Item Link: Access the Resource
Date of Publication: August 16
Year of Publication: 2023
Publication City: London, UK
Publisher: Planet: Critical
Author(s): Rachel Donald
The human population is a problem—tackling it through education isn’t.
Rachel Donald, author and host of Planet: Critical and its associated podcast, interviewed Population Media Center’s President and Founder, Bill Ryerson.
We need to slow our global fertility rate to 1.5 children per woman if we’re to lower our population to a sustainable level of around 3 billion. That decline is already happening in many post-industrial nations, to the chagrin and panic of their leaders.
However, many cultures around the world still prize large families. But in a world of increasingly scarce resources like water, limiting family sizes remains the main driver of some campaigners, including Bill Ryerson. Bill is an ecologist and founder of the Population Media Center, an initiative that creates mainstream entertainment in many nations around the world, pushing the needle on cultural practices to drive behavior change in population and even gender violence. PMC produces telenovelas and radionovelas which have seen fertility rates decline in nations they’ve been shown.
Watch the interview on YouTube or here:
The views and opinions expressed through the MAHB Website are those of the contributing authors and do not necessarily reflect an official position of the MAHB. The MAHB aims to share a range of perspectives and welcomes the discussions that they prompt.