By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org How does the old adage go?  Youth is wasted on the young, right? It is only wasted if the world chooses to not support and invest in young people.  Today, there are more youth than ever before in the history of humankind.  The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), in its just
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org Family planning efforts are mainly directed at women, which makes sense.  Yet too often men are disregarded, and they should be part of most discussions on family planning. Involving both men and women will not only help families, but the environment too. One overlooked topic when it comes to women, men
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org There has been some hoopla over a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) about how decreasing human population numbers is not a quick fix for environmental problems. Well, of course it’s not a quick fix.  Nothing really is, short of a catastrophe.  The two authors
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org For several years now, the topic that water would be the next oil has been bandied about, implying that water would be as valuable as fossil fuels. That day of reckoning may be coming sooner than many people think.  Last week, Reuters reported that the city of São Paulo – South
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org The stock market is up and down, oil companies are making record profits, there is a growing gap between the have’s and the have nots, a large number of people take anti-depressants, and the environment is increasingly being degraded.  Do we accept this as the way it is, or is there
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org Hopefully you’ve heard about this weekend’s People’s Climate March in New York City.  It is being billed as the biggest climate rally in the U.S., taking place before UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon’s climate summit. While there will be many organizations and diverse views being touted during the march, there is one
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By Suzanne York. Changing the way we live, to better our lives or the environment, is not always an easy thing to do.  Yet often times simple changes can amount to big differences. Take eating less meat, for example.  Eating less meat probably has a greater impact than changing to energy-saving light bulbs. You don’t
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org Global overshoot.  You’d have to be in serious denial, or living under a rock, to not realize that humanity today is living beyond planetary means.  We take so much from Earth to live our lives today. August 19th is designated as Earth Overshoot Day, the date humanity exceeds the carrying capacity
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org “Can Earth Handle 29 Billion People? Easy.” Where to begin with this statement?  Actually, it’s the title of an editorial in the Financial Post of Canada by one Lawrence Solomon, described as “one of Canada’s leading environmentalists.”  This editorial was preceded by another on the same theme and is based on
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org It’s certainly not unusual for temperatures to be hot this time of year, as summer is in full swing in the Northern Hemisphere.  But things are getting really, really hot across the globe. Last month the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) reported that the period March-May was the hottest in more than 120
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