Seven Billion

Seven Billion

The surge in human population is one of the defining crucibles of our era. If in 1900 we numbered but 1.6 billion people on the planet, we would a hundred years later in the year 2000 surpass 6.1 billion, a nearly 300 percent increase. This past October 31st, United Nations demographers suggest that the world has likely passed another demographic milestone, the seven billion mark. In light of this, the Whole Earth Library at Thoreau Center for Sustainability would like to highlight some of the numerous titles on population issues that we have in the collection.

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Lester R. Brown, Gary Gardner, and Brian Halweil editors. Beyond Malthus: Nineteen Dimensions of the Population Challenge. (1999)

For those interested in an introductory overview of the challenges of population growth, this short, concise primer examines the impacts of population growth on 19 global resources and services, including food, fresh water, fisheries, jobs, education, income and health.With the planet in danger of outstripping its carrying capacity,  Beyond Malthus examines methods such as the expansion of international family planning, investment in educating young people in the developing world and promotion of a shift towards smaller families which will represent the most humane response to the possible ravages of the population explosion.

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Bob van der Zwaan and Arthur Petersem, editors. Sharing the Planet: Population - Consumption - Species - Science and Ethics for a Sustainable and Equitable World. (2003)

This volume is the final report presented the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg in 2002 by the Dutch Chapter of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. The internationally renowned scholars contributing to this volume conclude that immense endeavors by the international community are required over the first few decades of the new millennium to effectively deal with the challenge ahead of establishing sustainable development. They also conclude that a renewed public awareness is needed of the inescapable limits of our planet's resources and focus on what scholars and activists can do to raise the necessary awareness.

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Wolfgang Lutz, Warren C. Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov editors. The End of World Population Growth in the 21st Century: New Challenges for Human Capital Formation and Sustainable Development. (2004)

This edition looks at the problem of demographic transitions. While most countries will continue to add population in the coming decades, a number of countries, primarily in Europe, are facing negative population growth which of course presents a different set of challenges. The volume addresses these challenges in a number of ways. It produces probabilistic population forecasts for the world and 13 major regions and introduces new ways of analyzing the uncertainty of these forecasts. It integrates human capital and sustainable development with population change and shows how combining the three provides a new way of unifying our understanding of demographic developments in the 21st century. The book contains chapters on probabilistic population forecasting; integrated forecasts of population and education changes in world regions; the use of literate life expectancy as an indicator of social development; the interactions between population, the environment, and agriculture in Ethiopia; the effects of education on trends in HIV prevalence in Botswana, a country that has had greater success in tackling AIDS than most; China’s future rural and urban population by education; population, greenhouse gases, and global climate change; and a new conceptual framework that combines considerations of population growth, age structure, human capital, and the environment and shows that the problems of rapid economic growth and rapid aging can be formulated and analyzed within a unified framework.

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Elizabeth Leahy with Robert Engelman, Carolyn Gibb Vogel, Sarah Haddock and Tod Preston. The Shape of Things to Come: Why Age Structure Matters to a Safer, More Equitable World. (2007)

Seven Billion
A wonky detailed analysis of the various projected demographic trends for various countries around the world. Based on more than two years of research and analysis, the authors conclude that population age structure can have a significant impact on countries' stability, governance, economic development and the well-being of its people. Most importantly, they find that age structures are dynamic and can be influenced—and shaped—through policies that affect the demographic forces (i.e. births, deaths and migration) that determine these age structures. The authors also find that in looking to the future and the shape of things to come, aid and assistance programs that promote the demographic transition—family planning, female education, maternal and child health, HIV/AIDS prevention, care and treatment--must be an integral part of development assistance.



 

World Blogging Action Day: Food, Sustainable Food

Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October that unites bloggers world-wide in posting about the same issue on the same day to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion around an important issue that impacts us all. This year Blog Action Day is being held on October 16th to coincide with World Food Day which commemorates the founding of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in 1945 and aims to foster a debate and increase awareness about issues related to global agriculture and food practices.

