Category: Environment

When I was a child many of my teachers were ex-hippies. They taught us about the then current and worsening overpopulation problem. The things they taught us back then have haunted me to this day.

The overpopulation issue is at the core of every major problem, if not as a cause then as a complicating factor. It is ignored by progressive people trying to help the planet and conservative people alike.

Just like it is natural to want to over-eat but bad for us to have a weight problem, it is also natural for many (not all) people to want to have children even though the size of the planetary population is a problem. Nobody is a bad person for wanting to eat more. Nobody is a bad person for wanting to have children of their own.

Hat tip to Mala for sending me this article from the BBC. I found it interesting, because a prominent highly visible federal expert talked about overpopulation bluntly. A rare occurrence:

Dr (Nina) Fedoroff has been the science and technology advisor to the US secretary of state since 2007, initially working with Condoleezza Rice.

Under the new Obama administration, she now advises Hillary Clinton.

“We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can’t support many more people,” Dr Fedoroff said, stressing the need for humans to become much better at managing “wild lands”, and in particular water supplies.

What was also interesting about the article is that Dr. Fedoroff is a strong proponent of Genetically Modified (GM) foods. I don’t know enough to agree or disagree with her. The opinion however is interesting. Just like the world is too strained to give everyone in the world a diet based on Michael Pollan-washed meat, the world may also be too strained to feed everyone off of organically raised crops:

A National Medal of Science laureate (America’s highest science award), the professor of molecular biology believes part of that better land management must include the use of genetically modified foods.

“We have six-and-a-half-billion people on the planet, going rapidly towards seven.

“We’re going to need a lot of inventiveness about how we use water and grow crops,” she told the BBC.

Again, I don’t know enough to agree or disagree with this scary and interesting opinion.

If you are considering having children someday please read this short post about why you should limit yourself to 1 – 2 children max

For the record, I’m not in favor of bashing people who have kids or who want to have kids.

So how bad is our toilet paper habit, really? The product that we use for less than three seconds extracts a larger ecological consequence than driving Hummers, according to Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the NRDC. More than 98% of all toilet paper sold here comes from virgin wood.

snip…

Americans, who use an average of 23.6 rolls per capita a year – more toilet paper than citizens in other countries—three times more than the average European and 100 times more than the average person in China. Europeans and Latin Americans are also less demanding about the quality of their toilet paper, with up to 40% of toilet paper sold in those markets derived from recycled products.

“I really do think it is overwhelmingly an American phenomenon,” said Hershkowitz. “People just don’t understand that softness equals ecological destruction.”

via Ecogeek and The Guardian

How insane is this? I don’t even see virgin wood used to build homes or furniture anymore, but it is used to make bathroom tissue?

I see this issue in a similar light to organic produce.

It isn’t enough for consumers to vote with their wallets and their pocketbooks. Leadership is needed to make the prices and availability of alternative products practical to consumers.

As far as I know Seventh Generation is the only brand of post consumer bathroom tissue. It an cost several dollars per roll depending on where you shop.

When I was a college student I used Seventh Generation bathroom tissue because I was able to special order mammoth cases of it with my housemates at a discount through the co-op I worked for. Not only is post consumer bathroom tissue more expensive, but a roll of post consumer bathroom tissue doesn’t last as long as conventional bathroom tissue. You need to buy and use more rolls.

“Post consumer” means what most people think of as being “recycled”. It was used for something else and instead of grabbing more resources, it was processed so that it could be used again.

“Recycled” with paper products usually only means that paper scraps that would normally be thrown away in creating paper products were gathered up and used instead.

If you can’t spend several dollars per roll of “post consumer” bathroom tissue you can buy normally priced “recycled” bathroom tissue at CVS. Just look for the “recycled” symbol on CVS brand bathroom tissue. Not all types of bathroom tissue with their label is recycled.

BTW, “CVS” stands for “Customer Value Store”. LOL! Their prices must be good because they don’t pay marketers to do things like up with sexy sounding titles :).