Earth, Population, and Zoonosis
COVID-19 is the latest of many zoonotic diseases that have reached epidemic or pandemic levels in recent decades, including SARS, Ebola, avian flu, and swine flu. Zoonoses are diseases that result from viral animal-to-human spillovers. These spillovers are predominately linked to human encroachment into animal habitats and ecosystem disruption through human activities and climate change. […]
Girls’ Education and Family Planning to Achieve Bodily Autonomy for All
We’re now a third of the way through 2021. We’re still in the midst of a global pandemic that has taken the lives of over 3 million people and has forever changed how many of us operate in the world. Although there is seemingly a light at the end of the tunnel with the distribution […]
Population Growth Around the World
Which Continent Has the Fastest Growing Population? This is a question we are often asked, so we’d like to dedicate an entire blog post to its answer. The reality is that, although the global fertility rate has declined to 2.4 children per woman (from 4.9 when we were founded in 1968), there is a wide, […]
Population Connection Member Profile: Eric Hirst
Eric Hirst has been a supporter of ZPG/Population Connection since 1979, and he’s also a member of our President’s Circle and ZPG Society. Eric has had an interesting life—and an especially peripatetic one. He lived in New York City, upstate New York, Alabama, Tennessee, and the Bay Area before finally landing in the Seattle area. […]
‘Under the Open Sky:’ Two Activists Aim to Reshape Nepal’s Youth Reproductive Health Landscape
At first glance, Sajja Singh and Riju Dhakal could be fellow students in your college Zoom seminar. You may not immediately suspect that they lead a nationwide youth empowerment and advocacy organization in Nepal, or that one of them is the first female president of the organization. Singh, the former Vice President of YUWA, and […]
Ten Population and Environment Connections
Human caused environmental changes, while felt everywhere, manifest differently by location. A forest you once explored on the periphery of New York State’s Adirondack Park may have large clearings from decreased fracking regulations—a relic from the Trump administration. You may have been ordered to evacuate your coastal home on the Gulf of Mexico in the […]
Amplifying Voices From the Global South
As a U.S.-based organization dedicated to stabilizing global population, we recognize our responsibility to amplify the voices of people from the Global South—people who live daily with the causes and consequences of rapid population growth. At the time of our founding as Zero Population Growth, or ZPG, more than 50 years ago, American women had, […]
Publication Notes: March 2021 Magazine Issue
The March 2021 issue of Population Connection magazine is live online today, and hard copies have already started arriving in mailboxes. This issue is a celebration of the change in presidential administration and the new reproductive health-supporting Congress and what this new representation in Washington, DC, means for the family planning programs that help women […]
Making Population Connections in Our Crowded, Hectic World
We don’t talk about population issues to a classroom of fifth-graders the same way we would at a retirement community—although our core population stabilization message is always there. Closing gaps between what we intend to say and what others may hear requires an understanding of what others bring to the table. It’s still common to […]
Don’t Let the “COVID-19 Baby Bust” Alarm You
Apparently, there’s a “COVID-19 Baby Bust” happening in the United States, and it’s dooming our country to economic challenges for years to come. Or at least that’s what some economists would have us believe. In the past week, news outlets from CBS to The New York Times to the Wall Street Journal have covered this […]
