—Systemic change begins with personal change—
Jane in an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Queensland
Growing up in regional Australia, Jane O’Sullivan became aware of the environmental strains caused by human activity, and the limits that the environment would place on the human enterprise. She gained her PhD in Agricultural Science at the University of Melbourne, and undertook postdoctoral research in the UK at the University of Durham and the John Innes Institute. In 1991, she joined a zoological expedition to Andean cloud forests and Amazon rainforests of Ecuador and Peru, witnessing the relentless encroachment of settlers into the wilderness.
Joining the University of Queensland in 1992, she led international collaborative research on tropical root crops, working with semi-subsistence farmers in the Pacific and South East Asia, who struggle to maintain soil fertility as land use intensifies. From 2009, she turned attention to the demographic pressures on food security, economic development and environmental sustainability. She has participated in a wide range of cross-disciplinary collaborations with colleagues in ecological economics, environmental philosophy, climate change responses and family planning promotion and implementation. She has represented Sustainable Population Australia at United Nations climate change conferences, assisting African colleagues to bring their perspectives to these meetings. She is an affiliate of The Overpopulation Project (University of Gothenburg, Sweden).
What happens when populations age? Can you envision a world with a sustainable population, well below Earth's capacity, therefore living resiliently in abundance per person? I can. Governments and media are petrified at populations shrinking and aging. It turns out they are motivated by reasons that sound plausible. Jane looked at the numbers and found the fears unfounded. She also found industries seeding and promoting the fears, making them scams. Allowing the scams to affect us exacerbates the risk of a collapse in Earth's ability to sustain life and society. She treats more unfounded fears about population size that lead people to baselessly fear what seems to me one of the top elements of retaining Earth's ability to sustain life---lowering our birth rate through the peaceful, voluntary, and fun methods that worked in Thailand, Costa Rica, and many other nations. Listen to Jane's conversation and read her paper to feel more confident in promoting smaller families. The evidence I see suggests Earth can support about two billion people living at Western European polluting levels, which means Americans will have to reduce consumption and every culture will have to reduce birth rates.
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