"The type of world in which our ancestors lived for hundreds of thousands of years women probably had four to six children in a lifetime." "Half of those children would die before they could reproduce." "So the only thing we can be sure about in human population studies is that for the last 100,000 years, people on average, had two children to succeed them." "Or there would have been a population explosion a thousand years ago." "In just the last nanosecond of human history, which began ten thousand years ago with the advent of agriculture, we began to change the way we looked at the earth;" "something that we separated ourselves from." "It is the basis for our civilization today." "We have spread notions of proper sanitization as we have vaccinated for diseases, as we have provided for famine relief and basic levels of health care, we see an unintended consequence of our best intentions." "By adding fossil fuels to our agriculture, we have allowed population to simply skyrocket." "Almost 100 million babies will come into the world this year." "The rate increases." "More babies mean finally, still more babies." "When these have reached the age of 40 the world will have doubled its numbers." "Helpless, harmless infants." "In the 1960's, population was growing at an unprecedented rate, the highest in human history;" "as famine developed in South Asia spreading fear to the rest of the planet." "these are harsh words." "They serve to describe the coming crisis in population and food supply that's aptly called the "population explosion."" "I started talking about the population issue because it hadn't been discussed." "People had not made the connection between what was happening to the environment and the fact that our population was growing like a skyrocket and that's where "The Population Bomb" came from." "Ann and I wrote it in about 5 weeks of evenings." "It was a political track basically." "The world started grasping the urgency of the situation." "Advocacy groups, such as Zero Population Growth, emerged in the US in the 1960s." "For the first time, population growth was linked as a major factor responsible for the global environmental crisis, at the first Earth Day in 1970." "Probably, the burning of fossil fuels, right?" "Probably cars, I would imagine." "Meat." "Meat?" "Meat?" "Garbage." "That's like the main thing, in my opinion." "Oh, people." "Oh, people." "The number of people." "OK, that's true." "People are consuming." "We're growing." "40 years later, the environmental message has not changed." "Apart from a few persistent groups, population growth is barely being mentioned." "It's as if the issue has been diluted among all the others;" "even though population growth and human consumption are the major factors in our on-going environmental crisis." "Oohh..." "About...uh...1 billion." "Maybe over a billion?" "Yeah." "What do you think the population of the planet is today?" "More." "A lot more." "It was 3.7 billion... in 1970, and now it's 6.8 billion." "Oohh..." "Way off." "The problem is not that we haven't had an environmental movement and that not that some effective things haven't been done." "It's a big cultural change, but not fast enough." "Since the first Earth Day we have had a fivefold increase in recycling, yet, we are producing more trash than we did in 1970." "And this is pretty well agreed upon today by conservation biologists and ecologists, people who study this... as we spread out we disrupt habitat whether we destroy it or simply disrupt it, it is eliminating species now at rates" "unheard of since the fifth mass extinction and that was the one that wiped out the dinosaurs." "The distinguishing characteristic of this mass extinction is that it is the only one caused by one species and we're it." "The human species is quite unique in the sense that our consumption pattern is not just driven by our appetite." "An elephant has a similar consumption pattern no matter what." "But people, they can decide not only, how to eat but also how big their houses are, how much else they consume, how many clothes they have, etc.." "So, there is no inherent limit to consumption for an individual." "We have a compound problem of rapidly growing populations." "At the same time as our demand for resources is increasing but the size of the planet is not." "Now we are at global overshoot." "Our demand is larger than what nature can regenerate." "And there is no need to think about anything like limits because we've never had to encounter them." "We see ourselves as this tiny, pimple on a pumpkin." "Our world population dynamic today, is much different than in 1970." "Although it is growing at a much lower rate, it is more than ever at the center of our global crises." "We are adding about 50 Million new middle class each year;" "modeling their consumption habits from the unsustainable lifestyle of the developed world." "A triumph for progress and poverty, but a ticking bomb for our civilization." "The world is already giving us warnings and clues about the looming global crises that we can't afford to ignore." "Agriculture has always been susceptible to supply side shocks caused by climatic conditions." "We're seeing a different situation now;" "the demand for agricultural crops is on a strong upward trend." "What