the only inkling i have of this destruction is the massive break-out of disease vectors among human, animal and plant species.
yes, at this point the process of moon and mars colonization looks bleak and we have to do the political organizing to make this necessity understandible among our elected leaders. somehow we will have to come to know “the subletities nature” and very quickly. the changes we will make to the earth, the moon and mars will make fears of global warming pale, and we will come to understand Vladimir Vernadski’s idea that human beings in a rapidly developing real economy will be beneficial to our solar system, obviating anti-human ideas such as anthropogenic global warming.