Here at the Whole Earth Library at Thoreau Center, we are participating in this important event by highlighting a few of the many titles that the collection boasts on food-related issues and sustainable agriculture practices.
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Dr. Gary Paul Nabhan. Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine. (2009)

Noted sustainable agriculture activist and ethno-botanist at the Southwest Center of the University of Arizona Gary Paul Nabhan is the author or editor of 24 books on agricultural practices, bio-diversity and food culture. Published in 2009, Where Our Food Comes From retraces the journeys of famed Soviet botanist Nikolay Vavilov who as the director of the All-Union Institute of Agricultural Sciences in Leningrad beginning in 1924 amassed the world's largest collection of plant seeds. In this book, Gary Paul Nabhan, a winner of the prestigious MacArthur "genius" Award, weaves together Vavilov’s extraordinary story with his own expeditions to the planet's richest agricultural seed depositories imparting critical insight into the cultures that preserve and maintain humanity's rich agricultural heritage and food stocks. Nabhan shows how global climate change, free trade policies, genetic engineering, and the loss of traditional knowledge are threatening the global food supply. Through discussions with local farmers across five continents, visits to local outdoor markets, and a comparison of his own observations in eleven countries to those recorded in Vavilov’s journals and photos, Nabhan reveals just how much diversity has already been lost while offering a vision on how to better protect our global seed stocks and food supply.

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Dr. Jane Goodall. Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating. (2005)


In Harvest for Hope, world-renown primatologist and conservationist Jane Goodall tackles the dietary habits of the world's most successful, if sometimes tragicomic, primate. Surveying human food production and consumption, Dr. Goodall traces the changes such as the development of large-scale food production that seeks to maximize profit for shareholders with scant regard for long-term human health and safety that have occurred in her lifetime. Grounded in the belief that every individual does make a difference, hers is a clarion call for action and individual responsibility to restore long-standing sustainability practices, now seemingly sacrificed at the altar of corporate profitability.

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Dean Cycon. Javatrekker: Dispatches From the World of Fair Trade Coffee. (2007)


Coffee entrepreneur and fair trade advocate Dean Cycon examines globalization, immigration, women's and indigenous rights, environmental degradation and trade issues all by looking at our humble cup of coffee. As much a travel book to exotic coffee lands as it is a primer on the issue of fair trade, Cycon offers a hands-on account at the implications in the global production and trade of a commodity such as coffee, the world's second largest trade in terms of value and one that dates back hundreds of years. Cycon argues that "our understanding of justice, in trade and society in general, cannot be confined to a formula." Instead, fair trade must be more accurately seen as a process that improves the lives of the hundreds of thousand of small farmers who have been systematically marginalized by the forces of globalization.

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Andrew Kimbrell. The Fatal Harvest Reader. (2002)


Written by world renowned scientists, activists and thinkers, The Fatal Harvest Reader is a collection of over 30 thought-provoking essays on the problems inherent in large-scale industrialized corporate agriculture. Edited by Andrew Kimbrell, one of the country's leading environmental attorneys and the author of several books on the environment and food issues, the essays cover a range of topics from the myths of industrial agriculture and the false promises of biotechnology to the hidden costs, including its deep ecological impact and adverse effects on human health as well as offering a vision for more sustainable agriculture practices in the 21st century. The volume includes an essay, Machine Logic: Industrializing Nature and Agriculture, by Jerry Mander of the International Forum on Globalization that urges agricultural practices that express "a reciprocal relationship with nature." In another essay, Helena Norberg-Hodge argues that localized food systems are a cultural imperative that offer an alternative to boom-bust globalization. Other contributors include Alice Waters, Gary Nabhan, Jim Hightower and David Ehrenfeld.

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Darrin Nordahl. Public Produce, The New Urban Agriculture. (2009)


Author and urban design guru, Darrin Nordahl is at the forefront of the new urban agriculture movement. In Public Produce, Nordahl makes the case for local government involvement in shaping food policy. In what he calls “municipal agriculture,” Nordahl notes how elected officials, municipal planners, local policymakers, and public space designers are turning to the abundance of land under public control such parks, plazas, parking lots as well as the grounds around government offices and public buildings to grow food. He argues that innovative urban food concepts can vitality to city spaces as well as improve our health and environment. This timely book highlights some of the many public initiatives around the country that are helping to reshape the urban landscape while improving the American palate.

Book Donations for Occupy San Francisco

Since we always have some extra books for which we try to find a good home (usually Better World Books, go check them out) we have decided to go downtown and give some to the people at Occupy San Francisco. Hopefully, they will find them useful. There are certainly some excellent works on economics, globalization, sustainability, history, and we threw in some fiction too since the Occupy Wall Street library certainly has plenty of that. You can see some of them in the pictures below, and maybe we'll get up a more complete list later. 

