Bob talks about population and the environment with Lou Dobbs on CNN.
“It’s interesting that this discussion is occurring at a time when everyone from President Bush on down has recognized that one of the reasons Americans are paying more for gasoline, more for food, is increases in demand. Demand matters and we’re starting to lose confidence that I think we used to have that we can always produce more, we can always find more of everything we might need, so it doesn’t matter how many people are consuming.”
»»» Read the interview transcript here

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Bob Engelman lends his creative expertise to bring attention to the population issue.
»»» Watch him sing “The Pill” by Matt McGinn…

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“Oops, I’m pregnant.”

Even in today’s age of safe and effective modern contraception, women in every society get pregnant when that wasn’t the plan. It’s a simple point I explore in More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want. In the wealthy and health-obsessed United States, for example, 49 percent of conceptions result in “oops” pregnancies. The figure for the world as a whole is estimated at around 38 percent. I suspect that women in many countries under-report unintended pregnancies and that the real proportion is even higher.

Interestingly, the estimated number of annual unintended pregnancies worldwide is almost the same as

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In my last blog post, I promised to wrestle with the time-honored Malthus Question: Does population growth outrun food supply? The old question is coming back as soaring food prices spark discontent, bread lines, and even riots around the world. I’ll try to answer this question decisively in the next 400 words.

Just kidding. Shelves heave under the weight of books that have grappled with the ideas of Thomas Robert Malthus since he first wrote in 1798. So maybe the answer will take more than one post.

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