What can you
do to HELP SAVE
18 SPECIFIC IDEAS FOR TAKING
ACTION AGAINST OVERPOPULATION: (
By: Brishen Hoff, President of Biodiversity First
1. Put bumper stickers on your vehicle to raise
awareness of overpopulation.
2. Make your
own custom T-shirts with slogans like "More people = More pollution"
3. Write
"Letters to The Editor" on how biodiversity is declining due to
overpopulation, which forces down our quality of life and how no environmental
problem can be solved when human numbers are rising.
4. Contact TV
and radio show producers and tell them that you want to see more discussion on
our overpopulation problem. This topic is far more important than any other.
Until the problem is solved by reducing our population to a sustainable level
(about 5% of the current population), there has not been enough media coverage
of the problem.
5. If you live
on a highway, put up an overpopulation awareness sign.
6. If you're a
millionaire, run some TV ads on overpopulation encouraging a population
reduction plan for
7. Encourage
yourself, your spouse, your friends, your family, etc to spend their time and
money ON helping to solve this local, national and global problem (namely
overpopulation), not ON having additional children.
8. Start your
own Internet blog (which is free if you have Internet
access) and document the media's incompetent coverage of environmental issues
resulting from their convenient avoidance of overpopulation.
9. Attend your
town council meetings and tell them that you are fed up with growth and how it
lowers quality of life in your community. Tell your politicians that you don't
want economic growth and the population growth that comes with it, because in
the short term it makes our lives worse and in the long term it threatens our
very survival. Do not accept their rhetoric that growth is inevitable or that
you can't stop "progress". Those are just cop-out excuses for
repeating the same mistakes.
10. Write
letters to your politicians demanding a population reduction policy and post
their replies on the Internet. (your website, a blog, a friend's blog)
11. Talk about
why you think overpopulation is the most important problem with everyone you
know. Tell them that we need to redefine what "progress" is, because
more human expansion is no longer in our best interests. Tell them how only
extremely rich people at the top of the pyramid scheme (from central bankers to
Royal Bank of
12. Complain
to the environmental organizations that ignore the need to stop population
growth in their home country. (David Suzuki Foundation, Nature Conservancy of
Canada, The Sierra Club of Canada, etc) Immigration is easy to reduce through a
simple policy change and doing so could eliminate the majority of the
population growth for
13. Complain
to humanitarian aid organizations and our government that supports them for not
making foreign aid conditional on reduced fertility rates.
14. Educate
others that high immigration does worsen global overpopulation by removing
barriers to human expansion into new territory, thereby allowing humans to
convert biodiverse ecosystems into more and bigger
human settlements. Also tell them how immigration drives down labour standards and wages in the destination country. Be
prepared for their primitive reactions. Explain to them that A POPULATION
REDUCTION POLICY WOULD BE HUMANE AND DOES NOT INVOLVE RACISM OR KILLING PEOPLE!
A POPULATION REDUCTION POLICY IS IN OUR BEST INTERESTS. WE SHOULD ALL WANT A
POPULATION REDUCTION POLICY IF WE DON'T WANT INCREASED WAR, STARVATION, DISEASE
AND BIODIVERSITY LOSS.
15. Tell the
government to pay people to not have children and fine people that do until our
population is at 5% of present levels. Then tell government to maintain a
steady-state population.
16. Sign the
Biodiversity First petition. http://biodiversityfirst.googlepages.com/petition.htm
17.
Donate money or volunteer your efforts to an organization that is committed
towards helping establish public will for population reduction such as Negative
Population Growth (http://www.npg.org/) or
Population Institute of Canada (http://www.populationinstituteofcanada.ca/)
or Population Media Center (http://www.populationmedia.org/)
or The Rewilding Institute (http://www.rewilding.org/).
18. Tell
others that technology and conservation are not the answer to this
unsustainable nightmare of 7 billion people by 2012.
The answer to our unsustainable nightmare is:
A) PEOPLE HAVE
TO WANT THE LEGISLATION REQUIRED TO REDUCE THE POPULATION TO A SUSTAINABLE
LEVEL IN ORDER FOR IT TO BE PUT IN PLACE
B) THE
LEGISLATION: It is easy to reduce our population humanely with the legislation
once it is in place.
Exclusively telling individuals to consume less is failing to reduce total
consumption because the number of consumers is increasing, and each person must
consume a substantial amount of resources just in order to survive and an even
bigger amount just to have a decent life. The average person on earth doesn't
consume enough resources to have a decent life, so redistributing wealth
equally is not a solution. Expropriating more resources from other species is
also not a solution. Reducing the human population to a sustainable level is
the only sensible choice, and a complete solution.