Calendar of Events

Population Awareness Week October 20–25

Library Display in Santa Cruz

An exhibit with facts on population and water will be on display at the Central branch of the Santa Cruz Library through the end of October for World Population Awareness Week (WPAW).

“Man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival; water . . . has become the victim of his own indifference.”

— Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

How long before we turn on the tap, only to discover the well has run dry? The math is simple — more people means less water for each person and other species. Water conservation is important, however, smaller families and population stabilization will ultimately make the difference in whether the well runs dry.

People who care about overpopulation and want to voice their concerns have many resources available on the web. The Population Institute established WPAW in 1985 as an action to alert the public about trends in population growth. Try their Web site. Many opportunities for WPAW are listed at the National Population Connection site.

Your participation is vital in educating yourselves and others towards achieving balanced populations and the natural resources that sustain them.

October 23: Membership Meeting

Our membership meeting will focus on our accomplishments for the last year, officer recommendations for 2004 from our Nominating Committee, and suggestions for a year-end donation from our chapter. We’ll have a population video to show, so join the fun, and get active. Gathering starts at 7 pm with a potluck. Contact: Amelia Koenig at 722-8227.

October 25: United Nations Day

We will be celebrating United Nations Day with the Santa Cruz Chapter of the United Nations Assciation and other community organizations. Our chapter supports this group as a member organization. Our booth will be there with information on The United Nations Population Fund and what you can do to help. Despite UNFPA’s strong and successful bipartisan support in both houses of Congress, President Bush cancelled the entire $34 million the U.S. had promised in 2002.

December 4: Holiday Potluck and Officers Election for 2004

This will be our last meeting for the year. All members are welcomed. Information: Robbin Anderson at 423-6293.

Chapter Action Since April

April 27: Earth Day

Population Connection folks worked the population table at Earth Day in Santa Cruz. Our main focus was international family planning, population stabilization, and chapter membership recruitment. Thanks to all who participated for a great success.

Bruce Bridgeman and Linda Brodman at Earth Day Booth

May 4: Cinco De Mayo Celebration

Amelia Koenig, Robbin Anderson and Linda Brodman tabled at the event. Thanks to Amelia Koenig, our booth is bilingual, in Spanish and English. Amelia is a heroine population activist! She has worked hard advocating for small families for many years, specifically in Watsonville where the majority of people are Latino.

May 10: Human Race Fundraiser

Once again, we raised funds for our chapter. We met our goal of $500 from the Walk-a-thon. Wow! Pat and Kirk Smith along with Cynthia Mathews, Gary Harrold and Keresha Durham walked for all of you. Many thanks to the walkers and all our generous sponsors.

Pat, Cynthia, Kirk and Keresha stop for a photo

July 4: Watsonville Parade

Bruce and Diane Bridgeman, Pat and Kirk Smith, Keresha Durham, Cornelius Paul, and Gary Harrold walked in the Watsonville Fourth of July Parade. They carried a world 16 feet in circumference that was just dripping with people (actually hundreds of cutout paper dolls). It had signs in Spanish and English that said “The Future?” and “¿El Futuro?” Others carried signs in English and Spanish urging small families. There were lots of positive responses from the crowd.

August 14: Nominating Committee

The Governing Board appointed Bruce Bridgeman, Royce Fincher and Robbin Anderson to solicit nominees for 2004 officers. Elections will be held at the December 4 meeting. If you are interested in getting involved, send nominations by November 20 to our mailing address or contact us by visiting our web site.

September 14: Mexican Independence Day Celebration

Amelia Koenig, Robbin Anderson and Kaye Beth greeted well over a thousand people with population literature in Spanish and English. Our message is simple:

— ¡Familias pequeñas viven mejor! —

Amelia and Robbin distributing information in Spanish

September 30: Tabling at Cabrillo College

The Fall Wellness Fair was attended by many community groups. Jeannine Cutter and Linda Brodman showed our six-minute video on population growth and handed out literature on family planning, women’s rights, and population stabilization. It was a very good day with strong participation from students and teachers.

Legislative Update

Our Chapter and its Board members took a stand against SB 60 which would allow illegal immigrants to obtain California driver’s licenses. Below is a letter to the editor by Royce Fincher, our legislative chair.

Santa Cruz Sentinel, September 2, 2003

SB60 Harms Environment

by Royce Fincher

We leave it to others to debate the adverse public-safety impacts of SB60 (Gil Cedillo, D-LA), which would permit persons unlawfully in the United States to obtain California driver’s licenses. But our organization, the Monterey Bay Chapter of Population Connection (formerly Zero Population Growth), rushes to point to the legislation’s adverse, if indirect, implications for our environment.

