Population

Tim Bennett and Sally Erickson discuss the influences behind this heartfelt and riveting documentary on "Life at the End of Empire." Framed in Tim's personal story of awakening to the big global issues threatening everyone's survival. It will touch you and make you think. Episode 72.

How will rising oil prices affect low- and middle-class lives? Sociologist and professor Rowan Wolf sees at-risk populations growing while government services and class divides are increasingly strained. A member of the Portland Peak Oil Task Force, she discusses relocalizing our economies, to counter globalization based on an unsupportable grow-or-die economic model. Episode 69.

Dr. William E. Rees is an ecological economist and professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning and co- creator of the Ecological Footprint Analysis. The footprint model calculates the area of the Earth’s productive surface necessary to support a particular lifestyle or level of consumption. Dr Rees explains that our present level of resource consumption, coupled with our current population growth, exceeds Earth’s carrying capacity and, therefore, is not sustainable. Unless we change our consumption patterns now, modern civilization as we know it is doomed to collapse.

Dr. Albert Bartlett, professor emeritus of Physics from the University of Colorado at Boulder discusses population growth, peak oil and global warming, solutions and sustainability in great detail with GPM's Andi Hazelwood. The in depth interview closes with a brief discussion of A Depletion Protocol for Non-Renewable Natural Resources: Australia as an Example and a look at Queensland's local government reform plan.

Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of "Arithmetic, Population and Energy".

Richard Katz and Dennis Brumm burst the technofix dream-bubble by naming the hard stuff: the lack of sufficient alternatives to oil and gas at the enormous scale needed. Overpopulation exceeding the planet's carrying capacity. Potential collapse. But wait! they close with ideas for positive individual responses. Episode 60.

"Many trends of the last century or more, made possible by cheap and abundant energy sources, are going to be reversed. These trends include population growth, centralization of political and economic power, vastly increased quantity of global trade, and mass tourism... Many proponents of current economic policies may be well intended, but often we end up with unsound rationalizations to justify short-term, often individual interests. What has been lost is a sense of the common good, future generations’ needs, and non-human welfare." - Jason Bradford, PhD

The Reality Report interviews Derrick Jensen, ecological philosopher and author of several books, including The Culture of Make Believe, Listening to the Land, Strangely Like War, and most recently the two volume set, Endgame. We explore the question: Is civilization, defined as the concentration of population in cities, ever able to transition to sustainability? His website is www.derrickjensen.org.

Presenting in Port Townsend, Washington, the founder/director of Post Carbon Institute lays out the problem of "overshoot", highlighting the impending worldwide oil and natural gas crisis, with a snapshot of Washington State's energy profile. Relocalization is the prime strategy to reduce community fossil fuel dependence. Post Carbon initiatives include Global Public Media, the Relocalization Network, Municipal Toolkit, Energy Farms Network, and the forthcoming book Relocalize Now!

If climate change sparks a global collapse this century, future historians are unlikely to acknowledge what caused it, says Norwegian scholar Jorgen Randers.