THE CROWDED PLANET ZERO POPULATION GROWTH OF GREATER BOSTON Volume 10, Issue 5 September/October 2000

Table Of Contents

Next Meeting—Barbecue and Potluck Brunch

The meeting will be at the home of Lee Strauss, 6 Ship’s Bell Road, Gloucester, MA 01930, telephone 978-281-6138.

At this meeting, we will be laying the groundwork for the coming year’s activities. We hope to see you all there. And don't hesitate to invite a friend or two.

The Vatican's UN Status Challenged

A special delegation to the Vatican, the Holy See, holds a position in the United Nations that is more powerful than any other non-governmental organization (NGO), enjoying the same status as politically neutral Switzerland. The Holy See claims to be the representative of "the entire people of God", and promotes its agendas by threatening to "pull out" of any of the 300,000 health care facilities it owns worldwide, if the UN should attempt to force any of those facilities to provide abortion services or contraception services. This threat creates a hostage situation for poorer countries that are reliant on the church for poverty relief and basic health care. The See Change Campaign was launched to challenge the Vatican's power.

Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice asks, "Why should an entity that is in essence 100 square acres of office space and tourist attractions in the middle of Rome, with a citizenry that excludes women and children, have a place at the table where governments set policies? If the Vatican is a state, then EuroDisney deserves a place on the Security Council."

This spring, the Churches' opposition prevented UN peacekeepers from distributing RU 486 to rape victims in Kosovo.

Source: "Giving the Vatican the Boot", Ms. Magazine, October/November 1999, Author: Laura Flanders, Faculty Evaluator: Laurel Holmstrom, Student Researchers: Corey Hale & Katie Anderson.

For more info: the See Change Campaign, and "The Vatican's Role in the World Population Crisis: the untold story" from the Center for Research on Population and Security.

Smart Kids Wait

Two studies, one conducted at McGill University in Montreal and the other at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, found that intelligent adolescents defer initiating all kinds of sexual activity with a partner. Smart kids even delay such apparently innocent activities as kissing. The first study looked at 200 girls and 100 boys in grades 7 and 8 from a single North Carolina school district. The second study surveyed 12,000 teens in middle and high school nationwide.

Intelligence tests were administered to the children in both studies, as well as questionnaires about the children's histories of sexual experiences. The research revealed that among children under age 15, the most intelligent children tended to delay their first sexual experiences. Among those older than 15, both the least intelligent and the most intelligent children tended to postpone their first sexual contacts with partners. The delays included all kinds of sexual activity, including hand-holding, kissing, and other kinds of sexual touching.

The researchers noted that the study showed that the intelligent teens expressed as much interest in sex as their less-intelligent counterparts. The intelligent children expected to delay sexual gratification in favor of achieving goals like completing their educations.

Based on information in: Journal of Adolescent Health, March 2000. Reprinted without permission from Spectrum Magazine. Journal of Adolescent Health, Volume 26, Number 3, March 2000, Pages 213 – 225: Smart teens don't have sex (or kiss much either), Halpern, et al.

Book Review

By Timothy P. Duane. University of California Press, 595 pages; $50.

The rural west is at a crossroads, and the Sierra Nevada is at the center of this social and economic change. The Sierra Nevada landscape has always been valued for its bounty of natural resource commodities, but new residents and an ever-growing flood of tourists to the area have transformed the relationship between the region's nature and its culture. In an engaging narrative that melds the personal with the professional, Timothy P. Duane—who grew up in the area—documents the impact of rapid population growth on the culture, economy, and ecology of the Sierra Nevada since the late 1960s. He also recommends innovative policies for mitigating the negative effects of future population growth in this spectacular but threatened region, as well as throughout the rural west.

Today, the primary social and economic values of the Sierra Nevada landscape are in the amenities and ecological services provided by its wildlands and functioning ecosystems. Duane shows how further unfettered population growth threatens the very values which have made the Sierra Nevada a desirable place to live and work. A new approach to land use planning, resource management, and local economic development—one that recognizes the emerging values of the landscape—is necessary in order to achieve sustainable development, Duane claims. Weaving personal experience with outstanding scholarship, he shows how such an approach must explicitly recognize the importance of values and the application of an environmental land ethic to future development in the area.

This review is from the University of California Press; it is also used by Amazon.com.

