Australian Businessman Dick Smith has just launched the Wilberforce Award for a young person under 30 who can demonstrate “leadership in communicating an alternative to our population and consumption growth-obsessed economy”. The media launch was spicy and the sexy photo shoot may have momentarily inspired a population rise. Maybe not the result intended. But moving our minds above our navels is a must in the campaign for the future of a Sustainable Australia and a Sustainable Planet. The $1million prize is nothing compared to the prize of a Sustainable future!

Details about how to win the award are available on DVD. The first step is to listen to the podcast from “Big Ideas” by Professor Tim Jackson which was delivered before a capacity audience (hmmm… the Prof obviously arrived just in time): Prosperity without Growth

The second step is to inform yourself on the issue of overpopulation as much as you can. You may like to start out with the Links listed on Dick Smith’s site, “which will give you information on a non-growth based sustainable system”. Alternatively, you may like to start out with the Population Puzzle website on abc.net.au .

At the end of last year, I posted a discussion about Overpopulation and the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference that I also translated into French. The English post enjoyed some popularity and was visited almost 2000 times and the French version almost 1500 times. What I perhaps failed to really bring home as the central argument of the discussion, was the idea that we can ethically reduce the world’s population growth by the cheap production and distribution of the contraceptive pill to developing countries who contribute to 95% of the world’s population growth. As the contraceptive pill is now off patent, surely we could find ways to make it accessible to people who could otherwise never afford it. Education about family planning by locals and through locals is also an imperative. As Tim Flannery pointed out during the Q and A Population Debate Special, “The thing that limits family size is education of women”. The distribution of education and the oral contraceptive pill may be the way to go.

Dick Smith might be considering the suggestion of one Q and A participant to brand his own label of condoms, but perhaps as a Philanthropist Mr Smith should consider investing in the production of steroidal contraceptives in the pharmaceutical companies of China, India, Indonesia and Thailand. (Hmmm… I would be interested to see how Mr Smith would brand his own label of Oral Contraceptive Pill’s?)

A popular post from earlier this year on our neuroanthropology blog was about Mental Health and Environmental Change. With the increased strain on infrastructure that population growth places on Australian cities, mental health suffers, petrol consumption rises, and our economy suffers. I was thinking about these issues just the other day when I spent an hour trying to get along 4km of road from the intersection of Hume Highway and Muir road to the intersection of Centenary drive and Arthur Street in Sydney:

A 2009 post entitled 150 years Since Darwin was a lament about overpopulation and climate change over the last 150 years. The post was read by some 1760 people. One reader labelled the post as “Stations of the Darwin”–a critique at the time, but poignant nonetheless. In our “Complete This Quote” series which ran for 25 or so weeks, Bobby Shabangu wrote an emotive end to the sentence: “From a systems standpoint, what cities are doing is…“. You might like to visit this page and write your own ending to the unfinished quote.

With the Australian elections coming up, Dick Smith has put the Population Puzzle into the limelight in a timely manner. I would love to introduce Dick Smith to a mentor of mine, Professor Roger Valentine Short, who has eloquently framed various arguments for Zero Population Growth in a recent article in Australian Science and another article in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Other links:

Jared Diamond on Australia’s Sustainable Population

Tim Flannery on Population (interview from 1995)

Your Last Emission

Optimum Population Trust

Home by Yann Arthus Bertrand

Anything but Flat

Overpopulation: National Geographic

The Adventures of Little Sacc

Are Humans smarter than Yeast?

Growthbusters

Is Economic Growth Sustainable?

Population and Growth

Panel on Sustainable Population Growth

Combating Overpopulation in Korea

Overpopulation

Overpopulation and Disaster

Greenblog

Essays on Overpopulation

Overpopulation Quotes

Definition Entropy

A World Problem

How to keep Koi

Human population and Species Extinctions

Population: A problem of resources

A World Threat

According to Accordion

At the root of numerous issues

Combat Overpopulation: Distribute Condoms

Neverunderestimateme

Overpopulation

Finite resources, Exponential Growth

The Wal-Mart complex

Questions

Overpopulation

Overpopulation

The Greatest Threat

Edward O Wilson

Paul Ehrlich

Overpopulation and sustainable life

Environmentalism and Overpopulation