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Banned Books Week, Sept 24 to Oct 1

It's that time of year again...Banned Books Week! Held during the last week of September, this event celebrates one of the most basic human rights of any democratic society: the right of intellectual freedom. It alerts people to the efforts that continue to occur on a regular basis in the United States to limit or to discourage access to books and other materials in schools, libraries, and bookstores. Sponsored by the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and several other organizations, Banned Books Week is a reminder to people not to take for granted their freedoms to read, to speak, and to think. In 2010 alone, the Office of Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association received reports of 348 challenges nationwide, and it anticipates that there are many more that go unreported. Such challenges are typically efforts to circumvent the normal institutional procedures for reviewing the suitability of materials in order to limit the access of students and others to ideas and viewpoints with which the challengers disagree. They are attempts to close off discussion and to prevent individuals from being able to judge ideas for themselves.

The Whole Earth Library will once again join libraries throughout the country in Banned Books Week which runs from September 24 until October 1. Look for the return of our interactive, appropriate technology Banned Books display on the outside of the library wall where you are encouraged to write quotes from your favorite banned and challenged books or to just share thoughts about intellectual freedom in other creative ways. In addition, we are once again sponsoring an essay contest for our neighbors at The Bay School of San Francisco, a private coeducational college preparatory high school just down the street from us in the Presidio. Students have been asked to write on the subject of intellectual freedom and sustainability.

If you would like to learn more and discover what books have been banned or challenged in the United States, visit the Banned Books Website and be sure to check out American Library Association's lists of Frequently Challenged Books. And Tango Makes Three, has returned to the top of the list for 2010, and you might be surprised by some of the books that are also on it. Regardless, there are lots of fun reading ideas.

Thank you,
John Bertland, Librarian

Thoreau Center Brown Bag: Promoting Biodiversity in the Presidio

Promoting Biodiversity in the Presidio
Presenter: Terri Thomas, Golden Gate National Recreation Area 
September 22, 12:30 to 1:30
Pacific Room at Tides, Thoreau Center for Sustainability


Why are the Presidio of San Francisco’s natural habitats, forests, and designed landscapes important to local, national, and international biodiversity? Terri Thomas will discuss the history, the current big picture, and the details of the Presidio's biodiversity. 


Terri’s career has been in the land management of national parks, and she has worked at Yosemite, Crater Lake, Everglades, and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. She is now the Director of Conservation, Stewardship, and Research at the Presidio Trust. She has a BS in Forestry from UCB and a MS in Ecology from University of Washington.


Brown Bag events are free informal mid-day learning sessions hosted at Tides. Friends, neighbors and colleagues are welcome. Visitors, please sign in at the front desk. 

New in the Library: Voice of Witness Series

In our media-saturated world of the twenty-first century, where so many things clamor for the public's fractured attention and for a place on the agenda, some voices are lost. Some of them lack the resources and abilities to compete in the information marketplace or are simply drowned out by the trivial noise of entertainment and vacant commercialism. Some voices are actively suppressed by more powerful interests. Who decides what stories we do get to hear? And then how do we decide what we listen to? What are the effects of such silencing and ignorance for our understanding of the practice of justice and power in the world?

Engaging with such questions, and others even more basic to our humanity, is Voice of Witness. Founded by author Dave Eggers and human rights scholar Lola Vollen, Voice of Witness is an ongoing nonprofit series of books that collects the firsthand accounts of men and women affected by contemporary human rights abuses and social injustice in the USA and around the world. The scope of the project involves numerous editors, translators, historians, activists, academics, novelists, and volunteers who have undertaken to render interviews with these individuals into story. They are books where the dispossessed are given space for their own words.

In doing so, the books provide a perspective on complex situations unique from what can be found in the immediate reports of journalism, the dry facts of statistics, or the brief testaments of social media. It is a perspective from within crisis and out of the voices of the people whose lives have been the most seriously disrupted, whose humanity has been the most severely violated. They are people in failed states beset by violence and brutal outrages of power, such as Sudan, Burma, and Zimbabwe. They are people subjected to the failures of states, namely the United States in the series so far, with books focusing on the wrongly incarcerated, the victims of Hurricane Katrina, the precarious existence of undocumented immigrants, and the governmental overreach of the War on Terror. A constant theme is that these are men and women who have been displaced – from their homes and communities, from the lives they thought they would and should have. The displacement comes from violence, from social barriers, from absurd systems of laws, from the petty self-interest of the powerful, and from the suspension of rationality. It leads to terror, victimization, exploitation, and even enslavement.