we're seeing in the world today is the demand for food, now driven by three forces;" "one is population growth, the second is rising affluence," "2-3 billion people trying to move up the food chain consuming more grain intensive livestock products, and the conversion of grain into fuel for cars." "The grain required to fill a 25 gallon SUV tank with Ethanol, would feed one person for a year." "Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel peace prize in 1972 for bringing about the Green Revolution." "He saw the Green Revolution as a way of buying, maybe thirty years, in order to, solve the population problem and he said if we don't do that, we're going to have a terrible situation." "And the fact that we're peaking in oil production, which is a key aspect of agriculture almost everywhere, availability of food globally is going to plummet." "The big issue is going to be water." "We see in some countries now, where farmers are using virtually all the technologies available to raise yields." "The market realizes that things are tightening up." "As one observer said," ""Land has become the new gold."" "And the more affluent importing countries like China, like South Korea and even India now are acquiring large chunks of land around the world." "It's enormous in scope." "Rising food prices, combined with rising unemployment, have sparked riots and political unrest." "Every year, there are about 78 million more people living on the planet." "That's about 220,000 people everyday competing for both natural resources and for economic opportunities." "Stretching further the capacity of the world to sustain us." "More than half of the world population, the majority in the developing world, is under the age of 28 and is either at, or will be at, a reproductive age in the next few years." "Depending on the kind of choices these youth will take, humanity, according to the UN projections, could be as low as 8 billion or as high as 10.5 billion by 2050." "A variance that could make all the difference as we are beginning to reach many thresholds on the planet." "Population doesn't turn around on a dime." "Population is continuing to grow, there's a momentum in population today." "Even if... all the couples in the world were to decide today that they were not going to have more than two children it's estimated that world population would continue to grow to about 8 billion." "That momentum means that we have got to, under almost any circumstances, continue to find ways to feed that many people." "Loulou we have it ready." "You guys can eat at the little table." "I think when I grew up and... met JP, who is my husband and we were going to have kids and we had our first child and that was great, a little boy." "We had our second child a little girl and that was great." "And then I kind of thought... you know I was kind of imagining we'd have more, but then we had talked about it." "JP is from a small family of two, and he said he really believed in the replacement." "That we wouldn't expand the population." "That it was a really big belief of his and I could fully get behind that and understand that intellectually, but there was a feeling in me that was like... you don't really have a family if you can't ... have a baseball team at any given moment." "So I wanted to have a bigger family and JP is a very, kind of a rare, willing mate in that he was up for that too." "Adoption seemed like a great way for our family to grow in a way that didn't impact population." "So we adopted our youngest daughter," "Lorato, from South Africa." "And I have to say... it feels...better to me to have three kids." "Two felt kind of puny to me." "It didn't feel like enough." "So I was approached by the producers of this film, to be involved because of the work that I have been doing with children's rights." "With some friends I co-founded Mothers Acting Up." "Which is a movement that invites mothers to see themselves as advocates for the world's children." "I was intrigued to learn more about how this issue was impacting children's issues and women's issues." "The population explosion has immediate dangers for us and for our children." "You know when this issue first burst into public consciousness, population was growing, incredibly rapidly." "People were making really dire predictions." "The world responded, things changed, a lot more women got access to contraceptives." "Population growth rates came down, pretty dramatically all over the world." "And so people said: "That problem is largely solved."" "For the last few years the UN has been revising its predictions upwards, in both developing and developed nations." "If we now assume the problem is solved and fail to pay adequate attention to it we're going to see all of that work undermined." "Over the past few decades, the debate about population has been pushed to the side." "One reason is the ongoing stigmatization of the issue, mainly coming from human rights abuses by several countries that have used forced sterilizations and other coercive means to lower their growth rate." "The topic of population is also a victim of it's own success." "The growth rate of the world has been nearly cut in half over the past 50 years." "The developed world, primarily Europe and Japan, have seen their decreasing