In Lester R. Brown's new book Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (2008, full-text)) - an update to Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble (2006, full-text) - he calls for a war-time mobilization (ch.13) to save global civilization (already showing Early Signs of Decline (ch.6)) from Deteriorating Oil and Food Security (ch.2), Rising Temperatures and Rising Seas (ch.3), Emerging Water Shortages (ch.4), and Natural Systems Under Stress (ch.5)
posted on Jul 2, 2008 - View this thread

New Kiribati "...will future climate change refugees become a new caste of service sector workers inhabiting a sort of Floating Hotel & Duty Free Mall ... ?" Small island states are on the front line.
posted on Jun 19, 2008 - View this thread

Baby Bust! After 200 years of exponential population growth, and just four decades after overpopulation doomsaying began filling the bestseller lists, the First World is suddenly gripped with underpopulation hysteria. The governments of the developed world have always maintained an interest in birthrates and procreation, but the reasons why are changing, and the ensuing demographic debates about gender, race and culture are "ideologically fraught and scientifically questionable."
posted on Jun 16, 2008 - View this thread

Did You Know 2.0 (Youtube 08:19) Facts about education, population, globalization.
posted on Feb 13, 2008 - View this thread

TheDataWeb - a network of online data libraries on topics including census data, economic data, health data, income and unemployment data, population data, labor data, cancer data, crime and transportation data, family dynamics, vital statistics data
posted on Dec 26, 2007 - View this thread

Animated population pyramids project a steady increase in the median age. England and Wales. United States. Canada. China. Japan. "The number of older persons has tripled over the last 50 years; it will more than triple again over the next 50 years." [pdf] There will be a shortage of workers to support the retired and disabled. The looming crisis has been predicted for years. Proposed solutions include robots and immigration. [previously, previously]
posted on Aug 29, 2007 - View this thread

This map displays county-to-county migration data for 2000-2005 from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. In, out, staying put, median household income. [via]
posted on Aug 16, 2007 - View this thread

How's the weather? Is it polluted? Do you have plenty of rainforests? Send someone a Geography Information Postcard and tell them about where you live by filling out infographics. (via)
posted on Jan 31, 2007 - View this thread

According to this site

• More than 700 Trillion BEEDIES or BIRI are smoked annually
• Indians smoke more than one trillion bidis every year.
• An experienced worker can roll 2,000 a day.

Step inside and learn more about these unrealistic stats!
posted on Nov 24, 2006 - View this thread

Tomorrow morning at 7:46am, the US Population Clock will hit 300 million. As the world population continues to grow at a similar rate to ours, perhaps its time to start asking some questions. After all, if you can read this post, chances are you don't live in Africa, where "more than 2,500 children are dying each day," simply for lack of access to fresh drinking water. Its so easy not to worry about when you're not the 1 in 5 who can't get a clean drink. But there's lots of ways you can help.
posted on Oct 16, 2006 - View this thread

Miracles You’ll See In The Next Fifty Years (Feb, 1950)
Some more up-to-date predictions: science, invention, space travel, colonisation, immortality, water shortage, flooding, nanotech, techno-apocalypse, extinction, mental health, smart machines, robots, mind uploading, AI, Asia, economics, demographics, goverance, cities. What is your prediction?
posted on Oct 5, 2006 - View this thread

Who'll be living where. Researchers at the Earth Institute at Columbia University have developed map that projects where people will be living in the year 2025.
posted on Jul 21, 2006 - View this thread

Boston's population woes may have been partially solved.
posted on Jul 6, 2006 - View this thread

The Global Baby Bust Summary: Most people think overpopulation is one of the worst dangers facing the globe. In fact, the opposite is true. As countries get richer, their populations age and their birthrates plummet. And this is not just a problem of rich countries: the developing world is also getting older fast. Falling birthrates might seem beneficial, but the economic and social price is too steep to pay. The right policies could help turn the tide, but only if enacted before it's too late.
posted on Dec 28, 2004 - View this thread

Alternative Olympic medal tally from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, ranking countries by population per gold medal. (Updated daily for the duration of the games.)
posted on Aug 24, 2004 - View this thread

The Empty Cradle. Our everyday personal experiences with traffic, sprawl and other irritants of modern life tell us there are too many people in the world and the problem is getting worse. However in truth world population growth peaked 40 years ago in 1963 and has been trending downward since. Demographers predict that absolute human population will peak at 9 billion by 2070 and then contract. Long before then, many nations will shrink in absolute size and the average age of the world's citizens will shoot up dramatically, including the fastest aging part of the world: developing countries, where for example Iraq is aging 2.5 times faster than the USA and Mexico 5 times as fast. Having averted the danger of overpopulation, the world now faces the opposite problem: an aging and declining population.
posted on Jun 6, 2004 - View this thread

Boom! A master planned community. Boom! A big-box mall! Our Sprawling, Supersize Utopia. This article, by New York Times columnist David Brooks, takes a look at exploding suburbs and exurban migration. This migration is nothing new, author Joel Garreau wrote extensively about it in his 1991 book Edge Cities. The phenomonon really took off after World War II, during the period of post war prosperity, and is best represented by this famous postwar American suburb. A veritable army of "suburban sprawl critics" has emerged over the years including Jane Jacobs and James Howard Knunstler plus many others including some who are predicting the immenent demise of suburbs because of oil depletion. For Brooks the critics of suburbs "just regurgitate the same critiques decade after decade, regardless of the suburban reality flowering around them" but you can't dismiss what the architect Paolo Soleri says about American society that "we have a society that is moving very rapidly to the super-, super-, super-consumptive."
posted on Apr 30, 2004 - View this thread