Their stories are not delivered simply as accounts of victimhood to be pitied, however. They do depict lives circumscribed by anxiety, where people are forced to make difficult choices and take precarious risks. They are accounts that necessarily focus on the habits and strategies of perception needed to survive in these worlds on the edges of the world we live in. But they are not limited to these things. The storytellers have stories of full individual lives, and the makers of these books want you to know them. For in so doing, they hope to present the greatest challenges possible. As author Brian Chikwava writes in the forward to Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives, “The disconnect between the stories told by a state and those told by its citizens at best obscures the moral choices that must be made, and some states may well prefer it that way.” The stories cannot hope to represent the full experience of a population who has suffered, but they do not need to in order to raise complicating questions.

Voice of Witness includes in its mission statement this goal of raising awareness, and much can be learned from the books. The editors do not pretend, though, that all will be well if we listen, these being stories about the world. Another recurring theme of the collections is how the act of storytelling is in itself an empowering and humanizing one for these storytellers who have been abused and ignored. Through that act, they can reclaim their individuality and their human dignity against those who would deny their voices. It is the chance to locate lives displaced. Through their stories, they tell themselves back into the world.

The following books from the series were kindly donated to the library by Voice of Witness, where they are available for check out. Learn more about Voice of Witness, the project, and the books at www.voiceofwitness.org.


Lola Vollen & Dave Eggers, eds. Surviving justice: America's wrongfully convicted and exonerated. (2008)

Lola Vollen & Chris Ying, eds. Voices from the storm: The people of New Orleans on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. (2008)

Peter Orner, ed. Underground America: Narratives of undocumented lives. (2008)

Peter Orner & Sandra Hernández, eds. En las sombras de Estados Unidos: Narraciones de inmigrantes indocumentados. (2009)

Craig Walzer, ed. Out of Exile: Narratives from the abducted and displaced people of Sudan. (2009)

Peter Orner & Annie Holms, eds. Hope deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean lives. (2010)

Maggie Lemere & Zoë West. Nowhere to be home: Narratives from survivors of Burma's military regime. (2011)

Alia Malek, ed. Patriot acts: Narratives of post-9/11 injustice. (2010)

Thoreau Center Brown Bag: Foot Soldiers of Change—The Battle Against Maternal Mortality in the Sierra Madre

Date: Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Time: 12:30-1:30pm

Location: Pacific Room at Tides, Thoreau Center for Sustainability
1014 Torney Ave
San Francisco, CA

Presenters: Arlen Samen, Founder, One Heart World-Wide and Carlos Tapadera Concheño, One Heart World-Wide Country Coordinator

One Heart World-Wide is dedicated to saving the lives of women and children. Founded in 1998 by Arlene Samen, the organization works with disadvantaged communities to raise awareness and teach good birth practices. In the 10 years that the One Heart program was active in Tibet, the number of women who died in childbirth annually dropped from thirty-three to zero. One Heart recently relocated its corporate offices to San Francisco and manages close to $1 million in donations to support maternal-child health programs Mexico and Nepal.

About the presenters:

Arlene Samen has been a Nurse Practitioner in Maternal Child Health for 31 years. In 2004, she left behind her clinical practice to dedicate her life to serving pregnant women living in the most vulnerable conditions in the developing world. In 1997, she met His Holiness the Dalia Lama who asked her to go to Tibet to help the women and children who were dying in childbirth. Arlene spent the next ten years in Tibet working side by side with the local government to bring a safe motherhood project to women who were poor, uneducated, and living in the most remote region on the roof of the world. She brought the "Network of Safety" model to women who face death in order to give life. In 2009, One Heart World-Wide took its life saving model to remote villages in Nepal and to the bottom of the Copper Canyon in Mexico. She has received many awards, including being an "Unsung Herero of Compassion," a CNN Hero and a Rainer Arnhold Fellow with the Mulago Foundation.


Carlos Tapadera Concheño is One Heart World-Wide's in Country Coordinator. He comes to the United States for the first time to share his experiences working with his community. He trains his fellow Tarahumara in the Copper Canyon to raise awareness, teach good practices, train local health care providers and distribute Clean-and-Safe Birth Kits.

Please RSVP to Bruce DeMartini if attending

Brown Bag events are free informal mid-day learning sessions hosted at Tides. Friends, neighbors and colleagues are welcome. Visitors, please sign in at the front desk.