numbers and the aging of their population as a threat to their prosperity." "In many countries they are paying people what I call bribes to have babies." "Thinking that if they get the birth rate up, they'll have more working adults to help support the aged population." "Having babies on top of an aging population that is relatively healthy and can work much longer years than the standard retirement age, that was set during the time of Bismark, is a crazy way to try to solve that problem." "If you increase the retirement age by a couple of years, by just about two years or two and a half years, this actually covers the costs of the old people." "In addition if you have a lot of young people coming along... we don't have jobs for the people in Europe and Japan now." "While the population issue is being raised among some governmental entities and NGOs it is still a taboo subject within societies." "the dominant message has been, population's over with, don't talk about it." "It's really taboo." "Even those concerned people who are sitting in traffic jams saying," ""I know there's a problem"" "have been afraid to speak out and it's really a reflection of people's fear of being out of line with what is socially acceptable." "My mom and my dad, just got married right at the end of WWII." "My mom was a good Catholic, my dad was a Protestant who converted over to Catholicism." "There was a time when my brother was... my oldest brother, was 4 years old." "And he fell into a pond... through the ice in upstate New York." "And my mom at that point prayed to God and she said," ""If Mike lives, I promise I won't do the one sin that I am doing, which is birth control,"" "that she was planning on doing." "My brother Mike lived, so my mom said she wasn't going to use birth control." "So you end up with ten kids... and that's what happens when you have this happy... loving relationship and no birth control." "There was this feeling of plenty, like you were in the center of the universe when you were at home with the whole family, like it was a really good feeling of, a lot of plenty of... enough." "Brazil." "Most Populous?" "Indonesia" "Can we phone a friend?" "Here, the US." "Right now it's the 3rd most populous country?" "Really?" "Although the US isn't the fastest growing country, with only about 1% growth, it is the highest in the industrialized world." "After including net migration the US grows by about 2.7 million people each year." "But the problem goes beyond these numbers." "If everybody, worldwide, lived American lifestyles, today...it would take about close to 6 planets like earth to regenerate all the resources we consume in the United States and to absorb the according waste and that would be entire planets," "leaving nothing for other species." "It's a model that is not globally replicable." "Of course, some areas can use more than what their areas can regenerate because of trade but not all countries can replicate this model of being net importers of ecological services." "Just physically, mathematically, it doesn't add up." "The lifestyle of average residents in India could be replicated around the world;" "possibly even at the population size of about 8 billion people." "But that means eating much much lower on the food chain with very little extra energy to either heat or cool houses or to drive cars around." "We've got to set an example and stop our own population growth, if we are going to have any moral basis for lecturing to the people in other countries and say," "You've got to stop your population growth." "The rich countries, broadly wrought, pointing to the poor countries and saying," ""The problem is population growth."" ""You should get your populations under control."" "The poor country is saying" ""No, the problem is inequity, and you should get your over consumption under control."" "So here this kind of fight goes on." "The solution we have is, OK, grow like us." "We have fetishized, we have worshipped, we have created an ideology out of growth, that has now, taken over our economic planning and development." "Our economy has grown highly dependent on people, or more precisely on consumers." "It always needs more to sustain its endless appetite for growth, and always manages to find more of us." "We became its lifeblood." "The people who are promoting growth are the people who make the profits from it." "You know, the one thing that people don't understand and the developers like to hide is that the growth never pays for itself." "Your taxes have to go up to pay the cost of this growth." "Local officials still sort of see all growth as good." "Research has shown that sprawl ends up costing more money than it will ever bring in." "You need more police and more parks and more fire departments and more schools and expanding the sewer system, another water treatment plant probably." "More everything." "If the growth was paying for itself, there would be money in the bank to pay for a downturn in the economy, to keep the state government going, but that hasn't happened." "Everyone, the cities, the states, are all turning to the federal government to get money from the feds because the federal people don't have any responsible limit on the appropriations and on their budgets." "So what we are having then is