Population Crossword

The first person to send us a correct solution (by snail mail, email or fax) wins a free one-year membership in ZPG/Boston. Of course, your membership includes a subscription to this newsletter.

If you prefer, you can also work this crossword online, at our website (see the masthead for the Internet address).

 

ACROSS 1 Population Research Center (abbr.) 4 Let go of 8 Large intestinal pouches 12 Slovenly sort 13 British nobleman 14 Arboreal anthropoid (abbr.) 16 Small boys 17 Type size 18 Rapidly growing Asian nation 19 Maybe a book by Bill McKibben? 20 Indian parents want one 21 Shrinking pop. org.? 23 Prank prone pixie 24 Control birth badly 26 Incubator? 28 Births do this to population 30 Biological pouch 32 Dull pain 36 Glimpse 39 Undesirable rain type 41 Third World financial status 42 High mountain

43 Fertilizer? 45 Kenobi, to friends 46 Widespread 48 Chilean coin 49 On top of 50 Adult male deer 51 Horse cousin 52 Birding grp. with pop. platform 54 Odious global rule 56 Regarding our living Earth 60 Number-one nutrient 63 Stereotypical paternal present 65 Cause population decrease 67 Unofficial env. grp. 68 A two-child average would be 70 Harvest 72 Norse god of wisdom and war 73 Population ___ Center 74 ___ Liberation Front 75 Very good 76 Grassy soils 77 Force out 78 British cigarette

DOWN 1 Prescription emergency contraceptive pill 2 Cowboy show 3 Broadcast TV network 4 ___ Provera 5 ___ rain; symptom of overpopulation 6 Grampus 7 Families need one 8 Middle Africa's largest country 9 Poet's before 10 Headland 11 Obsessive 12 Ancient Greek portico 15 Liberating pop. org. 20 Gonorrhea, e.g. 22 Population Media Center, for short 26 Beam of light 27 Geographic diagram 29 Male parent 30 Take ____ 31 Birth does this to population 33 Member-run org. 34 Vagrant

35 ___ Brockovich 36 Hearing organ 37 Cut lengthwise 38 PP in US 40 Pop. stabilization org. in CA 44 Hither and ____ 47 New life cell 49 Third most populous nation 51 Reproductive choice org. 53 Population growth rate factor 55 Collection of items in 39 Down 57 Second most populous nation 58 First-world demographic trend 59 Growth slowing offspring option 60 Stop at two 61 Thirteenth day, usually 62 Make over 64 Therefore 65 Speakers' platform 66 Ehrlich's famous equation 69 Assist 71 ___ de cologne 72 Not operating

PETNet Update

Lee: As you know, one of the main goals of this column is to provide a morale boost for all of our readers who may be already engaged or thinking of engaging in projects like yours. So far as I have been able to tell, ZPG's Population Education Training network can stand as a wonderful inspiration to anyone trying to figure out ways of effectively linking local and global concerns. It lets them know that there are really other people out there experiencing, learning, and improving. I've been reading about the history of the program, and was surprised to find out that it's been going on for so long.

Pam: Yes, we started curriculum development in 1975. At first the materials were developed by consultants living in various places around the country. But the teaching training component as it is now really got off the ground when we started getting volunteer trainers in the field. The reason we are always trying to bring new people into the network is that we know, as with any volunteer group, people burn out after a while. So you're always going to have some ebbs and flows.

Lee: And I suppose it works both ways. On one hand there is no substitute for going in and working on it day after day, but after a while that day-after-day stuff does tend to burn people out.

Pam: Right.

Lee: Yes. So that's a challenge.

Pam: What I find is that there are a lot of people who have been ZPG members for many years who don't know what the education program is all about, or how we approach the issue a little bit differently with teachers than we do with the general public. We are pretty sensitive to what's in the curriculum, to be non-advocacy in nature because you have to be a little more careful with schools. By the same token, the beginning of getting people to become active is to understand the issue.

Lee: The training this past May was a pilot program. It was the first time you have held a Leadership Conference outside of Washington. Can we talk a little bit about how you envision this program working in the future? Those of us from the Boston area who you trained that day are still a bit shy, and thought we might team up and perhaps go out once or twice next year and get our feet wet. On another level, I could go to the schools I've been working with in my area and sit down more informally with a social studies or science teacher, and ask them, "Do you want all or part of this kind of an activity program, and what looks good to you?" But in terms of building PET teams that can then turn around and build, say, second-echelon teams in the regions, creating sort of a domino effect…is that at all a part of your thinking yet?

