Planning for Depopulation

From Stephanie Feldstein, Population and Sustainability Program Director

The theme of this year’s World Population Day, on July 11, was empowering young people to create the families they want in a fair and hopeful world. Ensuring everyone has the ability to have children only if and when they want to is a part of that equation — a fight that’s far from over even in the United States — along with reducing consumption, confronting the climate crisis, creating a resilient economy untethered to endless growth, and fixing gender inequality.

There’s been a lot of alarmist talk about declining populations lately, but despite the fears stoked by pronatalists and people invested in a growth economy, peak population is something we can and must plan for. Research shows we also need to plan for biodiversity conservation and restoration as the human population decreases. Read on to learn more about how the Center is working to create a world where people and wildlife can thrive.

Crowded Planet: A new study reveals that when marine heat waves hit, clownfish adapt by shrinking in length — boosting their survival odds by 78%. The findings raise questions about whether other fishes survive by using the same method, which may explain global trends of shrinking fish sizes amid climate change.

Food and Loss

Anyone who’s gifted a casserole after a funeral or followed a family recipe as an act of remembrance knows that food is often tied to how we process and experience grief. In a recent special issue of the Graduate Journal of Food Studies, Senior Food Campaigner Jennifer Molidor and I published essays that examine the topic of food and loss.

Jennifer’s essay explores personal, cultural, and ecological grief over watching her home in California face the ravages of drought, climate-intensified wildfires, agricultural pollution, and livestock degradation. My essay looks at how to mourn the loss of beloved cultural foods and the disappearing ecosystems they need to grow.

Here’s one thing you can do: Read all the essays about food and grief in the latest issue of the Graduate Journal of Food Studies.

Start a Library of Things on Campus

The pressure to overconsume stuff is driving destructive resource extraction, pollution, and waste — all of which contribute to the climate and extinction crises. Libraries of things — or LoTs for short — are part of the sharing economy. They’re community spaces where useful items can be borrowed just like books that remain in circulation for years.

Last year the Center partnered with the University of North Florida to open its own LoT on campus. Drawing from that experience, our new how-to guide lays out how college and university campuses can all start LoTs. Want to build one that’s not on a college campus? Check out Shareable’s Library of Things Toolkit.

Here’s one thing you can do: Read Shareable’s post about how (and why) to add a party kit to your LoT.

A Beautiful Disaster of a Bill

President Donald Trump’s so-called Big, Beautiful Bill includes a whole slew of environmentally disastrous legislation, turning back the clock on our national effort to fight climate change and opening beloved public lands to developers — among many other cuts that harm vulnerable people and wildlife.

One such calamity is billions in subsidies to those who grow industrial monocultures of corn and soybeans, crops that primarily end up as biofuels or as feed for factory farmed animals. As I told Inside Climate News, the Trump administration is just pouring more money into the most destructive parts of our industrial food system.

Here’s one thing you can do: Support the workers who put food on our tables by contributing to Food Empowerment Project’s School Supply Drive to provide children of farmworkers with backpacks filled with supplies for the new school year.

Bring Sexual Health Kits to Your Community

Climate-fueled extreme weather continues to batter communities around the country. In addition to heartbreaking loss of life and property, these disasters can cause sexual and reproductive health disruptions — yet items like condoms, emergency contraception, and pregnancy tests are often left off of emergency checklists. To fix that problem and raise awareness, last year the Center launched a program to bring sexual health preparedness kits to communities in Florida.

This year we’re expanding our reach — and we’re looking for folks to distribute sexual health kits in communities across the country. If you’re interested in helping your neighbors prepare for sexual and reproductive health disruptions during climate-related disasters and extreme weather events by distributing our kits, fill out this form, and we’ll reach out to you.

Here’s one thing you can do: Catastrophic climate-fueled storms and heat waves are fueled by coal, oil, and gas. Demand that Duke Energy, the third-largest U.S. corporate polluter, ditch fossil fuels and invest in renewable energy now.

Achieving Climate Goals Through Food Systems

Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs, detail a country’s plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and contribute to global climate change goals under the Paris Agreement. NDCs are at the heart of the agreement and drive national climate action. While food system policies have been included in most countries' NDCs in the past, it’s clear that we won’t achieve global climate goals unless those policies in the next round of NDCs are more ambitious, comprehensive, and effective.

That’s why the Center joined Mercy for Animals and other partners to create the Food Systems NDC Scorecard, a structured and transparent methodology for evaluating how well food systems are integrated into countries’ NDCs. The methodology is a useful tool countries can use to develop their NDCs. The first round of assessments using the scorecard will be released this fall ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP30) happening in Brazil this November.

Here's one thing you can do: National commitments aren’t the only way to reduce food system emissions — a lot of climate action is happening at the local level. Learn more about climate-friendly cities and how to encourage your city to get involved.

Wildlife Spotlight: Barrens Darter

Barrens darters are unique because of the parental care the males provide, including guarding the nest from predators until spawning females’ eggs hatch. Despite the species’ family support systems, it’s one of North America’s most imperiled fish, surviving only in a few streams in central Tennessee.

Within Barrens darters’ narrow range, poor livestock grazing practices have destabilized riverbanks, causing sediment runoff that smothers life on the stream bottom. Water-intensive row crops and nurseries in the darters’ habitat have reduced stream flows and worsened water quality, further imperiling these fascinating fish.

But there’s good news: In response to decades of advocacy by the Center, in June the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed to protect Barrens darters as an endangered species.

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Photo credits: People around the globe via Canva; clownfish via Canva; veggie casserole via Canva; collage photos of students via Canva; cornfield via Canva; sexual health preparedness kits courtesy of Kelley Dennings/Center for Biological Diversity; harvested veggies via Canva; Barren's darter courtesy of Bernie Kuhajda, Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute.

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