essentially a ponzi scheme in which you have people contributing every year, which goes to the benefit of few a people, but it really means that the taxes have to go up for everybody." "Look at GDP, gross domestic product, gross national product, GNP." "These measurements would actually be funny if the consequences weren't so serious." "They include... as measures of economic health, activities that actually harm and even take life." "Selling cigarettes, the medical bills... they are wonderful for GDP." "An old stand of trees... has no value until it's chopped down." "But the fact that we can't breathe without it... has no value." "That's the economist's view of the world, but if you talk to natural scientist whether ecologists or meteorologists or biologists more broadly or agronomists or hydrologists and they see a very different world." "They see a world where we are overshooting the earth's carrying capacity in one area after another." "We have a market that's dishonest it's only covering part of the cost of the price of goods and services and we need to fix that otherwise... we will eventually face bankruptcy." "Biologists, chemists and many other scientists believe that we can develop new sources of food and new kinds of food." "They say that the sea can give us more food." "That we can develop large areas of new land but many among these experts warn us that there are limits to the worlds resources." "There is only so much fresh water, so much timber, coal, oil, minerals of all kinds." "Julian Simon had a PhD in economics and business and he was on the faculty at the University of Illinois in the department of economics." "Julian Simon says that human beings are the ultimate resource." "The more people you have, the more Einsteins you'll have to solve human problems." "You don't solve human problems by raising Einsteins in the slums of Lagos, Nigeria." "He wrote an article and in this article he said we have the knowledge and the resources so that we can continue to grow for 7 million years." "Suppose the world population grew just 1% per year, which is roughly the present rate of growth, for 7 million years." "How large would the world population be?" "Now, that's a nice problem in arithmetic because you can't do on a hand held calculator, it will overflow." "He couldn't do the arithmetic to know that long before that, at any rate he could imagine there would be more people than there are elementary particles in the universe, but it didn't make any difference." "People loved him in Washington." "He was a high level advisor in the White House." "He was a high level advisor in the Congress until the day he died." "When you're giving every human being on the planet a decent life." "That is a full belly and good nutritious food, shelter, clothing, clean water to drink, health care, time for amusement, education for their kids, then tell me about what the advantages will be to having even more people." "But until you're taking care of the people we have now, stop giving me this crap about how easy it will be to support more and more people." "The more that I learned about the population issue," "I felt like I wanted to go to a place on our earth where it's really a top issue." "I was given the opportunity to go back to Africa with the film." "I work on children's rights issues and the impact on children is enormous." "With that many children being born how are their basic needs going to be met?" "Just walking out in the streets of Addis and I... stopped to give one woman who was begging a one Birr note, which is worth, I don't know, not even 10 cents, and then more people started to come because" "they saw that I was giving money in... maybe larger increments than usual and I just got surrounded by so many people who needed money and to just eat and to feed their babies who were on their backs and... you start to feel the impact of overpopulation." "That there are so many people spilling into the urban centers to just...get what they need to live and to feed their children." "It is difficult or impossible to achieve economic development as long as birth rates are very high in the least developed countries." "Education and health cannot keep up and poverty goes right along with this." "You look at some of the poorest countries in the world already incapable of meeting the most basic needs of their citizens, and they're scheduled to double, population wise, in the next 30-40 years." "They just can't keep up." "This rapid population growth is certainly linked to political instability, resource competition, the global food crisis." "If you think that this is an isolated problem and it's only Africa's problem, think again." "The American housewife... who has a more important, a more responsible occupation?" "Wife," "Mother," "Laundress," "Counselor," "Maid," "Chef," "Purchasing Agent." "All of these are her duties at one time or another." "When you think back to the 50's the expectation was that a woman would stay home, run a household, raise the children and her husband would go off and work and bring home the bacon." "Uh..." "I wanted the pills." "I see..." "Well, the introduction of the pill in the 1960's was huge." "Women could choose the timing and the number of births." "They had the means and the opportunity to delay