February 8, 2001 | Read Time: 1 minute
People in the Balance: Population and Natural Resources at the Turn of the Millennium, by Robert Engelman, et al., discusses the connections between population growth, environmental degradation, and poverty. Family planning, the authors say, has proved to be a “success story for the environment.” The current trend of slower population growth, Mr. Engelman and his colleagues write, is the “one bright spot in an often-gloomy picture of increasing natural-resource scarcity.” The authors argue, however, that many concerns related to population still plague the six natural resources that were the focus of this study–fresh water, cropland, fisheries, forests, clean air, and biological diversity. An urgent need exists, they explain, to “expand access to family planning and related health services” both in the United States and in developing countries. Among the population-related environmental concerns that the authors list are rising rates of fossil-fuel consumption and the fact that one-fifth of the earth’s six billion people inhabit a tiny 12 percent of its land mass. This report is available free online at http://www.popact.org/balance/index.htm
Publisher: Population Action International, 1300 19th Street, N.W., Second Floor, Washington, D.C. 20036; (202) 557-3400; fax (202) 728-4177; pai@popact.org; http://www.popact.org; 31 pages; free.
