Environmental journalist Fred Pearce, author of the new book Peoplequake, on why overconsumption is the key issue, the need for relaxed immigration laws, and why men should look after children

Matilda Lee: What spurred you to write a book on population?

Fred Pearce: We had huge population concerns during the 1960s and into the 70s, then people rather lost interest in it. Just in the last two or three years, I've noticed that people have been talking about it again in the context of climate change and new concerns about food security. I wanted to look at what was actually happening to the world's population and the relationship to resource use and environmental damage.

ML: Many respected environmentalists - from Lester Brown to Jonathon Porritt - believe we are headed for disaster by not supporting family planning in countries with high fertility rates and dire poverty. What do you make of this?

FP: Overpopulation is the wrong issue. Forty years ago, women were having 5 or 6 children each. There really was a population bomb going off. Actually, around the world today, women have diffused the population bomb. Women now have an average of 2.6 children globally and the replacement level [demographers' figure for the amount of offspring women must have to maintain the population] is 2.3 - so we are really very close to replacement level fertility rate. There are exceptions, but those rates are still coming down very fast in most of the world. I'm not sure how much more we could actually do, short of really unpleasant Draconian policies, to make that happen any faster.

People like Jonathon Porritt and David Attenborough say it is the number one issue - Lester Brown often says it, but has a more nuanced stance. Every time people say that, they are not talking about the real elephant in the living room, which is over consumption.

If we're talking about overconsumption, we're talking about what we're doing. If we're talking about overpopulation, we're somehow blaming the planetary predicament on poor families in India, or Africa, or parts of the Middle East. That really ain't fair.

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New America Media, News Feature, Valeria Fernández

PHOENIX, Ariz.— Miriam Mendiola-Martinez, an undocumented immigrant charged with using someone else’s identity to work, gave birth to a boy on Dec. 21 at Maricopa Medical Center. After her C-section, she was shackled for two days to her hospital bed. She was not allowed to nurse her baby. And when guards walked her out of the hospital in shackles, she had no idea what officials had done with her child.

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This is a text by Clandestina network on the pitfalls of the hotly debated citizenship and election rights immigration bill introduced by the Greek government.

The proposed legislation to grant citizenship to some second generation immigrants puts partially an end to their chronic status of being hostages in the country where they were born and have lived so far their lives . However, this bill, which is ostensibly introduced to correct at least partially an injustice, does hold many pitfalls:

1) Children’s “legalisation” depends on the “legality” of their parents. As has been repeatedly stressed, no sans papiers can benefit from the proposed naturalization process.

2) The proposed conditions for granting citizenship turn the latter into a “certificate of social conscience” [as the one issued by post-civil war police or army authorities certifying that its owner was not a communist – thereof employable in the public sector and entitled to various other rights]; those eligible and finally granted citizenship will be under the constant threat of having their citizenship removed; moreover, one to be eligible for the naturalisation process ”must have not been convicted to a prison sentence of at least one year for a period of ten years prior to the application, must have not been convicted of offences against the state, (…) of resistance to authority [for instance, resistance to arrest], of slander” as well as “of facilitating the transfer or the provision of shelter to illegal immigrants or of breaches of legislation concerning the settlement and movement of aliens in Greece.”

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from Denver ABC

List Of Deaths in ICE Detention (2003-present) pdf

Shame on the New York Times: The truth could have meant one less person would have been beaten, raped or murdered this year by US Border Patrol agents

By Brenda Norrell
Narcosphere
UPDATE: Ofelia Rivas response to article

SELLS, Ariz. -- Shame on the New York Times for failing to tell the real story of the Tohono O'odham border and the complicity between elected Tohono O'doham officials, tribal police and US Border Patrol agents. The truth could have meant that one less person would have been beaten, raped or murdered this year by US Border Patrol agents.

Today's article in the New York Times, "War Without Borders," is the typical mainstream article on the Arizona border, which supports more militarization and abuse at the border. News reporter Erik Echholm offers a superficial view of the situation, focusing on drug trafficking, rather than revealing the real story.
If the reporter had spent more time here, knew more Tohono O'odham, and listened more to the Tohono O'odham, instead of the profiteering politicians, the New York Times would have told a different story.

Ofelia Rivas, Tohono O'odham on the border, describes her encounter with the reporter and what he failed to include in the article.