Pam: Well, one reason we decided to have the first training in the Boston area is that there are so many colleges and universities there that prepare future teachers. It would nice if we, as trainers, were asked to go to, say, Boston University, and then go there several times and work with the professors. We eventually want faculty members to not even have us come in, or a volunteer come in, but rather have the PETNet activities become a part of their own teaching repertoire. In that sense, there would be a sort of domino effect. Even if those professors don't run any trainings off their own campus, they still might reach a hundred or more future teachers every year.

The training in Needham this May was a somewhat unusual event because many of the participants had not been in the PETNet or even expressed a prior interest to join. When we do this event in Washington each year, it is with people who have already joined, but just haven't been trained yet. Whenever anyone of us presents a workshop, we do invite the new people to be trainers. So that's one thing we expect from our new trainees: when they go out and make these presentations they know that at the end of it they will be giving the same kind of pitch that they themselves were given. After that they can depend on us to back them up and provide any needed extra impetus.

Lee: So making a connection with a good ed school would always be a coup for the program; that way you are teaching the teachers of teachers.

Pam: Right. Another good example would be an organization like Massachusetts Audubon, which I've heard reaches something like 25% of the students in your state with their curricula. If we could get them to work a bit with us, that could be very beneficial.

Lee: One of the trainees at Needham was a member of that chapter, and as it happens, she's one of those five or six people I mentioned that may pair up as area trainers for you next year.

Pam: Yes. Because even if in their presentations they start making the connection of how population affects biodiversity, whether it's in Massachusetts, nationally, or worldwide, and if they can incorporate some population issues into what they do, then we would be making headway.

Lee: Yes. You know, we were all still sitting there towards the end of the training—Linda from Mass Audubon, Henry from the Sierra Club, myself and several others—looking at one another, thinking pretty much the same thought: that this wouldn't be something we would jump at doing all alone, at least not the first time, but if we could just pair up, then maybe… (laughs)

Pam: Sure. And it depends on the kind of event, too. Some of the conferences we go to might only give you 45 minutes or so, and that's not a lot of time.

Lee: So you really have to pick your activity.

Pam: And that's the kind of thing where, sure, two people could do it, but even if one person did it, you might only get to do a few activities anyway.

Lee: You know, some of those activities are so powerful, that you could just do two or three. Like "Food for Thought," in which students actually role-play the populations of the major regions of the world.

Pam: Yes. When we do that with students, it often takes a whole class period. We do a shortened version with teachers to give them the idea, but with the kids, we really want to spend time on the discussion and the debriefing and the figuring out.

Lee: "Take A Stand," in which the students react to a series of statements by either agreeing or disagreeing and then defend their positions, was another one that really stood out for me. I thought that one could be so wonderfully helpful as long as it could be couched in a context of peace and cooperation. So do you think that this would be a fair approach, particularly for those of us volunteers who are just starting out? That we pick the exercises that we are most comfortable with, and the teachers or heads we first contact are those we are most comfortable with as well—and begin with those.

Pam: I think that's the smart approach.

Lee: From there, it is really a kind of smorgasbord, in a way, looking at the various activities.

Pam: What may also happen is that, for instance, you might get a call from Anne Roughton, informing you that a professor from such and such a school that would like a presentation on a particular day. That may also be something you could do in a team. But she is going to be on the lookout for things up in your area, because we do a couple of mailings a year, usually right before each semester, to let these faculty members know that we can provide them with this service. Then they get back to us, and we try to match up the trainer to the event.

Lee: Yes. During our training in Needham, Anne, Nick and Tracy were very good at highlighting to us some of the key general points for us to keep in mind when doing our own trainings: the audience participation, the consensus-building, and the balancing of activities between sedentary and movement. Are there any other main guidelines you consider central to a successful training program? What over the years have proved the most effective strategies or approaches?