childbearing indefinitely... and many of us did." "There is still a lot of societal pressure to have children." "When you say," ""I'm childfree by choice,"" "there is an assumption that you are that way because you hate children or you're heartless or cold or there is an assumption that... something is seriously wrong, not just physically, but mentally or emotionally." "When I talked to people about their birth control methods, most of them told me they had sought permanent sterilization and this is very, very tough for women particularly younger women in their 20's and 30's that are seeking tubal ligations." "Many doctors will say, will ask you to undergo a year of counseling... at your own expense, before they give you a tubal ligation or they'll just flat out refuse your request for one." "Often it is," ""Oh you're too young..."" ""You haven't had any children yet..."" ""You're likely to change your mind."" "No one challenges a young woman who says," ""I want to have three children."" "If you say, "I don't want to have any children,"" "you will be challenged in the medical community... and in the mental health community." "We live in a sex soaked society, but we don't really like to talk about sex." "We certainly don't want our children to hear about sex." "Even though... sex sells all our products, sex is all over T.V." "Sex is what everybody loves in the movies." "So, it's a weird dichotomy." "In the United States, remember that 40% of pregnancies are unintended." "Our teenagers have the highest birthrate in the developed world and yet we make it very hard for them to get family planning in many states." "We should be looking at reducing the number of unintended pregnancies by making it easier to get family planning in the United States." "It is not widely known that there are a very large number of barriers standing between women and the means and the information to contraception that they need in order to manage their childbearing." "In almost all countries, the desired family size is lower than the actual family size." "in huge surveys, the demographic and health surveys." "According to published studies, it is estimated that" "215 million women worldwide who wish to have smaller families don't use modern family planning." "Largely because of informational and cultural barriers." "Many of these women don't want or intend to use it because they have heard it is dangerous, male partners are opposed, their religion is opposed, or they are leaving decisions on the number of children up to God." "According to the UNFPA, if those women met their needs it would reduce population growth by 28% and at the same time would save lives and advance human rights." "Every day 800 women and more than 20,000 children die from preventable causes." "Every 2 minutes a women dies at what should have been a joyful moment." "And millions of women are unable to choose if, when and how many children they should have because they lack modern ways of contraception." "For anybody who thinks that poor people want large families in Africa, for example, then they better look again and notice that Africa has an enormous number of abortions every year and a lot of those are unsafe and" "a lot of those do a lot of damage." "We are loosing every year about 350,000 women from maternal death." "13% of those women die because of unsafe abortions." "So that's the mathematics." "The numbers are out there." "There are so many women who are raped worldwide and have children who are then... often really not cared for." "The issue isn't abortion." "The issue is preventing... the need for so many abortions." "I wanted to meet the people." "not just read about it in a book, but really meet people and see what they're doing to figure out solutions." "That's where I found out about" "Population Media Center and they are using entertainment to get out social messages about population." "Population Media Center specializes in the production of long running serialized dramas on radio or television." "Also known as soap operas or tele novellas." "Where characters evolve into role models for the audience, gradually, over time." "I think what makes Population Media Center's work so unique is the fact that it connects with the audience at an emotional level." "We're not just building cognitive information, because so many of our decisions are based on emotion." "Not actually the information that we have." "By creating scenes that the audience can relate to and characters that the audience sees themselves in we're able to convey a message and also allow them to... really understand how they too can take the actions that the characters have taken in their lives" "and apply it to their own." "Do you usually listen when you are doing other things or when you are travelling?" "I was invited to a focus group of the radio dramas." "All the women there had amazing stories to tell about how these characters had served as role models for them so that they could be strong and... start to change some of the practices that kept the women down in their villages." "Women are basically viewed... as they are in very rigid domination systems, as technologies of reproduction." "In some of the poorest and most rigidly male dominated cultures and they go together;" "women have no status