As we’ve come to recognize, population growth is the ultimate threat to environmental degradation. It’s interwoven with politics. This country has neither the wisdom nor the right to dictate to other countries the politics of their growing human populations. All we can do is discourage their growing numbers from migrating here.

SB60 obviously adapts to those now here illegally, but more importantly, encourages others to follow. The incremental but constant impact of these greater numbers compromises limited water supplies, pollutes the air and the oceans, congests traffic, takes land out of production for housing and diminishes wildlife habitat.

Our elected officials should not ignore the environmental impacts that offering driver’s licenses will have on inviting further souls to illegally join the 35,591,000 inhabitants California started with this year.

Talk of the Bay Radio Show

KUSP June 5 with Joe Hall

By Bruce Bridgeman

I was interviewed on “Talk of the Bay” by Joe Hall on KUSP. We concentrated on the worldwide population problem. We started with some numbers — about 6.2 billion people on the planet, increasing at almost 80 million/year, a new California every 5 months. The UN projects this annual increase several decades into the future.

Joe related his experiences in Ethiopia where desperately poor families have six children, and I reviewed the “big four” reforms that international experience has shown can bring fertility down to the replacement rate:

1. Education, especially for women. This is the most important one.
2. Jobs outside the home, especially for women.
3. Universal health care, including reproductive services.
4. A pension system that people can trust.

The question is whether these social factors can be spread to all the world before ecological collapse overtakes us. At even 4 children per average family, it doesn’t take much math to see that the population will double in one generation. I compared technical efforts to increase the human carrying capacity of the earth to building a tower with blocks. If you’re clever you can add a few more blocks, but eventually the whole thing will tumble down, and the higher the tower the worse the collapse.

We ended with a discussion of the local chapter’s efforts on this big problem. If we weren’t optimists, we wouldn’t be working on the population connection.

Followup to Year 2002 Pledge

Pat Smith and Amelia Koenig represented our chapter at the kick-off celebration for the Teen Condom Vending Machine Initiative in May of 2003. We donated money to this initiative and are very excited to participate in this new endeavor for Santa Cruz County teens. If you would like to see these vending machines, just keep your eyes open when visiting local restrooms. Bookshop Santa Cruz is just one of many. Here is a thank-you letter received from Population Services International (PSI).

We would like to extend our thanks to everyone who supports us in our Teen Condom Vending Machine Initiative, aka Safer Sex Machines. Thanks to all of you, our launch event on May 7 was a huge success.

We were fortunate enough to receive a lot of print and TV media coverage of the launch, which we hope will stimulate public dialogue and increase funding for more teen pregnancy prevention programs in our communities.

Thank you again for all your support and we look forward to continuing our work together. If you’d like the links to our media coverage, please let us know and we can forward them to you.

— Christy Kieffer and Nan Lewicky

Book Review

Members who have belonged to ZPG/Population Connection for twenty five years recently received a copy of Lester Brown’s book, ECO-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth, published by the Earth Policy Institute in 2001.

ECO-Economy discusses the need today for a shift in our worldview. The issue now is whether the environment is part of the economy or the economy is part of the environment. Lester R. Brown argues the latter, pointing out that treating the environment as part of the economy has produced an economy that is destroying its natural support systems. Brown notes that if China were to have a car in every garage, American style, it would need 80 million more than the world currently produces. If paper consumption per person in China were to reach the U.S. level, China would need more paper than the world produces. There go the world’s forests. If the fossil fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economic model will not work for China, it will not work for the other 3 billion people in the developing world — and it will not work for the rest of the world.

But Brown is optimistic to restructure the global economy to make it compatible with the Earth’s ecosystem so that economic progress can continue. In the new economy, wind farms replace coal mines, hydrogen-powered fuel cells replace internal combustion engines, and cities are designed for people, not cars. Glimpses of the new economy can be seen in the wind farms of Denmark, the solar rooftops of Japan, the bicycle network of the Netherlands, and the reforested mountains of South Korea.

“We are creating a bubble economy — an economy whose output is artificially inflated by drawing down the earth’s natural capital,” says Brown in his new book, Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, August 2003.

Lester R. Brown is president and founder of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.–based independent environmental research organization. The Institute is dedicated to providing a vision of an eco-economy and a roadmap on how to get from here to there. It is media-oriented, seeking to reach decision makers at all levels, ranging from the Secretary-General of the United Nations to individual consumers.

Visit their Web site. Look for these books in your local independent bookstore. If you can’t find them, both are available on the internet.

Read the previous newsletter!