Pam: Well, one of the things that's important is that we are not swimming against the tide. We are constantly evaluating, what are the curriculum standards, what are teachers being told they have to teach? And showing them how our curricula fit with what they already need to teach. What we used to hear so often from teachers was, "Oh, I have so much I'm required to do, I can't add an extra thing." It was important to show them that this isn't extra. If you're teaching life science, if you're teaching geography, these issues are really already an integral part of the subject matter. Especially since we are doing a lot with future teachers in these pre-service workshops, it's very important for them when they are putting together their portfolios to be able to say, "Okay, this is something I can use right away." So showing them how it fits into what they need to do is very crucial. And also, the fact that these activities don't require a lot of expense on their part. Worries about costs were another obstacle that we would often encounter.

Lee: Schools that wish to participate in a full-fledged training are asked to pay $200. At what point do they actually have to pay that? For example, if I go to a school and sit down with a teacher going over some of the activities for a couple of hours, then we try one or two of them out with the students—that's all free so far, right?

Pam: Right. And generally speaking, we are pretty flexible on this point. Some school districts have a budget for inservice training, and we don't feel badly asking for it because it is just as if they'd paid any consultant to come in and do a training. And for such events and for summer institutes, the schools usually don't balk at paying. But for university professors, the suggestion is made that unless they have a budget for such things—and usually they don't—the training costs will be covered by our foundation support, and ZPG members. Most of the workshop sponsors pay little or nothing. It really just depends on their circumstances.

Lee: So it sounds like, that short of our connection with prospective schools being totally smooth sailing, we should send you a cogent, short write-up on where they are coming from, what their teaching constraints are, and what the format is within which such a training would have to take place. Then you would be able to give us some advice as to how to take the next step.

Pam: Yes.

Lee: Are there more regional trainings like the one in Needham coming up?

Pam: Yes. The next one is in North Carolina, and then we plan to do trainings in the Chicago area and in California. We have a lot of requests. A huge percentage of our ZPG membership is on the West Coast.

Lee: It sounds like you are doing a lot.

Pam: One of the challenges for the future is to really diversify our outreach, to try to find more ways to reach teachers who don't usually get these professional development opportunities.

Lee: How does school participation in PETNet divide up among age levels?

Pam: Probably more than half of the university requests we get are for elementary education methods classes. Those are a challenge because people going into elementary ed tend to have a real love of kids, but don't necessarily know their subject matter very well at all. And they are being asked to teach everything, all subjects. So outreach to them is akin to our campus outreach to 19 and 20 year old students, in that they are learning about population issues for the first time, and just letting that sink in a little bit. Whereas, students going into secondary education tend to specialize. They have already decided they are going to be, say, science or social studies teachers, and they teach because they are really interested in the content. And they usually already know a little something about what population dynamics are about, so you don't have to start from scratch with them.

Teachers of middle and secondary-level science use our material more than any other group, with social studies a close second. Taking a snapshot from the people who attended the workshops last year, about 30% of those who were current teachers, not future teachers, were elementary ed and another 27-28% were middle, and then another 25% were secondary. That leaves a relatively small percent for those who teach this on a college level, about 3%. The professors who invite us to come and work with their students, they are in the workshop as well. But the people we're addressing, most of them are not going on to teach at the college level; they are going to teach K-12.

Lee: Well I've just started thinking about this, but it seems to me it's much better to catch kids before they go off to college. Because many of them tend to get more progressive in their thinking in college, only to lose a lot of it when they graduate, at which point they sort of come back to where they were before. And if they had this information integrated into their studies back in grade school, they may be more likely to keep it.

Pam: Right. About 70% of the pre-service workshops we did were for elementary ed, so two-thirds of the participants—university students preparing to teach—were going into K-6.

Lee: Would you like to get more representation at the university level?

Pam: It's interesting. I think there are a several different kinds of courses where some of our methods might be useful for teaching about population issues. But even in the AP (advanced placement) community—high school classes which are supposed to be taught on the college level—they will say, "We only do lecture-style teaching, we don't do hands-on." They are just learning the statistics they need to pass that test and so forth.

Lee: That makes a lot of sense. You are getting right into cultural bias there. Sure. "We're brains."

Pam: Yes, so that's some of the feedback I get.

Lee: Too bad Margaret Mead isn't still alive.

Pam: Right. It's frustrating for us. I think there are a lot of innovative people in higher ed who say, "My students enjoy and learn from hands-on just as much as the younger students." But a lot of them, you know, are used to standing at their podium and having their overheads and so forth.

