Last Thursday was Blog Action Day: Climate Change. Thousands of bloggers from around the world, across countries and across topics, took a day to blog about climate change. It was a profound example of the power of collected action — nearly 32,000 posts reached an estimated 17 million people.
But as I was skimming through some of the posts, I noticed something. It’s something I’ve also noticed in almost every article I’ve read about sustainable agriculture.
There’s a big pink elephant in the room, and it’s growing exponentially each year.
Meet My Elephant. I call him “Population.”
There is much to read about fighting climate change, from the very small (eat less meat, turn off the lights) to the very large (complete overhaul of the transportation and energy infrastructure). The same goes for sustainable agriculture, where it seems that battle lines are now being drawn between advocates of old techniques and those that trust in new technology. In many of these debates, the elephant is mentioned offhand.
feed a population of 10 billion people…
mitigate increasing carbon emissions – rapid development, rapidly growing populations…
The wording changes, but underneath all these conversations is the knowledge that in the future, we will have to address the same problems we have now, but for many more people.
I’m not advocating government population control policy or saying that everyone should stop having children immediately. But I do wonder why we’re not talking about this more. Especially when there is one easy and affordable thing we can do that will make a dramatic difference.
Educate Girls
If we want to reduce our population growth, the easiest thing we can do is educate girls. This means that if we want to fight climate change, if we want to reduce poverty, if we want to be able to feed our population more effectively – we need to educate girls.
I’m not really sure why we can’t seem to talk about the elephant in the room. (Do any of you know?) But it seems like even if we can’t talk about the problem, we should at least be able to start talking about one of the solutions.