Garret Hardin and his wife Jane were found dead last Thursday in their house of Santa Barbara (California), presumably a double suicide. His 1968 essay Tragedy of the Commons (a critique of both communism and laissez-faire capitalism in the light of natural resources constrains) was one of the most widely known works of this expert in population and ecology. Garret was 88 and Jane was 81 and both were in poor health. Last week celebrated their 62nd anniversary. They were members of the Hemlock Society (now know as End-of-Life Choices).
posted on Sep 20, 2003 - View this thread

An undeclared war on latex is apparently being waged by the Bush administration, which is taking all sorts of steps to avoid condoning their use. This is a patently ridiculous stance to take in the face of a global AIDS epidemic, but this interesting essay also raised my eyebrows:

According to figures in a report on condoms by Population Action International, the average man in Botswana gets less than one condom per year from international donors.

Uhhh...doesn't the idea of condoms as a staple of international relief seem a bit strange? Haven't governments around the world devoted any resources to their own public health? Surely donor-nations can't keep everyon else's penises safely sheathed forever.
posted on Jan 10, 2003 - View this thread

Since this is the first day of the new year, I thought it would be interesting to check current US and global population numbers, and then compare those numbers on January 1st 2004, to see how much the world's population has grown or shrunk. Currently the clock shows 292,277,976 for the US, and 6,625,786,982 for the World. Metafilter readers from outside the US are welcome to post their countries current population level, as well.
posted on Jan 1, 2003 - View this thread

Miniature Earth ... Sure, you may have already seen something like this before... but as we're about to turn the calendar over for another year, it's as good a time as any to thoughtfully reconsider the world we live in. Miniature Earth is a flash presentation that compresses the world's population down to a community of 100 people, and gives statistical proportions. Work with passion; Love without needing to be loved; appreciate what you have; and do your best to make a better world.
posted on Dec 23, 2002 - View this thread

As Romanian factory workers prepare to sell sperm to a fertility clinic to try to reduce their company's debt one begins to wonder if capitalism is helping to fulfill Ceausescu's dream of increasing Romania's population from 23 million to 30 million by the year 2000, or if it's simply fueling the countries recent increase in the illegal sale of babies.
posted on Nov 7, 2002 - View this thread

Sweden's faultering population. Sweden has a population problem and it's effecting the economy. One women has come up with a brilliant solution.
posted on Sep 19, 2002 - View this thread

Half a billion Americans? The Economist crunches census data from both sides of the Atlantic and figures that the US will hit the 500 million mark sometime in the next few decades, surpassing the combined population of even the expanded EU. In typical style, the Economist looks at the economic and political reprecussions of this, but skips another interesting question: how will a doubling of the population change America itself? will it make the US more environmentally friendly? reduce urban sprawl? will the shifting population balance change the culture itself?
posted on Aug 23, 2002 - View this thread

What is the estimated US Population at this very moment? Find out at the official site of the US census. More fascinating information available by checking out the 2000 census homepage. As a post-script, what are your favorite sites for collecting interesting statistics?
posted on Aug 8, 2002 - View this thread

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement "Phasing out the human race by voluntarily ceasing to breed will allow Earth's biosphere to return to good health. Crowded conditions and resource shortages will improve as we become less dense." More inside...
posted on May 30, 2002 - View this thread

American Depop? From America to Europe to Russia, birthrates are declining -- and eventually, so will population. What are the implications? Guess who has some answers.
posted on Jan 10, 2002 - View this thread

There sure are a lot of us. Not to mention that there have been a lot of us. You might be surprised how many. We all know about the increasing world population, but it's interesting to compare the total, current, and past numbers; seeing 'em tick by like that reinforces it in a way that static numbers can't. My, how we've grown.
posted on Oct 21, 2001 - View this thread

World's numbers may peek by 2100 Implications ? Parking going to be easier? Should we do more to stop decline or tapering off?
posted on Aug 1, 2001 - View this thread

U.S. population up 13% from 1990 to 281 million. Power shifts South in the House. Yikes!
posted on Dec 28, 2000 - View this thread

This Census site is way cooler than the other one
The Census Monitoring Board is really snazzy. It has a lot of interesting reports to Congress on ways to improve the Census. It's way cooler than most .gov sites, especially census2000.gov
posted on Sep 1, 2000 - View this thread

I'm just one in a billion!

With the birth of a baby girl named Asha - 'Faith' in Hindi - India's population officially hit 1 billion today, an event marked with fanfare and concern over the nation's too-rapid growth. Astha was born to Anjana and Ashok Arora at 5:05 a.m. this morning, putting India in an exclusive club with China as the only nations with populations exceeding 1 billion.

Now if any country messes with us, all we have to do is jump at the same time to wipe out the enemy. :)

Source: yahoo
posted on May 11, 2000 - View this thread

If you were to draw one stick person every second 24 hours a day, it would take you 200 years to make 6 billion drawings. The YouDraw exhibition will show 6 billion drawings of the world's people together for the first time ever. 500,000 drawings of people will be collected from the internet. These 500,000 drawings will be compiled in a book of which 12,000 copies will be produced. 12,000 books will represent a total of 6 billion drawings and will be in shown in an installation, to be exhibited internationally.
posted on Feb 25, 2000 - View this thread