Lee: Education from the neck up.

Pam: In any case, while the private colleges and universities still give students a very good education, it is the big state universities we focus on the most at this level. Because teacher education is usually one of the smaller departments at private schools. Most of the new teachers in any state in this country are coming out of the state universities. We go to Indiana University every semester. Usually it's a staff person because we have to spend three or four days, and we probably work with 400 students who are just entering their student teaching rotation. So when we do get asked to go some of the smaller schools, it's fine, but we may only have a class of nine or ten people.

Lee: Just the fact that the PETNet is here and doing so well is the main thing. And I think you're so right in that you have to start from where people are, whether it be teachers or anybody else. But beyond that, in terms of ongoing projects that link the global and the local, can you give our readers any other general tips on what makes a successful project?

Pam: Well, I think being realistic about what can be accomplished and seeing that for what it is. For example, I get a lot out of the anecdotes they tell me about how they use our video, or how they use an activity like Food For Thought or Take A Stand. I realize that teachers can't spend three weeks on population in their curricula. But if they use even one or two teaching tools year after year that they know are very memorable, and that get the students talking… We will do college fairs here in the Washington area, and sometimes college students come up to us and say, "Oh, I remember that video; I saw it as a high-school student." Well, if they are remembering it several years later, then we've done a good job. So if you can present teachers with a whole array of things to do, and they pick just one or two, that's fine, that's more than they had before. And teachers will pick items that fit their teaching style and what they think their students can absorb.

Lee: That's so great, Pam. Thank you very much for doing this interview with us. I appreciate it a lot.

Pam: Thank you. I look forward to talking with you again!

Pam Wasserman has been ZPG's Director of Education since 1990 and on staff since 1988. She has co-authored and edited all of ZPG's curriculum guides for K-12 and has facilitated hundreds of teacher training workshops. Prior to joining ZPG's staff, Pam was a fellow at Population Institute. She is a new mom to Sam (9 months old) and lives in Silver Spring, MD.

Testimonials

Mark Demoranville
 

I really loved the training, but I can't say I had as visceral a reaction to it as Lee Strauss did. I get frustrated with the population thing, because it seems so obvious to me. Do I really need to teach it? How about just looking around? And yet, I'm amazed at people's ignorance. I tabled at a local Earth Day celebration and a guy came up to me, having seen a 6 billion poster and asked if that was the population of our country. I've spoken to so many people who have no idea what the population of the world is.

Being a former high school teacher I appreciated the ZPG training, because almost every activity required some kind of involvement from students. In Crowding Can Be Seedy, we had to get up out of our seats to simulate plants in a garden. When the garden got too crowded we could see for ourselves that our health was in peril due to lack of light. There were too many of us fighting for limited resources.

Food for Thought is a simple activity that educates participants on population and brings up some complex issues. Again ZPG did a great job of creating an activity that is engaging and thoughtful. Instead of being lectured to, students got up and stood in continents that were outlined on the floor. In the end, matches and chocolates were used to show energy consumption and wealth. Even as adults and teachers ourselves, it was interesting to see the surprise on people's faces as they learned population doubling times for different areas of the world.

I hope I get to do one of these training sessions soon. It will be fun.

Martine Larocque Gulick

The Cougar Hunt

In May over 30 people from around New England gathered at the Sheraton Hotel in Needham for the first regional training of ZPG’s PETNet program. The program’s goal is to show teachers how to integrate population issues into their curricula. Activities in science, social studies, and mathematics classes help students gain a knowledge and understanding of these issues.

Three very capable and articulate ZPG staffers ran the daylong training. It consisted of a wide variety of activities and mini-lectures, many of which utilized excellent multimedia aids.

An overview of the PETNET program, as well as a brief discussion of some of the specific activities we learned that day, can be found in the PETNET Update article on page 4 of this issue. All those interested in learning more about it are encouraged to contact Pam Wasserman or Anne Roughton at ZPG headquarters in Washington.

Something happened to me during one of the activities, however, that I thought worthy of mention, insofar as it underscores an issue close to my heart. I’ve already mentioned it in passing in a previous newsletter, and for me it still remains central to the quest for effective social change.