whatsoever, unless they produce a son." "The girl in a poor country, especially the poorest girls, they...eat last, they eat least." "They get up earliest, they go to bed latest." "They do the most work and... they have the least say over what happens in their life." "Women are in many poor countries considered property of the man and in some countries they have slightly lower status than the cattle." "When women are sold into marriage at age 9 or 10 and they become pregnant as soon as they're fertile they don't have the right or the ability to make decisions about family life or family planning on their own." "70% of those living in absolute poverty worldwide are female." "There is no way in a humane, non-authoritarian, caring way, to change this over breeding without raising the status of women worldwide." "After the focus group..." "I was so moved by Zinet's story and all the hurdles that she has encountered and... how she's overcome so many as just a young woman." "So I asked if we could go and visit her and her family... in the village." "Looking at her family and meeting her mother and her father, the first thing that struck me was how much older the dad was than the mother and then I later learned that... she was 12 years old when she married him and he was 45." "Zinet's father had another family before this one where he had 13 children with another wife and this is a typical scenario in Ethiopia." "They were stuck in these societal roles that had been handed down to them." "I couldn't help but see the parallels between my family and Zinet's family, both of our mothers experienced religious and cultural influences that made them feel like either they couldn't or shouldn't be the ones deciding how many children" "their bodies would have." "Christendom has been so powerful because the industrial revolution, the scientific revolution grew up in Christendom." "Europeans colonized the rest of the world." ""Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it,"" "It's time for us to recognize that that's the one Biblical commandment where you can say, "Check!" "We've done that!"" ""What else should we do?"" "I don't see how we can look at the devastation that's happening to the planet and the poor quality of life that many of those people have and still say that basic levels of birth control and family planning are inappropriate." "I find that a morally very confusing stance." "The Vatican actually has permanent observer status in the United Nations." "The Roman Catholic Church is the only major religion, the only religion in fact, that has this kind of status." "The permanent observer status is the same as what Switzerland has, for example." "The Vatican has tried or the Holy See has tried very hard in the United Nations to play down contraceptives and as a matter of fact to make it more difficult for women to get contraception." "They have made accusations as they did at Cairo that these conferences and the plans of action were efforts to undermine the family, destroy Christian civilization." "They use very inflammatory rhetoric." "The Catholic Church has a wonderful tradition of social justice, whether it's supporting health care or hunger programs or disaster relief." "For Catholic people living out in the world, family planning is more than just an intellectual exercise." "It really affects people's lives very deeply." "We aught not be moving forward, any one on any side of the debate saying you should have fewer children, you should have more children, you can't do this, you can't do that." "You must start with the people whose lives are most directly affected by this and these are the people you want to talk to about reproductive health." "Some extreme groups want to interpret the Bible as being even more patriarchal than it really is." "And use, just as some branches of Islam do and probably some Hindus do, theological texts to sort of reinforce their deeply felt desire and drive to control women's reproduction and that's what I think we've got to fight against." "Kids and other women from around here come and ask her how she's changed." "How she is this strong and she gives advice to everybody." "That's a great story." "She also is like a surrogate mother for her niece." "Six years ago," "Zinet's younger sister died of AIDS when this little niece was only three months old." "So now the niece has AIDS as well and is living with it." "Wassilla, we wanted to ask you a question." "What do you think about Zinet and what do you want to be when you grow up?" "What do you want to do when you grow up?" "A doctor!" "Fantastic!" "That's great." "This is just one child who's... symptomatic of a larger problem that we have all throughout Ethiopia and throughout Africa." "Zinet goes to school on the weekends in the university that's near her town and then during the day she works all day supporting the family at a family planning clinic." "And then when she comes home at night, she helps with the family, she helps with the chores, and then she has to study at night." ""My life was so hard..."" ""You give me strength..."" ""I named my daughter after..."" "That often leads to the decision for the woman or the man to seek family planning." "Often, women think their husbands are opposed, when they're not, but they've never