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In 1996 the United States Congress called for the construction of “triple layered fencing” along the U.S.-Mexico border, beginning in the Pacific Ocean and extending 14 miles into California. This was to consist of parallel 10 to 15 foot high steel walls, with 50 feet of land in between graded and cleared of all vegetation, and the entire expanse lit by stadium floodlights. The Border Patrol also proposed filling in canyons and scalping mountains to give the new walls and road a level path. The California Coastal Commission determined in 2004 that these initial border walls would violate the Coastal Zone Management Act. Of particular concern was the damage that walls would do to the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve, the largest of the remaining California salt marshes, which harbors many endangered plant and animal species. The Sierra Club, Audubon Society, and other environmental groups also challenged the border wall in court. Construction came to a halt.

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We couldn't agree with Sal Reza more when he says, "There was provocation by some groups who came here for their own purpose to disrupt a peaceful march." We know he isn't talking about those of us in the Diné, O'odham, anarchist/anti-authoritarian bloc. Not only have we patiently marched in the marches and held the signs for years now, but how in the world could O'odham peoples, native to this land, in any way be considered outsiders? Such an assertion is ridiculous on its face. Indeed, as one of our O'odham comrades from the Diné, O'odham, anarchist/anti-authoritarian bloc sang from the main stage before the march, flanked by two other members of the DO@ bloc, no one seemed eager to denounce them outsiders. Naturally, then, we reject this allegation.

So, who is the outside faction Sal's talking about? In our opinion it must be the Phoenix Police. Unprovoked, a female officer on horseback (who later covered her name on her uniform) charged her horse headlong into the march, colliding with several people and in the process almost running over at least one child in a stroller. After attacking families and protesters, she then whipped out her pepper spray and let loose on the whole crowd, who fled the noxious spew. In the process, children were blasted with pepper spray.

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from Zmag
By Joseph Nevins

In a November 13 speech to the Center for American Progress in Washington, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano made clear that President Obama's administration intends to move forward soon on legislation that would bring about "an immigration system that works." The administration, she promised, "will pursue reforms" true to an American identity as "both a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws." In this way, Napolitano asserted, Congress and the White House would avoid the pitfalls of the "one-sided" reforms of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. "The enforcement part of the equation was promised," she said, referring to portrayals of the 1986 legislation by its proponents, "but it didn't materialize."[1]

Napolitano's announcement seems to have countered much of the conventional wisdom, and even the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who let it be known that immigration reform—what he has called the "third rail" of American politics—would be off the table during Obama's first four years. According to this view, the administration would likely wait at least until after the midterm elections, if not until a second Obama term, before moving on the matter for fear that the political fallout would hurt the electoral prospects of Democrats.

The administration's apparent new willingness to take on immigration reform might seem like a ray of light in an increasingly bleak landscape for immigrants, especially of the unauthorized variety. But at a time of a deep economic downturn, and with anti-immigrant sentiment strongly in the air, the challenges are daunting, to say the least, in terms of Congress passing legislation aimed at easing the repressive laws and exclusion endured by immigrants.

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from http://blog.amnestyusa.org

This past weekend, the New York Times reported on the widespread and coordinated cover up of deaths in immigration detention. One such case, highlighted in our 2009 report on immigration detention, Jailed Without Justice, involved Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who had lived in the US for ten years when he was detained. Newly available video shows him begging for help while handcuffed on the floor in solitary confinement. After four months in a coma, he died in detention.

The deliberate and coordinated dehumanization of the 107 people known to have died in immigration detention is shocking and shameful. For the last seven years Amnesty has monitored, investigated and advocated on the mistreatment of immigrants in detention, some of the core problems seemed to stem from incompetence and mismanagement. But it seems clear now that officials involved in immigration detention were regrettably quite competent at re-framing deaths due to neglect, and that detention facilities were in fact well coordinated in the cover up of ill-treatment and disregard.

from Censored News
By Brenda Norrell
Narcosphere

The US made new threats about the condemnation and seizure of Lipan Apache lands in Texas for the US/Mexico border wall, as the abuses of Indigenous Peoples in the borderzone continues unabated. President Obama continues the genocidal borderland policies of the Bush administration.

The Lipan Apache announcement came this week at the same time that a US Border Agent shot and killed a migrant throwing rocks east of Douglas, Arizona. The practice of US Border Agents murdering rock throwers mirrors the genocidal practices of Israeli soldiers shooting rock throwers, including children, at the border of Palestine.

The Lipan Apache in Texas have been targeted for the seizure of their land, while wealthy white land owners in the Texas borderlands benefit from US white supremacist policy.

The Lipan Apache said, "Indigenous peoples along the Texas-Mexico border — more than many other impacted groups — are burdened in multiple ways and disproportionately on all border wall construction projects because their communities have already been consistently targeted for State violence, militarization, repression and dispossession as a matter of the normative policies of the neo-liberal and settler State.