“I am very concerned about the bias in the media, and lack of accurate information presented about the importance of stabilizing the planet’s population,” Ms. Paul says.

Today, former Baywatch actress Alexandra Paul announces that a lowered population is a good thing, not a crisis. She refutes the media’s claims in a recent avalanche of articles that the Census Bureau’s report that one in three US counties are losing population means that the counties are ‘dying.’

In a TEDx talk released earlier this year, Ms. Paul argues that a lowered population is necessary for the United States and the entire planet. In her 8 minute presentation, she states, “If we want everyone to have a good quality of life, the number of people on earth needs to go down. I believe it needs to go down to 2 billion people on the planet, which might seem radical because there are 7 billion now, but 2 billion was the world population just 80 years ago.” Ms. Paul’s TEDx talk can be viewed on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNxctzyNxC0.

By bringing attention to her TEDx Talk, Ms. Paul hopes to shift the media coverage and public discussion on overpopulation issues away from the economic ‘doom and gloom’ scenario and toward the positive human and environmental aspects of this critical conversation. “I am very concerned about the bias in the media, and lack of accurate information presented about the importance of stabilizing the planet’s population,” Ms. Paul says. She points to the recent release of Jonathan Last’s book What to Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster saying that it “fueled extensive media discussion, virtually all of it focusing on how terrible it is to lower our population”.

She recognizes that her voice on this issue is in the minority, and that Pope Francis’ very conservative views on birth control do not bode well for activists like Paul who are struggling to get out the overpopulation message globally.

Although fertility rates in the United States and the world have slowed, the planet’s population rises by 220,000 more people every day. The United States’ population as a whole continues to rise too, which makes the emphasis on a “birth dearth” misleading.

Ms. Paul acknowledges that “our economic system will suffer as the population lowers, but it will be a lot less suffering than running out of oil, food, and water because there are 10 billion people on the planet in 40 years like the UN is projecting.”

In her TEDx talk, entitled “Talking about What We Don’t Want to Talk About”, Paul notes that the number of people on the planet has more than doubled in her lifetime and continues to grow at the stupendous rate of 1 billion people added every 12 years.

Ms. Paul serves on the Boards of Advisors of World Population Balance, Growthbusters and the Population Media Center, for which she traveled to Sierra Leone in 2012 as a volunteer. She is a past President of the West Los Angeles chapter of Zero Population Growth and has been honored by the UN Environmental Program, Global Green and the ACLU for her work on overpopulation and the environment. Through a school program she developed, she has addressed over 6,000 students on overpopulation issues.

Ms. Paul has starred in over 75 movies and TV shows and has produced an educational film on human overpopulation.