asked them." "Meeting Zinet, getting to go to her home... and...kind of got to know each other even thought it was quick..." "I feel like she's my new hero." "She has overcome enormous obstacles and has met challenges face on." "She's taken cultural traditions in her village that have been..." "lasting over millennium and has said "No!"" "I want better for myself and for my siblings and for all the women in my community." "It doesn't stop just with her, she...works so much within her community to get other women to be listening to the radio dramas so that they too can get that... role modeling, so that they can feel that... courage and that power within themselves." "I'm going to think of her when I need... more strength to think... one person can make a difference." "Everyone should have the right to reproduce." "It's a fundamental, basic human right." "The course of population stability is going to come from millions of women just like Zinet making these same choices." "They need an education." "They need some outside agent that's going to help them empower themselves... and they need a voice." "The poor girl doesn't have options... unless there is some kind of intervention." "And what BRAC tries to do with girls...is... invest in them." "Invest in giving them options and opportunities and education, because a girl who is educated... will marry later, will have fewer children, her children will survive and be healthier and they'll all have a better life." "In fact, that's what we call" "The Girl Effect." "The majority of the whole banking system is catering to men." "Less than 1% of loans from our formal financial institutions would actually flow to women." "So what happened... is people discovered that women are better fighters of poverty." "That 100% of what a poor woman will earn... gets put right back into the mouths of her kids, into improved healthcare, into a better roof over the family, invests into getting those kids into school." "Microfinance... it's a strategy that has poor women's fingerprints all over it." "Women who never touched money before suddenly...have new forms of power and status in their household." "That enables them to negotiate the relationship they have with their husbands, with their fathers, with their sons, with their community members." "It's brought hope to millions of women and they're not only improving their own lives and those of their family, but they're contributing to society." "It's only natural... that we empower women," "I mean it's just common sense and it's difficult to understand... why we are still not getting it." "Why we are still keeping half of the population in a situation where, it cannot contribute to the wealth... of the country and to the wealth of the world." "I'm hoping, that one day... we would have...more women who would have opportunities to go to school, to learn how to read and write, to learn their rights." "Not even from western ideologies, within their culture, within their religion, they have rights, but they don't know." "And we don't have to go far to start... teaching them these things." "We can start right from within the culture and then go the next steps." "You can't liberate the women... without changing the men or you will just end up with a lot of beaten women." "So changing... men's minds about the humanity of women is critically important." "Start talking about that vexing thing called gender." "You know people feel uncomfortable talking about it, but as the great sociologist Louis Wirth said," ""The most important things about a society are those that people feel uncomfortable talking about."" "We saw that about race and we certainly see it about gender." "Before Copernicus everyone thought that the Earth was the center of the Universe because the Sun revolved around the Earth." "The whole field of astronomy had to be reconstructed and that's where we are now with economics and economic policy." "We've got to reconstruct the whole thing and to realize that it is the economy that is a subset of the Earth's environment." "What does it take for humanity to live within the means of one planet?" "We haven't found the silver bullet yet." "But essentially you start to look at all these five factors:" "population, consumption, efficiency... productivity of ecosystems, etc." "to see how we can match them all to get us back...within, the capacity of one planet and possibly even below that line because some space we want to leave for wild species because they too need food." "If there's anything we know is coded into our genes it's out-reproduce your buddies." "That is the principle of natural selection, we wouldn't be here if it doesn't work, we do it in the laboratory all the time, we see it in nature all the time but human beings use culture to override it" "No society we know has ever fully exercised it's ability to keep reproducing." "The big problem today intellectually is consumption." "Many economists think that the solution to every economic problem is to consume more." "But of course to consume more means wrecking the planet more." "And we don't have ... there are no consumption condoms." "The reason you want to start controling the size of the population early, is that to do it humanely, it takes many decades." "Whereas we know we can solve