BRYAN WELCH

We in the developed world consume far more than we need. We are fat, we drive big cars, we throw away whole households of valuable goods because we’re spoiled and we can afford to buy something new rather than preserving or repairing what we have. Our bad habits damage our environment.

But conservation is not going to save our habitat. Global warming, deforestation, desertification and pollution are all products of overpopulation. The poorest people don’t have the option of leaving the nearby forest standing, or keeping their goats off of an overgrazed pasture. For the world’s poorest people, every scrap of land is part of a thin barrier between life and death. They must use every resource available to keep themselves and their families alive. That’s the grim reality at the heart of human population growth. At some point we all end up there, struggling to sustain our lives regardless of the consequences for our community or our habitat.

It’s easy to get excited about the potential of solar and wind power. For one thing, generating electricity from the sun and wind is a great alternative to burning fossil fuels because it does not produce carbon dioxide emissions or other air pollutants. But did you know these renewable technologies can help fight poverty, too?

That’s because solar panels and wind turbines can bring power to parts of the world where people don’t have electricity. In fact, an estimated 1.6 billion people — a quarter of the world’s population — do not have electricity at home, according to the Energy for Development report from REN21 (the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21^st Century). Installing small-scale solar panels and wind turbines can be an especially effective way to bring electricity to these areas, because it doesn’t require the enormous investment of, say, building a coal-fired electric plant and transmission lines.

The REN21 report mentioned above was published by the Worldwatch Institute, and it’s full of good information on renewable energy and poverty. You also can find more information on this subject on the Worldwatch Web site. For example, here’s one interesting article about a successful pilot project in rural India. The project brought solar power to 100,000 people who previously did not have reliable electricity. By providing electricity for lighting it reduced local reliance on kerosene, a fuel that was often unavailable or unaffordable — and that can cause serious problems with indoor air pollution.

Do you know of other projects where renewable energy is being used to alleviate poverty? You can share your thoughts by posting them in the comments field below.

This year, join the fight to help alleviate world hunger. Currently, 923 million people around the world are starving. World Food Day, held every year on October 16, is an international event put on to acknowledge the founding of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and promote ways to diminish hunger around the world. All planned events bring people together to raise awareness and funds.

Many events will be held in the United States and around the world. Check the World Food Day Web site to see if there is an event in your area. Anyone can host their own gathering, so if you’re interested, get tips here. It can be as simple as meeting with a small group and brainstorming ways to get involved in your own community.

To learn more, watch the video promo below and see how global warming contributes to this ongoing crisis.

This blog has been written, in part, in response to Blog Action Day 2008. This year thousands of bloggers will unite to discuss poverty and raise awareness.

Right now, over 200 million children work long hours in poor conditions to feed themselves and/or their families. Almost 75 percent of those children are working in the worst forms of child labor — trafficking, armed conflict, slavery, prostitution and hazardous work. Poverty is the sole cause of this type of exploitation because poor families have no other choice if they want to survive.

In 1999, the International Labour Organization’s Convention 182 set a goal to set international legal standards to protect all children from the worst forms of child labor by 2016. As of April 2007, 163 ILO member countries ratified the convention, agreeing to provide and enforce these legal standards. Unfortunately, 14 ILO member countries —Afghanistan, Burma, Cuba, Eritrea, Guinea-Buissau, Haiti, India, Kiribati (Republic of), Sierra Leone, Soloman Islands, Somalia, Timor-Leste, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan —have still not ratified it. Because of these countries’ refusal to participate, the ILO published a report last year saying that the international 2016 goal will not be achieved.

While the child labor movement has come a long way, there is still a lot to be done, especially in bringing about awareness of the issue. The Tides Center’s project, Child Labor and the Global Village: Photography for Social Change, is doing just that.

A team of 11 photographers are photographing child workers around the globe. Through their photos, they hope to illustrate the conditions and raise awareness of the problem to people that can do something about it: politicians, business people and consumers. The photos from the project are part of an on-going exhibit, traveling across the world from the U.S. congress to Bangladesh. You can see some of the photos here, or you go visit one of their exhibitions, listed here. Hopefully it will encourage you to join the cause and help give those 200 million children a chance at having a childhood.

If you’re interested in joining the cause, check out the Global March Against Child Labour to see how you can help.

BRYAN WELCH

At the beginning the 19^th century during the rosy dawn hours of the Industrial Revolution the world’s human population finally surpassed 1 billion individuals. [1] After about 200,000 years of evolution our extraordinary intellect and extreme mobility had brought us that far. We had, by then, colonized every continent except Antarctica. Civilized cultures were generally aware of the world as a finite sphere, 70 percent of it covered in water. We lived everywhere, from the sweltering tropics to the icy arctic wastelands.

We dominated everything we surveyed, but we couldn’t survey the microscopic yet, at least not very effectively. The germs still pretty much had their way with us. They limited human population growth. Average Europeans were lucky to live to 40 years of age. Almost a third of babies born in Europe’s cities died before their third birthdays, mostly due to diseases borne by microbes. People flocked to the cities where they found new affluence in factories and textile mills. The crowding in city tenements gave the pathogens an ideal habitat and accelerated the spread of disease.

Louis Pasteur was born in 1822[2] and soon began whipping the germs into shape.  With an uncanny instinct for the nature of disease, Pasteur revolutionized our understanding of the world and helped us train new weapons on the microbes that made us sick. Pasteur gave us the specific tools to fight cholera, anthrax and rabies, but more importantly he revolutionized our knowledge of microbes and their effect on our lives – both good and bad. We had been drinking wine for thousands of years but we didn’t know that bacteria caused fermentation. Pasteur identified disease-causing germs and invented tools for fighting them. Soon, people were living longer. More babies survived. Modern medicine was born, and human population growth accelerated.

By 1900 there were more than 1.6 billion of us, up 60 percent in one century. That population doubled in about 60 years, then doubled again in half the time. I was born into a worldwide human population of about 3 billion people. Based on current United Nations projections and my expected lifespan, there will probably be about 9 billion people on earth when I die.

So far we’ve done a remarkably good job of feeding all these new people. When you think about it, it’s almost miraculous that we’ve kept up with our own expansion. Shortly before Louis Pasteur was born, the English philosopher Thomas Robert Malthus made himself one of the world’s most famous thinkers by suggesting that unless we did something about population growth, we could never ease the burden of poverty. His basic thesis was that because our population expanded geometrically while food production expanded arithmetically, and because birth rates increase with prosperity, we would never be able to create consistent surpluses in food supply.

The poor, as Jesus of Nazareth said, would “always be with us.”[3]