by Alan Weisman
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1. Jeremiah 8:7.
1. This estimate, widely accepted, comes from the United Nations Population Division.
2. The result of the same housing debacle.
1. Demographers today put replacement rate at slightly higher than two (an average of 2.1 children per female in the developed world) because some child mortality is inevitable. For developing nations, where children are more vulnerable, the number is higher. The world’s average replacement rate is 2.33.
2. Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo.
3. Anne Ehrlich was not credited as coauthor of The Population Bomb, due to a publisher’s decision. Many subsequent books and articles have appeared under both Ehrlichs’ names.
4. An abbreviation for Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase.
1. With notable exceptions: California, which led the United States in forced sterilizations, continued them into the 1960s. North Carolina’s Eugenics Board remained active until 1977.
2. Michener, author of the magnum opus The Bees of the World, was still at work in 2013 at age ninety-four.
3. Currently, the UN projection for around the year 2082.
4. Almost double that of 2012.
1. In 2011, to avoid the controversy of suggesting an optimum figure, Optimum Population Trust changed its working name to “Population Matters.”
2. In the United States, both the Sierra Club and Zero Population Growth (today, Population Connection) endured wrenching battles over whether to oppose immigration. The Ehrlichs and Gretchen Daily have debated immigration in the scientific literature with physicist Albert Bartlett, who has called for halting it.
1. Some critics also contend that modified golden rice delivers far less vitamin A than naturally vitamin-rich leaves, vegetables, milk, and eggs.
2. Since Humanae Vitae, the number of U.S. Catholic seminarians studying for the priesthood has dropped by more than half. Only 1 percent of nuns today in the United States are under forty. (Source: Center for Applied Statistics for the Apostolate, Georgetown University.)
3. About US$934.
4. Approximately US$4,200.
1. Marie Stopes was mentored by Margaret Sanger when the latter fled to England in 1916 to avoid arrest on obscenity charges. In succeeding decades, however, the two warriors for women’s reproductive rights came to despise each other, and competed.
2. 2.47 acres.
1. Her name is changed by request.
2. At www.naturalcapitalproject.org/InVEST.html. The Natural Capital Project is a partnership of Stanford University, The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, and the University of Minnesota.
3. About US$1,260.
4. US$1,575.
1. His name is changed.
2. This 2007 census figure is for “Greater Manila,” which includes urban areas contiguous to the sixteen towns officially called “Metro Manila.”
3. Polls show that around nine of every ten Filipinos favor government-funded contraception.
4. Program for Appropriate Technology in Health.
5. Our smallest fellow primate is Madagascar’s Berthe’s mouse lemur, weighing just over an ounce.
1. Nigerian: person from Nigeria. Nigerien: person from Niger.
2. Do as I say, not as I do.
1. Names in this family have been changed.
2. About US$43.
3. In Sindh province, marriage between cousins is common.
1. A claim popularized in Rezā Shāh’s time was that Iran and Aryan were essentially the same word. His courtship of Germany was partly strategic, to counter British and Soviet designs on the Iranian petroleum
that each hoped to control. Although friendly with Hitler, he also personally guaranteed the rights of Iranian Jews, whose synagogues he would visit.
2. Noah.
1. Source of English translation: Connolly, Kate. “Angela Merkel Declares Death of German Multiculturalism.” The Guardian (UK), October 17, 2010.
2. In 2009, the population of Russia rose for the first time in fifteen years, and has increased by a few thousand per year since then. The growth is due not to rising birth rates, but to immigrants from other former Soviet republics.
3. 1 Singapore dollar is approximately US80¢.
1. About US $40.
2. Her name is changed at her request.
1. The goal of not exceeding an increase of 2°C, used at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, has become an oft-repeated threshold figure. Leading climate scientists, however, such as NASA’s James Hansen, Stanford’s Ken Caldeira, and the University of Southampton’s Eelco Rohling, point to prehistoric high sea levels in times of increased CO2 and conclude that, given weather disruptions, flooding, and Arctic melting already occurring at 0.8°C, a 2°C increase will be disastrous. Yet with carbon emissions still inexorably rising, a growing consensus among scientists suggests that a 2.4°C increase is now unavoidable. The United Nations Environmental Programme currently projects a 3°C increase by 2050. And the World Bank now warns that unless we change our carbon-based behavior, fast, we’ll reach 4°C before the end of the century.
2. Worldwide, about half of grain production is used for animal feed.
3. Source: University of Massachusetts Extension Center for Agriculture. Beef industry estimates of just 4.6:1 conversion claim to take into account an animal’s weight before it enters the feedlot; estimates by vegetarian advocacy groups of up to 20:1 claim to calculate how much of a slaughtered carcass is actually edible beef.
4. The others are Denver, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Tijuana, and Mexicali—as well as dozens of smaller cities, such as Albuquerque and Tucson.
5. Founder Alan Guttmacher, 1898–1974, was an obstetrician-gynecologist who taught at the Johns Hopkins, Mount Sinai, and Albert Einstein medical schools. During the 1960s, he was president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