the consumption problem, in a very short time." "We're going to need a different compass than growth as it is currently measured." "We want to grow in wisdom, we want to grow in knowledge, we want to grow in just plain smarts in figuring out how to live well and take care of each other on this planet." "There's many opportunities now for developing countries to be able to leap frog over the traditional path of development, the way that we got rich in the US or in Europe." "In every poor community you're going to find these kinds of social entrepreneurs that are figuring out a different way to create a better lifestyle." "People are already creating solar energy and bio gas solutions, more village level or homestead level solutions." "The real wealth of a nation, indeed of the world is not financial." "We've certainly seen that in the economic melt down;" "that the real wealth of a nation consists really of the contributions of people and of nature." "And we therefore need what we haven't had economic policies that give visibility and value to the work of caring for people, starting in early childhood and caring for our Mother Earth." "Sweden, Finland, Norway, invested in what I call a Caring Economic System." "They have policies that are very, very much intended to help care for people starting in early childhood not only universal health care, high quality childcare, very generous paid parental leave for both mothers and fathers." "Common wisdom would say that these should be countries with a very large population because after all these are what we call family friendly policies, but on the contrary they have a very stable, low population growth." "By investing more, as the Nordic nations have in that high quality human capital you have a more skilled, if you will, functionally literate society and you also will have people who will contribute more to programs like social security." "This is a kind of shift that is very tough to imagine in our current political climate but this idea of investment of public goods is a big part of a sustainable economy." "Before I went to Ethiopia" "I intellectually understood..." "JP's position about having a smaller biological family." "But now..." "I feel like I really get it." "About how population is the thing putting all this pressure on children's rights and... on our planet." "I think it's interesting that I'm the one... being in this population film." "My brothers and sisters have gone on to have many children." "Their children are now having children." "A lot people have advanced degrees." "We have a surgeon, lawyers, doctors, but it's still just an issue of numbers." "Each person has a car, each person has to have a home." "The impact is huge." "And I realize that it..." "it starts with people like me and like JP just sitting down together at the beginning of our families and saying, "Our planets limits have changed."" ""How are we going to change how we make a family?"" "As long as you acknowledge that you do have choices and you take responsibility for those choices," "I think happiness is something that we all can have whether or not we have a child, or not whether we are parents or not." "Everyone has their own path, everyone has their own choices, everyone has their own desires, hopes and dreams and that diversity is a good thing." "There are people working on the climate change issue." "There are people working on agricultural issues, food security, HIV/ AIDS, etc." "We cannot deny... that population growth is the common factor that could help the missions and agendas of all of these separate groups." "There should be more dialogues between those groups, there should be more comprehensive... programs being delivered into communities." "So until we reprioritize... we're going to continue to just focus on... crises that result from population growth issues... of the day." "We will need our collective thinking as humans." "And that's an opportunity maybe, to break the barrier between poor and rich..." "North and South." "I think the planet forces us to define new solidarity projects, for the first time maybe in our history." "Over population is a symptom of domination systems and if we want to change that... we've got to change the system." "What is really the kind of world we want for our children?" "It's about an education that no longer idealizes the kings and the queens and the rulers but that tells a story of modern times in terms of one challenge after another." "One social movement after another challenging entrenched traditions of domination." "All of these social movements, including the environmental movement, are really what challenges man's once hallowed conquest of nature." "So part of our job... is to change the stories." "The story of our history for the last 10,000 years has been a story of domination." "But with women, who have been nurturing... all these years, that are now stepping into these new roles of public leadership, all over the world... we can create this tidal wave of change that's not only going to ease" "our population problem but it's going to bring about these policies that will sustain a new attitude towards our planet." "It's just us, it's one human family... and that we're connected in our challenges... but we're connected in our solutions."