Are children going out of fashion?

When footballer Mesut Özil married model Amine Gülse last year, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan served as a witness at the ceremony. In his speech, Erdogan asked the couple to have at least four children. Why? More than 200 years ago, the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus hypothesised that when population grows exponentially, it rapidly outpaces our capacity […]

Richard Heinberg: Avalanche

How bad could it get? For the United States, it seems there is no bottom. Back in March, I wrote that the nation’s response to the coronavirus pandemic would likely shape its economic, political, and geopolitical fortunes for years or decades to come. Four months later, it’s time for a check-in. How’s that pandemic response going? Not […]

Fears devastating fungus could starve world’s population to death in global famine

A little-known yet devastating fungus could starve the world’s population to death if it spreads far enough, scientists fear. Stem rust, caused by the Puccinia graminis fungus, is considered a serious disease that affects cereal crops such as bread wheat, durum wheat and barley. It has been blamed for crop failures and devastating famine in […]

Fewer people, or less consumption?

It’s one of the great ironies of 2020 that in a year spent trying to save so many people, we’ve come to the conclusion we have too many on the planet. That was the gist of a large number of emails (our inbox was certainly overpopulated) that Upside readers sent in on the subject of […]

The Arc Of Our Future

In last week’s open post, I noted that I didn’t have anything in particular planned for this fifth Wednesday of the month, and asked my readers what they wanted to hear about. Quite a few subjects got brought up for discussion—among others, the novels of Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity, and the metaphysics […]

Fighting Overpopulation: Ten methods to exterminate most of humankind

  First of all, a disclaimer: I am not advocating the extermination of anyone! This post is just an attempt of mine to place myself in the boots of the bad guys who could think of doing such a thing and examine how they could do it. Could these scenarios occur for real? I don’t […]

Heinberg: Doom or denial: Is there another path?

I was recently asked to comment on a dustup between some members of Extinction Rebellion (see Thomas Nicholas, Galen Hall, and Colleen Schmidt, “The Faulty Science, Doomism, and Flawed Conclusions of Deep Adaptation”) and Jem Bendell, founder of Deep Adaptation (see his “Letter to Deep Adaptation Advocate Volunteers about Misrepresentations of the Agenda and Movement”). […]

So It Turns Out ‘Overpopulation’ Was Always A Stupid Patriarchal Myth

A new study published in the Lancet confirms what people like myself have been saying over and over again for years: that the human population is unlikely to get much bigger than it is right now, and will in fact begin declining in the latter half of this century as more and more women obtain […]

If you can’t stand the heat…get off of the planet!

As I sit in 90-degree heat typical of Washington, D.C. in midsummer and a so-called “heat dome” hovers over much of the United States, I am reading the following: At 11 or 12 degrees [Fahrenheit] of [global] warming, more than half the world’s population, as distributed today, would die of direct heat. Things almost certainly […]

Researchers Warn Of “Jaw Dropping” Crash In Global Fertility Rate

Researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation have warned that the planet is not prepared for an ongoing global population crash, and that the impact will be “jaw dropping”. The BBC reports that the research, published in the Lancet highlights that the global fertility rate almost halved to 2.4 in 2017, and projections […]

We need a new way of seeing the world

Long-term predictive models don’t have a very good record, but some turned out to be prophetic. One case is that of Hubbert’s 1956 prediction of a peak in the production of fossil energy shortly after the start of the 21st century. He was optimistic about the possibility of replacing fossil fuels with nuclear energy, but, […]

The free market: Our secret weapon for protecting the environment

Free markets are our secret weapon against environmental challenges. This is not something we hear very often. We are more likely to hear the opposite, as when Greta Thunberg lectures us about “fairy tales of eternal economic growth” and David Attenborough remarks, “Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment […]

China reports case of bubonic plague

While China appears to have reduced coronavirus cases to near zero, other infectious threats remain, with local health authorities announcing a suspected bubonic plague case in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Authorities in the Bayannur district raised the plague warning on Sunday, ordered residents not to hunt wild animals such as marmots and to send […]

An Archdruid’s Tales by John Michael Greer

John Michael Greer is a longtime scholar of civilizational decline, and he’s noticed that when most people try to make sense of our current civilization’s inevitable fall, they succumb to an odd fallacy. A fair number of those who accept the impermanence of modern industrial society somehow seem to expect its demise to be abrupt […]

On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare

The author in Maranhão, Brazil, 1995 On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem. I may seem like a strange person […]

Why Oil Didn’t Save the Whales – and Why it Matters

A widely aired talking point among those who believe that new technological developments are the key to solving our environmental problems is that “oil saved the whales”. In this view, the emergence of petroleum products in the mid-19th century undercut the price of whale oil, prompting the decline of the whaling industry and thus reprieve for […]