One of the activities we learned that day is called the Cougar Hunt. In it, the students (in this case us) played wild animals looking for food during the winter. Food was represented by little paper cups with the letters S, R, P, B, and D (for squirrel, rabbit, porcupine, beaver, and deer) written on them. These cups were placed at random about the room and hallway outside. Participants may only collect one cup per trip from one’s chair. Each cup is valued at 2, 3, 5, 10, or 25 food points, depending on the animal. Obviously, there are a limited number of cups to be collected, and only those “cougars” piling up 50 or more points—or 100 in the case of the mother cougar with two babies to feed as well—can be considered to have survived the winter.

The exercise lasted about 15 minutes. During that time we were all rushing madly about, collecting cups as though engaged in some highly compressed Easter egg hunt. Afterwards, we counted up our cup points. To no one’s great surprise, only a few of us “survived”. After all, most of those cups had been “squirrels”—worth only two points.

I, however, considered myself lucky to have racked up an amazing 37 points. During the next part of the exercise, the program coordinator was tallying up each of our respective hunt totals on the blackboard. As she did so, I was sitting there gloating: “Ha ha ha, maybe I didn’t survive the winter, but at least I did better than that poor cougar sitting next to me who only got 10 points, or the one across the room with 18.” It was then that I realized that, even though the activity had already been over for about five minutes, I was still in the thrall of an intense competitive mindset it had stimulated in me.

Remember, folks, we’d all been there for hours now being shown just how important rational and cooperative ecologically minded behavior was to our current survival upon the planet. But it only took a few minutes for me to forget all that and revert to an utterly primitive point of view. Is it just me? I don’t think so, but I’d like to hear from other participants. How were you feeling at that point? Because it seems to me that, as important as its ecological ramifications are—that we must all understand that our planet’s resources are limited vis-a-vis population—this exercise contains another important lesson. We must also become more aware of the deep-seated psychological responses that tend to pull us back into the same old behaviors, often despite our very best conscious intentions to the contrary.

Clearly we will not be able to change these responses overnight. They have been thousands of years in the making. Nevertheless, as human beings we should expect ourselves to be something more than just cougars. In fact, we very much need to be, if we are going to learn how to manage our ecology effectively and beneficially. This is our great challenge, it seems to me. Otherwise, no matter how sophisticated we pretend to be, we are just crunching the numbers and going through the motions. We must learn better tools of psychological self-awareness even as we’re learning better tools for practical environmental self-help. I would welcome any further opinions or ideas concerning this question from the readers of this column.

This one caveat aside, I have only good things to say about the PETNet training program. Congratulations to ZPG for a job well done, and I wish you only continued success in your efforts to train teachers across the country in population issues.

PETNet Reflections: Why Teach the Children?

Ellie captured the deer on her first trip out from her den.  Needing no more food for the winter, she set about helping a blind coyote gather food for himself.  “Why would I keep hunting for myself when I have what I need?” she asked.  In the discussions that followed, students didn’t understand why humans keep on wanting and consuming more, when the rest of the animal population seems to know when it has enough.  These savvy, suburban 10-year-olds were asking questions that should make us adults sit up and take notice.  They truly are our hope for the future, which is why the PETNet is so vital today!

Polly Vanasse
Concord, MA

Anti-family Planning Votes Lead to Abortions

Abortions are deplorable. In the name of reducing the number of abortions, Rep. Charles Taylor and many other Republicans have repeatedly voted against supporting family planning services both in the U.S. and overseas (voting records at www.zpg.org).

No matter what the excuse, a vote against family planning services is a vote to maintain the ignorance of (mostly) women who would otherwise use those services. This ignorance causes hundreds of thousands of unnecessary unplanned pregnancies, many of which end in abortion, some with the hideous "coat hanger" technique. Women with no access to family planning services are seven times more likely to resort to abortion than women with access to these services.

A vote against family planning services has little effect on promiscuity, which is much more influenced by advertisers' use of sex to sell everything from apples to zippers. Family planning services simply reduce the tragedy that results from this advertising, particularly the individual and societal tragedy that results from teen pregnancy (over 900,000 per year in the U.S.).

Rep. Taylor's votes against family planning services cause more abortions, more unwanted children, more teen pregnancies, and more children raising children.

This has got to stop.

Steve Schuck
Candler, North Carolina