Urban Fruit or Urban Fruit Gleaning is a concept taking off all over the world. Neighbours get together to collect fruit in people’s gardens, street plantings and vacant land that would otherwise go to waste, and work together to distribute, preserve or use it in other useful ways.
The concept is being tracked on Twitter
Last month, the Pope made reference in his world peace day address to the “false correlation between poverty and birthrate.” The Pope has criticized population policy a number of times this year, observing in Sydney Australia during World Youth Week that developed nations have a population crisis and must increase their birth rates to re-establish population growth.
The focus on population growth has been building all year as a result of looming crises in water, food and energy supplies, coupled with the apparent failure of attempts to address World Poverty.
The irony of the fact that world leaders were in New York to discuss World Poverty on the day the financial markets decided to collapse has been lost on the two billion people in the world who do not have enough to eat and whose future looks more bleak than their past.
The Australian Senate this week voted not to consider the challenges of population growth. Greens leader Bob Brown put a motion to the Senate, calling on the government to develop a white paper to address the challenges of supporting the projected stable population of 9-10 billion people on a planet constrained by climate change and Continue Reading →
John Feeney in The GuardianÂ
Only since 1800, in the last 0.01% of the history of Homo sapiens, has the human population shot into the billions. Now at nearly 6.7 billion, with 9 billion looming 40 years away, few environmentalists seem to care.
Yet the population-environment link is clear. Our environmental impact, as gauged by total resource consumption for a country or the world, is the product of population size and the average person’s consumption.
Today’s crumbling environment, racked by climate change, mass extinction, deforestation, collapsing fisheries and more is evidence our total consumption has gone too far. We are destroying our life-support system. In ecological terms we are in “overshoot” of Earth’s “carrying capacity” for humans, our demand exceeding the planet’s absorptive and regenerative capacities.
To avert catastrophe, we need to reduce both factors in the equation: our numbers and per person consumption.
Jared Diamond in The New York TimesÂ
TO mathematicians, 32 is an interesting number: it’s 2 raised to the fifth power, 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2. To economists, 32 is even more special, because it measures the difference in lifestyles between the first world and the developing world. The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences.
To understand them, consider our concern with world population. Today, there are more than 6.5 billion people, and that number may grow to around 9 billion within this half-century. Several decades ago, many people considered rising population to be the main challenge facing humanity. Now we realize that it matters only insofar as people consume and produce.