Green Options

Zero Tolerance policies often include everything under the sun: prescriptions, over-the-counters, and of course the illegal junk.

But when a Fairfax County, Virginia mom got word that her daughter would receive a two-week suspension for the birth control pill, she was shocked,

I realize my daughter broke a rule. The punishment does not fit the crime.

I’ll say. Whether or not you believe in teens and birth control, it was a decision the girl made with her mom. And because she responsibly remembered to take the hormone on her lunch break, the Zero Tolerance Policy mandated she be punished.

Now the teen is even facing expulsion. WTF?!

Since Paul Erhlich wrote The Population Bomb, it’s long been recognized that uncontrolled human population growth is the greatest threat to our planet.  Coupled with an economic recession, many families, including the first family, recognize that small family size is crucial for surviving the current depression and climate crisis.  That’s why President Obama has endorsed a $10,000 tax credit for American males that undergo vasectomies, essentially making the surgical procedure free.

According to CNN Health:

Since then, the Cleveland Clinic has seen a 50 percent increase in vasectomies, an outpatient surgery that is the cheapest form of permanent birth control. Vasectomies are less invasive and cheaper than tubal ligation, which involves blocking, tieing or cutting a woman’s fallopian tubes to prevent pregnancy.

Let me start this off by saying I don’t want to have a big ol’ controversy here. But when I open my big fat mouth laptop, sometimes it’s inevitable.

Looks like the crashing economy is “good” for a sector besides pawn shops: the family planning clinics.

Maybe it’s because we’re all jobless; we’re all at home with nothing better to do.  Maybe it’s because our unemployed butts have no health insurance.  Maybe it’s because we have to make a monthly choice between groceries and contraception.  Or a perfect storm of the three.

Whatever it is, for one Planned Parenthood clinic, January was the biggest month for abortions.

We’ve seen some people who said that they didn’t really think that they would ever be making this decision, but recognize that this is a time when they have to think about taking care of the families that they have.

By Lester R. Brown

Some 43 countries around the world now have populations that are either essentially stable or declining slowly. In countries with the lowest fertility rates, including Japan, Russia, Germany, and Italy, populations will likely decline somewhat over the next half-century. A larger group of countries has reduced fertility to the replacement level or just below.

They are headed for population stability after large numbers of young people move through their reproductive years. Included in this group are China and the United States. A third group of countries is projected to more than double their populations by 2050, including Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Uganda.

United Nations projections show world population growth under three different assumptions about fertility levels. The medium projection, the one most commonly used, has world population reaching 9.2 billion by 2050. The high one reaches 10.8 billion. The low projection, which assumes that the world will quickly move below replacement-level fertility to 1.6 children per couple, has population peaking at just under 8 billion in 2041 and then declining. If the goal is to eradicate poverty, hunger, and illiteracy, and lessen pressures on already strained natural resources, we have little choice but to strive for the lower projection.

Slowing world population growth means that all women who want to plan their families should have access to the family planning services they need. Unfortunately, at present 201 million couples cannot obtain the services they need. Former U.S. Agency for International Development official J. Joseph Speidel notes that “if you ask anthropologists who live and work with poor people at the village level…they often say that women live in fear of their next pregnancy. They just do not want to get pregnant.” Filling the family planning gap may be the most urgent item on the global agenda. The benefits are enormous and the costs are minimal.

Birth control has become an important issue for woman’s rights as well as the environment. However, a survey of South Korean women age 19-34 found 45% believe contraception should be a man’s responsibility.

The survey, by the Study Group for Contraception, shows that most women are doing little or nothing to avoid unwanted pregnancies. Of the 1000 women who participated in the survey, one in five said she relied on coitus interruptus or timing pregnancy cycles as a form of birth control. Both methods have high failure rates of around 25%.

What’s more, abortion is illegal in South Korea, except under extenuating circumstances. The result is an almost entirely first-world country where each year hundreds of thousands of women practice illegal abortions at “don’t ask don’t tell” clinics.

Sometime back on National Public Radio, a panel discussed the high cost of gasoline and what the next president should do about it. When asked if we should be concerned about running out of oil, a panelist quipped that “President Obama” will create appropriate tax incentives for photovoltaics and oil will become so much “useless sludge”. Am I alone in thinking that there is a general lack of understanding about what the future holds for all of us when petroleum runs out?

Yes, We Eat Oil

When nitrogen is allowed to infiltrate a suitable body of water, the normal population of algae grows explosively. It consumes available nutrients and oxygen, turns the water green, and kills most other species. The algae, unable to thrive under the conditions they themselves have created, begin to die. This is called an algae bloom.

Petroleum is humanity’s source of nitrogen. Increasingly, we’re aware that it doesn’t just heat our houses and propel our cars; we actually eat it. Through the twin miracles of modern agriculture and wet-milling, petroleum becomes nitrogen fertilizer, which becomes corn or soybeans, which become virtually every and any processed food product we know (including virtually all meat and farmed fish).[1] In Michael Pollan’s acclaimed book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, he documents that over sixty percent of the average American’s diet comes from (petroleum-derived) corn![2]

Note: This post examines Population and Climate Change in honor of World Population Day, Friday, July 11. This post, written by Carolyn Vogel of Population Action International (PAI), originally appeared at RH Reality Check, a daily publication dedicated to news, analysis and commentary on the issues surrounding reproductive health and justice.

Examining linkages between population and climate change through many different frames leads to important research and policy questions — and it also allows the reproductive health community to discuss these linkages in a productive and positive way. If we leave the debate unframed, and the research questions unanswered, we leave space for harmful discourse and inaccurate facts to take center stage. The following series of blog posts, written by staff at Population Action International, will look at population and climate change from different angles, and provide an initial review of some of the broad frames.

Dr. Karen Hardee raises many of the difficult ethical issues that arise when population and climate change are linked. She examines these linkages from a women’s rights and empowerment frame. She encourages people, both those comfortable and uncomfortable with the linkage between population and climate change, to discuss the issue in order to come up with the best solutions and avoid mistakes of the past.

Birth control methods. There are many, but the two most common forms are the condom and the hormonal pill. Can these products be manufactured sustainably?

If not… who cares?

There is something I would like to add to list of “things I would never give up, even if sustainable solutions are never found.”

The first thing I mentioned in my second post with Sustainablog.  In “An Evil Kind of Green,” I concede the importance of Western medicine after the immediate relief it gives me from a severe poison ivy rash.

The second is along the same lines…

Based on my grasp of the environmental situation we face right now, it matters little if birth control pills cannot be manufactured in a sustainable way, or if some excess estrogens may be leaked into waterways as a result. The number one factor that needs to be brought under control as soon as possible is… just how many of us there are around.

It’s a topic that, by its very nature, provokes a passionate response.

Should population growth be curbed?

Immediately, we are faced with important moral, ethical and religious quandaries.

I write this in the light of a piece that appeared in the UK’s Observer. In it, John Gray, a political philosopher, states:

The uncomfortable fact, which is ignored or denied by both ends of the environmental debate, is that an energy-intensive lifestyle of the kind enjoyed in the rich parts of the world cannot be extended to a human population of nine or 10 billion, the level forecast in UN studies for the middle of this century.