Earth’s Rapidly Degrading Soil Is Bad News For Human Health

“If mama ain’t happy, nobody’s happy,” says soil advocate, Holly Arbuckle… “In order to have nutrient dense food, [and healthy people] we need healthy soil.” Given that 95 per cent of per capita calorie consumption worldwide comes from crops that grow directly in the soil or from food sources that indirectly rely on it, the […]

David Attenborough’s Population Scare Is Unwarranted

The planet is on the cusp of a seismic demographic shift. Peak population growth was in 1968. It has slowed inexorably since. Probably well before the end of this century, the number of humans will be on a path of absolute decline. The brakes have not been exactly slammed on, but the pace of growth […]

Covid-19 has led to a pandemic of plastic pollution

As the world produces more protective equipment—and gorges on takeaways—pity the oceans THE THAMES has always been a reflector of the times, says Lara Maiklem, a London “mudlark”. Ms Maiklem spends her days on the river’s foreshore foraging for history’s detritus, from Roman pottery to Victorian clay pipes. She can tell the time of year, […]

The Arctic is on fire: Siberian heat wave alarms scientists

The Arctic is feverish and on fire — at least parts of it are. And that’s got scientists worried about what it means for the rest of the world. The thermometer hit a likely record of 38 degrees Celsius (100.4 degrees Fahrenheit) in the Russian Arctic town of Verkhoyansk on Saturday, a temperature that would […]

Overshoot day: the other side of the coin

Every year on Earth Overshoot Day, a table becomes very popular, showing the number of Earths needed to be ecologically sustainable if all the people in the world had the same ecological footprint as the average citizens of various countries. This is computed by fixing the world population at the current value and varying the […]

Wild fire in Arizona reaches nearly 175000 acres

The Bush Fire burning in northeast of Phoenix, US state of Arizona, raged to 174,397 acres (705.76 square km) as of Saturday morning, with 7 per cent containment. According to the latest data updated by InciWeb, an interstate incident information system, 769 personnel were assigned to fight the fire with the help of eight helicopters. […]

Half of the world’s population breathe polluted air

Despite global efforts to improve air quality, half of the world’s population are experiencing increased levels of air pollution, according to a team of researchers at the University of Exeter.  The study, which was carried out in collaboration with the World Health Organisation (WHO), suggests that air pollution constitutes a major and in many areas […]

Can the World Get Along Without Natural Resources?

  If it is very easy to substitute other factors for natural resources, then there is in principle no “problem”. The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources. Robert Solow, 1974 In the distant future, aliens come to Earth. They find a planet devoid of life. Looking closer, the aliens see that life […]

Under the weather

Energy demand destruction from the coronavirus has brought forward a nagging problem for efforts to deal with climate change – the prospect of permanently cheap fossil fuels. By Nathan Witkop The coronavirus pandemic has pummelled energy use. Lockdowns and travel restrictions around the world have cut consumption of both electricity and the fuels used to […]

Our Food Systems Are Failing

The United Nations secretary-general António Guterres has just released his latest policy brief on the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on global food security and nutrition. In the report, Guterres stresses that the world is at a crossroads where hundreds of millions of people are facing hunger and malnutrition, while disruptions in the food chain […]

Why Are There So Many Humans?

Something curious happened in human population history over the last 1 million years. First, our numbers fell to as low as 18,500, and our ancestors were more endangered than chimpanzees and gorillas. Then we bounced back to extraordinary levels, far surpassing the other great apes. Today the total population of gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans […]

The Great Pause Week 11: Son of a Lab Rat

“Humans, by and large, seem unshakable in their beliefs that skin color, religious affiliation, or ethnic-origins confer separate forms of intellect.“   My dad was literally a lab rat. Grandpa too. But dad was genetically manipulated by CRISPR to develop a coronavirus vaccine. They inserted human genes that allowed the SARS-CoV-2 virus to move by […]

20,000 Ton Oil Spill in Russian Arctic Has ‘Catastrophic Consequences’

Russian President Vladimir Putin declared an emergency after 20,000 tons of diesel fuel spilled into a river in the Arctic Circle. The accident is the second largest oil spill in terms of volume in modern Russian history, the Word Wildlife Fund (WWF) told AFP, as BBC News reported. The oil spread around 7.5 miles from the fuel site, turning the […]

Mass Extinctions Are Accelerating, Scientists Report

We are in the midst of a mass extinction, many scientists have warned — this one driven not by a catastrophic natural event, but by humans. The unnatural loss of biodiversity is accelerating, and if it continues, the planet will lose vast ecosystems and the necessities they provide, including fresh water, pollination, and pest and […]

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